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Jessica Mitford’s A Fine Old Conflict continues the Decca Mitford project of walking out of the aristocratic drawing room, slamming the door, and then spending several decades sending back beautifully written reports on what a relief it was to escape. Having already fled the Mitford family circus of country-house privilege, political lunacy and high-born theatrical weather, she now lands properly in America, where rebellion comes with different hats, larger sandwiches, and a Communist Party apparently determined to prove that idealism and committee meetings are natural enemies.

This is Mitford’s memoir of her years on the American left: organising, campaigning, arguing, believing, doubting, laughing, and discovering that even revolutionaries have paperwork. She enters the world of radicals, labour struggles, civil rights, party discipline, FBI interest, ideological quarrels and domestic inconvenience with the same dry, lethal eye she previously applied to the upper classes. The scenery has changed from English stately oddness to American political fervour, but human absurdity, fortunately for the reader, remains in excellent supply.

Mitford is never a pious narrator, which saves the whole thing from becoming one of those memoirs where the author looks nobly into the distance while History plays a violin. She believed things passionately, made choices, joined causes, fell among comrades, and then retained the unforgivable habit of noticing when everyone was being ridiculous. The Communist Party may have promised a new world, but it still contained egos, factions, slogans, discipline, suspicion, and the eternal problem of people who are certain they know what is best for humanity before lunch.

The title is perfect Mitford: affectionate, mocking, and faintly dangerous. A Fine Old Conflict suggests both noble struggle and an argument that has been going on so long everyone has forgotten who brought the sandwiches. There is politics here, certainly, but also marriage, exile, class, loyalty, disillusionment, friendship, wit, and the strange pleasure of watching someone from one of Britain’s most notorious families become a sharp-tongued participant in American radical life.

The grand irony is that Decca’s rebellion did not lead her into some clean world of virtue, because no such place exists and she was far too intelligent to pretend otherwise. She escaped one tribe and joined another, swapped inherited privilege for chosen conviction, and found that every camp has its rituals, blind spots and comic potential. Luckily, she could describe all of them with the brisk cruelty of someone who had survived both aristocrats and activists and knew which knives were used at dinner.

For readers of Jessica Mitford, political memoir, twentieth-century radicalism, American left-wing history, Mitford family fallout, or simply prose with its elbows sharpened, this is splendid stuff. It is not a dusty ideological tract. It is a memoir with blood in it: funny, argumentative, disobedient, and perfectly aware that history is usually made by people who are both sincere and impossible.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. Respectable enough on the outside, subversive enough within. A solid copy of a book about causes, comrades, quarrels and one Mitford sister’s lifelong refusal to sit quietly in the class position provided.

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