Some weeks later, back home at Chartwell, he resumed the massive writing projects to which he was now dedicated. The World Crisis had been a financial and critical triumph. Before publication of this work, his prose, in England, had been viewed with a certain amount of skepticism. Unlike Americans, the English are nurtured on good literature from the cradle to the grave and are not easily wooed by writers who ply the artistic trade as partial employment, or as the offshoot of a more favored vocation. The four volumes of The World Crisis had appeared at different times in the twenties; from them Churchill had realized something over a hundred thousand dollars, after earning out his advance of sixteen thousand dollars. His personal interpretation of the war stirred up unprecedented comment all over the world. It was an argumentative work, and, naturally, not slighting of his own part in the great events he was narrating. As the series began appearing, the critics were at first tentative and then increasingly devoted when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came forward with the bland announcement, “I have long recognized that Winston Churchill has the finest prose style of any contemporary.” Most reviewers fell in line behind this clarion call; a few were seriously antagonized by it. The novelist Arnold Bennett felt that “Churchill will write for effect, when he has neither the leisure nor the natural ability to do that.” The poet John Masefield, on the other hand, thought the volumes “masterly.” The Observer took up a diplomatic perch astride the fence, beating the drum for the man and cautiously including his writings. “None in the line of English statesmen is more sure of a lasting place in literature,” observed the editor, adding that the author was “one of the born organists of language. He is all vigor, personality. There is a style because there is a man.”
As if this apologia for his prose on account of its human origin were not peculiar enough, H. G. Wells, in the burbling fever of his hottest Liberal period, jumped on Churchill for having an unromantic attitude toward the Russians, and went on to say that “He believes quite naively that he belongs to a peculiarly gifted and privileged class of beings to whom the lives and affairs of common men are given over, the raw material of brilliant careers. His imagination is obsessed by dreams of exploits and a career. It is an imagination closely akin to the d’Annunzio type. In England, d’Annunzio would have been a Churchill; in Italy, Churchill would have been a d’Annunzio. He is a great student and collector of the literature of Napoleon I, that master adventurer. Before all things, he desires a dramatic world with villains — and one hero.”
In general, the only journals rendered bilious by The World Crisis were those that opposed Churchill politically. The chief exception was the London Mercury, which appeared to be genuinely discontented with his technique, calling it “ambitious and crude.” The author, it was thought, possessed “no ear, no fingering, a meagre rhythm, an impoverished imagery,” and, “like the young, he has a fondness of phrases.” There was a ray of hope, however, for even though when “excited with material and the neighborhood of the engines of war” he is “heavy and commonplace,” at other times “his intelligence wakes and he writes simply and surely.”
The critical tone of these remarks was candid, but the English as a whole are conspicuously frank in their reviews. “It was one of those books which, once you have set it down, is almost impossible to pick back up,” said a writer not long ago, dealing with the work of a cherished friend. The give-and-take spirit is genial, rather unlike that in America, where critics have been shot down like dogs for challenging a fugitive comma. But England belongs to an older civilization, in which all the known insults have been bandied about so persistently that they have lost their sting. Moreover, the dueling blade has disappeared, and its modern substitute, the naked subpoena, is not much of a deterrent to unvarnished speech.
The English reception of The World Crisis was, by and large, that accorded a new and sturdy pretender to immortality among the nation’s great writers. And in America the cheers were almost undiluted. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it “Truly a magnificent work, deeply moving as a story and of permanent importance as history.” In the opinion of the Christian Science Monitor, “Mr. Churchill is a writer of great power. Though it is full of official data and accurate detail, his book never loses hold of the tremendous drama which it treats.” And the New York Herald Tribune held that “Churchill was alive to his task with every nerve and fiber, and this aliveness survives and animates The World Crisis, making it the extraordinarily fascinating book that it is.”
Faced with reviews like these, Churchill had no reluctance in undertaking further sweeping works, and he completed, in the ten-year period of his retirement from public office, his monumental Life of Marlborough. As a direct descendant, he had, of course, access to all the family papers and lore, so that he toiled away with uniquely expert advantage. Also, his propensity for hard labor was so strong that, aside from Marlborough, he had energy left over for a bewildering variety of other writing. For magazines in England and in America he spoke up with authority on subjects high and low, but always at high prices. Collier’s was the outlet for most of his American articles. He struck some provocative notes. In one issue he casually predicted the return of silent movies, basing his stand on the enjoyment he recently had derived from a film of Charlie Chaplin’s. The piece was, in fact, substantially a minute biography of the comedian, with side lights on pantomime, then and now. Churchill gave credit for the art to the Emperor Augustus, and added that “Nero practiced it, as he wrote poetry, as a relaxation from the more serious pursuits of lust, incendiarism and gluttony.”
