Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
in covert ways, notably over the campaign for a second front or affairs in Greece. The Standard’s coverage of international affairs greatly gained from expertise gleaned through people writing for Tribune. In addition to Kimche on military matters and Deutscher on eastern Europe, there was also excellent analysis of Franco’s Spain by the Spanish socialist historian A. Ramon Olivera.
A more exciting journalistic recruit still was Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jew and ex-Communist. Foot first met him when Koestler was wearing the uniform of the Pioneer Corps, albeit in the comfortable ambience of the Savoy Grill. A previous place of residence for him, as an ex-Communist immigrant, had been Pentonville prison. His breathtaking book Darkness at Noon (1940) had exposed the Stalin show trials in unforgettable language, and explained his earlier conversion to Communism in terms of a psychoanalytical theory of political neurosis. In Loyalists and Loners (1986), Foot later described the book’s indelible impact upon him: ‘I can recall reading it right through one night, horror-struck, over-powered, enthralled.’13 Koestler on his side was much attracted by Foot as a highly intelligent, literate socialist ‘whose projection about the future was untrammelled by a sense of guilt about the past’.14 Despite Koestler’s notoriously combustible, even violent, temperament, he and Foot struck up a strong political affinity. They also shared an enthusiasm for chess and for Foot’s girlfriend from 1942, Connie Ernst (no relation to Lily). Koestler’s biographer has commented that Koestler was important for Foot, and later for Richard Crossman, for ‘unshackling their socialism from the Soviet incubus’, but he was very much pushing at an open door on that front. Foot helped him in introducing him to a rich range of socialist writers, intellectuals and activists, and their relationship was often very close. However, Koestler’s relations with the Standard came to a shuddering end when he revealed a darker side of his personality. A series of articles in the Standard in June and July 1942, ‘The Idle Thoughts of Sidney Sound’, supposedly conveying the reveries of ‘typical’ figures on the London underground, caused alarm for their erotic quality, and they were wound up.15 Foot remained on warm terms with Koestler for several years, and worked closely with him in promoting the cause of the Jews after the war. But this other Koestler, with an almost sadistic approach to young women, was eventually to reveal himself to Foot, to his personal anguish. He was startled later on to hear that Koestler had been involved with British espionage work, and lamented his sympathies with ideological anti-Communism, what Crossman was to call Koestler’s ‘entry ticket into McCarthyite America’.
Koestler was one of three remarkable writers who imposed themselves on Foot’s sensibilities at this time, and was the one with whom Foot was most intimate. The other two were George Orwell and Ignazio Silone.16 As it happened, two of this trio, Koestler and Silone, heartily disliked one another. After the war, at the international Congress of Writers in 1949, Silone advocated ‘spiritual resistance’ towards Communism, whereas Koestler urged an aggressive head-on confrontation and sneered at Silone as a pacifist. Koestler and Silone were two of the six famous ex-Communist, though still left-wing, writers who contributed to the famous volume The God that Failed after the war, while of course Orwell’s anti-Communism became legendary from his account of the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia (1938) onwards. Their influence is essential to the understanding of Michael Foot as a public figure; they also demonstrate the foolishness of attempts by shadowy agents in later years to depict Foot as any kind of Communist dupe. Foot got to know Orwell through Tribune, where he wrote a famous column, ‘As I Please’, which was often attacked by the Tribune management for being over-critical of the Soviet Union, but was always defended by Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot. These wartime years saw Orwell at his greatest, in Foot’s view. He was thrilled by The Lion and the Unicorn in 1941, and the way it uniquely captured ‘a patriotic English socialist moment’, in the words of their joint friend Tosco Fyvel. But Orwell had left Tribune by the time Foot became editor after the war, and disappeared to a remote Scottish island. Michael and Jill were closer to Orwell’s controversial widow Sonia in the decades after his death. Later revelations that Orwell, like Koestler, had been providing information about his friends to MI 5 did not increase Foot’s affection for him, though he remained an admirer of his writings, including Animal Farm and (to a degree) Nineteen Eighty-Four. The latter, however, he claimed had been taken by American cold warriors (and the Daily Mail) to be more of an anti-Soviet document than was in fact the case. In Loyalists and Loners Foot wrote of Nineteen Eighty-Four leaving a ‘taste of sourness, even defeatism’. He applauded Bernard Crick’s fine biography (1980) for showing that Orwell, to his dying day, was a democratic socialist.
