My Favorite Mitford

My 21-year-old son is very political, probably too much so for his own good. He is perpetually outraged by the injustice of the world, and I suppose he should be because the world is unjust and getting more so all the time. Still, I worry about the boy's mental health. And yes, I am aware that I am the last person who should be commenting on anyone else's mental health. 

Anyway, because he is very well informed about current events and not quite as well informed about history; and because he is of course very young, he doesn't really believe me when I tell him that the world has been in greater peril, and relatively recently. He’s convinced that world economic and social and political conditions have never been worse than now, and when I try to remind him about the 1930s, he rolls his eyes. “The Depression and World War 2,” he’ll say. “I know.” The phrase “boomer logic” entered the chat at some point, proving my earlier claim that the boy just doesn’t know his 20th century history because if he did, he’d know that his parents are Gen Xers, not Boomers. 

*****

This is what I am thinking about as I read Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford’s famous memoir of her childhood, youth, and marriage to Esmond Romilly, distant cousin to the Mitfords and nephew of Winston Churchill. Jessica, known to her family as “Decca” admired Esmond from afar (although they were cousins, they had never met) when she read about his exploits as a Loyalist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. Later, she finally met Esmond at a house party of the kind depicted in Wodehouse or Waugh novels or PBS Masterpiece Theater programs like Upstairs Downstairs or Downton Abbey, because that is the kind of life that the Mitford sisters lived. The two young aristocrats fell in love, almost at first sight, and they ran away together. After a brief stint in Spain, the newlywed Romillys went to the United States, arriving in 1939 just before the whole world was about to explode. 

Jessica Mitford was a great writer. Hons and Rebels moves easily from the intimate details of Mitford family life with the very quirky Lord and Lady Redesdale as parents, to the political and social cataclysms of the late 1930s. If my son thinks that 21st century Democrats can’t get on the same page, he should read Jessica Mitford on Stalinist vs. Trotskyite infighting in the American Communist Party in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Those people were trolls before trolls were even invented. 

Esmond and Decca both came from absurdly privileged backgrounds, but that didn’t make their lives especially easy. As one of the youngest, and a girl, in a large aristocratic English family, Decca had few options other than to live the life of a debutante and “Honorable,” or to rebel as she eventually did. Decca and her sisters, though extremely well-read and bilingual (English and French, of course) had practically no formal education, a lack that Decca felt keenly and resented bitterly. Esmond, educated in the famous or infamous depending on your perspective English “public school” (anything but public) system, was separated from his family at age 8 or so and left to the tender mercies of headmasters and older boys, who freely brutalized their younger schoolmates. 

*****

Jessica Mitford was remarkably honest and clear-eyed about herself, her beloved Esmond, and the unfairness of the British class system. Even though she missed her sisters, especially Unity (“Boud”), she expressed practically no sentimental attachment to her family’s way of life, and she didn’t make excuses for Diana and Unity, who were wholehearted and enthusiastic Nazis. Don’t @ me on this until you read their letters. 

Esmond Romilly was killed in action early in the war, leaving poor Decca widowed and pregnant (the Romillys had already lost their first child, who died as an infant). Had he lived, maybe he would have remained an idealistic rebel, even in middle age. Or maybe he would have reverted to type. Maybe he and Decca would have returned to England, bought a country house, and voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Esmond would only have been in his late 50s then. We’ll never know. 

But I don’t think it’s likely, if Decca was any indicator. Conventional wisdom claims that young radicals often turn conservative, even reactionary, when they get older, but Decca Mitford remained a radical for the rest of her life. She was a member of the American Communist Party, and she spent a good part of her career sticking it to the man, fighting against segregation, writing exposes about the funeral industry and polemics against everything from segregation to fancy spas to snooty restaurants. She was the real thing. Unlike a lot of privileged radicals, Decca seemed quite ready to give up her own privilege in order to make the world fairer and more equitable for others. But like a lot of other radicals, privileged and otherwise, she seemed not to understand that politics was neither the only way to go about this, nor even the best way. Her enthusiasm for Soviet-style Communism was stupid and misguided and wrong, but she certainly wasn’t the only left-leaning intellectual of that time who believed in Communism’s false promises. And at least she tried. She tried to do something to make the world more just. 

In Casting Off, the fourth of the five Cazalet Chronicles novels, one of the Cazalet brothers, responding to another brother’s complaints about England’s newly emerging postwar welfare state, recalls the First World War and remembers the guilt and shame he felt as an Army officer and son of an upper class family when he encountered truly poor people for the first time among the enlisted men who would fight under him on the battlefields of France. Many of these men were badly malnourished, bearing scars of untreated injuries or diseases, with rotting teeth and bad eyesight and stunted growth and a whole range of other maladies associated with extreme poverty. He remembers thinking that they barely seemed human to him when he first encountered them. He acknowledges that the welfare state has its flaws and that it will undoubtedly cause inconvenience for people of his class. But thinking of those men, he knows that something has to be done; that the status quo ante cannot continue, not after the working classes of England have sacrificed two generations of their young men to war. 

Reading Hons and Rebels, it doesn’t seem that Decca Mitford really felt much class guilt. She seemed to accept that the circumstances of her birth were beyond her control, for better or for worse. Her lifelong dedication to social justice seems to have been the result of an ingrained sense of fairness (although she did also seem to enjoy trolling her family, just a little bit). This is the question, then: Why do some rich people feel that sense of responsibility to others, and so many others manifestly do not?  Why do some people recognize that their good fortune is a gift that must be repaid while so many others believe that they deserve their privilege; that they earned it all and owe nothing to anyone? Is it innate, or is it cultural? Nature or nurture? A look at the Mitford family would suggest the former since none of the other sisters seemed particularly interested in social justice, although Unity and Diana were certainly political enough. Just another reason why Decca was the best Mitford.