Many of Collier’s readers took the notion, right or wrong, that the great statesman was hitting his ripest vein — a kind of genteel, delayed-fuse chortle — in the pages of the popular weekly. The humor that would seem ill timed in a history of war, or a treatise on his father, often sprang into joyous life in his rapid-fire potboilers. One of his best numbers was entitled “The Shattered Cause of Temperance,” a subject for which he had deep sympathy, as evidenced by the warmth and sincerity of his remarks. There were fundamental differences in English and American drinking, Churchill suggested, saying, “It is possible that the dry, bracing, electrical atmosphere of North America makes the use of alcohol less necessary and more potent than does the humid climate of Britain.” He spoke at length of his last tour of the United States, during which he had worked hard to observe prohibition from every angle. “I must confess,” he said, “that on one occasion I was taken to a speakeasy. I went, of course, in my capacity of a Social Investigator.” It was easy to gather from the article that prohibition had caused Churchill suffering on the trip, but his distress was perhaps less acute than he made out. He had omitted to say, in Collier’s, that his lecture contract had included a paragraph stipulating that his agent must provide him with a bottle of champagne each evening before dinner.
Collier’s circulation finally got the impression that, at least in a literary way, Churchill could not leave whiskey alone. A short time after his blast at temperance, he came forth with a sprightly item called “How We Carry Liquor.” It led off with the astounding statement that “The story of wine is the story of human culture.” This unbreakable link between man and the grape assumed the stature of a religious symbol in Churchill’s piece, and, to all intents and purposes, established God as the Master Distiller. It was related how Mohammed, after passing a kind of early Volstead Act, saw his thirst-racked followers go half crazy and embark on a world program of murder that was directly traceable to sobriety. Churchill made out a strong case for drinking, but he admitted that the happy medium was not always easy. He divulged how Britishers had learned to swill and stay on their feet, and declared that he, for one, was glad that the days when the English pub advertised “Drunk for a penny; dead drunk for tuppence” were gone. In this piece, as in others of his Collier’s series, there were cartoon illustrations featuring the author, now holding his belly in lively distress from drinking the barbarous cocktails, now tiptoeing out of a “dry” banquet for a pr
ivate snifter, again seated at a dining table painfully examining an American hotel menu, which described unspiked orange juice as being worth fifty cents a glass.
It was an opportune time for Churchill to be discussing liquor. As his political impotency gnawed at his vitals, he strove hard for relaxation. Britain’s financial plight having worsened after 1931, another National, or Coalition, Government was eventually formed, and Stanley Baldwin, in 1935, was again Prime Minister. But in selecting his Cabinet he passed Churchill over, calling Neville Chamberlain to the springboard ministry of the Exchequer. Churchill burrowed obliviously into his researches on Marlborough and into vacation distraction on the Côte d’Azur. “Yet the life he breathed into the reputation of his long dead ancestor seemed to be at the expense of his own,” said Life magazine, which was serializing his memoirs and was presumed to be authoritative, several years later. “He turned flatulent and became a conspicuous landmark of the French Riviera. He was the despair of hostesses. There were still flashes of the fine talk that had made a thousand dinner parties famous. But often he sat silent and glowered while the champagne simmered in his stomach. His drinking bouts were the talk of the Empire — a two-bottle man.”
Politically, Churchill was in an extraordinary situation in these years. His periodic appearances in Parliament, as a member for Epping, first were objects of curiosity, and some amusement. The prevailing comment was, “Listen to Winston harping away on the same old string.” His was the voice in the wilderness, crying hatred of Socialism on the one hand and sounding the dangers of somnolent Conservatism on the other. Essentially he was, as he still is, fighting for the maintenance of empire, for continuing the philosophy of a powerful but benevolent England. He warned against giving away advantage, something that democracies are forever doing out of misplaced shame at having built themselves strong. It is a fatal quirk of men of good will that, once they achieve eminence by thrift and hard labor, they dissipate their police influence by an apologetic urge to elevate all others, including the rogues. In the debates on severing India from Britain, Churchill predicted that an immature withdrawal from the swarming, fanatic land would result in wholesale religious murders and an India set against the Western world. Somewhat more than half of his prediction has now come to pass, and India’s frequent siding with Russia gives suspicious validity to the remainder.
Churchill made further enemies among the reorganizers of society when he had the effrontery to point out that both Gandhi and Nehru, the prime exponents of Indian humanitarianism, were die-hard Brahmins, with upper-class viewpoints that would classify as reactionary anywhere in the world. “To abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence,” he said in Commons. “It would shame forever those who bore its guilt. These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own fellow countrymen whom they call ‘untouchable,’ and whom they have by thousands of years of oppression actually taught to accept this sad position.”
