Debts of Honour

...Would Paine return the esteem of a Foot who has done more than any British politician in modern times to foster the tyranny of the closed shop, and whose Labour legislation gave such scope of power and legal immunities to British unions that many observers feared the country was heading for a quasi-syndicalist corporate state...

...Have we, then, the mad scientist after all, intent on building not Jerusalem but a human battery farm in England's green and pleasant land...

...but this is a flagrant case of affection at the expense of principles...

...They would then impose an iron-curtain censorship on the media and post thugs at Hyde Park Corner to shout (or knock) down any orator who ventured to criticize the party line...

...Biat is this a description of Randolph Churchill, or of Foot himself...

...Foot's association with what Labour (now SDP) moderate Shirley Williams once called "the fascism of the Left" has not loosened with the passage of time...

...But there is more to these essays than acknowledgement, simple friendship, and respect...

...Though Tony Benn lost (by a paper-thin margin) the party election for the post of Foot's deputy, the recent Labour Conference did adopt the bulk of the policies which Benn and his supporters have inspired: unilateralism and evacuation of American nuclear bases, withdrawal from the EEC, massive expansion of the public sector and public spending, etc., etc...

...Disraeli, "The Good Tory," is redeemed in F o o t ' s eyes (almost) by his o u t s i d e r quality and by a tinge of feminism which Foot tries to extract from Disraeli's writings and secret sympathies...

...and Chandler's complete output (like T.S...

...Yet Chandler, in spite of everything, evokes a response far different from that given to such authors as Hammett or Rex Stout...

...If the American-written introduction to his new book is any criterion, the answer is: not very much...

...This rather stupid (and mistaken) snobbery is bad enough, but it hardly prepares the reader for the climax of this introduction: Should IFoot'sl Labour Party be invested w~th power over England it would go forth to battle m the hermr cloak of past and present, the Levellers would share pride of place with Canadian press lords...

...There would, of course, be plenty of rhetoric about: the turgid agitprop variety, likely to make Milton and Shakespeare sick to their respective stomachs...

...Of course, Chandler's limitations as a serious writer--the soft core of sentimentality at the heart of his work, the infrequent but horrendous purple patches, the implausible characterizations--are hard to overlook, and no one knew this better than the man responsible for them...

...The rest of the book is interesting more for what it tells about Foot himself than for the subjects of his discourse...

...It would be even more interesting to know Paine's opinion of this champion of Democracy and Individual Rights who has so enthusiastically wheeled and dealed with the big bosses of British trade unionism who achieve and hold their positions by notoriously undemocratic means...

...The title implies a sort of journalist's answer to the journalistic question, "Who, or what, made you what you are t o d a y ? " In his foreword Foot says the list is incomplete, and he mentions several other honorable creditors, including especially the g r e a t Welsh left-winger Aneurin Bevan to whom he owes "the biggest political debt of all...

...They had nothing to do with the Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie type of superb plotting...

...but by God, a kind of lightning struck on every page...

...This is the unanimous testimony of those who know him well, and it belies his dreadful public image...

...He is a kind of literary taxidermist, using the readings and writitags of his subjects as stuffing...

...He squirmed at the schoolboy gush implicit in Auden's praise: "Is this a criminal milieu...

...What, after all, could his father Isaac Foot, bibliomane, puritan, and provincial politician, share with that Fleet Street despot and one-time appeaser of Hitler, Lord Beaverbrook--or either of these with Bertrand Russell or the alcoholic failure Randolph Churchill, egregious son of Winston...

...This tribute is amusing in light of Foors bitter (and sometimes hysterical) d i a t r i b e s against Mrs...

...Such jolts of verbal electricity light up Chandler's pages from beginning to end, and they are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 35...

...Featuring our infamous Turkey logo, this mug will be the envy of all your friends in the "Masterpiece Theatre" coterie...

...Anyone who would apply the adjective "cozy" to Britain (not just England) as it might be governed by the present Labour Party must have spent the past few years sealed inside a thermos jug...

