Yours Ever (4 page)

The Mark Twain letters are replete with Clemens’s own failed business ventures, to which he always applied the sort of sustained zeal Orion could never summon. When it came to managing work he created personally, Clemens could be shrewd: he understood immediately
that the banning of
Huckleberry Finn
by the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, would prove good for sales; knew enough to squelch hopeless dramatic adaptations of
Tom Sawyer;
fended off requests for product endorsements; and refused newspaper editors’ requests for free comment on one thing or another when he could just as easily compose his remarks for money. But his long detours into two different businesses supposedly allied to authorship—publishing and printing—proved slow-motion, draining debacles.

Working with Charles L. Webster, he had a solid success publishing Ulysses Grant’s memoirs, whose gallant completion by the dying Grant occasioned Clemens’s moving portrait of the persistent old general. Still, Charles L. Webster & Co. went bankrupt in 1894, at roughly the same time Clemens’s “ten-year dream” of developing a perfect typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor, came clanging to a dismal close. “All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplace contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle,” he had written—to Orion!—in 1889. The old boastfulness of those youthful letters from New York and the Mississippi River balloons once more over the mighty Compositor (“We own the whole field—every inch of it—and nothing can dislodge us”), but in the end, no amount of time and money can make the enterprise go. After it and the publishing business are gone, Clemens will discharge his debts by once more strenuously driving his pen.

How little detachment this greatest of ironists has in the peak moments of his far-flung life. Clemens hated “sham sentimentality” whenever he got wind of its sour sweetness, especially from incoming mail. But his own often exclamatory letters never stint on genuine feeling. He can rhapsodize a “perfect” summer day or unleash a
cri de coeur
of grief and guilt, such as the one he lets loose during his river days over the death of his brother Henry in a shipboard boiler explosion: “Men take me by the hand and
congratulate
me and call me ‘lucky’ because I was not on the
Pennsylvania
when she blew up!” (This long, despairing letter stands in inverse proportion to the joyous later one about Lewis, the heroic farmhand.)

After the death of his wife, Clemens directs his cry of sorrow
toward Howells: “Shall we ever laugh again? If I could only see a dog that I knew in the old times! and could put my arms around his neck and tell him all, everything, and ease my heart.” This lord of fictional mischief had been a worshipful husband from the start, introducing Livy to his family in a letter written on February 27, 1869: “She is only a little body but she hasn’t her peer in Christendom … I warn you that whoever comes within the fatal influence of her beautiful nature is her willing slave for evermore.”

On those occasions when Clemens and Livy were apart, letters between them substituted for companionable conversation from pillow to pillow. Having witnessed a spat between the Howellses, Clemens couldn’t wait to tell his own wife about it: “It didn’t seem to me that I had any right to be having this feast and you not there.” It must have been particular torment, during her long last illness, for Clemens—as Charles Neider, the editor of his letters, tells us—to be permitted only forty minutes of daily visiting with Livy, and the dispatch of only two letters per day, preferably newsless and unexciting, into the sickroom.

As he aged and death increased its takings—not just Livy, but two daughters and many friends—Clemens grew more preoccupied with a dark religious determinism that held man to be “a helpless and irresponsible coffee mill ground by the hand of God.” The design was anything but intelligent, and the machine ran backward. “The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to. Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.”

As the twentieth century arrived, the big picture began commanding more of his focus than anything small—world disarmament trumping “that sewer—party politics”—but little sublunary concerns could never fully disappear from the letters of a writer so instinctively prescriptive. Near the end of his life, Clemens adds Sir Walter Scott to a list of literary dismissals that already includes Hawthorne, Henry James and
Middlemarch
. Posing a series of innocent-seeming questions to the critic Brander Matthews, he asks, regarding the Scotch novelist: “Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous? … Did
he know how to write English and didn’t do it because he didn’t want to?”

