‘Starry and Restless’ — but Also Sidelined in the Literary Pantheon

‘Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford’By Carla KaplanHarper, 592 pages‘Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World’By Julia CookeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pagesJessica Mitford never met Rebecca West, author of “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” a masterpiece about the Balkans, and one of the three world shakers in Julia Cooke’s lively group biography. I wrote to Mitford to make sure, and she wrote a friendly reply regretting that she never had occasion to be in West’s company. It is a loss to history — that encounter between a fervent Communist and her anti-Communist counterpart.The epigraph to the Introduction in Carla Kaplan’s authoritative biography reads: “It never occurred to me to be happy with my lot.” This could have been said by West. Yet the difference between these two dissenters is instructive. Mitford distrusted those with power and privilege, which included her titled British family, and West, equally discontented, nonetheless burrowed her way into the modern bureaucracies of Great Britain and America, befriending FDR’s attorney general, Nicholas Biddle, Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, and the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Theobald Matthew, even while enjoying the company of Paul Robeson, Martha Gellhorn and many other friends on the left. Jessica Mitford pictured in 1964. Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesMitford is renowned for her muckraking 1963 study, “The American Way of Death.” The book is the product of an “indefatigable researcher,” Ms. Kaplan notes, who “couldn’t help seeing the funny side of everything she attacked by deftly combining facts and wit.” Much the same could be said of West. Mitford, however, did not realize, as West did, that Communism was not the answer to inequality and injustice.Ms. Kaplan explains how by temperament Mitford devoted herself to exposing the unfair world for the less fortunate. She asked her high born mother: “wouldn’t it be a good idea if all the money in England could be divided up equally among everybody? Then there wouldn’t be any really poor people.” Her mother replied: “Well, that’s what the Socialists want to do . . . it wouldn’t be fair, darling. You wouldn’t like if you saved up all your pocket money and Debo [sister Deborah] spent hers and I made you give up half your savings to Debo, would you?” Rebecca West would have told Mitford something like: “The problem and the solution are not simple,” but Ms. Kaplan does not pursue the import of the mother/daughter exchange, except to quote Mitford’s opposition to “everything” her upper class family “stood for.”Of Julia Cooke’s three subjects, Martha Gellhorn is perhaps closest to Mitford. She grew up in a comfortable middle class doctor’s family in St. Louis, left Bryn Mawr college before graduating to become a journalist on a local Albany newspaper, and went on to write brilliant firsthand accounts of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and many wars to follow, collected in “The View From the Ground.” West, a world class reporter and novelist, was one of Gellhorn’s inspirations, even though she deplored West’s anti-Communist politics.Ms. Cooke’s lively and shrewd group biography employs New Yorker writer Emily Hahn as a kind of go-between, befriending both West and Gellhorn. Hahn is less well known but just as important in Ms. Cooke’s book, with reporting that “thrummed with curiosity about human relationships: gendered dynamics, sex, friendship, family life.”Hahn, as I once learned from my interview with her, had a wise perspective on parenting unattainable by either Gellhorn or West who had fraught relationships with their sons. Several of Hahn’s books remain in print. I recommend “China to Me.” She was married to Charles Boxer, a British intelligence agent, and her shrewd reporting rivals West’s and has a depth of perception that surpasses Gellhorn’s.Emily Hahn. Wikimedia CommonsThe aim of “Starry and Restless” is to restore West, Gellhorn, and Hahn to the ranks not only of important journalists but also to show that their pioneering nonfiction narratives, largely unacknowledged by the so-called “new journalists” of the 1960s and 1970s, established a mode of personal and perceptive reporting that was even more adventurous and innovative than that of their male contemporaries.For several decades now, West and Gellhorn have been the subject of attempts to put them at the forefront of modern nonfiction writers. Perhaps this time, by including Hahn, and showing the interrelationships between these three women, Ms. Cooke will make their work stick.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl” and “Beautiful Exile: The Life of Martha Gellhorn.”

‘Starry and Restless’ — but Also Sidelined in the Literary Pantheon

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