The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

2001, 2002 Norton edition
Mary S. Lovell
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family
Original and purchase price both unknown
Hardcover in good condition
B

I was wrong that Jessica's The American Way of Birth (1992) would be the end on my blog for this colorful family, because after that I got a used copy of this group-biography.  I thought Lovell did a fairly good job of balancing the different sides, although she's admittedly harder on Communist Jessica than Fascist Diana or Nazi Unity, perhaps because Diana and Debo were then still alive.  (Diana died in '03.)  She even pays some attention to Pam, who's sort of the Gummo Marx of the family.  Father David and in particular Mother Sydney come off as much nicer, if not as colorful, than in Jessica and Nancy's books.  Yes, there's some repetition from other books (including the Collier & Horowitz book on the Kennedys), but there was enough new material to be interesting, and sometimes amusing.

The American Way of Birth

1992, later undated edition from Dutton/ William Abrahams
Jessica Mitford
The American Way of Birth
Original price $23.00, purchase price $3.99
Hardcover in good condition
B-

This is another book that convinced me, in my 20s, that if I ever had a baby, it would be a home birth with a midwife.  As in the 1950s women's fiction and Armstrong's A Midwife's Story, the hospital practices (including the fetal monitor, which is still being used 20 years later, despite Mitford's hopes) range from insulting to life-threatening, for mother and child.  Mitford traces the history of midwifery and obstetrics, the former from the Middle Ages to its comeback a couple decades before this book came out, and it's clear which she prefers.  (She does admit to being uncomfortable with the spacier, hippie-ish side of some advocates, but she emphasizes the compassion and proficiency of the midwives themselves.)

Her title here is a spin on her "Death" book of three decades earlier, and she does address the financial and legal sides, as there.  She discusses her own experiences, giving birth four times under very different circumstances.  (When told, years later, that she must've imagined the air enema, she does research to prove that this was one birthing fad.)  As always, her wry humour is apparent, if not as prevalent as in the Muckraking collection, perhaps since like death, birth is often too serious to joke about.

Mitford died four years after this book came out, her funeral costing $533.31.  Her now only surviving child, Constancia "the Donk" Romilly, became an emergency-room nurse and had two sons by an African-American activist she never married, which no doubt would've shocked Farve had he been alive, and hadn't Jessica herself rebelled so much.  And, yes, Deborah is alive, as 93-year-old Duchess of Devonshire.  Unless I pick up a copy of her 2010 Wait for Me!...Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister (I checked it out from the library when it was released), this is it for blogging about this colourful family.

Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

1979, 1988 Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Jessica Mitford
Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking
Original price $8.95, purchase price $5.40
Worn paperback with partially torn front cover
B

A collection of articles, some investigative reporting, others on some relatively uncontroversial topics, like "frenemies."  Equally good are Mitford's behind-the-scenes "Comments," discussing where the ideas came from, whether and how the articles were changed upon publication, and reaction, if any.  Best of the bunch are "Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers," which brought down a mail-order business, temporarily anyway; "My Short and Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor," which I enjoyed all the more as a graduate of the Cal State system; and the Comment on her two articles about a rip-off posh restaurant.  As Carl Bernstein says in his Afterword, Mitford tells and shows how to be a good reporter, including realizing your mistakes.  (She seems as gleeful about angles she missed as a frenemy would be.)

Mitford sisters notes:  "Frenemies" comes from one sister's term for a childhood companion (although Wikipedia credits Walter Winchell with the first published usage), and Nancy comes up a couple times, in the discussion of Jessica's visits to the set of The Loved One of course, and also in "You-All and Non-You-All," whose title had to be changed for American readers.