In the year he turned forty-five, Clemens had found himself reading the “diffuse, conceited, ‘eloquent,’ bathotic” letters of the youthful Daniel Webster—and musing upon epistolary survival. At that point quite content in the prime of his own life beside a loving wife and healthy new baby, Clemens sat down to write a letter to his best friend, the Reverend Joseph Twichell and to wonder about whoever might be reading this same letter “80 years hence,” in the year 1960. Curiously enough, Clemens imagined this reader as a “pitying snob” who would only sneer at the “pathetically trivial” doings of the author’s family. Bringing the composition to an abrupt close, Clemens stopped addressing Twichell and issued a warning to the nasty specimen of posterity he was envisioning: “Suffice it you to know, scoffer and ribald, that the little child is old and blind now, and once more toothless, and the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years. Yes, and
your
time cometh!”

Come it does, of course. But a half century beyond 1960, finding ourselves still avid for Clemens’s letters—in which the children are still cutting their teeth and the bloom remains on Livy’s cheek—we have the pleasure of seeing that the joke, for once, was on him.

THE MOST IMPORTANT
letter Jessica Mitford ever wrote was a forgery, addressed to herself (“Darling Decca”) at the age of nineteen, on February 3, 1937. Pretending to be a girlfriend traveling on the Continent, the future muckraker issued an effervescent pseudo-invitation to come across the Channel: “We have taken a house in Dieppe—that is, Auntie has taken it! We mean to make it the centre of a sort of motor tour to all the amusing places round. We are going there from Austria on Wednesday, and we should so
love
you to join us next weekend sometime …”

The letter made it appear as if Mitford might soon be headed toward a world as stable and socially regulated as Madame de Sévigné’s. In fact, her destination was war-torn Spain, which she intended to reach after eloping with her second cousin Esmond
Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill’s who’d achieved a precocious stardom through his flamboyant rebellion against British public-school culture and his later service with the International Brigade defending Madrid. The Dieppe ruse worked. Shown the letter of invitation, Mitford’s mother, Lady Redesdale, let her daughter slip out of England, and before long Decca and Romilly were in Loyalist Bilbao, transmitting news of the Spanish war for a press bureau that had taken them on.

Looked at in class and period terms, all this might be regarded as normal youthful revolt. Lord Redesdale, known to his children as “Farve,” was a glowering martinet who used a stopwatch to time the sermons of whatever vicar he hired for the Cotswolds village that the Mitfords dominated. His wife (“Muv”) insisted that their six daughters, widely spaced in age but sharing a complicated matrix of games, nicknames and nonsense languages, receive much of their education at home—a confinement especially resented by Decca, who from the start possessed terrific gumption.

She was the fifth of the sisters to make a London debut. All of them had looks, wit and aggression to burn; each was “a terrific hater,” Decca would remember. The escapades of the older ones had been harmless enough during the 1920s heyday of the Bright Young Things (Evelyn Waugh even worked twelve-year-old Decca’s pet lamb into
Vile Bodies)
, but they proved a good deal less amusing when conducted under the darker clouds of the decade that followed. It would be the grotesque doings of her sisters, more than the eccentricities and strictness of her parents, that prompted Decca’s flight in 1937.

“Whenever I see the words ‘Peer’s Daughter’ in a headline,” sighed Muv, “I know it’s going to be something about one of you children.” In 1936, after the collapse of her marriage to Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, Diana, the greatest beauty among the girls, wed Sir Oswald Mosley, head of the British Union of Fascists. This new connection fired up Nazi enthusiasm in the most physically imposing of the sisters, Unity (middle name Valkyrie), who soon became friendly with Goebbels, Goering and Hitler himself. Nancy Mitford, the eldest and most caustic of the girls, satirized
the family’s political adventurings in a novel called
Wigs on the Green
, but even she had the Mitford gift for group-loathing; in her case, a weirdly virulent anti-Americanism. When Decca, the clan’s only leftist, made her escape, Nancy joined forces with the family in trying to retrieve her.

