The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (133 page)

C
hurchill was not dawdling abroad while Clementine raised the family at home. He swam, he rode, he painted, he gambled, he cruised on Beaverbrook’s yacht. But he also worked furiously on manuscripts, and no one knew better than his wife that this toil was absolutely necessary for their financial survival. After acknowledging a gambling loss he noted: “But I have earned many times what I have lost by the work I have done here on my book.” Usually he worked in bed from breakfast until noon, but writing from Mimizan he described an altered regimen: “I ride from 7:30 to 9, work at my book till lunch, 12:30.” Unless the skies were overcast—in which case he kept writing—afternoons were spent at his easel. After dinner he resumed work, continuing until the early hours of the following morning. Clementine prayed that the manuscripts would sell. The children were unaware, as Mary recalls, of “how fragile was the raft which supported our seemingly so solid way of life.” From time to time they were told, “Papa and Mummie are economizing,” were lectured about the need to turn off lights and reprimanded for long telephone conversations, yet, in Mary’s words, the manner of the life her parents led “belied the insecurity and fragility of their financial situation. They lived and entertained elegantly; they traveled; they brought up and educated their four surviving children handsomely. But had Winston’s diligence, health, or genius failed, the whole fabric of their life would have crashed, for they literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.”
¹⁵⁶

Winston having fun at the beach

Like most writers he derived his income from various sources: newspaper and magazine sales, publishers’ advances, royalties from books sold in England and other countries, and the sale of first serial rights—selections from books which appear in periodicals before publication date. And, like every other ink-stained wretch, he could never be certain of future income. During his two years out of Parliament he supported his life-style by writing, apart from books and edited collections of his speeches, thirty-three articles for the
Empire Review, Pearson’s Magazine,
the
Daily Chronicle,
the
Strand Magazine, Nash’s Pall Mall, English Life,
the
Sunday Chronicle, John Bull,
the
Weekly Dispatch,
the
Daily Mail,
and, in the United States,
Cosmopolitan.
His earnings from these alone were about £13,200, or, with the pound pegged at $4.86, about $64,152, the equivalent of $200,000 today. It made him unique among upper-class British politicians, most of whom had private incomes or lived on parliamentary salaries, and Clementine worried about that. She recognized the absolute necessity of his free-lancing, but was afraid it might be considered beneath his dignity and therefore an obstacle to high office. Her eye was on No. 10. Eventually, she believed, Winston’s moment would come. She thought it might arrive in the near future. Once returned to the House, his gifts would carry him straight into the cabinet, where his chief rival—Stanley Baldwin not yet having consolidated his strength—would be Curzon, or, as she called him, the “All Highest.” She wrote Winston: “I have a sort of feeling that the ‘All Highest’ rejoices every time you write an Article & thinks it brings
him
nearer the Premiership, tho’ I think that a man who had had to bolster himself up with two rich wives to keep himself going is not so likely to keep the Empire going as you who for 12 years have been a Cabinet Minister & have besides kept a fortuneless Cat & four hungry Kittens.”
¹⁵⁷

Churchill with Mary, aged two, at Chartwell

At that time he was considering a piece on his painting. She thought it a bad idea; to her it smacked of hackwork. What, she asked him, was he going to write about? “Art in general? I expect the professionals would be vexed & say you do not yet know enough about Art…. Your own pictures in particular? The danger there seems to me that it may be thought naif or conceited.” The
Strand
had offered him £1,000 for two articles, to be illustrated by four-color and monochrome reproductions of his landscapes. She was “as anxious as you are to snooker that £1,000 & as proud as you can be that you have had the offer; but just now I do not think it would be wise to do anything which would cause you to be discussed trivially, as it were.” Nevertheless, he went ahead. The result was his charming essay “Painting as a Pastime,” which was later republished in
Thoughts and Adventures,
a collection of his pieces, and, later still, combined with an article on “Hobbies” he had written for
Pall Mall,
was issued as a slender volume which sold 5,000 copies in Great Britain, was published in the United States, translated into French, German, Finnish, and Japanese, and ultimately appeared as a Penguin paperback. Among the pieces he ground out during his exile from Parliament between 1922 and 1924 were “Who Rules Britain?,” “The Case for Singapore,” “Plugstreet,” “Socialism and Sham,” “The Danger Ahead in Europe,” “Should Strategists Veto the Channel Tunnel?,” “My Dramatic Days with the Kaiser,” “If We Could Look into the Future,” “My Own True Spy Story,” “When I Risked Court Martial in Search of War,” “A Hand-to-Hand Fight with Desert Fanatics,” and profiles of Kitchener, MacDonald, Birkenhead, and Lloyd George. It occurred neither to him nor to Clementine that a time would come when, once more in political Coventry and with the survival of England at stake, he would arouse the nation with powerful articles in the press. During the 1920s he wrote for newspapers and magazines with money as his chief object. In a typical note to his wife on August 14, 1923, he reported: “I have 8 articles to write as soon as the book is finished: £500, £400, & £200. We shall not starve.”
¹⁵⁸