The American Way of Death

1963, undated Fawcett Crest edition that seems to be not long after that
Jessica Mitford
The American Way of Death
Original price $1.50, purchase price unknown
Very worn paperback with split spine
B-

Mitford's examination of the American funeral business (with glimpses of the U.K. as well) gave a voice to families who felt exploited by morticians and "the allied industries."  It's still a pretty good read, although Mitford's humour is more restrained than in her other works.  The book is of course dated in the amounts per funeral-- the average casket now costs $2000-- but Mitford did update her research with her posthumously published The American Way of Death Revisited, which I remember getting from the library years ago.  And it's heartening to see that there are some consumer websites advising bereaved families, so it remains (sorry) a significant topic.

Mitford sisters note:  in her Acknowledments, she thanks Nancy and Deborah, who "contributed a certain amount of misinformation on the subject."

Daughters and Rebels

1960, Avon edition from unknown year
Jessica Mitford
Daughters and Rebels
Original price 75 cents, purchase price $1.00
Very worn paperback with front cover detached
B

Yes, yet another biography, although this is more about the author than the colorful father.  It goes only up to 1939, with Mitford's first husband dying in a footnote!  Jessica has the same breezy tone about horrible events as big sister Nancy has.  And yet, in the sequel autobiography, which I've read but don't own, she omits a son who died at a young age because it was too painful to write about him.  Here, we never learn the name of her first baby, who died of measles.

It's fun to compare this mostly true book to Nancy's fiction, particularly since Jessica told Nancy that the latter had no imagination.  For instance, the original (British) title of this autobiography was Hons and Rebels, and Jessica explains here how "Hon" came from the hens that she and little sister Debo (Deborah) raised in order to sell the eggs to their mother.  In Nancy's novels, the older sisters are Hons as well, and "Hon" seems to come from "Honorable," since Fa/Farve was a baron.

While Jessica's life in the 1920s and 1930s was certainly interesting (if not always to her), her life afterwards got even more colorful.  After this book, she became interested in the funeral industry and wrote a 1963 book about it, which I own.  The cover of this book says, "The audacious lady who wrote The American Way of Death tells the marvelous story of her life."  So this edition obviously came out three years or more after the first edition.

Madame de Pompadour

1953, 2001 New York Review Books edition
Nancy Mitford
Madame de Pompadour
Original price $12.95, purchase price $7.50
Worn paperback
B-


Mitford writes a sympathetic account of Louis XV's famous mistress, although as the Introduction by Amanda Foreman makes clear, Mitford originally planned to present Pompadour as an example of why women shouldn't interfere in politics.  (And, yes, this was after her sister Diana did time in prison for supporting British Fascism; sister Unity, an admirer of Hitler, shot herself when Britain declared war on Germany; and sister Jessica became a notorious Red.  Not that Nancy was apolitical herself.)


Mitford does show Pompadour's political side, but the emphasis is more on where Pompadour put it, "life as art."  Pompadour enjoyed herself, and she also supported artists, architects, and writers.  She also seems to have been a nice person, much nicer than most of the people around her.  It's Mitford who makes the catty remarks about the 18th-century French notables, but that's part of the fun.


Two gripes.  One, there are too many untranslated French passages.  And two, Mitford never mentions the famous hairstyle.

Love in a Cold Climate

1949
Nancy Mitford
Love in a Cold Climate
B

Although I don't generally like the term "companion novel," this is closer to that than to a sequel of The Pursuit of Love, since it's set from the mid 1920s to the early '30s, and it tells of Fanny's distant cousin Polly.  The love of the title is Polly's for her uncle by marriage, Boy Dougdale, whom the Radletts have nicknamed The Lecherous Lecturer, because he likes to molest teenaged girls.  It's not clear what he does to Polly at 13, at least hair-stroking, probably much more, since he pinches Jassy's bottom, and she must be about 7 at the time.  Mitford is not at all consistent with the Radletts' ages in this novel.  Not only does Jassy sound much older than she is, but so does little Victoria, who can't be more than 10 by the end of the novel.  Also, Mitford has the Crash of '29 happening a year or two too soon if Fanny and Linda are born in 1911.  (Polly is a year or two older.)

