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.