he became, in his own words, even more rickety. As Mike Bessie observed:
Michael is greatly changed. Even when he had his eczema [in the 1940s] and a certain shyness, he was not as vulnerable as he now looks—the eye [Michael had been blinded by an attack of shingles] and he just doesn’t have the strength. His continued activity is a triumph of will. Each time I see him I wonder, “Where does he find it?”
Michael’s energy did seem, in part, of a piece with his will to make a world in which he could think well of people. “Jill thought Michael lived in the nimbus of his qualities,” Mike observed:
He didn’t really see how awful some people were. You had to do something pretty bad before Michael would criticise you. He might criticise your ideas, but of your character or behaviour he tended to be sympathetic or understanding. Jill would be much sharper about people. Michael could be a destructive speaker in the House and tear you down. But that was an argument about something, not about a person.
Especially in their last years together, “You had a feeling that Jill pretty much arranged Michael’s life,” Mike thought. Michael grew increasingly dependent on her—“perhaps we all do,” said Mike, including all us husbands in his observation.
This reliance on women showed up early, in Mike’s view. “Whatever affair or relationship he had with Connie [Ernst]” (who became Mike’s first wife after she had ceased her World War II romance with Michael), “there was an element of dependence in it.” When Connie told Michael he should move out of his crowded flat during the war, he seemed powerless to effect a change. How could he manage all his books? he wondered. Rather like Jill taking charge of Michael, Connie engineered his removal to more spacious surroundings, taking care to ship his precious library to his new accommodations.
“Did you seriously consider marrying Connie?” I asked Michael when I got to Pilgrim’s Lane in June. “You bet,” he replied. “Tell me about Connie,” I prodded him. “I was very fond of Connie,” he began:
I had two Jewish friends that I fell for. The other was Lily Ernst, the Jewish exile I first met at Beaverbrook’s and got to know during the war. She was Beaverbrook’s mistress and I would have liked to take her off him. But I didn’t have much success. She was a passionate Jew. Her mother had been taken to the camps from Yugoslavia. Beaverbrook had met her in somewhere like Cairo and said if you’re ever in trouble, let me know. Now Connie I met sometime in 1942 through Mary Welsh.
This roundabout explanation was rather typical. Michael could recall significant events, such as being with Connie in New York City on the night Roosevelt’s death was announced, but he never clarified the nature of his emotional tie to her. I would remain in as much doubt about what Connie meant to Michael as Mike Bessie was. “For three or four years during the war we were going around lots of places together,” Michael said of his relationship with Connie. I persisted:
[CR] Do you think that if she had not met and married Mike Bessie she would have married you?
[MF] Well, I’m not quite sure. I don’t think she really wanted to live here. As it turned out, it was probably better for both of us.
I made another try:
[CR] As a personality, was Connie anything like Jill?
[MF] No. I don’t think really. Just let me think ...
A minute went by:
[CR] Did she have Jill’s feminist interests?
[MF] I don’t know that she did exactly. She practiced it—that is to say, she was a strong liberal.
The word liberal triggered his mention of coming to New York in 1954 during the Army-McCarthy hearings. Michael and Jill stayed with Connie’s father, Morris Ernst, famous for his defence of Ulysses.
Mike Bessie’s discussion of Michael and women brought me to the issue of Michael’s infidelity. I was keen to know what Mike Bessie, an old hand at publishing, would make of the ‘‘Lamia’’ story. I wondered how he thought I should handle it in the biography. “I have a suggestion to make,” he began:
You don’t know how you will handle it until you do. If it comes out to your satisfaction and you are inclined to use it, I would give it—not send it—to Michael, saying, “Here’s a part of my book that I believe to be true and that I would like to use, but it is not sufficiently important for me to use if it distresses you in any way.”
Although at the time I agreed that this was good advice, I should have known that I would never take it. My vision of Jill’s biography—any biography I chose to write--took precedence over anyone else’s feelings. The truth came first, Dr. Johnson asserted, even at the cost of hurting others.1 But how I would pursue that truth in the light of Michael’s own trust in my judgment I had not decided upon.
At this point Mike’s second wife, Cornelia, joined the conversation and I asked her for her impressions of Jill. Cornelia felt Jill was conflicted, playing the good wife to Michael, but being a feminist. “There were those moments when she and Michael disagreed,” Cornelia said. “My dear child,” Mike broke in, imitating Michael’s habitual method of addressing Jill. “That must have been fun to watch,” I said. “It was fun,” Cornelia agreed, because “my dear child” would bring out the feminist in her. “All of a sudden she was on her hind legs snarling—sweetly snarling but snarling.”
11
In June 2000, I had settled into a cosy stay at Pilgrim’s Lane. Only later would I begin to see that by providing me with so much access and comfort, Michael was buffering the biography. I don’t mean that he made some sort of calculation that I would be indebted because of his generosity—although this is exactly what his nephew Paul Foot would later say: I was abusing Michael’s hospitality by dealing with issues that for Michael’s sake should be left out of Jill’s biography. It was simply in Michael’s nature, I believe, to extend his liberality, which easily segued into his thinking I would produce a biography in the same spirit of amity that characterised our jolly talks together.
I did not realise then that I could not count on Michael to be his own man. He had a minder, Jenny Stringer. I met her during the course of my June 2000 stay at Pilgrim’s Lane. Although she promised me an interview, it would be quite some time before she would sit for one. “I better not stay.” Jenny said after stopping by to look in on Michael and I think, monitor my progress. “Why not stay?” Michael asked. “I have things to do,” she said.” “Better not stay,” Michael muttered, “doesn’t sound very convincing to me.” This was the sort of banter Michael enjoyed with the women—and it was mostly women—who catered to him.
Jenny was a friend of Victoria Reilly’s, Michael’s godchild and the daughter of Paul Reilly, whose father, Sir Charles Reilly, had introduced Michael to Jill at a London party in late 1944 just before Jill embarked on her most important film, The Way We Live. Jenny had not met Michael and Jill, however, until 1963, when they bought their home in Pilgrim’s Lane, close to Jenny’s home. Jenny became one of the younger women Jill encouraged, praising her as both homemaker and worker. They shared the same politics and Jenny was deeply involved in Labour Party affairs. When Jill realised she was dying, she began to worry about what would happen to Michael. Although Jenny never said so in so many words, I believe she made a promise to Jill to look after Michael. She was always cordial to me, but in her view, I was an interloper not to be trusted, especially since I always seemed to carry with me what she grimly called the “black box”—my cassette recorder.
12
The world seemed to turn on Michael’s likes and
