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a Private Life of
Michael Foot
Carl Rollyson
Contents
ebook edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by University of Plymouth Press, Endsleigh Place, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, United Kingdom.
eISBN 978-1-84102-408-0
© Carl Rollyson 2015
The rights of this work have been asserted by Carl Rollyson in accordance with the Crown Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library in print ISBN 978-1-84102-390-8.
Publisher: Paul Honeywill
Editor: Michelle Phillips
All rights reserved. No part of A Private Life of Michael Foot may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of UPP. Any person who carries out any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
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Carl Rollyson
Micheal Foot (his portrait) in the studio of Robert Lenkiewicz
PREFACE
This is not a conventional biography. I rely not on documents, but almost exclusively on recorded interviews and memories of Michael Foot constituting a raw record of conversations not smoothed over by a biographical narrative. This is a book about process. I show how I went about obtaining my story, which ostensibly concerned Jill Craigie, who married Michael Foot in 1949. Michael entered Jill’s life in 1945. He was such an important source for this biography that, inevitably, I learned as much about him as about her.
Readers come to biographies to learn about the subject, not the biographer. Yet the biographer is, in a sense, half the story. Or, as Paul Murray Kendall put it in The Art of Biography, every biography is an autobiography. So A Private Life of Michael Foot is an effort to show how a biographer struggles to tell his own story, even as family and friends cherish differing narratives about that same subject. My wish is to highlight these clashes of perception rather than reconcile their discrepancies.
There is value, too, in showing the rough edges of biography, the stops and starts, in an unapologetic fashion. I wonder if there has ever been a biography that has treated a British political and literary figure in quite so revealing a fashion.
March 2000
1
“Here’s my library, which, I’m sorry to say, is a bit of a mess. Jill used to [huh!] reprimand me.” ‘The huh!’ does not do justice to Michael’s high-pitched wheeze, or capture the wry pleasure he took in recalling her scolding. Their Hampstead home on Pilgrim’s Lane she had so beautifully refurbished had a shabby and dishevelled appearance now—rather like its surviving rumpled owner. The room was lined top to bottom with bookshelves. It even had a wall of bookshelves that could be moved like a door, opening to a smaller room congested with more books and papers. The library seemed to serve as a huge storage vault: a long table was piled high with books, books blocked up an unused fireplace and the floor supported still more heaps of books and papers.
It had been nearly five years since I had last seen Michael. Then we had talked in a cosy sitting room where we were surrounded by books, but also by lovely furnishings. I had come to discuss Rebecca West, the subject of the biography I was writing at the time and Jill was not only telling me about the writer and woman she befriended and grew to love, but also she was producing Rebecca’s first scrapbook of articles. These West wrote just after she had abandoned her family name, Cicily Fairfield. Jill , pointed to Rebecca’s own handwriting announcing:
Rebecca West born 11 December 1912
Michael was a widower. I had missed Jill’s memorial service because I had recently moved and Michael had sent the notice to my old address. I first met Jill just after Michael retired from Parliament in 1992. The couple were selling their cottage in Wales. Over dinner, Jill asked me if I knew anyone who might like to buy it. “A good place for a writer,” she added, smiling at me. Her ‘big eyes,’ which both her daughter and an ex-lover, William MacQuitty, extolled, seemed to swallow me up. I wanted to buy the place on the spot, such was her charm—and Michael’s. They displayed not just the good humour biographers experience during interviews that go well, but also extended an affection that amounted to a blessing.
When Michael greeted me at the entrance to their home only three months after Jill’s death, his pallid complexion shocked me. I thought that I had arrived at death’s door. He appeared to have aged more than a decade. I remembered that he sometimes stumbled, even with a cane, but now he was all wobble, yet his voice was as strong as ever and as engaging as it always had been.
I had come to discuss writing Jill’s biography. In order to ascertain if Michael would be receptive to my overture, I had consulted my agent (Gloria Ferris) who had represented Michael’s biographer, Mervyn Jones. Gloria and Mervyn thought Michael would meet me. So I wrote to Michael, simply saying that I had felt a terrible loss myself when I read Jill’s obituary in The New York Times. Perhaps it was too soon to think about a biography, but if he should
