The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (242 page)

A
s the dreary decade approached its close, Winston’s main effort, the key to his financial survival, was directed toward completion of his
History of the English-speaking Peoples
, the linchpin of his agreement with Sir Henry Strakosch. The grand design was totally Churchillian: “I have all that in my head,” he explained to one researcher. So was the prose; the entire text came from his muttering lips or, if he was revising galleys, from his fountain pen. He needed a supporting cast, of course, and he picked a first-rate troupe—Bill Deakin, Maurice Ashley, C. C. Wood, Ridley Pakenham-Walsh, John Wheldon, and three scholars who would one day become illustrious biographers of his most famous foes: Keith Feiling (Neville Chamberlain), Alan Bullock (Hitler), and G. M. Young (Stanley Baldwin, perhaps the most hostile official biography ever published). Eddie Marsh once more came aboard to read proofs and make general comments on syntax and grammar; Brigadier Sir James Edmonds, the official historian of the Great War, was recruited because his knowledge of the American Civil War was profound. Considering their skills and the immense amount of time each devoted to his assignments, they can scarcely be said to have been overpaid; the researchers received fifty pounds a month and Marsh twenty pounds per 100,000 words—less than twenty-eight cents a page. But, of course, they weren’t in it for the money. Other scholars would have done it for nothing.
¹⁴⁵

Winston’s correspondence during these months reveals a quicksilver gift for bounding back and forth across nearly twenty centuries, from 55
B.C.
, when “the Proconsul of Gaul, Julius Caesar, turned his gaze upon Britain,” to the Boer War, an adjournment chosen, perhaps, because it was then that the author himself appeared as a historical figure. Churchill opened with the broadest of themes:

To an exceptional degree he enjoyed writing and was even invigorated by it. Few writers of depth are actually exhilarated by creativity; it drains them; at the end of a session most are exhausted. In many ways he was an exception. “Writing a long and substantial book,” he said, “is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in your mind.” His letters seem to reflect the excitement of a writer rejoicing in the power of his inimitable style; to Clementine, skiing in Austria, he wrote: “The days pass quickly for I have so much to do.”
¹⁴⁷

One senses his delight in his own virtuosity as, moving from informal to formal English, he shifts tone and syntax. Writing Clementine of his progress with the
History
, he tells her:

Then, in his manuscript, we see the magic, his bold strokes, the might he could always invoke:

Eden wrote that he read Winston’s accounts of the past “to forget the haunting apprehensions of our present days.” His historical works appeared to offer Churchill the same asylum. “It has been a comfort to me in these anxious days,” he wrote Mortimer Wheeler, keeper of the London Museum, “to put a thousand years between my thoughts and the twentieth century.” On July 10, 1938, he had written Keith Feiling:

And yet…

It was anything but a lark. Ten days later he wrote Eddie Marsh, “I am staggering along to the end of this job, and am glad to have found the strength to have accomplished it.” Over half the present volume was in galleys, but ahead lay the insertion of special studies by Deakin and Bullock, checking facts, and soliciting comments from scholars who were expert in various areas. “I have had to work very hard,” he wrote his publisher, “and many a night have sat up until two or three in the morning.” In early 1939 he wrote Clemmie, “I have been leading a life of unbroken routine at Chartwell—and have now got into print no less than 220,000 words i.e. 63 days ahead of the vy hard task I prescribed of 1,000 a day from August 1. At this rate I shd cover the whole ground by May, wh wd leave 7 months for polishing. It is a formidable grind; but if accomplished will put things in a vy satisfactory basis.”
¹⁵⁰

The strain was evident to those closest to him. Grace Hamblin recalls him as “a very hard taskmaster. He drove us.” Kathleen Hill recollects that he “could be very ruthless.” But he was exciting, too. Mrs. Hill was now living at Chartwell, and she remembers her first impressions of it: “I had never been in a house like that. It was alive, restless. When he went away it was still as a mouse. When he was there it was vibrating.” In retrospect she sees him as “a disappointed man who was waiting for the call to serve his country.”
¹⁵¹

Pride and drive, that inner gyroscope which never failed, spurred him on. His remarkable output is even more extraordinary when seen in the context of the time. As events accelerated in central Europe he continued to be the best-informed private citizen in the country. Following his instructions, foreigners arriving in London would take the Oxted train from Victoria Station and detrain to find Winston himself there to greet them. Flattered, they would enter his car, sublimely unaware that they were putting their lives in the hands of the worst driver in the British Empire.

