Читать книгу A Private Life of Michael Foot - Prof Carl Rollyson - Страница 8

June 2000

7

“I went to see Mervyn,” I told Michael at the beginning of my second stay at Pilgrim’s Lane.

[CR] I raised the issue with him that there were things about his book that Jill didn’t like. I mentioned the house and the garden. My impression is that to this day, this is something Mervyn doesn’t grasp. He admired you. He admired your politics, but the domestic side did not become part of the story. Jill must have been terribly disappointed.

[MF] Mervyn has quite a good artistic interest. In fact, he got on with Jill, you see, earlier. In a kind of way he was understanding Jill as well as anyone. But she did say, “Fancy him, writing the book without appreciating what this house was.”

I made no comment but thought, ‘How could Michael be so wrong about Mervyn?’ Other than a few respectful comments about Jill’s film career and her passionate commitment to nuclear disarmament, his tone was highly dismissive of her.

Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died. These men relied on women to perform in what Martha Gellhorn liked to call “the kitchen of life.”

Just then the phone rang and before Michael could heave himself into motion, his housekeeper, Emma, answered the call. “She’s a great help,” Michael said, “She’s knows what she’s up to.”

“My legs are not quite properly operating and I’m having physiotherapy every Tuesday,” Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wait like anyone else for his turn. I was amazed that he did not have someone come to the house and that the therapy was not more frequent. He could barely walk now. But he was loyal to the National Health Service, the creation of his hero Nye Bevan and avoided any appearance of seeking special treatment or assistance outside the NHS.

“Tomorrow I’m going to see Bill MacQuitty,” I told Michael, who responded: “He knew Jill before I did. He was the producer of her films and a wonderful friend to her and to us. I hope he is in as full possession of his faculties as I am,” Michael said, laughing. I asked him if he had read MacQuitty’s memoir, A Life to Remember, which included passages about Jill. “I haven’t, really,” Michael admitted. I would continue to be surprised at how little Michael knew about Jill apart from what she herself had told him. She had been able, in fact, to fashion an image of herself for him that he could not bring himself to contest, even when I began to present him with evidence that Jill had sometimes misrepresented her life.

When I mentioned that Jill had a brief career as an actress, Michael responded, “I didn’t know that. She never told that to me.” In 1937, she appeared in a film, Makeup, written by her second husband, Jeffrey Dell. They had also collaborated on a successful stage play. “I see,” Michael said, seeming to muse over this new information. “I never met Jeffrey Dell. Jill said he was very clever.” That seemed to sum up all Michael knew about the man—or cared to know. Michael was not the kind of spouse to concern himself with his wife’s former life. “Jill didn’t talk much about Jeffrey Dell.”

Just then Michael was exercised about a letter he had received from Michael Scammell, Arthur Koestler’s authorised biographer, raising doubts that his subject had actually raped Jill. Certain of her friends had expressed their skepticism to Scammell, he reported. Michael pronounced Scammell’s name so that it sounded to me like “Scoundrel. “I’m going to write to the fellow in a pretty fierce way.” Michael revered the author of Darkness at Noon, a riveting exposé of Stalinist tyranny that Michael had stayed up reading all night when it was published in 1940. Michael was quite proud of his role in introducing Koestler’s writing to a British audience. As editor of the Evening Standard, he arranged for Koestler to write a column because he “knew more about what was happening in Spain than almost anybody. He was very good to teach the bloody fool English how these things run. I knew him as well as anybody.” Michael fondly remembered the pre-rape days, when he and Jill had socialised with Koestler, visiting him in France along with Richard Crossman and his wife.

Michael then retold the story of the rape. “She didn’t report it to me then, and she did not report it to anybody,” Michael said, “except maybe Ronald Neame. You can ask Ronnie Neame about that.” I did and Neame’s account would raise disturbing questions about Michael’s version of events.

Scammell entered the story because a rival, David Cesarani, had scooped him, interviewing Jill about the rape and publishing her account as part of his Koestler biography. In Michael’s view, Scammell was attempting not only to discredit Cesarani but also to destroy Jill’s report of the rape. I had had my own run-in with Scammell when, as American director of PEN, he had denied me access to board minutes dating from the period of Susan Sontag’s presidency. As a PEN member, I had a right to see the minutes, which I wanted to consult for my biography of her, and PEN’s Freedom-to-Write committee had supported my request thirteen to one (the holdout was an attorney associated with Sontag’s publisher). Telling Michael about Scammell’s shameful behaviour strengthened the bond between us, especially since Michael was a staunch partisan and believed in backing his friends to the hilt.

Scammell’s announcement that he was the “authorised biographer” also grated on Michael. “I don’t agree myself about definitive, authorised biographies. Absolute balls.” He handed over Scammell’s correspondence to me: “That’s a terrible letter, isn’t it?”

“Why hadn’t Jill seen Scammell?” Scammell’s letter pointed out that ten years earlier when he came calling, Michael had spoken with him but Jill had not. “She hadn’t told me about the rape,” Michael said. “She didn’t want to ... ” Michael hesitated and I added, “open the whole story.” I have to wonder, given what I was later to learn about Michael, if Jill ever wanted the whole story told. Julie told me she doubted her mother wanted Michael to know exactly what happened because he would not react as a normal man would. He had too much respect for Koestler as a writer to confront him. Just after Michael spoke of his admiration for Koestler’s “abilities,” I decided to put the question directly:

[CR] Michael, this is a hard question to deal with. It’s difficult putting yourself back in that time. What do you suppose you would have done if Jill had told you?

[MF] I don’t know.

[CR] It’s hard to say, I’m sure.

[MF] I think I would have written him a letter, you know. Something like that. It would have been a terrible shock to me.