The uncle-niece romance is distasteful, but it's seen that way by most of the characters.  It does lead to one of my favorite exchanges, between sassy Jassy and always hilarious Uncle Davey:
"'I say,' said Jassy.  'Come on, Dave.'"
"'Oh, no, dear, thank you.  Marry one of you demons?  Not for any money.'"

Polly does marry her uncle soon after his wife dies, but her parents, Lord and Lady Montdore, disinherit her.  The estate is entailed, but she was going to get everything else.  Now all the property is going to go to a distant relation, so distant he's Canadian.  (Thank you, I'll be here all week.  Try the veal.)  People imagine a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and a lumberjack, but what they get in Cedric is closer to the former.  He's a stereotypical but completely happy homosexual, gay you might say.  (Tip your waitress.)  The story ends well for him and everyone, as both he and Lady Montdore get the Boy, although Fanny points out that the stodgy Borely family "think it simply terrible."

As with Pursuit, read the novel for everything other than the main romance.  Lady Montdore is a delightful old bitch and Uncle Matthew continues to be a delightful old bastard.  My favorite section was the chub-fuddling, although I also enjoyed Fanny's disillusionment with Oxford wives.

The Pursuit of Love

1945, 1982 Modern Library edition with Love in a Cold Climate
Nancy Mitford
The Pursuit of Love
Bought newish for $12.95
Good condition hardcover although dustjacket a bit worn
B


Despite an arguably more depressing ending than Cass Timberlane-- the heroine dies in childbirth-- this is a frothier, funnier book than its year-peer.  Set roughly 1925 to '41, it tells of romantic Linda's romances, although you'll want to read it for the Radlett family, a thinly disguised version of the Mitfords.  The Mitford siblings were six (in)famous sisters and a brother who died the year this book was published.  The Radletts are four sisters and three brothers, although the boys are less memorable.  Rather than Nancy born in 1904 down to Deborah (still alive and writing at 92), we have Louisa (1909), Linda (1911), Bob (1913?), Jassy (1917ish), Matt (1918ish), "little Robin" (male, unknown birth year), and Victoria (1923).  Not that Mitford is very consistent about the ages, in this or the 1949 sequel.  The seven siblings are joined by their cousin the narrator, relatively sensible Fanny, who's Linda's age.  Fa and Mother, Uncle Matthew and Aunt Sadie to Fanny, are as eccentric as their children, Mitford taking the real-life oddities of her parents and exaggerating them, apparently to the amusement of Baron Redesdale (Farve, AKA her father).

Linda marries first a stodgy "middle-class" millionaire and then a distracted Communist, then she finds love with a French Resistance nobleman.  None of the romances are particularly interesting, and it's always a relief to get back to things like Jassy running away to marry film star Gary Coon (or was it Cary Goon?), or Uncle Davey fretting about his health, or Uncle Matthew ranting hilariously about foreigners.  Even "good" sister Louisa is wittier and more fun than any of Linda's love interests.  Oh, and there's the Bolter, Fanny's much-married and much-divorced mother.

The humour is outrageous and sometimes deliberately in bad taste, joking about rape and abortion.  But it's all part of the over-the-topness of the Radletts, who can make Linda cry over a matchbox-less match or wage an ongoing battle with the gamekeeper.  There is some snobbishness in the book, but it takes surprising forms, as in the contrast between Society parties and those of "The Party."

As in Cass Timberlane, the war is mostly offstage, although it comes figuratively and literally closer to home in England than the U.S.  Linda's French lover dies, leaving their son to be raised by Fanny.  And yet, this is less depressing than Cleo the cat dying in Cass, even if Cleo's granddaughter shows up at the end.  The Radletts and friends are much more unsinkable than the denizens of Grand Republic.

This edition has a charming foreword by Jessica Mitford, who doesn't even seem to mind that her involvement in the Spanish Civil War is given to a nonexistent brother, while irrepressible Jassy goes to Hollywood.