...all moving forward in a wild clash of oratory and a volley of rhetoric fit for Shakespeare and Milton...

...Even the normally 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 moderate Times was moved by this to pose the editorial question: "Is Mr...

...In "The Case for Beelzebub," he does his best as an advocate for the man whom he says he loved as a second father: Lord Beaverbrook...

...How often do you read a description of a character who says that he had hair growing out of his ear long enough to catch a moth...

...It also leaves out the peculiar affection which Foot can inspire even among those who oppose him most fiercely...

...Where Foot has moved against any of this, it has not been to extinguish the policy, but to fard it over and avoid frightening voters...

...Thatcher, who so closely resembles the Duchess in temper, and indeed more in philosophy than Foot does himself...

...Now Frank MacShane--who wrote the biography and edited one of the unpublished prose collections--has produced a new volume of letters to supplant the 1962 Raymond Chandler Speaking, one which bears the imprint of no less august a firm than the Columbia University Press...

...With no apparent sense of irony he writes: " I t was the m e n . . . who had allowed things in England to go from bad to worse, and Sarah, given her magnificent head, could have saved it all...

...Perhaps, in that dark place where most men keep their fundamental honesty, Foot is aware of this corruption, and knows well enough how it may end in the most stultifying and cruel tyranny...

...He had made his share of mischief, as a man fighting alone--not just for comically obsolete rituals, but as an embodiment and celebration of that saving grace which makes an individual hold out, ~ l'envers et contre tout, against those who reject his dreams of better things...

...He writes with the pen of a journalist who has read widely and remembered most of what he has read, but--pace Roy Fuller, whose (London) Sunday Times review is quoted on the dust jacket--Foot does grind his own axe almost all the time...

...My [ check for $36.50 is enclosed...

...Chandler buffs, of course, will find all this Terry Teacbout is jazz critic for the Kansas City Star...

...During most of his career he manifestly did not want anything of the kind, being primarily concerned to damn and blast the real world with its anomalies, its messy compromises, its necessary dirty deals and vagrom unpredictability...

...13.95 Herb Greer Tendency...

...Exactly as Don Quioxte was swept away by fancies of knighterrantry culled from the reading of too many books (which overheated his brain), so Foot has been carried off on a torrent of Romantic nineteenth-century socialism, tilting with pen and Parliamentary lance against a cigar-smoking cabal of bosses who live now only in the scenes and pages of left-wing melodrama, and on behalf of an oppressed working class which no longer exists...

...No, just average corrupt living with the melodramatic angle over-emphasized, not because I am crazy about melodrama for its own sake, but because I am realistic enough to know the rules of the game...

...he wrote to a friend...

...Foot does not discourse like a scholar...

...Budding thesis scribblers will find their paths smoothed by a checklist, two critical studies, a biography, a collection of critical essays and reminiscences of Chandler, two volumes of uncollected and unpublished miscellaneous prose, and a poorly edited, longunavailable selection of letters...

...and Hyde Park orators would sit at table with belted kmghts, all cozy, all Enghsh...

...printed (no tacky decals) on clear THE SATURDAY EVENING CLUB ! glass, and the rim-of this magnificent ! mug is trimmed with an attractive P.O...

...Now you can not only drink to the American Spectator, but from it-=the better to tolerate the besotted hokum passing for wisdom in the Republic these days...

...It is doubtful whether Randolph Churchill, a consistent failure who furiously opposed almost everything Foot stood for, could have influenced him very much if at all...

...Perhaps that is one reason why he wrote this book--to evoke and preserve in its pages some of the moments when that madness was still a rich source of inspiration and optimism for good men, with Foot himself among the best of them...

...To paraphrase a famous remark which he quotes in his essay on Tom Paine, Foot gives us a deal of literary plumage, but not very much of the birds...

...The difference is an open secret: It is a function of style...

...The nostalgic glow of Debts o f Honour throws into relief the important difference between the literary and the British "Knight of the Sad Countenance...