Michael’s response confirmed Julie’s speculation that Jill would not have confided in Michael because she knew his response would not be visceral, but intellectual. But later, after interviewing Elizabeth Rushdie, Salmon Rushdie’s ex-wife, I began to doubt that Michael knew as little about the rape as his retrospective account suggested, even if Jill had not spelled out the details.

The more Michael talked about Koestler, the warmer his memories of the man became. Beaverbrook considered it quite a coup to get such a writer (“starting on his fame,” as Michael put it) into a paper that was admittedly thin during wartime. Michael believed it was important for his country to give Koestler, an exile, a “proper reception.” Koestler appreciated Michael’s efforts, Michael emphasised: “he took an interest in my life and I took an interest in his.”

“You’ll find me dodging all over the bloody place in my mind, but don’t you worry about that, you make order out of chaos,” Michael directed. “I will,” I replied. “I’ve got many more questions to ask you, but I’m perfectly willing to listen.” He wanted me to ask him everything, he assured me “and you must make the judgment about what you use and don’t use.” The dodging was oftentimes simply an expression of the gusto of a man with many stories to tell, and story-making is often a matter of digression, but there were occasions when I simply could not bring Michael to the point. I wondered whether he could not see the point —or wished to avoid it.

Michael loved to talk about books he read with Jill. The first was Wynwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man. H. G. Wells had called it one of the great books of the world, Michael pointed out, and it was one of the first presents he gave Jill at the White Tower restaurant. The book was not a European-based view of the world. “It is written like a poem and beautifully shaped. It is a defence of heresies. Heresies make the world go round.”

Mentioning the White Tower brought on memories of the war and Mary Welsh, then a reporter for Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. In these pre-Jill days, Michael used to frequent the restaurant with Mary and Connie Ernst, the daughter of renowned American attorney Morris Ernst.

[MF] Mary and I invited our fellow journalists to come and have a lunch with us — chiefly ones that had just come from America or Australia — and then halfway through the lunch we’d say to them, “You know, by the way, you’re paying for this meal because we’re giving you so much information.” We did have quite a big list of those who would come — and along came Hemingway. I’d never met him nor did she. It was a sunny day in the second year of the war and we put to him the proposition and he didn’t object to that at all and indeed was enamoured of it. “Come tomorrow, if you like, and I’ll take you to the Dorchester,” he said. Of course he went off with Mary Welsh. Farewell to Mary.

This farewell could not have been more breezy or light-hearted. She faded from our view like a ‘dissolve’ in a motion picture.

The period with Mary coincided with Michael’s years as editor of the Evening Standard. Lord Beaverbrook had hired Michael on the strength of Aneurin Bevan’s recommendation after putting Michael through a kind of on-the-job simulation. Michael enjoyed retelling the story of how Beaverbrook asked him to read the morning papers and then give him an account of the news. When Michael did so without hesitation, not even pausing to look at notes, he won the press proprietor’s admiration — and soon his affection. Beaverbrook enjoyed arguing with his journalists whatever their politics and Michael certainly did not keep his socialism a secret. Like Aneurin Bevan, Michael satisfied Beaverbrook’s intense curiosity about what the other side was thinking. Michael enjoyed quoting bits of Beaverbrook’s advice: “Don’t use question marks in headlines. It implies you don’t know the answer.”

Later Jill fit right into Beaverbrook’s circle, feeding the old man tasty bits of gossip about Labour Party personalities and sharing with him her hopes for Michael’s career. Beaverbrook did not ordinarily care for his journalists’ wives, so Michael was quite proud of how Jill charmed his employer.

But the Beaverbrook-Foot-Craigie attachment went much deeper. Michael was virtually a second son, adopted not merely by Beaverbrook himself but by the press baron’s family. “They might have been awful with me, or jealous, but it was exactly the opposite,” Michael told me. Why did Michael admire Beaverbrook so much? In part, it had to do with Beaverbrook’s openness to people. “He had no kinds of prejudices such as the English people have. Of course, he hated the English aristocracy,” Michael observed.

Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs. Pankhurst, Lady Astor—all of them affiliated with the Tories. Sometimes, as I would later learn, Michael would go into contorted arguments to support those he liked even when they manifestly stood for views opposite to his own.

Friendship was, I think, a deep enchantment for Michael. He built up his favourite as a nonpareil. He touted you. But if you broke the spell, he would erupt with fury and then subside in a silence that just cut you out entirely.

8

William MacQuitty, then ninety six and still handsome, had a spacious flat overlooking the Thames near the Putney Bridge underground station. A world class raconteur, his conversation ranged from his upbringing in Ulster, where he saw the Titanic launched (he later made the film classic, A Night to Remember), to his years as a banker in India learning about Hinduism and other world religions, to his study of psychology with Wilhelm Stekel, to his renowned collection of two hundred and fifty thousand photographs (he was a superb photographer), to his entrepreneurial start in the film industry with a self-produced documentary entitled Simple Silage (based on his years as a farmer). His wife Betty brought in tea, which I proceeded to serve to this ancient.

MacQuitty, Jill’s producer during the war, had wanted to marry Jill—or so Michael, Julie and everyone else then on the scene except William MacQuitty-—told me. When I pressed him about his feelings for Jill, he changed the subject, portraying a woman who believed in a world he could not conceive of ever coming to pass. He thought Jill and Michael were fantasists, their socialism a pipe dream.

“The dog and the duffle coat and the flowing hair. They’re a lovely couple,” MacQuitty said, laughing. But he believed they had no idea of what was up. He remembered one of Jill’s first meetings with Michael. When Jill and Liam (as she called him) went to see Michael during the making of Jill’s film The Way We Live, about the rebuilding of Plymouth, they were treated to an “oration,” MacQuitty recalled. Michael was “inspired, talking Jill’s language,” MacQuitty said. “Where there is no vision, the people perish and here was a man with vision.”

