PREVIEW BOOKS
BIOGRAPHY
War of the words
After successful biographies of Aneurin Bevan and Lord Byron, Michael Foot’s study of H. G. Wells has aroused howls of protest. Marc Lambert asks him why.
As leader of the Labour Party from 1980 to l983. Michael Foot was no stranger to controversy. Passionate and intellectual. he simultaneously proved a media and electoral disaster. a figure who seemed from an earlier age when substance was still more important than image in politics. At 82. he is doggedly courting controversy again with his interpretation ofthc life and work of H. (J. Wells. best known for his sci-ii classics The Time Mae/zine and The lVlll' ()fT/Ie War/(ls.
Foot is scarcely concerned with Wells the artist. Wells in any case said he would prefer to be remembered as a journalist. and disdained stylised writing — Henry James‘s fastidious literary technique reminded him of a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea. Instead, Foot's biography uncovers a different man. the Utopian proponent of free love and visionary of socialist paradises. the prophet of the modern world.
‘He wrote about it all in The World Set Free in l9l5.' says Foot in his unmistakable voice that
Michael Foot: courting controversy
mixes ancient gravitas with the tones of a slightly scat'y professor. ‘There he discusses the whole future of the world and society and also. by the way. warns of the atomic dangers and how we might be threatened by terrorists taking bombs around in suitcases and all these modern menaces.‘ ln Foot‘s opinion, Wells is the saint of forward-looking socialism.
Hence the controversy. While Wells was undoubtedly pivotal in pulling fusty Victorian Britain into the 20th century. among his vast output are some frightening ideas — proposals for eugenically—
controlled Utopias where the price of individual failure would be sterilisation. Moreover. the Wellsian paradise was to be firmly Anglo-Saxon.
Foot is scathing about those who see Wells as a latent fascist. ‘Anyone who calls him an anti-semite or racist is talking absolute nonsense.‘ he says emphatically. "l‘his stuff about eugenics is spread around by skilled propagandists and those that accuse him have just bowdlerised what he wrote. 'l‘hat's why I'm so angry when people just pick out a quotation. The whole weight of the evidence is the other way.‘ Why then should they choose to do so‘.’ Rather bizarrely. Foot asserts: ‘the main motive for attacking Wells is a religious one -‘ they‘ve got to get him down. They think that he's a menace to the Christian religion and he certainly is.‘
Foot is similarly dismissive of the accusation that Wells's advocacy of free love was self—serving. another charge frequently levelled against him. ‘Wells wrote a lot about what he called the Passionate Daughter.‘ he says. "l'hat is to say women had as much right to sexual expression and liberation as men. They ought to have the right of choice. even if it breaks the conventions ofordinary society. Feminism expanded the whole of his mind.‘ This argument forms an important part of Fool's book and goes some way to countering claims that Wells w as a cold-blooded genetic supremacist.
Yet for all this. it is difficult to escape the fact that Wells‘s preference for ‘a world run by the physical science man straight from the laboratory‘ sometimes pushed him into dangerous areas of thought. liool takes too little account of this. so anxious is he to hand Wells the socialist crown, Speaking to him. one has the uncanny feeling of travelling backwards in an ideological time machine. of taking part in arguments from a by gone age. One is left with the impression that in using Wells as a vehicle to restate his own beliefs. some injury has been done to the complexity ofthc man.
The His/my (if Mr Hells /)_\' .illtlmel /'iml Is published by Doubleday (ll [20.
' Gangsta rap
In Born Fi' Dead, Laurie Gunst attempts to get inside the heads of the Uzi-toting gangsters who have been giving Jamaica a bad name. These are the original ‘yardies’, though Gunst avoids using the term which has now become a lazy shorthand to describe just about any young black criminal.
Gunst’s introduction to Jamaica’s violent underworld came through a
i experienced.’
3 activities.
However, Gunst was undeterred, and armed only with a doctorate in Caribbean studies set out to unravel the rise of the Jamaican posses who had became the unofficial enforcers for the country’s two rival political leaders, Edward Seaga and Michael 5 Manley. In return for protection during ; vote-winning trips to the ghetto, the a 2 gangs were given money, guns and . tacit approval for their drug dealing
‘No one was telling the story of how attempts to build a nation were betrayed by the corruption of politicians,’ she says. ‘Often, the more
a stream of illegal immigrants flooded out of Jamaica to Miami and New York, creating the ‘yardie’ panic which subsequently filtered across to the UK. The afterward in the book’s British edition argues that the term is generally used by the media as a way of demonising young black men. Born Fi’ Dead is an impressionistic account of one white woman's ' response to an urban environment of i almost unimaginable deprivation ' where violent death is an everyday occurance. After two years dodging ricocheting bullets in Kingston’s underworld, Gunst has earned her right to comment, if only as an
man called Brambles who lived with his two children in a single room in the slums of downtown Kingston. Though she won Brambles’s trust, Gunst recounts an eloquent speech in which he expressed doubts that she would ever grasp the complexities of
l
5 It is even more difficult to express or
he said. ‘It is difficult for a white person to simulate black experience.
Jamaican street life. ‘You are white,’ l interpret something you have never
Born Fi' Dead: gun-running in the ghetto
an outsider you are, the more you see ; because you are ignorant. In Jamaica ; there is just this acceptance that
politicians employ gunmen.’ In the ghettos, the Jamaican drug of
. choice had been marijuana, but the rise of crack cocaine blew the lid eff an already violent situation. Trouble
' spilled over into mainland America as
' outsider. Her prognosis for a country crushed under the weight of multi-
billion dollar debt is not encouraging: ‘The thing I notice when I go back to Jamaica is that there is no hope.’ (Eddie Gibb)
; Born Fi’ Dead is published on 19 Oct by Payback Press at £9. 99.
The List 20 Oct-2 Nov l995 89