Perhaps the biggest impact on Foot’s literary and political sensibilities, however, came from the third of the trio, the Italian ex-Communist Ignazio Silone, at the time in long-term exile from Mussolini’s Italy in Switzerland. He had joined the Communist Party when very young in the 1920s, but soon found its intellectual tyranny unbearable and was expelled in 1931 when he refused to denounce the ideas of Trot-sky. Foot first became aware of Silone’s work when he read a translation of the social novel Fontemara, originally published in Zürich in German in 1933. It remained an iconic work for Foot all his life, and in 1984 he wrote a foreword to a new English-language edition which explained how Silone’s taut but passionate prose enshrined the idea of democratic socialism for him. At this time Silone was little known in the English-speaking world, and Foot played a major role in familiarizing the British public with him after 1945. Most of Silone’s books, including perhaps the most famous, Bread and Wine, were novels, but the one that made the most intense impression on Foot was a work of non-fiction, School for Dictators (1939), a vivid account of the horrors of Mussolini’s fascism and the persecution of the Italian left during his period of power. Foot’s introduction to Fontemara even compares School for Dictators with Machiavelli’s The Prince. After the war Foot found Silone’s affirmation of socialist values inspirational, and quotations from him appeared frequently in Foot’s writings thereafter, including the famous story about Saint-Simon, ‘Get up M. le Comte, you have work to do.’ By the time of his death in 1978, Silone had become an honoured figure in the literary canon of the socialist left. He was a central figure in Foot’s political odyssey. The first of Foot’s three meetings with him in Rome in 1949, when Foot was on a Labour National Executive delegation, was among the most memorable encounters of his life. Most movingly, he quoted Stendhal in relation to Silone as a thinker: ‘Only a great mind dares to express itself simply.’
One way and another, the Standard years meant that Foot was having a thoroughly good, comfortable war. Jill Craigie was later to twit him as a ‘Mayfair socialist’. He had built up an impressive social reputation as a man worth knowing. He moved in attractive intellectual and literary circles, friendly with a rich array of writers like Koestler, Orwell, H. G. Wells and Moura Budberg and others. Koestler’s friend Dylan Thomas, then living in Chelsea and hanging around its pubs, was also a visitor to Foot’s top-floor flat at 62 Park Street, Mayfair, keeping pace with Koestler in drinking the drinks cabinet dry. As a younger man Foot kept up an extraordinarily unhealthy lifestyle – no exercise, little fresh air, a good deal of drink, mainly of spirits, and smoking sixty to seventy Woodbines a day, which did not help his asthma. But he remained remarkably energetic nevertheless. He also acquired a new, much closer girlfriend, Connie Ernst, a dark-haired Jewish New Yorker working in London for the US Office of War Information. With her he had a serious relationship from 1943 onwards, and he was to propose marriage on a visit to New York in 1945. They became for two years a consistent partnership, and would invite friends to dine with them at the White Tower, a Greek restaurant in Soho. Through Connie he got to know other American intellectuals, notably Ernest Hemingway, whom he greatly liked, and his second wife Mary Welsh. It was Mary who helped him in renting the flat in Park Street (drawn to his attention by Connie Ernst). Here he could live in some style, pore over Swift and Hazlitt, listen to music, play chess with Koestler and others. Nor was the rent crippling – just thirty shillings a week. There he stored some of his precious wartime literary purchases, many bought from Kimche, including a first edition of Gibbon’s Decline and