Vansittart, fuming under the meaningless title Chief Diplomatic Adviser to the Foreign Secretary, had become his silent partner. But Van remained on His Majesty’s payroll; he had no establishment to support and could devote all his working hours to gathering and analyzing the European situation, which grew in complexity and frightfulness after the Anschluss, as Hitler led the Continent from crisis to crisis. Somehow Churchill kept all that in one part of his mind and his work in another. Only the first Queen Elizabeth could check his creative flow. In August 1939 he wrote to G. M. Young, the Oxford historian and Fellow of All Souls College. Young had agreed to vet parts of the work, and Winston now wondered “how you are getting along with the proofs I sent you.” He himself, he added, had “completed the Commonwealth story (Lambeth and Monk), but have still not cleared away the Queen Elizabeth block. I am now working on the Chatham period, which is very inspiriting.” He overcame the Queen’s intimidation after the war, when his work was published. And that block stands alone. If in his long career he ever again struggled with anyone more complex, there is no record of it. And if he had, there would be.
¹⁵²

The Lambeth Articles of 1595 can scarcely be regarded as possessing great historical significance. There were nine articles, and they were meant to express Calvinist doctrine in such weighty matters as predestination and justification. Since they were never adopted by the church in any synod, they lacked ecclesiastical authority and are interesting to us only because they interested Churchill. Nor could George Monk, a Devonian soldier, be regarded a key figure in the vastness of history, though he was certainly more engaging. At the outbreak of the English Civil War he fought for the King; captured by Roundheads, he was imprisoned in the Tower for two years, emerged as an admirer of Cromwell, fought hard for him while intriguing for the reestablishment of the monarchy, and became a duke. During the plague of 1665 and the great fire a year later, he restored order in London; he wound up fighting the Dutch as a British admiral. In the long reach of history, he deserves a footnote at most; his prominence in Churchill’s work is startling.

But history, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. If it happened, and if the writer believes it to be consequential, in it goes. To the dismay of the dons advising him, Churchill overruled their recommendation that he cut the tale of King Alfred burning the housewife’s cakes, on the ground that myths are as important as facts in the memory of a people. Actually, the weight of four thousand years was on his side. In ancient Greece and Rome historical accuracy was subordinate to style and dramatic tone. During the millennium which followed, theological historians—there were no others—sought evidence of divine motives, intervention, and design. This was the evocation of Saint Augustine’s
City of God
and, in 1681—a thousand years later—Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet’s
Discours sur l’histoire universelle
. Interpreting human experience was considered the function of religion or philosophy—even of poetry or other imaginative works. Modern historiography, constructing a documented record of mankind’s activities and then interpreting it, did not emerge until early in the nineteenth century. By 1900, however, it had emerged as a distinct discipline, the preserve of academicians who, jealous of their hard-won recognition, regarded interlopers like Churchill as trespassers.

Yet despite jeers that Churchill was shallow, volatile, the Barnum of politics, Sir Isaiah Berlin, singling out a 1928 condemnation of Winston’s style, comments that “the stern critic and his audience were… mistaken. What he and they denounced as so much tinsel and hollow pasteboard was in reality solid; it was this author’s natural means for the expression of his heroic, highly coloured, sometimes over-simple and even naive, but always genuine, vision of life.” Both as a politician and as a historian he was an unrepentant romantic. He did indeed divide those of whom he wrote into white hats and black hats. But that is how he saw life, as a struggle between the forces of light and the powers of darkness. He never tried to hide it, or veil it, or hoodwink or mystify or dupe his audiences. It was an authentic view of life; there was and is no need to justify it.
¹⁵³

His grand vision, as the
History
testifies, was of an expanding British Empire governed by Great Britain and the United States, ruling in tandem. A. J. P. Taylor comments that while this theme “has a few merits… he never considered how far England and America had been associated, which was very little, and—particularly—how far they could be associated in the future.” To Churchill, it is clear, the great thing, apart from the fact that the two countries shared the same language, was that they had fought side by side. Wars, to Winston, were of immense historic importance; like Carlyle and Nietzsche, he believed that armed conflict was a natural state of man. Although one may argue that events since 1945 have vindicated him, this viewpoint put him on a collision course with mainstream intellectuals of his time. His derogators declared that he was a boy who had never outgrown playing with toy soldiers. This denied him not only maturity but also the high seriousness to which he was entitled.
¹⁵⁴

Nevertheless, his zest for combat
was
excessive. In a revealing comment to Lord Moran he complained that 1830–1860, when England and the United States were at peace, were “thirty years when nothing happened.” So marked was his lack of balance that in his second part, dealing with the era between 1485 and 1688, Shakespeare was not even mentioned in the index, and in the third the Industrial Revolution was disposed of in a single paragraph. His trivial dismissal of those who abhor war is jarring, as is his later remark, in the 1940s, to a British general: “Cheer up! We can’t have a war every day.” It was Crane Brinton, an American historian, who observed that the fourth part, covering the years between Waterloo and the end of the nineteenth century, gave “disproportionate attention” to the bloody struggle between America’s North and South, while the development of the British Dominions received “comparative brevity.”

In part this imbalance was a reflection of the tumultuous times in which he lived. Moreover, he was writing—particularly toward the end of the
History
—under tremendous pressure. And in fact it would not be published until after the coming war. But the wonder is not that his text was incomplete and flawed, but that he got most of the job done when he did. Part of the explanation was his skill in dictation; part was his memory, which one survivor of those days calls “Napoleonic”; part his prowess in commanding his team of researchers; and part his proficiency in gathering a chaos of material in his mind, mastering it, assembling it in an inner prism, and then refracting it in a terrific, blinding beam. Of course, he could have improved upon it had he had time, but with an eye on central Europe he did his best, and Churchill’s best was very, very good. If his reach exceeded his grasp, it was because he was intent upon more than literary achievement in the first eight months of 1939. Had he not been the preeminent leader in the struggle against Hitler during this time, the results would doubtless have been very different.