But where was that vision leading? Jill and Michael reminded MacQuitty of a joke. A pretty Liverpool girl wanted to get to the Far East, but she had no money. So she stowed away. A fortnight later she was discovered aboard ship. The Captain said, “You look very spruce, well fed and turned out. How come?” She said, “One of the crew took pity on me.” After more questioning, she revealed that her benefactor was the second officer. “What did you give him in return?” the Captain asked. “Well,” she replied, “You might say he took advantage of me.” Then the Captain said, “I can confirm that. You are on the Liverpool-Birkenhead ferry.”

MacQuitty was full of this kind of badinage, but he was a wary gent who kept referring me to his published memoirs. He seemed uncomfortable with the idea of straying from his text. I would make several return visits, but I was only slightly successful in penetrating his persiflage.

9

MacQuitty’s joke reminded me of Ronnie Neame’s view of Michael. Before my June visit, I had called Neame at his home in Beverly Hills. He was nearly as guarded as MacQuitty and almost as old, telling me he was now put together with string. He remembered that Jill introduced him to Michael in the late 1940s. Ronnie had heard that Michael was a Communist and not a very nice man. On television, Michael came across as soapbox strident, a monomaniac:

People used to come up to Jill and say, “What a shame you are married to that awful man.” In fact, Michael is an absolute sweetheart. The only thing about him is that he is up in the clouds. He would like a world that is just not practical or possible.

Ronnie’s arguments with Michael were always friendly and though he had not seen Michael in many years, he was obviously very fond of him.

10

Ronnie Neame echoed Michael’s editor and publisher, Mike Bessie—another witness I interviewed before setting off for London in June 2000. Mike talked at his apartment off of Washington Square in New York City. Bessie, Michael’s friend since the Second World War, regarded Michael as a brilliant writer, but also an imperceptive personality and a bungling politician. Almost the first thing Mike said was, “I wonder what kind of a source on Jill Michael is? He is so kindly a person.”

But beneath that veneer was a controlling personality, Bessie went on. Michael often attempted to short circuit Jill, calling her “My dear child,” a habit Barbara Castle regarded as a form of “gentle bullying.” Mike Bessie interpreted the phrase as the effort of a man exerting his patience. Often the outspoken Jill did not give ground, but Mike never saw Michael lose his temper, no matter how outrageous her comment.

To Mike there was a mystery about Michael. For forty years he had asked his friend to write a book entitled “Why I am a Socialist” and for four decades Michael Foot had written books that avoided confronting that important issue, Mike thought.

“You know the central criticism of Jill?” Mike asked. She was ambitious for Michael and forced him into a political career, which ended sadly. “If it can be said that there was anybody not qualified to be the leader of the Labour Party at the time Michael became the leader of the Labour Party, it was Michael!” Mike said, his voice rising. “He has none of the aggression — when he speaks he is a demon,” but that is not enough to make a leader, Mike implied.

Then Mike described a different Michael Foot:

To Jill has been attributed what many see as a wrong turn in Michael’s career. If you didn’t know them well, watching them in a room together, you would think that she was very dominant because what you wouldn’t necessarily observe is that he would allow that to seem so. It didn’t deter him from doing what he felt he had to do. He just didn’t fight back in terms of argument or discussion.

Mike wanted to know if I agreed. On two occasions I had watched the dynamic he described while working on my Rebecca West biography. I sensed it again when another biographer sent me a recording of Jill arguing a point while Michael played second chorus, so to speak.

Why did Michael permit such an impression to be created—one that would continue even after Jill died, when he would attract a kind of female confederacy around him? Or did Mike feel otherwise, that Jill could orientate her husband in directions he might not otherwise have taken?

I think the turn in the road was after Nye died. The party came to Michael and said you must take Nye’s constituency. “You are Nye’s heir and you must do that.” I think Michael had made up his mind about writing—God knows I wanted him to write and we had begun talking about the books he would do. But going back into politics that way—I think Jill was one of the elements that persuaded him to do that. But immersed in Labour Party politics through my friendship with Dick Crossman, I certainly understood why Michael did that.

If Jill did have a significant impact on Michael’s political decisions, it was, in part, because he really liked women, Mike emphasised. Michael Foot saw a great future role for women in politics.

When I entered Michael’s life, he was rebuilding his support system, superintended by Jill’s close friend, Jenny Stringer. He had an enlarging circle of new and old companions shepherding him not only around London, but also accompanying him to Dubrovnik, Plymouth, Grassmere (to meetings of the Wordsworth Society) and even to Bermuda. The frail, pale figure I had met on the doorstep was beginning to burgeon, devoting more and more time to his beloved football team and serving on its board, even as he became, in his own words, even more rickety. As Mike Bessie observed:

Michael is greatly changed. Even when he had his eczema [in the 1940s] and a certain shyness, he was not as vulnerable as he now looks—the eye [Michael had been blinded by an attack of shingles] and he just doesn’t have the strength. His continued activity is a triumph of will. Each time I see him I wonder, “Where does he find it?”

Michael’s energy did seem, in part, of a piece with his will to make a world in which he could think well of people. “Jill thought Michael lived in the nimbus of his qualities,” Mike observed:

He didn’t really see how awful some people were. You had to do something pretty bad before Michael would criticise you. He might criticise your ideas, but of your character or behaviour he tended to be sympathetic or understanding. Jill would be much sharper about people. Michael could be a destructive speaker in the House and tear you down. But that was an argument about something, not about a person.

Especially in their last years together, “You had a feeling that Jill pretty much arranged Michael’s life,” Mike thought. Michael grew increasingly dependent on her—“perhaps we all do,” said Mike, including all us husbands in his observation.

This reliance on women showed up early, in Mike’s view. “Whatever affair or relationship he had with Connie [Ernst]” (who became Mike’s first wife after she had ceased her World War II romance with Michael), “there was an element of dependence in it.” When Connie told Michael he should move out of his crowded flat during the war, he seemed powerless to effect a change. How could he manage all his books? he wondered. Rather like Jill taking charge of Michael, Connie engineered his removal to more spacious surroundings, taking care to ship his precious library to his new accommodations.