...But Chandler has long been taken seriously by a wide variety of authors and critics ranging from Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen to Anthony Burgess and Wilfrid Sheed...

...in such a manner that every other activity--politics especially--has become associated with books and, in p a r t i c u l a r , with books about books...

...Order a set today--and never [ drink alone...

...These handsome schooners were made especially for the discriminating American Spectator bacchanal--holding a generous 15 ounces of your favorite beverage...

...They weren't even as well plotted as Dashiell Hammett...

...He does seem by fits and starts not a furious and energetic mad scientist, but the wan and rather weary figurehead of a party once possessed, like himself, by a fine madness now going sour...

...Beer mugs | are available only in sets of four...

...More than one Briton has likened him to a mad scientist: that lank white hair, those bali-bearing eyes peering through thick lenses which seem to hang from brows arching up like the antennae of a mantis, while his harsh thin lace-straight lips snap out imprecations against Mrs...

...DEBTS OF HONOUR Michael Foot / Harper & Row, Publishers Inc...

...yet few have gotten to the point as neatly as Billy Wilder, reminiscing in an interview about his collaboration with Chandler on the screenplay for Double Indemnity...

...Where the subjects of his essays have sinned against his faith or its axioms, Foot is prepared to forgive them--though one cannot help noticing tha't his shriven sinners are all dead...

...No political power was ever put into his hands to spoil the perfection of those dreams...

...He offers eccentric comparisons: Only William Buckley in America has the mind and learning which might match Foors or, even more bizarre: Ebbw Vale IFoot's very Welsh constituemyl wa~ not Minnt-apolis, but many of the charatteti~t;cs seemed similar . Salisbury is also fond of a false analogy, as between the speeches of Adlai Stevenson and the literary essays of Michael Foot, meant to typify some cultural superiority of British politicians to the American species...

...Postal Service...

...Thatcher and her "criminal government...

...The image, like a great deal of comment on modern political personalities, leans a little too hard on the cultural icons of comic books...

...And the most melodramatic thing about the Philip Marlowe novels was Marlowe himself, a Walter Mitty daydream with a cynical line of backchat and a badly disguised romantic streak, whose ability to step directly from the fantasy life of Chandler into the fantasy lives of his readers was--and is--chiefly responsible for his enormous popularity...

...The Grub Street hustler and journalist Daniel Defoe is also given a feminist label, mostly on the evidence of Moll Flanders...

...Because of her scorn at " a book without a woman," Foot has included a "Defence" of the early eighteenth-century Whig aristocrat, the Duchess of Marlborough, who is praised for her wit and for the toughness which earned her a reputation as a monumental virago...

...There is really only one of the latter just now, and he is not Canadian but Australian...

...I and enjoys probably more intensely in Britain than in any other country...

...these Trotskyite fanatics have for some time been trying--with recent success--to infiltrate the grass roots of the Labour Party and influence its policies...

...I read two or three of his novels," Wilder recalled_9 "They were no great structural things...

...Each one, from the anarchistic "Hyde Park Sceptic" to the Tory Prime Minister Disraeli, shared that critical contrary streak which has sustained Foot through so many years...

...Brailsford, and, most sympathetic of all--and rather more alive than the rest, though the piece on him is one of the shortest--a littleknown anarchist and Hyde Park orator called Bonar Thompson...

...I t is this quondam role which connects Foot with all the subjects in his book...

...The election of Denis Healey as his deputy is just such a cosmetic gesture in a party whose grass roots are now ruled largely by the raging Left...

...The design is...

...He himself insists that office has made him not less but more of a socialist, and he has shown a curious passivity to left-wing extremists in his party...

...Please note that these [ tankards are shipped in quantities of [ four, and via UPS when possible...

...In its fatuous academic complacency that passage is so utterly devoid of any sense either of British politics or of Michael Foot himself that one wonders: Was it really written by a world-traveled senior American journalist, or by the resurrected spirit of James Thurber, making one last adempt at dead-pan farce...

...Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu," W.H...

...In the same gallery we find the radical writer William Hazlitt...

