Books: Nye in Shining Armor

ANEURIN BEVAN by Michael Foot. 536 pages. Afheneum. $7.50.

“Squalid nuisance,” the Great Man called Aneurin Bevan. He, in turn, called Churchill a case of “petrified adolescence.”

Both men, it is shrewdly noted by Sevan’s biographer, British M.P. Michael Foot, were romantics. Churchill’s romanticism was invested in the manifest glories of the English past and Sevan’s in the evangelical dream of a new Jerusalem in a classless England of the future. But the boy who was born in Blenheim Palace and the boy born in a collier’s cottage were well matched when history brought them face to face in the House of Commons. They were the greatest parliamentarians of the century.

Ghostly Feet. In scope and detail, Foot’s Bevan bears comparison with Churchill’s Memoirs: the central figure is set against a wide and populous political landscape; biography becomes history. Churchill, of course, is all grandeur and the tragedy of nations; Bevan was a class warrior, and his finest hour, like Socialism’s, was never to come. But as near as may be—though he has been dead three years—this is Sevan’s own brief. It is a sort of ghost-written book, with Foot as ghost, for Biographer Foot was not only a close friend and passionate partisan; he is today what Bevan was—Member of Parliament for the Welsh miners of Ebbw Vale and Socialism’s most bitter and intransigent voice in the House of Commons. Thus he can hardly be expected to stress the central irony of Sevan’s life: that a man cannot make himself, as Bevan did, an effective tribune of the poor, the obscure and the powerless without himself becoming prosperous, famous and something of a power in the land. Foot insists that Bevan sought to “rise with his class and not out of it,” but Foot’s facts vote “No.”

Bevan, a man of chivalrous gaiety and wit, was an intellectual dandy who relished the great world of London where he cut so fine a figure. He believed that he spoke for the underside of English life, but in the nature of things he had ceased to belong to it. “Bellinger Bolshevik,” jeered Conservative Brendan Bracken as Bevan lolled in Lord Beaverbrook’s drawing room. Unmoved, Bevan retorted that Beaver-brook’s Bollinger was better champagne than he was offered at Bracken’s house. A good riposte, but was this scene another of “the radiant ambiguities of the word Socialism”?

A Day-Off in Wales. There were no ambiguities in the mine valley of Nye Sevan’s youth; life could be sketched as a charcoal cartoon. In Tredegar, it was lived between the pits and the chapel. The visible enemy was the Tredegar Iron & Coal Co., and the audible heroes were the preachers in the chapels and the orators in the miners’ lodges. Nye Bevan grew up in a time when Welsh nonconformity was moving from religion to politics, and Nye moved with the times. He easily shed the Methodist-Baptist faith of his home, because it transformed so easily into political evangelism. Roaming the green hills above the black pitheads, he spouted verses to cure his stammer, and, in a race fearsomely gifted with the power of speech, he became a noted orator.

At 14, this boy of easy, brilliant talents went into the pits like his father and grandfather before him. That he became a Marxist is not surprising. It was hard not to have hard feelings about the Tredegar Iron & Coal Co. One early strike eloquently led by young Nye was called because the company had docked a miner a day’s pay: the idle fellow had taken off part of the working day to convey home the body of a comrade killed working down the pit. So the world was black and white for young Nye Bevan as he became the miners’ voice, first in the lodge, then in the local council, then finally in the House of Commons.

Bankrupt Passion. There is no denying the strength and passion of Sevan’s rages against the Establishment. In the depths of the Depression of the early —’30s, he saw millions voted to bolster tottering banks and pennies cheese-pared from the dole of the unemployed poor. “Christ drove the moneychangers out of the temple,” he snarled at the Tories, “but you inscribe their title deeds on the altar cloth.” The trouble was that his fellow Laborites were not really Socialists. When capitalism, in Depression-time phrase, “went bankrupt,” Ramsey Macdonald’s Socialist government got cold feet, did what the Bank of England told them to do, and deflated the economy—and themselves.

Bevan jeered at his party as a “Salvation Army which took to its heels on the day of judgment.” What he felt for many of them, especially the office-hungry respectable bureaucrats of the trades unions, was nothing but a fine, aristocratic disdain. He raged not only against Baldwin and Chamberlain (“that dusty soul”) but also against men who should have been his own comrades, like Trades Union Chief Sir Walter Citrine. He “suffers from files,” Bevan said contemptuously.

Bevan by temperament was an artist rather than a politician, and he sought his friends not among the worthy pedants of social reform in the “slouching, sluggish” Labor Party leadership but among artists like Jacob Epstein, writers like H. G. Wells, or even with an aristocrat turned columnist like Lord Castlerosse. Bevan behaved as if his own talent and exuberance gave him a spectator’s seat rather than an underdog’s role in the old British game of class soccer. After a fine meal with good wine he would quip: “You can always live like a millionaire for five minutes.” This is the tone of the bohemian rather than the social reformer. And when he set up house with pretty Socialist Jennie Lee, the Bevan cottage was exactly the sort of modest weekend retreat inhabited by a thousand middle-class intellectuals.

No Seduction. Though his enemies gibed at him as “Playboy of the West End World,” Foot claims that Bevan was not “seduced by the aristocratic embrace.” Indeed, he had one quality rare in a politician of any party: he did not personally hunger for power or hanker for the managerial role in human affairs. Criticism was his long suit. Intellectual disdain kept his far-left course from Communist involvement. After a visit to Russia, he quipped, “We were slaves to the past; they were slaves o the future.” And when war came, he demanded that the “undertaker” Chamberlain go, and called for his Tory enemy Churchill to take power.

Bevan did not promise, however, to told his tongue. Almost alone in the Commons he would heckle when the Churchillian grand strategy failed. “Merchant of discourtesy,” snapped Churchill across the floor of the House. “Better than being a wholesaler of disaster,” retorted Nye.

Foot leaves his hero on the eve of taking office as Minister for Health in the postwar Socialist government of Clement Attlee. It was the only real national power Bevan ever attained, and he put into operation Britain’s system of free medical and dental services. The final ironies of his career lay in the future, when the prosperous electorate repudiated Socialism and bit the hand that fed it. What is more, it bit with Nye Sevan’s free false teeth.

Another volume is promised, but Bevan in office is an anticlimax. He was the greatest of His Majesty’s Opposition.