“Did you seriously consider marrying Connie?” I asked Michael when I got to Pilgrim’s Lane in June. “You bet,” he replied. “Tell me about Connie,” I prodded him. “I was very fond of Connie,” he began:

I had two Jewish friends that I fell for. The other was Lily Ernst, the Jewish exile I first met at Beaverbrook’s and got to know during the war. She was Beaverbrook’s mistress and I would have liked to take her off him. But I didn’t have much success. She was a passionate Jew. Her mother had been taken to the camps from Yugoslavia. Beaverbrook had met her in somewhere like Cairo and said if you’re ever in trouble, let me know. Now Connie I met sometime in 1942 through Mary Welsh.

This roundabout explanation was rather typical. Michael could recall significant events, such as being with Connie in New York City on the night Roosevelt’s death was announced, but he never clarified the nature of his emotional tie to her. I would remain in as much doubt about what Connie meant to Michael as Mike Bessie was. “For three or four years during the war we were going around lots of places together,” Michael said of his relationship with Connie. I persisted:

[CR] Do you think that if she had not met and married Mike Bessie she would have married you?

[MF] Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t think she really wanted to live here. As it turned out, it was probably better for both of us.

I made another try:

[CR] As a personality, was Connie anything like Jill?

[MF] No. I don’t think really. Just let me think ...

A minute went by:

[CR] Did she have Jill’s feminist interests?

[MF] I don’t know that she did exactly. She practiced it—that is to say, she was a strong liberal.

The word liberal triggered his mention of coming to New York in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Michael and Jill stayed with Connie’s father, Morris Ernst, famous for his defence of Ulysses.

Mike Bessie’s discussion of Michael and women brought me to the issue of Michael’s infidelity. I was keen to know what Mike Bessie, an old hand at publishing, would make of the ‘‘Lamia’’ story. I wondered how he thought I should handle it in the biography. “I have a suggestion to make,” he began:

You don’t know how you will handle it until you do. If it comes out to your satisfaction and you are inclined to use it, I would give it—not send it—to Michael, saying, “Here’s a part of my book that I believe to be true and that I would like to use, but it is not sufficiently important for me to use if it distresses you in any way.”

Although at the time I agreed that this was good advice, I should have known that I would never take it. My vision of Jill’s biography—any biography I chose to write--took precedence over anyone else’s feelings. The truth came first, Dr. Johnson asserted, even at the cost of hurting others.1 But how I would pursue that truth in the light of Michael’s own trust in my judgment I had not decided upon.

At this point Mike’s second wife, Cornelia, joined the conversation and I asked her for her impressions of Jill. Cornelia felt Jill was conflicted, playing the good wife to Michael, but being a feminist. “There were those moments when she and Michael disagreed,” Cornelia said. “My dear child,” Mike broke in, imitating Michael’s habitual method of addressing Jill. “That must have been fun to watch,” I said. “It was fun,” Cornelia agreed, because “my dear child” would bring out the feminist in her. “All of a sudden she was on her hind legs snarling—sweetly snarling but snarling.”

11

In June 2000, I had settled into a cosy stay at Pilgrim’s Lane. Only later would I begin to see that by providing me with so much access and comfort, Michael was buffering the biography. I don’t mean that he made some sort of calculation that I would be indebted because of his generosity—although this is exactly what his nephew Paul Foot would later say: I was abusing Michael’s hospitality by dealing with issues that for Michael’s sake should be left out of Jill’s biography. It was simply in Michael’s nature, I believe, to extend his liberality, which easily segued into his thinking I would produce a biography in the same spirit of amity that characterised our jolly talks together.

I did not realise then that I could not count on Michael to be his own man. He had a minder, Jenny Stringer. I met her during the course of my June 2000 stay at Pilgrim’s Lane. Although she promised me an interview, it would be quite some time before she would sit for one. “I better not stay.” Jenny said after stopping by to look in on Michael and I think, monitor my progress. “Why not stay?” Michael asked. “I have things to do,” she said.” “Better not stay,” Michael muttered, “doesn’t sound very convincing to me.” This was the sort of banter Michael enjoyed with the women—and it was mostly women—who catered to him.

Jenny was a friend of Victoria Reilly’s, Michael’s godchild and the daughter of Paul Reilly, whose father, Sir Charles Reilly, had introduced Michael to Jill at a London party in late 1944 just before Jill embarked on her most important film, The Way We Live. Jenny had not met Michael and Jill, however, until 1963, when they bought their home in Pilgrim’s Lane, close to Jenny’s home. Jenny became one of the younger women Jill encouraged, praising her as both homemaker and worker. They shared the same politics and Jenny was deeply involved in Labour Party affairs. When Jill realised she was dying, she began to worry about what would happen to Michael. Although Jenny never said so in so many words, I believe she made a promise to Jill to look after Michael. She was always cordial to me, but in her view, I was an interloper not to be trusted, especially since I always seemed to carry with me what she grimly called the “black box”—my cassette recorder.

12

The world seemed to turn on Michael’s likes and dislikes—as I learned when I mentioned I was giving a talk about Dr. Johnson at Cambridge. Michael objected to him as though Johnson was just another Tory politician. Indeed, literature seemed another form of politics and one had to declare a position. “What’s all this anti-Johnson stuff,” Michael’s brother John had asked him. “It won’t stand up,” John said. Michael explained his complaint to me:

It all derives from Johnson’s attack on Swift. Several people I admire very much like Alan Taylor was also a tremendous admirer of Lives of the Poets. No one can deny what a wonderful book it is. But he describes Swift’s madness without any kind of qualification. Once you look into it the story is absolutely false. He was not mad at all. Even Swift admirers like George Orwell swallowed the story of Swift’s madness.

