Britain's Literary Labor Leader

...For an American reader not steeped in British literary history, Foot's highly partisan and political treatment of Haz-litt, Swift, Defoe, and Disraeli offers a lively, idea-centered, non academic re-introduction to men usually dehydrated and bowdlerized in English Lit courses Who would have suspected from the standard college anthology selections of "On Familiar Style" or "On Going a Journey" thatHazlitt was a great rebel and simultaneously an admirer of Edmund Burke, a witty critic of his most famous contemporaries (in Spirit of the Age), a prolific commentator on politics past and current, and (in Liber Amoris) a pre-Freudian analyst of the madness of romantic passion...

...Britain's Literary Labor Leader_ Debts of Honour By Michael Foot Harper & Row 240 pp $13.95 Reviewed by Nathan Glick Former editor, "Dialogue" OVER THE PAST four decades Michael Foot has been a journalist supporter and an activist leader of the British Labor Party's Left wing A protege of Aneuran Bevan, Foot inherited that Welshman's Parliamentary constituency at Ebbw Vale and his gift for flamboyant oratory He was the most colorful figure in Harold Wilson's Cabinet, a reporter for the Guardian described him answering questions in Parliament as "gyrating at the Commons dispatch box, his hair untidy, his collar askew, his manner Thespian and his few facts wrong ' Today he is the party's titular head and the likely Prime Minister in the unlikely event of Labor's winning the next election Seen on the platform at mass meetings, his unruly white mane bouncing as he fiercely urges unilateral disarmament, England's departure from the Common Market and large-scale nationalization of industry, Foot might very well strike the foreign observer as an uncompromising revolutionary He is in fact something quite different, more complex and more traditionally British in his sense of history and his tolerance of opposing views The 14 essays in Debts of Honour show his appealing side his appreciation of eccentrics and provocative books, his taste for journalistic gossip and high jinks, his gift for friendship, and his relish of unbuttoned polemical exchange Here, obviously, is no Robespierre, but a civilized, life-enjoying, book-savoring Labonte whose politics are inseparable from his literary enthusiasms The range of his subjects is itself testimony to catholic interests and offbeat predilections He discusses such writers as William Hazlitt, Jonathan Swift, Darnel Defoe and Benjamin Disraeli (in all of whom he finds strains that confirm his reformist sentiments), the pamphleteer Thomas Paine, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the political cartoonist Vicky, the Tory journalist and failed politician Randolph Churchill, the great Italian novelist Ig-nazio Silone, the elder statesman of British Socialist journalism H N Brailsford, the Hyde Park orator and remorseless skeptic Bonar Thompson, the sharp-tongued and unpopular Duchess of Marlborough, the author's solicitor-politician-clergyman father Isaac Foot, and the newspaper publisher Lord Beaverbrook, who became a second father to him The last two essays are the most personal and revealing "My father must have been just about the happiest man who ever lived," goes the opening sentence of that memoir Isaac Foot, a teetotaller, was nevertheless a "bibhophi-hal drunkard" with bookshelves "spread like erysipelas up every available wall " From boyhood on he was a reader and declaimer, and Michael absorbed from his father a passion for rhetoric that seems to have immunized him against the follies of fanaticism, though not from the platitudes of populism Isaac's sermons in his Plymouth church preach-ed "a gospel of hope in a voice as rich and memorable as Devonshire cream " So one is not surprised when, in another context, Michael refers to the "born, blind, boneheaded optimist that I was " And still is Labor's moderate Left leader can be caustic in debate, yet he never intends personal harm and his outlook remains upbeat, even after the recent fratricidal clash between Denis Healey and Tony Benn Predictably, Foot chose Healey—and the hope residing in a united party—over the implacably sectarian Benn, a man with views that are actually closer to Foot's own In Lord Beaverbrook the young Foot found a mentor and patron whose startling difference from his father proved fascinating and challenging Beaverbrook was a press mogul in the William Randolph Hearst tradition—indeed, he thought he was the model for Citizen Kane and no one was allowed to refer to Orson Welles' film in his presence He was brash, overpowering, conspiratorial, and intent on impressing his will on whatever circumstances seized his attention, from stocking a Cabinet to preventing an implied criticism of Presbyterians from appearing in one of his papers Where others saw Beaverbrook as "a kind of Dracula, Svengah, IagoandMe-phistopheles rolled into one," Foot discovered a "native radical," an enemy of snobbery and the Establishment, an indefatigable listener always open to clashing ideas, a man of infectious zest and humor Some time after Foot deserted Beaverbrook's Evening Standard for the Tribune, Labor's Leftist weekly, the Tory publisher saved the Tribune from demise by a secret contribution of 3,000 pounds, explaining to a conservative friend "What would we do for recruits without Tribune''" When dealing with his favorites, however, Foot is not even-handed He was, for example, the principal author in 1941 of Guilty Men, a scathing indictment of the Chamberlain set, that made no mention of Beaverbrook's ardent support for the men of Munich In another essay, Foot even refers to the Beaverbrook of that period as "the splendid isolationist " One episode m the Beaverbrook chapter is particularly revealing of Foot's indiscriminate radical sentimentality He was a weekend guest at Beaverbrook' s country home on the Sunday morning of June 22, 1941, when Hitler's armies marched against the Soviet Union Hearing the news on the radio before the other guests were up, Foot dashed down to the gramophone cupboard, took out a record of the "Internationale" and turned it on full blast He tells this story triumphantly, without comment, as if the falling out of the two totalitarian dictators were proof of the socialist character of the Soviet state One might excuse this lapse of judgment in a budding 28-year-old radical, but the essay was written very recently After 40 years of revelations about Stalin, the nostalgic befuddle-ment hits a painfully false note I do not mean to imply that Foot was or is a Popular Front nai f Indeed, in his touching tribute to Brailsford, "the greatest Socialist journalist of the century," he records that in 1936, at a time when "almost the entire Labor movement m Britain, Left, Right and Center, was vehemently eager to be pro-Russian and pro-Stahn," Brailsford "conducted, single-handed in the Bntish Left-wing press, a persistent criticism of the Stalin show trials " (In another vein, though, Foot speculates that Soviet Ambassador Ivan Maisky's reports to Moscow that the Britain of 1940 would survive, based partly on his contacts with Beaverbrook, "may have had some minute marginal influence on events " This overlooks the reality that Stalin's subsequent alliance with Britain was based on desperate necessity, not choice...