After a period in Spain, the young Romillys did return, briefly, to England, where the lights in their London flat “blazed away night and day,” since nobody had ever informed Decca “that you had to pay for electricity.” Following the Munich pact of 1938, the couple were off to America, determined to stay there while Britain’s international alignments sorted themselves out. Esmond and Decca sponged and schemed and odd-jobbed their way up and down the East Coast until during the spring of 1940, in response to Hitler’s westward invasions, Romilly decided to enlist in the Canadian Air Force. He was killed the next year.

Decca remained in Washington with their baby daughter, Constancia (“Dinky”), finding work with the Office of Price Administration and a social life among the young New Dealers. She lived with Clifford and Virginia Durr, Southern liberals whose guests sometimes included Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife. (“Who is Lady Bird?” Muv wrote to Decca. “I looked her up in the Peerage, but could find no trace.”) By the middle of the war, Mitford had moved to San Francisco and gotten remarried to an OPA lawyer named Robert Treuhaft. She became an American citizen in order to join the Communist Party, in whose activities she and her husband avidly participated for the next fifteen years.

Her natural leftward leanings were no doubt overstimulated by the “very lonely opposition” she recalled maintaining within her family’s feathered nest. That she was able to remain a Party member, well past Khrushchev’s “secret speech” denouncing Stalin in 1956 and beyond the Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year, suggests a garish, surrogate penitence for the Mitfords’ Nazi sinnings. Her eventual resignation from the Party, in 1958, came about “not on any principled issue” but only because the CP had “got rather drab and useless.”

A reader of her collected letters can only marvel at how such a
lively spirit and instinctive debunker stayed so devoted to the commissars who kept plugging and torturing their way along in the USSR. Unity Mitford lasted several years in Nazi Germany before shooting herself when war broke out with England. It’s hard to imagine her mischievous sister surviving a month in Soviet Russia without being sent off somewhere cold for re-education. Mitford loved making fun of the Party’s American jargon and forever exhibited her difficulty with any form of piety or political correctness: “I should never have let you inveigle him to that Unitarian Sunday School,” she writes a friend in 1959, after her son has criticized her for generalizing about people. California’s Communist Party was known for being looser than other state affiliates, but Mitford’s joking still got her into trouble. And yet, at no point in her letters does she question the Party’s right to shun and chastise its members for the smallest deviations. Her ideological worst and self-mocking best are both on display, in annoyingly peaceful coexistence, in a letter written in 1958:

Most of her political activity was local, involving work for the East Bay Civil Rights Congress (CRC) on numerous cases of police brutality perpetrated by the Oakland police department. Despite subpoenas received and passports denied, Mitford sustained an overall feeling of comfort among Americans, whose “lack of bleakness” contrasted with so much of what remained back home in England. “Could it be,” she wrote her mother with some amazement in 1951, “that I am, after all, the only one who is really settled down, as they say?”

Of all the sisters, she probably made the happiest marriage. Treuhaft, himself a fine wit, is “Darling Old Bob” in decades’ worth
of salutations to her letters, whose domestic subject matter proceeds from pablum (“a kind of sawdust which they mix with water & feed to children here”) to housekeeping (four-year-old Dinky shows her how to clean the stove properly) to a phase in which the children are old enough to pass out leaflets and make do with sandwiches on days of heightened political activity. The Treuhafts’ worst sorrow—the death of their first son, run over by a bus in 1955—makes scant appearance in the letters; in Mitford’s memoirs she could not bear to write of it at all.

Otherwise, death became her.

Led to the subject by Treuhaft, who was doing legal work for a Bay area co-op promoting inexpensive burials, Mitford soon beheld the American funeral industry as a high-pressure game of grotesque profiteering, not to mention a paradise of macabre euphemism and fantastic technique: “If [the corpse] should be buck-toothed, his teeth are cleaned with Bon Ami and coated with colorless nail polish,” she wrote in what became the bestselling
American Way of Death
(1963). “His eyes, meanwhile, are closed with flesh-tinted eye caps and eye cement.”