Word: decca
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...about unity of drama and music, based on very frail analogy to classical Greek tragedy, now find few admirers, especially since he himself failed to apply them carefully. And the music is much less well-served by this recording sonically and artistically than by Georg Solti's classic 1964 Decca set. If there is a need for Wagner in translation, it is in the theater, not on record...
After them among the daughters of utterly respectable Lord and Lady Redesdale came Jessica Mitford, known to her family as Decca, who scratched hammers and sickles on the windowpanes of her stately home with her diamond ring before running off to the Spanish Civil War at the age of 19 with a nephew of Sir Winston Churchill's. In A Fine Old Conflict, a sequel to her earlier memoir, Daughters and Rebels, Decca promises to explain why she in particular and Mitford sisters in general have behaved so-well, Mitfordly...
Nobody can fault her story for lack of plot. After Spain, Decca married her lover, Esmond Romilly. They came to the U.S. She conceived his child, Constancia, nicknamed Dinky, before he returned to Europe with the Canadian Royal Air Force and died in action in 1941. Despite that tragedy, Decca tells, with a nice sense of wartime humor, of her duty on the Washington front in the Office of Price Administration. At last it is the moment for the slap in the face of the British Empire-the really big Mitford-sister gesture. After moving to California, marrying a brilliant...
...account, Decca made an odd sort of Communist. She drummed up attendance to party rallies with flame-colored flyers that read: CHICKEN DINNERS LIKE MOTHER USED TO MAKE. FREE-FLOWING LIQUOR. 20 BEAUTIFUL GIRLS 20. Whether investigating police brutality in Oakland in the '40s or leading a White Women's Delegation to Mississippi to appeal the case of convicted Rapist Willie McGee in 1951, Mitford the Marxist seemed to operate with a touch of what she called "high jinks." Missions might be missions, but why could they not also be "a thrilling adventure," or at least "a welcome...
...this, of course, makes a good story too. It is when Decca tries to explain the Mitford syndrome that everything falls apart. Why did she join the Communist Party and remain a Communist for the better part of two decades? "The Zeitgeist of the thirties" is the best she can do for an answer. She is no more convincing about why she left the party...