“The book” was not to be completed for eight more years; it would run to five thick volumes, 2,517 pages, and would never be described as a potboiler. As originally conceived, it was to be a two-volume memoir of his years at the Admiralty. During the war he had carefully filed memoranda, documents, and letters, explaining, in a letter to Clementine on July 17, 1915, “Someday I shd like the truth to be known,” and in March 1920 Sir Frederick Macmillan, at his request, set these in type so they would be readily usable. He began organizing them when Lord Esher published a distorted account of the Antwerp operation in
The Tragedy of Lord Kitchener,
charging that Churchill had “slipped away” to Belgium on his own while Kitchener was “in bed asleep.” By October, Winston was hard at work, singling out quotations from other men’s memoirs, pasting the passages Macmillan had set on large sheets of blank paper, writing commentary in the margins, and drafting transitions. Admiral Jackson checked his facts; Eddie Marsh, his grammar, punctuation, and style. An exchange between Eddie and Winston survives:

Soon the news that Winston was writing about the war was all over London. It was unnerving for some and exciting for others, if only because of the money involved. Late in November, Thornton Butterworth, working through Winston’s agent, Curtis Brown, advanced him £9,000; Scribner’s paid £5,000 as an advance for American publication. The magazine
Metropolitan
had offered nearly £8,000 for first serial rights, but he chose
The Times
instead. His deadline for both volumes was December 31, 1922, which subjected him to an unremitting pressure, but he liked it that way. On January 1, 1921, he attended another Sassoon party, at Lympne, in Kent. Riddell, a fellow guest, noted in his diary: “I had a long talk with Winston about his book. He says he has written a great part of the first volume. He proposed to dictate 300,000 words, and then cut down the matter and polish it up. He added that it was very exhilarating to feel that one was writing for half a crown a word! He went upstairs to put in two or three hours’ work on the book. When he came down, I said to L.G., with whom I had been talking, ‘It is a horrible thought that while we have been frittering away our time, Winston has been piling up words at a half a crown each.’ This much amused L.G.”
¹⁶⁰

It did not amuse Bonar Law, who said that if Churchill was quoting government documents, which he was, he was violating his privy councillor’s oath. The problem of copyright torments every writer who uses contemporary sources, and Winston was no exception. He pointed out that Fisher, Jellicoe, and one of Kitchener’s biographers had used confidential material. Hankey told Law that Churchill’s point was a good one, but the matter was raised again and again as the several volumes appeared. Later, when he himself was back in the cabinet, Churchill learned that Birkenhead was working on a book about Woodrow Wilson. Dismayed that it might come out before the appearance of Winston’s next volume and provoke an embargo on ministers publishing while still in office, he unreasonably begged F.E. to drop the idea. It was a false alarm; the issue was never raised. Most of his former colleagues had nothing to fear from an accurate account of the past, but all were immensely curious. They wondered, among other things, about the title. So did the author. In the last throes of the first volume, on January 30, 1922, he wrote Clementine, “I am so busy that I hardly ever leave the Ritz except for meals,” adding that Dawson of
The Times
had called “and suggested himself the title ‘The Great Amphibian,’ but I cannot get either Butterworth or Scribner… to fancy it. They want ‘The World Crisis’ or possibly ‘Sea Power and the World Crisis.’ We have to settle tomorrow for certain.”
¹⁶¹