...SELECTED LETTERS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER Edited by Frank MacShane Columbia University Press / $19.95 Terry Teachout Though the saga of Philip Marlowe, private detective, drew to an unexpectedly feeble close over twenty years ago with the novel Playback, Raymond Chandler's seven Marlowe books still continue to attract new readers and fascinate old ones...

...The Don died in his bed, tragically reconciled to God and forswearing his illusions...

...Randolph, too: "Outrageous and endearing, impossible and unforgettable . . . along with his honesty . . . . and his streaks of kindness, it was this reckless courage which shone most b r i g h t l y , " with a t a l e n t for "boiling intoxicant invective...

...Benjamin Disraeli, "The Good Tory," and the left-wing European Jew, "Vicky," who killed himself at the height of a successful career as a British political cartoonist...

...I n tone and in most of their content, these essays hark back to an "earlier" Foot, in the days before he became embroiled in the responsibilities of office...

...What is perhaps more surprising, however, is the extent to which Chandler has been posthumously taken up by the academic machine...

...With the confidence and (sometimes) uneven flair of a good journalist, Foot ranges over an astonishing variety of people, a magpie-collection with no apparent common ground except the interest of the author himself--I stress, no apparent common ground...

...He suggests that the epithet is unfair, and gives special applause to the lady's political intelligence during the Byzantine i n t r i g u e s of Queen Anne's reign...

...Having no ideas of his own, Foot found it easy to dissolve into the currents of British middle-class socialism, the perfect faith for a man whose politics are "associated with books, and, in particular, with books about books...

...In the years befot'e Foot accepted office, the words could as easily have applied to him...

...It would be worth a long and expensive search to find a medium who could ask the d e p a r t e d Paine what he thought of Foot's reference to him as "The American Trotsky...

...It is the rusty weapon of British middleclass socialism, the "Hampstead Left," which substitutes selective compassion for critical thought, symmetry for justice, and a terrible Procrustean egalitarianism for real appreciation of society's uneven, organic human textures...

...Contemporary "Levellets" tend to be found in the Socialist Workers' Party or in the ranks of a beady little group called the Militant Herb Greer is an American wrtter and playwright living m Europe...

...His dreams are now on the verge of being cast into the corrupt forms that occur when hope is hardened into a diktat and a selective compassion is imposed--by force if necessary...

...Eliot's) is small enough to be read through in a single week...

...His principal achievement then was in the role of gadfly, Britain's loudest and angriest Jiminy Cricket...

...His essay on Tom Paine glows with fellow feeling for the difficult, eloquent pamphleteer, implying if never claiming in so many words a_common membership in the age-old anti-establishment, anti-tyranny protestors' club...

...popular culture is big in English departments these days...

...I want the real world...

...He shares the illusions of the class war which are swirling up from Labour's grass roots to dominate the party,~ most of whose Sancho Panzas have taken their common sense and their retreaded "moderate" policies into the ranks of the SDP...

...Before (and more cautiously after) taking up his first government post as secretary of s t a t e for employment in 1974, he deployed words, orated and printed, praising Social Justice, Democracy, the Common Man, and denouncing the tyranny of Capitalism, political chicanery, poverty and injustice (like his colleagues he tends to equate the two), and, of course, all forms-of oppression as he defined the word...

...He really belongs in another more literary frame, one carved about 400 years ago by Miguel Saavedra de Cervantes...

...in some elusive way he is a real writer while they are merely superlatively competent entertainers...

...There is a fair amount of praise for the public "This rather nasty story is told in detail in another book by Foot, The Pen and The Sword...

...activity perfectly reasonable, but readers less familiar with the progress of Philip Marlowe down the" mean streets of Los Angeles may be wondering just what all the fuss is about...

...And yet h e r e ' h e is, "The private Randolph whose memory many of us treasured...

...Your mugs are fully insured against { oafish handling, thirsty thieves, and I [ the general uncertainty of the U.S...