...Disraeli's radical Toryism—Foot likes to appropriate "good" Tories as political allies—is more familiar to Americans, although here again Foot is selective, focusing on Disraeli's sympathy with the Chartists rather than his defenseof the protectionist Corn Laws, and his early support ol the Irish rather than his imperialist policies in Asia, Africa and the Near East The piece on Defoe purports to call our attention to the implicit feminism of Moll Flanders, yet Foot does far better at conveying the intricate effects of changing political allegiances on Defoe's multiple careers as journalist, merchant (of everything from bricks to oysters), secret agent, and public relations officer for the first British head of government to be called Prime Minister The most scholarly and embattled of Foot's literary essays is his defense of Jonathan Swift against the proliferating "calumnies" (of madness, misanthropy and misogyny) flung at him by writers from Samuel Johnson to William Thackeray to D H Lawrence and George Orwell Against this distinguished roster, Foot (as if he were conducting a political debate) mobilizes an opposite consensus—of lesser waters, obscure critics and physicians, and generally people "on the Left of Enghsh politics" plus Irish patnots who have a nationalistic claim on Swift—to badger the reader into regarding the man who wrote Gulliver's Travels as a sane and even a progressive figure Granted his selective use of quotations, Foot makes a vigorous and often persuasive case He seems to have read everything ever written on Swift, and one can only marvel at this further specimen of the dogged British passion for controversy and detail that used to make the letters column of the London Times so delightfully cantankerous The only non-Britisher celebrated in this collection is Ignazio Silone, and Foot's tribute takes on qualities of largeness and nobility that the great Italian novelist always seems to inspire At the same time, Foot appreciates the Machiavellian mordancy and aphoristic wit contained in Silone's The School for Dictators Strangely, Foot does not even mention Bread and Wine or The Seed Beneath the Snow, those marvel-ously humane novels where Silone explored the moral dilemmas facing the dedicated revolutionary Perhaps the answer is that the pragmatic Michael Foot prefers to work out his doubts in the hurly-burly of the political arena without involving himself too deeply in difficult questions of religion and ethics Still, Foot and Silone agree that the only tolerable politician is the one who values many other things besides power And in Debts of Honour Foot reveals himself to be irrepressibly political and rrrepressibly many-sided The truly doctrinaire Left recognizes Foot's lack of the proper single-minded ideological zeal and gives him low marks A young, sharp-penned apostle of the Bennite wing, for instance, reviewing a recent biography of Foot in the New Statesman, concludes "The returns on Foot are now in, and we can see him whole the pea-green corruptible whose public lapse into second childhood was thought by some at first to be a rebirth The master of floundering and duplicity whose apotheosis has been such a regular source of grim amusement tor his enemies, and such a cringing embarrassment to his few remaining t nends Michael Foot is, in tact, the best-liked and most befriended leader the Labor Party has produced in recent years...

...For all that his policies mav be wrong-headed, parochial and tied to the misty rhetoric of youthful radicalism—he seems not fully to have gauged the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet regime, or confronted the totalitarian potential of economic power entirely in the hands of the state—it speaks well for the British temperament that a man so cultivated, literate and engagingly quirky should play a central role in that nation's public life...

...Even so, he is scarcelv thetvpeot politician to unite glontication and, with the new Social Democratic Parts draining Labor s moderate support, he is not likely to head the next British government...