Michael took fire on the topic of comic geniuses, putting Swift at the top with Shakespeare, followed by Rabelais, Charlie Chaplin, and Dickens. “I’m anti-Thackeray—I know that people will say that’s a foolish thing to say—because of what he said about Swift. “They tried to destroy Swift. If they had their way, he’d be dismissed as an absolute maniac. Terrible, what Thackeray said about him. Partly it’s because of his treatment of the women, but in my view he was in love with Stella and Vanessa.” The “they” almost sounded like a political party.

Talk of Stella and Vanessa transitioned in Michael’s mind to the question of fidelity and then to an old joke. A chap comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. He upbraids her. She gets up and says, “That just proves you don’t love me. You’d rather believe your own eyes than what I tell you.”

13

After an afternoon at the British Film Institute, I returned to Pilgrim’s Lane in quite a state of excitement, eager to read a letter to Michael that I had found in Jill’s papers. She had written to Michael Balcon, a friend of hers and Michael’s, asking him for the opportunity to direct a film. Although she had made her name during the war as a director of documentaries, her work had received mixed reviews and when postwar developments in British cinema closed off her efforts to continue her career, she turned to script writing for Ronnie Neame and his producer, John Bryan. Essentially Jill was making a pitch to Balcon for making films about contemporary women, a subject ignored or poorly handled in 1950s Britain, which she nonetheless had explored with considerable success in an Evening Standard series of articles. Balcon sent her a polite but firm brush-off. I wondered if Michael knew about this letter and how he would react.

I read the letter to him in the living room while he played classical music. “An amazing letter,” I said. 2 “Good, isn’t it?” Michael replied. “How could anyone not hire this woman?” I asked. “Yes, I think so too,” he said. “I daresay she was disappointed.”

Michael asked again the date of Jill’s letter. It was written in 1958. This was a shattering period for both Michael and Jill. He had recently lost his bid to recover his Plymouth seat (he had been out of Parliament since 1955). At around the same time Michael had had a row with Nye Bevan, his mentor, closest friend, and ally. Bevan’s refusal to endorse unilateral disarmament came as a bitter disappointment to Michael, who continued to campaign for it, putting tremendous strain on the Bevanite faction of the Labour Party. The acrimony reached its climax when Bevan smashed one of Jill’s antique chairs and called Michael a cunt in his own home.

In 1959, Michael reconciled with Bevan, then dying from cancer. Michael went on to write an acclaimed biography of his mentor. Michael reminded me that a year or so later he decided to make a bid for the Ebbw Vale seat Bevan had held until his death in 1959. Helping Michael, he acknowledged, became a full time job for Jill—“the election and the actual process of settling there [in Tredegar, part of Michael’s constituency].” It was a distraction. I’m sorry to say it must have often happened. She was turning away from what she had been doing in the film industry.” In fact, Jill’s last substantial film work was a screenplay for Windom’s Way (1957), a vehicle for Peter Finch. She did not produce another substantial work until Who Are the Vandals? (1967), a BBC television documentary about tower blocks and public housing. In that film she resumed her passion for architecture and town planning. She also caused an uproar in the Labour Party and among architects with two articles for the Times in which she accused both of reneging on their promise to provide housing on a human scale. Michael admired the ruckus Jill caused, but he seemed unable to understand why she did not continue with her causes. She would not make another film until the 1990s, when Michael’s retirement from Parliament allowed him to put himself at her disposal. Initially he had balked at the idea of her doing a film about the Balkan Wars, but then he capitulated to a suddenly adamant Jill, determined to make the film no matter what.

Was he making amends? Or was he simply caught up in her own passion to tell the story about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the shelling of Dubrovnik, their beloved holiday retreat? If Michael was no Carlyle when it came to reassessing his marriage, was the film nevertheless an act of restitution?

I watched Michael mulling over Jill’s letter to Balcon. Michael mentioned his friendship with the film producer but seemed unable to grasp that Jill had been rejected. “They should have pressed her more,” he said vaguely. Who “they” were was in doubt. Jill apparently never told Michael about the letter, and to me that was as heartbreaking as the letter itself.

But then, Jill had another life that Michael acknowledged but did not share. A case in point was Tom Driberg , a part of the Bevanite faction. Driberg’s personal affairs, as Michael described them, were a mess:

He had an unhappy life, Tom, because of his sexual ... He was taking terrible risks before the whole change had happened in the atmosphere of what could be done and not done. Tom from his earliest days was a homosexual, but he couldn’t enjoy sex with members of his own class. So he was constantly engaged in affairs ... you know ... in a way that was not at all ... In his last few years he used to come up here quite often and talk to Jill. He wouldn’t say all this to me. Jill was very good to him.

Michael then described a scene with a dejected Driberg standing alone on the street with his belongings, not knowing how to arrange a move into new lodgings. Jill understood this kind of male helplessness—as did all those women around Michael—and she soon had Driberg settled.

The ‘Dribergs’—the hapless males of this world—often turned up on Jill’s doorstep, Michael recalled. The artist Stanley Spencer would come calling, unwashed and dishevelled. He would ask: “Why am I so attractive to women?” and he was, Michael explained. At one point Spencer turned out a quick sketch of Michael, which Jill thought awful. She destroyed it, Michael recalled, adding that Clementine Churchill had done the same with Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her husband.

Just then Julie arrived. “How are you?” Michael asked. “Okay,” she replied. “Doesn’t sound very enthusiastic,” Michael said. Michael seemed to crave big entrances and provocative pronouncements, and he liked to send visitors away with some kind of provoking comment: “Drive properly,” he would say to Jenny. He knew that would get a rise out of her and prolong, if only for a moment, their comic crosstalk.

Julie got up to get us drinks, refusing my offer of help. When she returned, she handed me a whiskey (with Michael, I almost always drank whiskey, a cheap Scotch I would down while eying the superb collection of single malts—gifts from admiring visitors—displayed on the mantel).

