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Black SheepThe letters of Jessica Mitford.

By Daphne MerkinUpdated Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 7:26 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

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In 1941, at the age of 23, Esmond was killed when the Royal Canadian Air Force mission he was on was shot down over Bremen. Within short order, Decca, who was left to grieve in her adoptive country with a baby daughter, Constancia, was being courted by Robert Treuhaft, a lawyer with impeccable Jacobin credentials. The two married in 1943, and in 1947 they moved with their growing family—Decca had given birth to a son, Nicholas, and Benjamin came along three years later—to a largely black neighborhood in Oakland, Calif. Although her richly detailed letters are full of charming anecdotes about her children, Decca described her parental style as one of "benign neglect" and was resolutely undomestic, preferring to expend her energies on picketing, leafleting, and generally raising a ruckus about whatever misdemeanor caught her ire. In 1958, she published an article on expensive funeral practices called "St. Peter, Don't You Call Me" in a small magazine called Frontier that would eventually blossom into her 1963 exposé of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death. The book, which became a best seller and made her name, was the first sustained example of Mitford's "poison penmanship" (the title she gave to the 1979 collection of her take-no-prisoners investigative pieces). As was true for much of her journalism, Decca took an ends-justifies-the-means approach to securing information; she posed as a bereaved widow in order to gain access and was spared by her husband from having to view an actual embalming before describing it in full gory details.

Over the years, Decca's reverse snobbism led her to embrace the disempowered and even the bien-pensant rich, with their "super-plush" houses, but never, ever the irredeemably middle-class—the sort of people, as she sniffingly characterized them, who sell "USED CARS for a living." Her upper-class English background was successfully eradicated to the point where she felt comfortable hosting Leadbelly as a houseguest. But traces of it lingered in her aesthetic judgments and visceral responses—in her description, for instance, of Alex Haley's "amazing spread" in Knoxville, Tenn.: "The Haley ranch," she wrote Sally Belfrage, one of several younger friends Decca counseled and shared confidences with, "is a dream/nightmare of marvellous comfort and incredibly hideous décor. I shared a cottage … furnished with fake Louis IV things & false flowers & false ferns." Despite her lifelong nose-thumbing campaign against all her family stood for, Decca remained very much a champagne socialist. She was her parents' daughter in matters of taste both small and large, someone who had certain "U" standards bred into her bones (such as never resorting to paper napkins or furniture of inauthentic provenance) and who was "brought up never to cry in front of other people."

These letters are rarely less than amusing, colored by a salubrious scorn for the pieties and deceit of the status quo and marked by Decca's gimlet eye for the maliciously telling detail. All the same, it can become taxing to spend long periods of time in the company of someone playing so incessantly for laughs. Did Decca experience a moment of sadness, doubt, or vulnerability in her life? With the exception of her correspondence with her grandchildren and the young, which features a more closeted, lovelorn part of her, one would have to conclude that mockery always had the upper hand when it came to anything to do with feelings, especially those she deemed unseemly. ("You know those absurd expressions," she wrote, "'Wounded,' 'Pained,' 'Hurt' ?") Vitriolic archness was her first and last defense, abetted by an almost compulsive lack of self-reflection. Openness about the more shadowy corners of experience was one of the many things, along with psychiatry and religion, that Decca simply didn't "go in for." Her lapses in empathy are disturbing, especially toward people of pallor and privilege, as opposed to people of color and penury, and although one can admire her for her stoicism in the face of tragedy, it's hard not to wonder where stoicism leaves off and flintiness begins. The death of her son Nicholas, who was killed at the age of 10 when he was struck by a bus as he rode his bike, gets mentioned briefly in a telegram and follow-up note to Lady Redesdale, but then disappears from sight until the very end of the book. By her own account, Decca "simply airbrushed" Nicholas' existence out of her second memoir, A Fine Old Conflict: "His birth, his short & delightful life, never mentioned."

And yet, overall, it's impossible not to be drawn in by Decca's spiky charm and disarming curiosity, which remained with her to the end. "I do wish I knew who Miss Jerry Hall, tall Texan, is," she wrote her younger sister Deborah in 1990, in response to a description of a ball her sister and her husband, the Duke of Devonshire, had given at Chartworth, the family estate, which both Mick Jagger and his then-girlfriend attended. Perhaps it's only Decca exerting her force of will once again, but in a world that seems to grow ever more homogenized, it is refreshing to encounter a one-of-a-kind character—however eccentric and bullying—especially at safe remove. In her penultimate letter, dated July 13, 1996, 10 days before she died of a metastasized lung cancer that had been diagnosed less than a month earlier, Mitford observed to her younger sister: "Am also taking FULL ADVANTAGE of condition to press all sorts of things (lawsuits etc of no interest to you) on ground that you can't refuse a dying person's request." Decca remained a naughty child all her life, one who ventured out from the nursery, thinking of ever more ingenious ways to annoy or alarm the grownups. But who among us doesn't nurture a feisty inner imp, intent on having the last laugh before bedtime?