...As a brilliant figure of the bourgeois Left, he raged at both Tory and Labour governments from journalistic sidelines and from the back benches of Parliament--formidably eloquent, abrasive, respected as the political embodiment of the decent man's dissenting conscience cloaked in radical socialist rhetoric...

...been so lucky...

...the formidable emmerdeur and great propagandist Tom Paine...

...Please rush me a set of four official [ American Spectator beer mugs for $34.50 [ plus $2.00 for postage and insurance...

...None of this has been disavowed by Foot, who has in fact been a unilateralist for more than two decades...

...To some extent, the current interest in Chandler is a product of exclusively academic concerns: Hemingway and Fitzgerald have been pretty thoroughly worked over by now...

...For most of his career, Foot has refused to dilute it by accepting the responsibilities and compromises of office...

...Trying to present Foot to American readers, Harrison E. Salisbury flounders like a Rocky Mountain trout that has somehow been dropped live into the middle of Parliament Square...

...His book displays this free-ranging spirit, and not just in its kaleidoscopic selection of subject matter...

...Foot has not "l'The new breed of Labour activist is usually middle class and universityeducated...

...An attractive skein of nostalgia runs through them, reminding one that Foot is not only an aging puritanical leftist and the weakest Labour Party leader in decades, but a man who can be warm, generous, personally charitable, and capable of great charm and humor...

...Perhaps that is why a Times columnist could ask recently, " I s there a sadder figure in politics today than Michael Foot...

...If Foot's preoccupation with feminism appears forced at times, this may be because it does not come naturally to him, but springs from the prompting of his very radical chic wife, J i l l , an ex-producer of documentary fiims and a writer on her own account...

...Much has been written about the Chandler style, an iridescent confection of colorful slang, acute observation, and startling juxtaposition...

...Auden wrote in 1948, adding that "his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged . . . as works of a r t " ; and Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?," took time out from a withering salvo directed at the entire detective story genre to confess grudgingly that Chandler had the power to "invent character and incident and to generate atmosphere _9 . . a malaise conveyed to the reader, the horror of a hidden conspiracy that is continually turning up in the most varied and unlikely forms...

...The Tory journalist Jonathan Swift is pardoned because of Gulliver's Travels...

...He has also accepted quite cheerfully a reshaping of Labour's selection procedure for Parliamentary candidates which will enable party apparatchiks to dominate MPs in the "disciplined" manner of certain prewar parties in Germany and Italy, or of the "socialist" parties in Eastern Europe today...

...If they came to have pride of place anywhere, it would probably be on a firing squad that was mowing down belted knights and "press lords' alike...

...Daniel Defoe is there with his contemporaries Jonathan Swift and the volcanically Whiggish Duchess of MarlTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 33 borough whose husband Swift helped to d i s c r e d i t ' ; beside these are set more obscure figures like Ignazio Silone, Italian novelist and Communist a p o s t a t e , the minor socialist writer H.N...

...Box 877, Bloomington, IN 47402 [ gold band...

...Foot a Fascist...

...These are paradoxical words for a man who was asked upon coming down from Oxford whether he would like to be a don and replied, "No...

...Foot's "Debts of Honour" to this motley crew are never s t a t e d with any precision...

...PLEASE PRINT" | Name Address City State Zip Money-Back Guarantee Return in ten days ff not satisfied...

...Speaking of his father, he says: He loved books and t a u g h t me how to read and love them too...

...Most of all he admires her stubborn adherence to Whig principles...

...with a wonderful gift for oratory and wit, this made him one of the d e a d l i e s t d e b a t e r s in the House of Commons, and gave him that peculiarly intoxicating specific gravity which the political maverick acquires At last Something'for people who don't wear tee shirts...

...instead, he n a t t e r s or rambles through and over his people like an excited tourist, browsing around them as it were in a manner which Foot himself points to in his foreword...

...After months of testing, design, and much perspiration, we are pleased to present the Official American Spectator Beer Mug...

...2 O aving it all" has been the focus of Foors energy both before and after taking office, and he has chosen some odd means to this end...