I had brought a copy of my Rebecca West biography for Julie. “You should read it for your education,” Michael said to her. “My ongoing education,” Julie tittered. She would be the first to say she was not an intellectual. It had often been hard on her simply to be in the company of Michael, Jill, and leading lights in theatre, politics, and the arts who frequented the Foot /Craigie dinner parties. Julie loved private, domestic life and she had little patience for the sacrifices Jill made to Michael’s status as a public man. She was fond of Michael but critical as well—as she was of her mother. Michael would eventually sour on me because I gave Julie so much of a voice in my biography of her mother. But Julie had also been a problem for Jill and Michael, running through three marriages (as her mother had done), borrowing money, and bitching up her life while wanting Jill and Michael to give her not only economic but moral support. To many of Michael’s and Jill’s friends, Julie’s motives were mixed. To Julie, however, families were meant to help out, and she had certainly helped out at certain crucial points in Michael’s and Jill’s lives.

Just then, Julie was planning a two-week stay at the Villa Dubrovnik, where Michael and Jill had spent so many happy holidays. Jill’s friends were assembling, as were many Croats, who honoured Jill and Michael for making a documentary about the shelling of their city. Two Hours From London marked Jill’s astonishing return in her eighties to filmmaking. Of course, I had to be on hand to meet as many of her friends as I could. “Fun is to be had there,” Julie said. “You’re making it impossible for me to say no,” I replied. “That’s what we like to hear,” Michael chimed in. Michael and his entourage planned the rendezvous for that September. I did not know then that he was paying the way for many of these people, including Julie.

14

After Julie left us at Pilgrim’s Lane, I came back to the question of Michael and women, which he had alluded to when describing his period at Oxford. I pointed out to him that one of Jill’s obituaries referred to him a “man about town” during the war, while another claimed he had been a “womaniser” in the period before he met Jill. “What I want to know,” I said to him, “is how much of a ladies’ man you were.” “Well I wasn’t at all, hardly,” Michael replied. I laughed, “What a disappointment, Michael!” “I wish I could have made the boast,” he added. “I sometimes had eczema so badly I wouldn’t go out of the house. For quite a long time I didn’t think any woman would look at me.” The word womaniser bothered him. “It should be exterminated from history.” Frank Owen, his colleague at the Evening Standard, seemed to attract women effortlessly, but Owen was no womaniser. In Michael’s book, the term implied one-way gratification and in Owen’s case the women received as good as they got. “I was in awe of such men and thought, ‘How do you do that?’” Michael continued: “In the 1930s, I was tremendously inhibited about sex. I was very backward in such matters. I started reading H. G. Wells properly then. He liberated me.” Michael adored novels like Ann Veronica and thought the world would have been a poorer place if H.G. had not had his affair with Rebecca, no matter how many hardships and griefs their liaison caused. Rebecca had attacked H.G.’s feeble characterisations of women such as Margerie in his novel Marriage. But in subsequent novels, Michael pointed out, Wells included much more complex portraits of women—some of them clearly based on Rebecca herself.

I was still trying to piece together what Michael was like when he first met Jill:

[CR] She must have seemed an extraordinary woman. She was doing this film [The Way We Live]. She had been married twice before. She had a child. What was that like for you?

[MF] Yes, oh well ... By the way, I was tremendously admiring of all the time she gave to Julie. Sometimes Julie poorly appreciated that.

I didn’t think he was going to answer my question, but he continued:

It didn’t happen all at once, you know. After the [1945] election we started doing some things together. I was living at sixty two Park Street and she came up and saw there was no music, and she put a radiogram in the corner and played Mozart. Jill was the one who really made me understand what music was—all such things.

[CR] Was it difficult for her to divorce Jeffrey Dell?

[MF] I didn’t know about that at all, really. I don’t think it was difficult. We weren’t pressing to marry, but my father was in favour of it.

Such dialogues were all too brief, with Michael often breaking off to discuss another book, another writer—this time it was V. S. Pritchett, who put him on to Disraeli’s novels. “All the women are different,” Pritchett pointed out, “not a stereotype among them.”

Literature, especially Michael’s favourite works, had a presence so palpable for him that it deflected discussion of his own emotional life. Personal experiences seemed displaced in literature, or rather, the crucial events in his life could only be approached in terms of literary analogies. For example, Michael’s great friend, “Vicky,” a newspaper cartoonist, a Hungarian Jew who had emigrated to England before the war, was quickly merged into a discussion of Heine, whom Michael revered for his melancholy Jewish sensibility. The witty yet often morose Vicky committed suicide—in large part, Michael believed—because of the sorry state of the world. The cheerful Michael was nonetheless drawn to apocalyptic visions and would recite—as he had for Rebecca West—the whole of Byron’s holocaust poem, “Darkness.”

Just then Jenny returned, having sorted out some business for Michael. But a good many items remained to be acted upon in what she called his “procrastination file.” He was about to go out and she said:

[JS] When you come back, I’m going to pounce on you and you’re not going to have lunch until you said yes or no to every single one of them.

[MF] Right.

[JS] I’m going now.

[MF] I’m coming with you to see you’re not arrested.

[JS] No, you better not. Arrested? For what?

[MF] Leaving your bloody car in the middle of the road.

15

Jenny mentioned as she was leaving that Michael might expect a call from Moni. “Who is Moni?” I asked after Jenny left. She had been James Cameron’s wife, an Indian woman who figures in Cameron’s wonderful book, An Indian Summer. Michael considered Cameron the best journalist of his generation. He was dead now and Moni had married Sir Denis Forman, former head of the British Film Institute and the producer of, among other noteworthy projects, The Jewel in the Crown. Forman, I was later to learn, had first met Jill during the war, when, as he put it, she was quite a nightclub hopper and girl about town.

