Fancy Footwork

By Christopher Porterfield

DEBTS OF HONOUR

by Michael Foot

Harper & Row; 240 pages; $13.95

It is as if Tip O'Neill had published a series of erudite feuilletons on such figures as Hawthorne, Henry Adams and William Randolph Hearst; or Howard Baker had come out with a sheaf of witty commentaries on the likes of Whitman, Santayana and Bernard Baruch. Michael Foot is, after all, not a professional man of letters. He is a politician, the leader of Britain's Labor Party, and, as such, his country's shadow Prime Minister.

Such stateside equivalents are almost beyond imagination. On their feet, American politicians may have commanded a vigorous rodomantade, salted with the Bible and tall tales. But sitting down to write, few since the founding fathers have proved to be on more than speaking terms with the language (a present-day exception: Daniel Patrick Moynihan). The British Parliament, on the other hand, has always been a veritable academy of accomplished scribblers, as the examples of Benjamin Disraeli, A.P. Herbert, Winston Churchill--and now Foot--attest. This may not necessarily make for better politics, but it is surely a comfort to the mother tongue.

The best of these biographical and literary essays flash with the fervor and assurance of a man nurtured on late Victorian intellectuality, steeped in 1930s radicalism and tempered by more than 30 years on Fleet Street. He makes no apology for his bookishness: "Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power." He draws a charming portrait of his father, who passed on his bibliophilia, and a colorfully contradictory one of his father-figure, Lord Beaverbrook. Foot reminisces warmly about his exasperating fellow journalist Randolph Churchill, but repeats the remark that he "should not be allowed out in private." He sketches a learned dissertation on the political significance of Disraeli's novels and states the case for Hazlitt as England's Shakespeare of prose.

Rather, he overstates the case, as he does most of the time. These are Foot's mentors and heroes, and he cannot resist eulogizing them any more than he can resist retroactively converting them, even the most unreconstructed Tories, to socialism. In the process, he unabashedly reveals himself as something that many a politician would not readily admit to being: human. -- By Christopher Porterfield

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