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Treuhaft, himself a fine wit, is “Darling Old Bob” in decades’ worthof 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.”
    It all left her “roaring” (a favorite word). A muckraker had been born, one whose spirits would forever be as high as her dudgeon. Magazines began calling with story ideas, and she soon had “masses of things ½ cooking.” The tastiest results included her takedown of Elizabeth Arden’s exorbitantly ineffectual Maine Chance beauty spa in Arizona, and her assembled letters show that writing home was sometimes a way of making notes for her articles: “I have cased the visitors book,” she tells Treuhaft from Maine Chance in November of 1965. “Part of it reads like a list of products advertised in the daily press (Heinz, Ford, Fleishmann etc).” Retaining a sense of herself as a kind of lucky amateur, Mitford would always be surprised by her success in investigative journalism. She was particularly pleased when her 1970 exposé of the Famous Writers School, a mail-order fraud that had grown fat with promises to the aspirant scribbler, forced the operation out of business.
    The onetime revolutionary was actually a born meliorist, shining her gleeful light upon the venal and phony, even if she neveragain found quite so glorious a target as the funeral industry. Her largest other subject was the U.S. prison system, whose Advanced Han-Ball Tear Gas Grenade, seen by Mitford at a corrections convention, was a kind of counterpart to the embalmer’s Flextone preparation. But the prison book that she produced,
Kind and Usual Punishment
(1973), while full of fine stuff on matters like abusive medical experimentation, ends up feeling too much of a downer for the author’s natural talents. In
The American Way of Death
, the corpse, well out of it but all made up, seems often to be as amused as the reader; not so, of course, the wretched convict.
    The prologue to her memoir
Daughters and Rebels
includes the confession (odd in a memoirist) that “Looking backward is not much in my nature.” Even so, the second half of Mitford’s life was often spent coming to terms with the first. She traveled several times to Lady Redesdale’s home on Inch Kenneth, a Hebridean island in which Decca herself had received, from her only brother, a one-sixth share. (An attempt to donate her portion to the Communist Party of Great Britain proved unsuccessful.) By 1960, her gradual reconciliation with Muv had become a source of deep pleasure.
    Her sisters were a more intractable matter. Unity, who died in 1948 from the aftereffects of her suicide attempt, would come to Mitford in dreams that reflected Decca’s own enduring and horrified love: “well there’s no forgiveness possible (nor would it have been sought by that feckless, unregenerate soul).” In the 1970s, a willingness to help Unity’s biographer, David Pryce-Jones, get to