Talk of Moni set Michael off on a trail of funny stories: the time, for example, when a Parisian friend with a weak grasp of English idiom wrote him on the eve of his first election campaign in Ebbw Vale, “I’m crossing my fingers for you.” To which Cameron added: “I’m fingering my crosses.” Michael did not have much to do with crosses or any sort of religion, he wanted me to know. When he spoke of Heine, for example, he described a man who rejected Judaism because of his “humanity.” Heine seemed a greater figure than his friend Karl Marx, Michael added, because the former had a much better sense of humour.

Comedy, in fact, was a huge topic of conversation in the Foot household. Michael often quoted Jill’s assertion that it was much more difficult to write a great comedy than a tragedy. The couple seemed to regard comedy as a capacious way of describing and understanding humanity, even a form of social justice. “If Karl Marx had only brought Heine over to London with him. It might have saved us all.” Michael then paraphrased Heine: “I don’t want a poet’s crown. Say that I was a soldier in the fight for humanity.”

This fight for humanity is the way Michael glorified the Labour landslide of 1945, which became his next topic of conversation. It was much more than a party victory and what drew him to Jill was her confidence—far greater than his—that not only would he win a seat in Devonport, Labour would triumph too. The turning point for her, Michael suggested, was watching Nye Bevan speak on Michael’s behalf in Plymouth.

Michael never mentioned the passes Bevan made at Jill, but this subject did not bother him when others—including me—spoke of it. “You must make a list of the men who made passes at Jill,” I told him. “An appendix,” he suggested.

16

Michael’s praise for Jill seemed extravagant to nearly everyone I spoke with about her. She was a filmmaker, a journalist, and finally a kind of historian, but she did not make history. But Michael wanted to make an epic out of her life:

She was dedicated to the women’s fight and in one form or another that’s what she’s doing for the rest of her life—in some ways I think better than anybody else. If you take it all together—at our commemoration for her I said that she called herself a William Morris socialist and I said that at the commemoration service they had for William Morris, Robert Blatchford said that William Morris was our best man. I said Jill was our best woman.

Michael spoke of how well Jill had taken his devastating defeats in Plymouth in 1955 and during the general election debacle in 1983. Turning to me, he said abruptly: “Now the way to recover from this defeat of hers is your book. It is very important to us. You understand, I’m sure. I’m tremendously pleased you’re doing it. I’m sure she’d be pleased.” I nodded, but I could not honestly say that my biography would be what Jill wanted. Michael wanted it very badly. He proposed a title: “Jill Craigie and the Fight For Women’s Rights.”

It seemed odd to me, however, that Jill’s book, Daughters of Dissent, which I came to regard as her unfinished masterpiece, provoked so much uneasiness in Michael. “What happens about the actual stuff there [in the book] I’m not quite sure. I’ll read it through again sometime, but I’m doubtful whether it should be published separately. If you think it should be, that’s another matter. . .” But he proved resistant to my proposal that it should be published with a foreword and afterword explaining Jill’s intentions and how she planned to complete her work. She had left eighteen substantial chapters (well over 250,000 words), but Michael continued to balk at the idea of publishing because Jill never was able to write about the postwar years when women actually got the vote. When Michael Bessie said the book needed considerable editing and shortening to be published, that pretty much shelved the project in Michael’s mind.

So far as I could tell, Michael never did re-read the book. I sat in Jill’s study for days reading it all and marvelling at the way she created a great drama out of the Pankhurst and Fawcett family histories, including cameo appearances by John Stuart Mill, Disraeli, and many other 19th--century notables. Her book was pure story, it seemed to me, a wonderful narrative composed of multitudes of biographies. There was nothing dry about her approach or arcane about her use of sources. Her work in film and her love of music showed in the book’s images and symphonic structure. Indeed, she had used this material to write a play with music about the suffragettes, eventually also a screenplay. Neither of these works were ever produced.

17

“So ... what’s the time”—an expression Michael invariably used, especially around drink time. “10 to 6,” I said. “I found a nice reference to Jill in Richard Crossman’s diaries,” I told Michael. “Yah ... Ah,” he muttered. “I just happened to pick this up coming down the steps.” It was hard to turn in any direction in the Hampstead house and not find a bookcase. This volume was in the hallway leading to the downstairs kitchen. Actually, the hallway was like an antechamber lined with shelves of Crossman’s diaries and biographies of political figures. “I was looking in the index for an entry under Jill Craigie, but it was not there. It was under Jill Foot.” “Good God, a scandal!” Michael said in mock outrage. “Page two hundred and thirty five,” I continued. “He’s talking about Celia Strachey, John Strachey’s widow.” I began reading: “She had been devoted to John all her life ... She has been a wonderful wife in the same way that Dora Gaitskill and Jill Foot are wonderful wives. All of them are possessive women who fight for their husbands like tigers and all of them, unlike Anne, are politicians themselves and not merely interested in politics.”

I had been hoping to stir Michael to comment. I was already frustrated by his unwillingness or inability to analyse the role Jill had played in his political career. I would later learn from Leo Abse and Glennys Kinnock about this aspect of his marriage to Jill. Michael only asked me which of Crossman’s diaries I was reading. “Volume one, Minister of Housing, 1964-66,” I told him. “How do you think Jill would react to that?” I prodded. He paused, “Well ...” and I re-read the part about possessive wives fighting for their husbands. Michael cleared his throat and began talking about Crossman. “We became much more intimate in the last ten years of his life ... I’m just going to have a short sharp one [a nap] ...” and off he went to rest on the upstairs sofa.

Michael was more voluble later that evening, discussing the Callaghan government and its efforts on behalf of maternity rights. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative leader, she showed no interest in women’s issues, Michael observed with considerable dismay. After which he got on to one of his heroes, Lloyd George and Lloyd George’s affair with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, a strong supporter of women’s rights. Lloyd George said to her, “We can’t have another Parnell case, you know.” Michael mentioned that both he and Jill were interested in Frances Stevenson, whom Michael had met. He did not know that Jill had kept a diary with rather acerbic comments on the submissiveness of secretaries.

