Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford by Carla Kaplan; Harper, 592 pp., $32
Jessica Mitford spent a lifetime shaking off her highborn English heritage. Whereas one of her sisters married Oswald Mosley, Britain’s leading fascist, and another became an intimate friend of Adolf Hitler himself, “Decca” devoted herself to fighting for the progressive causes of her era. She and her first husband fellow-traveled with antifascist forces in Spain in the late 1930s. Not long after, as a sudden World War II widow, Decca rebuilt her life in the United States, where she toiled for the American Communist Party and the nascent civil rights movement.
Yet Mitford’s most public triumph was for a cause that doesn’t quite fit the picture: raising public consciousness about the American funeral industry. The American Way of Death, her 1963 best-selling sensation, appeared alongside two other books that captured the emerging zeitgeist: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In that context, funerary practices would seem less urgent. “What could such a book contribute to racial justice, freedom of speech, fair housing or labor? How could overcharges for caskets compare to firebombed buses, battered protesters, besieged churches … or an impending war?” So asks Carla Kaplan in her warm biography of Mitford. The answer, Kaplan continues, is that Decca “saw political potential in any cause that could give voice to the voiceless. She perceived a broad constituency for the subject: Everyone dies, after all. And she imagined a future in organizing consumers—‘Trade-Unionism for Corpses,’ Evelyn Waugh called it—as yet unappreciated by most American radicals.”
To expose everything from euphemisms to price fixing to embalming, “an extraordinarily expensive and grisly practice with no demonstrated health benefits and no demonstrable purpose,” Mitford and her second husband, Robert Treuhaft, went underground, as it were. They posed as customers and recorded their treatment and the industry schemes behind it. Decca “had a wonderful time in mortuary ‘slumber rooms,’ dressed up in her best pastel suit, pearls, pumps … deciding between expensive caskets for imaginary Loved Ones, and dabbing her eyes with a hanky.” The satire wrote itself, to judge just by one advertisement for “Futurama, the casket styled for the future.”
The American Way of Death may have been the summit of Mitford’s celebrity and influence, but as a writer and lecturer, she was tireless and resolute about taking on less titillating subjects. In 1969, she published a book about a notorious trial of Vietnam war draft resisters; The Trial of Dr. Spock showed that “she was deeply, innately, sympathetic to the anti-authoritarian strains of the war resistance movement, warmly supportive of their sometimes wild, dramatic antics.” Next, she took on the American prison system in Kind and Usual Punishment (1973), protesting not just the euphemisms that surrounded contemporary incarceration but its politicization and dubious results.
Neither of those exposés sold as well as The American Way of Death, but after that initial success, Mitford’s public persona became the basis for new book contracts. She likewise wrote numerous magazine articles, including a takedown of the Famous Writers School, a Trump University–like credentials racket, and its leader, the publisher Bennett Cerf. Teaching appointments and well-paid lecture engagements came her way, allowing her to put her terribly Briddish manner to good use in challenging and entertaining audiences.
Before The American Way of Death, she had already published in Britain one memoir, Hons and Rebels (1960), about her eccentric family and cloistered upbringing (her parents forbade their daughters from getting an education). And in 1977, she published another: A Fine Old Conflict, about her escape from that upbringing and her and Treuhaft’s adventures in the Red Scare era. Finally, in 1979, she published her most eclectic book of muckraking, Poison Penmanship, a collection of some of her best essays.
Though other biographers have tried, it’s difficult bringing a prolific writer like Mitford to life—to record all those thousands of hours at the keyboard, the false starts, the drafts, revisions, interruptions, and interactions with editors and publishers and critics. In its depiction of her career as she comes into her own in the 1960s, Troublemaker succumbs to this handicap. Nevertheless, Kaplan’s reconstruction of Mitford’s young years in Spain, in Washington, then in Oakland and Berkeley reveals her to have been a superb administrator and natural leader long before she turned to writing full-time.
For a biographer who doesn’t suffer from lack of confidence, Kaplan is prone to some writerly before-and-after exaggeration. Here, for example, is Decca, age 19, in Spain with her soon-to-be first husband in 1937: “She spoke no Spanish. She’d been dressed, fed, and amused all her life. She had no skills. She’d traveled rarely and mostly to visit family. She and Esmond, moreover, were nearly strangers.” When Esmond died (in air combat four years later), Decca became a changed woman. “Almost overnight, the young forward-looking, frivolous optimist became a bold, driven pragmatist,” Kaplan writes. “The young woman who’d spent her whole life following others became fiercely self-directed. Confidence replaced caution. Courage replaced uncertainty. Her personal grammar dropped question marks and now everything Decca did or said ended with a period.”
Nothing happens “almost overnight,” but it’s fair enough to say that these early setbacks and tragedies toughened Decca for the struggles ahead. She was also lucky in love the second time. Treuhaft was not only a comrade in Oakland’s Marxist struggles of the ’50s; he became a true writing partner, the silent coauthor of many of Mitford’s muckraking books. Kaplan picked up on an author’s acknowledgment in the first edition of The American Way of Death, where Decca writes that “large portions of [the] book” should have been labeled “By Robert Treuhaft, as told to Jessica Mitford.” When Treuhaft had the chance to revise parts of the book after she died, the line was deleted, but he didn’t deny that theirs had been a joint enterprise.
A scholar who has written on Zora Neale Hurston and other prominent literary figures, Kaplan throughout probes Mitford’s qualities as an earlyish feminist. Mitford batted away the idea without quite burying it. One of her better quips was a riposte to a friend who said Decca didn’t have a feminist bone in her body. “Perhaps true,” she said, “but I do have splashes of cartilage.”
