All this, and a great deal more, is contained in Decca, a 744-page collection of letters, painstakingly and usefully edited by Peter Y. Sussman, a journalist and friend who has contributed lengthy biographical accounts between sections.
The letters are a treasure. Decca lived and battled by a pen that was as graceful and witty as it was sharp. Teeth were her means of propulsion, her wings; and the marks they left were singularly fine and even to be prized. She was, consummately, a happy warrior; in her letters, as in her books, she gets at her targets — the funeral directors, fat-farmers, prison establishment, writing programs — with their own words. There is no insult like a mirror's.
Only a few letters battle directly; most report the details to friends. Her activism, though, is only one subject in a collection that deals with virtually every part of her life: her husbands, her children, her writing, her publishers and, more and more as the years pass, the Mitfords.
Each one gets her own treatment. Early on, there was a touching reconciliation with her mother, and as the years pass, this becomes warmer and more solid, though after Lady Redesdale's death, Decca can't resist noting to a friend one of her mother's diary entries: "Heifer born today. Mabel (a servant) two weeks holiday. Decca married. Tea with Fuehrer." (The Redesdales were visiting Unity in Germany.)
If Decca has forgiven her mother her one-time Hitler sympathies, has nothing but tenderness for the deluded and disabled Unity, is cautiously affectionate with Nancy and warm though prickly with Deborah, she is unbending about Diana's steely and unrepentant Fascist history. Visiting London with her son, Benjamin Treuhaft, who is half Jewish, she notes Diana's offer of a meeting: "I thought better not, as I didn't want Benj turned into a lampshade."
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