Talk of Lloyd George led to an aria about the poor record of Liberals on the subject of women’s suffrage. Michael deplored Gladstone’s opposition but saved most of his fire for Asquith, whose government force-fed the suffragettes. Jill, Michael noted, had given Roy Jenkins a hard time for not adequately dealing with Asquith’s hostility to votes for women in his biography of the politician. Although Jenkins had made certain government documents concerning the Liberal government’s treatment of the suffragettes available to Jill, she continued to hector him. “She would not let him off,” Michael chuckled, “every time she saw him.”

I seized my opportunity: “Do you think that’s part of what Crossman meant when he said Jill was not just a politician’s wife but she was a politician too?” “She wasn’t a politician’s wife at all,” Michael replied. “She was very good to me, but she had her own ... ” When Michael hesitated, I asked, “So a politician’s wife would not speak up, right?” Well, a politician’s wife might not put it the way Jill did, Michael conceded. “She was not doing anything to injure me,” he quickly pointed out. “She did not meekly follow what the males were saying.”

Hoping for further openings, I mentioned a passage in Barbara Castle’s autobiography describing Jill’s effort to corner Harold Wilson, then President of the Board of Trade, about more support for the British film industry. “Barbara said Jill became quite outspoken and she quotes you as saying, ‘Jill, come off it,’ perhaps because she was becoming a little aggressive.” Michael lowered his voice, “I don’t remember that.” I continued: “My impression is that Jill was outspoken and not particularly concerned about being tactful.” Michael seemed to agree that Jill was pursuing her cause “by the best available means.” Jill could be tactless, but Michael asserted that she dealt better with people than Barbara did. Wilson was one of Barbara’s heroes (he promoted and backed her), Michael reminded me, but Michael felt Jill was justly critical of Wilson’s lukewarm support for British filmmakers. For a Labour Party member, Wilson evinced a shocking want of support for leftwing filmmakers and in fact seemed to Jill, all too cosy with rightwing rogues like Alexander Korda.3

“I don’t think it would be much use, ever,” Michael said, referring to any effort to silence Jill. I laughed. “But that did not mean that she lacked subtlety,” Michael added. “I think she was both outspoken and charming,” I offered. “Yes, she was,” Michael agreed. “I also wonder if she had more latitude to be her own person. She wasn’t a member of Parliament representing somebody. She was just representing a point of view,” I suggested. “She wasn’t representing my views. She knew much more than I did about film,” he noted. According to Jill, the trouble started with Stafford Cripps, who seemed in the grip of reactionary filmmakers and then continued with Harold Wilson, Cripps’s protégé. Michael Balcon would have supported Jill in this regard, Michael emphasised.

Michael remembered other instances when Jill had gone after Labour leaders—even Robin Cook for the Party’s policy on the Balkans. This was before Tony Blair’s first election victory when both Jill and Michael thought New Labour had not condemned Serb aggression in stronger terms. James Callaghan himself had come up to Jill to quietly suggest that perhaps she should “lay off.” Callaghan and Michael had never been personal friends, Michael pointed out:

But after we had the election [for party leader, with Michael losing by only a few votes to Callaghan] I was doing everything I could in the House of Commons to keep that government in office. Also, I didn’t want Callaghan to resign. I thought there was still a chance of winning the next election—much better than I would have. I pleaded with him not to do it [resign]. He was very nice to Jill. After the election [for party leader] he invited us to Chequers and showed us around, saying, “Five more votes, Jill and you would have been here.”

When I asked him about it, Callaghan did not remember saying this, but he saw no reason to doubt Michael’s memory.

“How did you and Jill feel about coming so close—five votes?” I asked.

Michael said he never thought he would win:

I didn’t think I was going to come as close as that … he did that terrible thing about sacking Barbara and Barbara will never forgive me [because she thought Michael should have resigned from the Cabinet in protest over her dismissal]. She thought from that moment onwards the government made an awful hash of it. Not the truth. My opinion is that Callaghan ran that government better than Wilson.

“What happened to Wilson?” I asked. “Did he just get tired?” Michael thought so: “Yes. Nobody knows for sure.”

18

At the end of my London visit, I discussed with Michael the possibility of joining him in Dubrovnik in September. It was difficult for me to get away because of my teaching and my two Scotties, which I refused to put in a kennel. My wife could look after them, but more than a week of that became rather burdensome for her when alone. “I could never put Dizzy in a kennel,” Michael said. I said I’d have to find someone in the neighbourhood to take care of the dogs if my wife came with me (a doubtful possibility). “That’s what we did,” Michael said. “Dizzy was quite adventurous with other people. He was very frisky. When we said he was a Tibetan, some people laughed. They’re supposed to have a terrible reputation.” Indeed, Julie had told him that the breed “yapped” all the time. “During the first two years he was a bit hard to control,” Michael said, a massive understatement. “We got him just before the terrible election of 1983. On Sundays, I’d do seven or eight miles with him up to Kenwood [in Hampstead Heath] and all those other parts.”

“How did Dizzy get his name?” I asked. “I was writing a piece about Disraeli at the time. Greatly undervalued as a writer. A better novelist than that bloody Trollope. Better on politics. . . He was genuinely interested in the women ... in women’s rights.” Thus Michael rewound the spool of his recollections. Sometimes it seemed like an endless loop.

1 See my argument in A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005).

2 I include the entire letter in To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie (London: Aurum Press, 2005).

3 Later, film historian Philip Kemp sent me a tape recording of an interview with Jill, who attacked Korda and remained unwilling to accept Michael’s defence of the producer when Michael joined the conversation.