They settled on
The World Crisis.
“Winston has written an enormous book about himself,” a colleague remarked, “and called it
The World Crisis
.” Balfour said he was reading Churchill’s “autobiography disguised as a history of the universe.” A volume appeared in 1927,
The World Crisis: A Criticism,
comprising essays quarreling with some of his statistics and minor points of strategy and tactics. They didn’t amount to much. Beaverbrook was offended by the treatment of Law, whose friend he was, and the
Times
reviewer observed: “Serious students will not need, and others will not heed, the warning that an apologia may be first-class material for history but cannot be history itself.”
¹⁶²
The reviewer was absolutely wrong. It is indeed the precise strength of the work—which covers events from the prewar “Vials of Wrath” to the aftershocks of 1922—that the historian was either in the thick of events or had special access to many who were. He was a cabinet minister before the war, during the early and latter parts of it, and after the Armistice. In this regard
The World Crisis
is perhaps unique. Many statesmen have published memoirs; few have attempted a comprehensive account of their times. Caesar’s
De Bello Gallico
and
De Bello Civili
are dry and unimaginative; Frederick the Great had a first-class mind, but his
Histoire de mon temps
was written in a language he had not mastered; Talleyrand’s
Mémoires
is largely based on letters he himself did not write; Metternich is characteristically vain and obscure; Bismarck’s three-volume
Gedanken und Erinnerungen
is insular, confusing, and inchoate. Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War,
Clarendon’s
History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England,
and the memoirs of Grant and Henry Kissinger, though immensely valuable, lack the breadth of
The World Crisis.
Churchill’s perspective is amazingly broad. Even in describing the activities of Lenin and Trotsky, whom he loathed, he is scrupulous of facts and objective in examining the social matrix which made their rise possible.

But his achievement is greater than that. T. E. Lawrence described the second volume as “far and away the best war-book I’ve yet read in any language.” John Maynard Keynes, finishing the fourth, wrote in the
Nation:
“With what feelings does one lay down Mr Churchill’s two-thousandth page? Gratitude to one who can write with so much eloquence and feeling of things which are part of the lives of all of us of the war generation, but which he saw and knew much closer and clearer. Admiration for his energies of mind and his intense absorption of intellectual interest and elemental emotion on what is for the moment the matter in hand—which is his best quality. A little envy, perhaps, for his undoubting conviction that frontiers, races, patriotisms, even wars if need be, are ultimate verities for mankind, which lends for him a kind of dignity and even nobility to events, which for others are only a nightmare interlude, something to be permanently avoided.” Keynes had touched on the work’s deepest theme: its recreation of the past, the illusion of immediacy created by the author’s powerful presence. Keynes had also identified the reasons for Bloomsbury’s reservations about it: the author’s certitude and his lack of curiosity about subconscious motivation. Malcolm Muggeridge points out that Churchill, as a historian and biographer, “remained obstinately Victorian and pre–Lytton Strachey”—interested in public events, that is, not in private lives. Writers like Strachey, literary beneficiaries of a decade in which irony and understatement were fashionable, dismissed Churchill’s style as outmoded. In reality its essence is timeless; it found its greatest audience in 1940, when it moved an entire nation, but it lives today in allusion and everyday speech.
¹⁶³

Here he writes about the eve of Britain’s 1916 offensive:

And after the Somme:

Churchill had received the first payment of his American advance, a check for £3,000, in July 1921, and on August 19 he paid £2,550 for a new Rolls-Royce. It was a token of his faith in the work’s popularity, and it was more than justified. The British editions alone sold 80,551 copies. Since his British royalties ranged between 30 and 33 percent, this brought him £58,846, or $285,996. Moreover,
The Times
serialized four of the five volumes. Further excerpts appeared in the
Sunday Chronicle.
An indefatigable worker, he produced the last three volumes of
The World Crisis
when serving as the cabinet’s busiest minister. Considered in their entirety, his achievements as an author in that decade were prodigious, though he was not the most successful political author of those years. Five days before Christmas, 1924, when he was writing his version of the Somme, a former German soldier who had been wounded in that battle left Landsberg Prison in southern Bavaria, where he had been serving time for attempting to overthrow the government, with the rough draft of a very different account under his arm. Like Churchill, Adolf Hitler had a problem with his title. He wanted to call it
Viereinhalb Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit
(“Four and a Half Years of Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice”), but his publisher persuaded him to settle for
Mein Kampf
(“My Struggle”). Within a few years, when its writer came to power,
Mein Kampf
’s presence would be almost obligatory in the homes of respectable burghers, and it led the list of his country’s most popular graduation and wedding gifts through the 1930s. How many actually read it—plowing through those desperate Teutonic sentences to find the verb at the end—is unknown, but its sales eventually exceeded six million copies, making it Germany’s number-one best-seller and bringing Hitler $1.8 million in royalties. Unlike Churchill, he paid no taxes on this income after 1933, having declared himself exempt from them. His prose, however, has not borne the test of time.