BOOKS
Words, words, words
Alan Watkins
LOYALISTS AND LONERS by Michael Foot Collins, £15 Afew years ago Mr Foot published Debts of Honour, a collection of essays on people who had influenced him. If books can be divided into good and bad, a crude but serviceable division, it was a good book rather than a bad one. It was not perhaps as successful as his Aneurin Bevan (his own favourite) or The Pen and the Sword, about Swift and Marlborough, in which he starts off by admiring Swift extravagantly, as he still does, and ends up — untypically — by acknowledging that one of his heroes' enemies had something to be said in his favour after all. For Mr Foot's political and historical universe is black and white. Characters are either sons of darkness or children of light. This was true of his previous biographical collection, and is equally true of the most recent one.
This is inevitably, perhaps, a kind of side chapel or subsidiary gallery, even though it contains 30 portraits. Many of them (of Winston Churchill, for example, and David Lloyd George) are much restored. Occasionally the joins show, and some of the brushwork is newer than the rest. But though Mr Foot has expanded, contracted and joined together various articles, chiefly book reviews, his latest production is not shoddy. 'All craftsmen enjoy tinkering', Evelyn Waugh once remarked in a similar connection. The book hangs together quite well, ten pieces on Labour luminaries, including two ex-luminaries in Dr David Owen and Lord George-Brown; four on prime ministers; eight on literary and historical figures.
'A rich feast indeed!' as Mr Foot might put it. For the truth is that I find his way of writing irritating. I do not think that his enthusiasms (for Stendhal, say, or Lytton Strachey) are false or contrived. It is rather that he expresses them in the fashion of a huckster. We are always in Mr Foot's disjunctive universe, which bears no rela- tion to real people or politics, real morals or criticism. Only words are real. I know this opens a large philosophical question about words and meanings. For the pur- poses of this review, let me say merely that Mr Foot's language of noisy excess dimi- nishes what he loves and admires.
Thus, of Heine:
He was truly the wittiest German who ever lived, and, if that compliment appears in- sufficiently glowing, let us say he was the wittiest Jew, which is certainly saying some- thing. He wrote about love and food and drink and sometimes mixed them all up together in the most lascivious of souffles, and, for further measure, he had wisdom; breathtaking, prophetic wisdom.
Now, I know no German, a disability I am able to bear with fortitude and equanimity (as Mr Foot might write) because Mr Foot, as he admits, knows none either. It is obviously possible to enjoy Heine in trans- lation without knowing the language. It is also possible, though less obviously so, to write articles about him. But the wittiest German who ever lived? And the wittiest Jew as well? How does he know? And has Mr Foot ever seen, cooked or eaten a lascivious soufflé? Souffles can expand, collapse, burn or be underdone in the middle. They provide ample scope for simile and metaphor as they are, without accusing them of arousing libidinous thoughts.
Another of his enthusiasms is for the Celtic nations. Again, I am sure it is sincere enough. He regards himself as a Cornishman, his mother was Scottish and he has represented a Welsh constituency (scandalously renamed, as he agrees, Blaenau Gwent) for a quarter of a centurY. And yet, as we all know perfectly well, Mr Foot is as English as they come, and none the worse for that. We are prepared to smile. We will humour him in his delu- sions, even though we are a prickly lot who sniff out patronage even where none Is intended. When Mr Foot claims, in his essay on the Chartist William Lovett, that 'the history of British Socialism cannot be written without constant reference to the Celts', we are willing to be half-flattered. But he goes on: 'Perhaps I may say in passing that this was one reason why I was so eager to see a Devolutions Act passed through the House of Commons, to hell) keep the Celts within the United King- dom.' Come off it. Devolution was treadmill on which Mr Foot and his col- leagues reluctantly found themselves. They were flung off it into an election which they lost.
There is also a certain heaviness about Mr Foot's irony, irrespective of the side of his sharply divided universe on which its subjects find themselves. And so Richard Crossman, a white rather than a black, Is 'not necessarily to be appointed, unless I am seriously mistaken, the final arbiter on the Day of Judgment in these or other matters.' While Mr David Marquand, more black than white, having written perfectly sensibly and truthfully that after the general strike the Conservatives could be presented as the party of class war, and Labour as the party of reason and modera- tion, is dismissed by Mr Foot as `ineffablY moderate . . . . it may be imagined what must have occured to bring David Mar" quand's blood to the boil.' Moreover, there is a hint of violence about the language. Mr Foot is by nature kindly and tolerant, though he has a fella! side. But the violence is almost always, In his writing, being done by the good people to the bad, the whites to the blacks. Their violence likewise is performed in writing °.t speaking. So perhaps no great harm IS done. But the general effect is monoto- nous, to say the least. His heroes, fr°111 Swift to Bevan, are constantly flaYIng' chastising, devastating, wielding rapiers or cudgels, and pondering whether a whip a scorpion would best meet the occasion. It is no surprise that most of his heroes are Pretty nasty pieces of work: Cromwell, Swift, Lloyd George, Churchill, Beaver- brook.
The pattern is familiar enough. Mr Foot Is a romantic; is intensely loyal in his Personal, political and literary preferences; sets up heroes and bows down before them. His case against diaries, against any disclosure of what happened at private meetings, is that they diminish the quality of public life by making politicians afraid to Speak their minds. He does not perhaps believe that government is a mystery, but he certainly does not believe in freedom of information either.
This is a respectable and consistent view. But wait (as he often likes to write, being a great user of the hypothetical imperative). When the Crossman diaries are taken to court he finds himself, as a literary execu- tor, opposing the then government. True, one can perfectly well disapprove of some activity and yet oppose its suppression. But When another friend, Mrs Barbara Castle, Publishes her diaries, unthreatened by the _law, Mr Foot approves of her and them. No such indulgence is extended to George Thomas, Lord Tonypandy, who, unlike Mrs Castle, deals unkindly-with Mr Foot in his reminiscences. Mr Foot deals even more unkindly with Lord Tonypandy in return, accusing him, among other crimes, of breaching the constitution. His case is that exchanges between the Speaker and party leaders 'behind the Chair' are some- how different in kind from exchanges between ministers in the Cabinet room. I do not see the distinction myself.
We most of us spend our lives still seeing the world as it was at one period of time, usually that of our late adolescence or early adulthood. But we can — we certainly ought to try to — adjust our views and modify our vision. Mr Foot makes no such attempt. It is not only that his universe is black and white but that they are the blacks and whites of one particular period. For Mr Foot, it is for ever 1940. And so Stanley Baldwin 'guided his party and the nation to the edge of disaster.' Course he did, stands to reason, always said so, haven't I? Equally inevitably, 'for multitudes of European Socialists, the Second World War of 1939-45 started three years earlier on those Spanish battlefields, while Neville Chamberlain was still seeking pacts with the Fascist invader.' Has Mr Foot ever contemplated what would have happened if the communists had won in Spain and subsequently allowed entry to the Ger- mans as a consequence of the Hitler- Stalin pact? I doubt it. Such a question involves jettisoning old ideas and old illu- sions. This is something Mr Foot is reluc- tant to do, maybe because he is incapable of it.
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