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 ...