literature seemed another form of politics and one had to declare a position. “What’s all this anti-Johnson stuff,” Michael’s brother John had asked him. “It won’t stand up,” John said. Michael explained his complaint to me:
It all derives from Johnson’s attack on Swift. Several people I admire very much like Alan Taylor was also a tremendous admirer of Lives of the Poets. No one can deny what a wonderful book it is. But he describes Swift’s madness without any kind of qualification. Once you look into it the story is absolutely false. He was not mad at all. Even Swift admirers like George Orwell swallowed the story of Swift’s madness.
Michael took fire on the topic of comic geniuses, putting Swift at the top with Shakespeare, followed by Rabelais, Charlie Chaplin, and Dickens. “I’m anti-Thackeray—I know that people will say that’s a foolish thing to say—because of what he said about Swift. “They tried to destroy Swift. If they had their way, he’d be dismissed as an absolute maniac. Terrible, what Thackeray said about him. Partly it’s because of his treatment of the women, but in my view he was in love with Stella and Vanessa.” The “they” almost sounded like a political party.
Talk of Stella and Vanessa transitioned in Michael’s mind to the question of fidelity and then to an old joke. A chap comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. He upbraids her. She gets up and says, “That just proves you don’t love me. You’d rather believe your own eyes than what I tell you.”
13
After an afternoon at the British Film Institute, I returned to Pilgrim’s Lane in quite a state of excitement, eager to read a letter to Michael that I had found in Jill’s papers. She had written to Michael Balcon, a friend of hers and Michael’s, asking him for the opportunity to direct a film. Although she had made her name during the war as a director of documentaries, her work had received mixed reviews and when postwar developments in British cinema closed off her efforts to continue her career, she turned to script writing for Ronnie Neame and his producer, John Bryan. Essentially Jill was making a pitch to Balcon for making films about contemporary women, a subject ignored or poorly handled in 1950s Britain, which she nonetheless had explored with considerable success in an Evening Standard series of articles. Balcon sent her a polite but firm brush-off. I wondered if Michael knew about this letter and how he would react.
I read the letter to him in the living room while he played classical music. “An amazing letter,” I said. 2 “Good, isn’t it?” Michael replied. “How could anyone not hire this woman?” I asked. “Yes, I think so too,” he said. “I daresay she was disappointed.”
Michael asked again the date of Jill’s letter. It was written in 1958. This was a shattering period for both Michael and Jill. He had recently lost his bid to recover his Plymouth seat (he had been out of Parliament since 1955). At around the same time Michael had had a row with Nye Bevan, his mentor, closest friend, and ally. Bevan’s refusal to endorse unilateral disarmament came as a bitter disappointment to Michael, who continued to campaign for it, putting tremendous strain on the Bevanite faction of the Labour Party. The acrimony reached its climax when Bevan smashed one of Jill’s antique chairs and called Michael a cunt in his own home.
In 1959, Michael reconciled with Bevan, then dying from cancer. Michael went on to write an acclaimed biography of his mentor. Michael reminded me that a year or so later he decided to make a bid for the Ebbw Vale seat Bevan had held until his death in 1959. Helping Michael, he acknowledged, became a full time job for Jill—“the election and the actual process of settling there [in Tredegar, part of Michael’s constituency].” It was a distraction. I’m sorry to say it must have often happened. She was turning away from what she had been doing in the film industry.” In fact, Jill’s last substantial film work was a screenplay for Windom’s Way (1957), a vehicle for Peter Finch. She did not produce another substantial work until Who Are the Vandals? (1967), a BBC television documentary about tower blocks and public housing. In that film she resumed her passion for architecture and town planning. She also caused an uproar in the Labour Party and among architects with two articles for the Times in which she accused both of reneging on their promise to provide housing on a human scale. Michael admired the ruckus Jill caused, but he seemed unable to understand why she did not continue with her causes. She would not make another film until the 1990s, when Michael’s retirement from Parliament allowed him to put himself at her disposal. Initially he had balked at the idea of her doing a film about the Balkan Wars, but then he capitulated to a suddenly adamant Jill, determined to make the film no matter what.
Was he making amends? Or was he simply caught up in her own passion to tell the story about the breakup of Yugoslavia and the shelling of Dubrovnik, their beloved holiday retreat? If Michael was no Carlyle when it came to reassessing his marriage, was the film nevertheless an act of restitution?
I watched Michael mulling over Jill’s letter to Balcon. Michael mentioned his friendship with the film producer but seemed unable to grasp that Jill had been rejected. “They should have pressed her more,” he said vaguely. Who “they” were was in doubt. Jill apparently never told Michael about the letter, and to me that was as heartbreaking as the letter itself.
But then, Jill had another life that Michael acknowledged but did not share. A case in point was Tom Driberg , a part of the Bevanite faction. Driberg’s personal affairs, as Michael described them, were a mess:
He had an unhappy life, Tom, because of his sexual ... He was taking terrible risks before the whole change had happened in the atmosphere of what could be done and not done. Tom from his earliest days was a homosexual, but he couldn’t enjoy sex with members of his own class. So he was constantly engaged in affairs ... you know ... in a way that was not at all ... In his last few years he used to come up here quite often and talk to Jill. He wouldn’t say all this to me. Jill was very good to him.
Michael then described a scene with a dejected Driberg standing alone on the street with his belongings, not knowing how to arrange a move into new lodgings. Jill understood this kind of male helplessness—as did all those women around Michael—and she soon had Driberg settled.
The ‘Dribergs’—the hapless males of this world—often turned up on Jill’s doorstep, Michael recalled. The artist Stanley Spencer would come calling, unwashed and dishevelled. He would ask: “Why am I so attractive to women?” and he was, Michael explained. At one point Spencer turned out a quick sketch of Michael, which Jill thought awful. She destroyed it, Michael recalled, adding that Clementine Churchill had done the same with Graham Sutherland’s portrait of her husband.
Just then Julie arrived. “How are you?” Michael asked. “Okay,” she replied. “Doesn’t sound very enthusiastic,” Michael said. Michael seemed to crave big entrances and provocative pronouncements, and he liked to send visitors away with some kind of provoking comment: “Drive properly,” he would say to Jenny. He knew that would get a rise out of her and prolong, if only for a moment, their comic crosstalk.
Julie got up to get us drinks, refusing my offer of help. When she returned, she handed me a whiskey (with Michael, I almost always drank whiskey, a cheap Scotch I would down while eying the superb collection of single malts—gifts from admiring visitors—displayed on the mantel).
I had brought a copy of my Rebecca West biography for Julie. “You should read it for your education,” Michael said to her. “My ongoing education,” Julie tittered. She would be the first to say she was not an intellectual. It had often been hard on her simply to be in the company of Michael, Jill, and leading lights in theatre, politics, and the arts who frequented the Foot /Craigie dinner parties. Julie loved private, domestic life and she had little patience for the sacrifices Jill made to Michael’s status as a public man. She was fond of Michael but critical as well—as she was of her mother. Michael would eventually sour on me because I gave Julie so much of a voice in my biography of her mother. But Julie had also been a problem for Jill and Michael,
