Jessica Mitford’s ends and frenemies
Or, wit as a tool to rake muck
It was a good week for muckraking, and muckraking is a great word for recent feats of investigative journalism. It sounds filthy but actually describes the process of disinfecting, in a way. Raking the current U.S. president’s very mucky tax returns is a perfect example, especially because a previous president invented the term for exactly this sort of investigation. More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt coined muckraker to describe “journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, who in his view had gone too far in exposing corruption in government and corporate enterprise.”
Those are the words of Jessica Mitford, the “Queen of the Muckrakers” (according to Time) and probably the best of the famous Mitford sisters. Those six ladies were helpfully categorized by journalist Ben Macintryre as “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover, Nancy the Novelist, Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur.” (You know you’re in deep when you need to distinguish the fascists from the Hitler-lovers.)
Nancy (the subject of GWQ No. 40) ranks a close second to Jessica, and this 2013 ranking from The Toast helpfully supports my view. A streak of cruel wit ran in the Mitford blood, and while Nancy channelled it to dark comic effect in her novels, Jessica poured it all into her journalism. She asked tough questions of powerful people, and to prepare she would list her questions “in graduated form from Kind to Cruel.”
“Kind questions are designed to lull your quarry into a conversational mood,” she explains in the wonderfully titled collection Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking. “By the time you get to the Cruel questions … your interlocutor will find it hard to duck and may blurt out a quotable nugget.”
Mitford’s work is full of quotable nuggets, all in service of an ideal greater than just being quotable: She saw muckraking as a way of shouting at society, and she aimed to “shout long and loud enough to get people not only to listen but to do something.” Though the trick was that she wasn’t shouty but sharp. As she quipped:
Objectivity? I always have an objective.
Her crusades got her disowned from her family, to the point where (as Christopher Hitchens describes) the bookstore at the Mitford estate sells works by and about every sister but her. But while they could kick the girl they called Decca out of the manor, they couldn’t get the manner out of the girl. As Hitchens writes of her aristocratic tone:
Anything faintly nice is ‘bliss’; anything vaguely clever is ‘brill.’ Anything below par is ‘ghastly.’ Work in progress is “dread’ used adjectivally, as in ‘the dread manuscript.’ The absolutely worst thing to be is ‘boring,’ or ‘a bore.’
Mitford most famously went after the funeral parlours with her book The American Way of Death, calling the whole industry a “huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public”; other targets included writing schools and for-profit prisons. But my favourite piece in the book isn’t one of her famous investigative works but rather a trifle she knocked off in a day — wherein she popularized the word frenemy. It was called The Best of Frenemies (you can find it in its entirety here) and it was commissioned by the Daily Mail in 1977 in response to the very minor news item that former British Prime Minister Edward Heath had maintained a Friends List for his secretary, featuring short notes next to each name such as “Old lady, not too nice” or “We owe dinner.”
In her Poison Penmanship comments on the piece, Mitford admits “there is no muck in this one” but justifies its reprinting “because of the difficulties it presented as a commissioned piece far afield from my normal proclivities.”
The Mail editor had sweet talked her into writing a short essay on friendship, and further sweet talked her into delivering it within 24 hours. She had some coffee (“always a good mind-jolter”) and drew a bath, but no ideas were forthcoming. She prepared a telegram to decline the assignment, but when Western Union’s lines were busy, she decided “this was really an unprofessional thing to do, and hung up.”
It was then she remembered that one of her sisters (perhaps the chicken lover? She doesn’t specify) invented the term frenemy, “an incredibly useful word that should be in every dictionary,” to “describe a rather dull little girl who lived near us.” In her telling,
Those fringy folks whose proximity, either territorial or work-related, demands the frequent dinner invitation and acceptance of their return hospitality.
The real friends are those “we knew and laughed with and loved passionately circa age twenty. Only rarely does one make new friends in later life; I have, and I cherish them dearly.” The real enemies are “as hard to make and as important to one’s well-being as lifelong friends.” But most acquaintances, she concludes, would really be on a frenemies list, their names followed by the words “We owe dinner.”
This process was “all in all, a lucrative and satisfying day’s work,” not least because her agent resold it to the New York Times. And it continues to satisfy because it highlights how Jessica Mitford’s wit was a means to various ends, including raking muck, meeting deadlines, and managing unfortunate dinner invitations.
Quick quip; lightning
“We measure ourselves against our nemeses, and we long to destroy our archenemies.”
— Chuck Klosterman, in his perfectly Klostermanish 2004 Esquire piece on the need for both an arch-enemy and a nemesis. (h/t to GWQ arch-pal Jenkins.) From same piece: “Superman is the reason Batman became an alcoholic.”
Link link, nudge nudge
“The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio. To the English ear it might sound like an inadvisable amatory practice involving gasoline, but in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind.”
— The late Clive James pairing the profane and the profound in an excerpt from The Fire of Joy, his final book.
That was GWQ No. 65, a weekly compilation of brill quotable nuggets. Here’s Jessica Mitford’s band Decca and the Dectones covering Maxwell’s Silver Hammer with cowbell and kazoo. Why are the only things sold in parlours funerals, ice cream, pizza, and tricks? More shower thoughts like that can be found in Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. Be kind and not cruel by mind-jolting the ♥️ below.