The extent of Churchill’s solitude may be seen from the subsequent action of his old companion Leo Amery, who had patiently backed him at nearly every turn. When the India plea was ended, Amery arose and made the hurtful statement, “Here endeth the last chapter of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.” He could scarcely have been more wrong. The Prophet, while now without honor in his own country, was slowly gathering both strength and confidence from his lonesome battle. The business of making a clean fight against odds is of incomparable value to the morale, especially if there develop evidences, however slight, of approval. As Churchill hurled his relentless alarms, the House began to fill up with quietly listening members and spectators. The word would go out that Jeremiah was on his way in to read the national tea leaves. The amusement gave way to attention, then to unaffected interest, and, at last, to the crashing rally of support, that awoke only in time to stave off disaster.
But in 1936, when Edward VIII startled the world by trying to make a Queen of the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson, Churchill’s resources were insufficient to turn the tide in the King’s favor. Hundreds of columns of newsprint have been devoted to explaining his determined intercession in the case. The popular notion has always been that Churchill’s patriotism was simply outraged by any thought of abdication. Some of his friends now feel that there was an extra dimension to his reasoning, that, in Churchill’s mind, the polo-playing, night-clubbing Edward was exactly the sort of King that England ought to have. Certainly the two were congenial spirits. Churchill had been present when Edward was made Prince of Wales, at Carnarvon Castle, in 1911, and they had since held lordly wassail together on several occasions, both in England and on the Riviera. A second public misconception, when the crisis arose, was that Churchill had thrust himself all unofficially into the argument. The facts are that Edward invited his counsel and clung to it, as representing the friendliest and sagest voice on the scene, until the bitter end. Just as Churchill considered Edward England’s true and rightful King, Edward unquestionably looked upon Churchill as the country’s informal Prime Minister.
The romance had flourished for some time, while all of Britain stood in a tacit conspiracy not to bring it into the open. London’s editors, stifling their professional instincts, dutifully killed story after story. It was finally the Bishop of Bradford, Dr. A. W. F. Blunt, who spilled the beans during an injured sermon on the first of December. The King had been very naughty, it was implied, and both Dr. Blunt and the Archbishop of Canterbury, resolute guardians of the national weal, were upset. (Bradford was even more upset in 1950 when the House of Lords asked him to explain his exhortations in behalf of the Communist-inspired “Council of Clergy and Ministers for Common Ownership.” And one of the pious lights of Canterbury, the notorious “Red Dean,” was making somewhat similar news at the time, also in the interest of the “national weal.”) The main count against Mrs. Simpson seemed to be that she had trod the matrimonial aisle on two previous occasions. Commoners had at one point or another married into nearly every court of Europe. But the further fact that the lady was an American appeared to clinch her ineligibility in the eyes of the British clergy and Parliament. These various defects could not be expected to offend Churchill too seriously. His mother was an American and, while never divorced, had married three times; in addition, his long-dead kinswoman, Arabella, humble sister of the first John Churchill, had been warmly esteemed by James II, and had borne him four sons in the process. How much these factors affected Churchill’s championship of the love-torn King is not known, but they were thought by some to be influential.
As the single-minded Stanley Baldwin applied his by now well-known pressures, the King grew increasingly irritated. Baldwin had a dismal habit of snapping and cracking his knuckles, a mannerism rendered further eccentric, and even slightly dangerous, by an occasional flinging of his right arm past his head, as if he were catching flies. How he rose to political heights in the face of these galvanic exercises remains a mystery, but it is on record that they ruffled Edward VIII. Beyond question, had the age been a few hundred years before,
Baldwin would have found himself snapping and crackling in the Tower; now he sententiously plodded on with his theory that a king must on no account be permitted to behave like a man. A suggested morganatic marriage was denied, Mrs. Simpson left for the convalescent atmosphere of Cannes, and the King summoned Winston Churchill, who was preparing to ask the nation for “time and patience.” In his memoirs, A King’s Story, Edward has summarized Churchill’s status of the moment:
“It is no doubt somewhat difficult for many of us whose impression of recent history is so dominated by the immeasurable greatness and prestige of this man to remember, let alone believe, that in 1936, his position in British life, and even more within his own party, was regarded as anything but immortal. Throughout the period when the events that are the subject of t
his narrative were unfolding he was, in fact, a virtual outcast from the Conservative party, respected and even feared for his undoubted intellectual brilliance and audacity but distrusted by the party leaders, who denied him a place in the Government.”
Churchill arrived for a select council of war and dinner at Edward’s sanctuary, The Fort, and delivered a monologue on the situation. The King and the other guests listened respectfully. “Although I had long admired Mr. Churchill,” wrote Edward, “I saw him that evening in his true stature. When Mr. Baldwin had talked to me about the Monarchy, it had seemed a dry and lifeless thing. But when Mr. Churchill spoke, it lived, it grew, it became suffused with light. His argument was simple and convincing. No constitutional issue had arisen between me and my Cabinet, and none could arise until Wallis’s decree nisi became absolute in April, then nearly five months off.”
These facts prompted Churchill to offer a Plan of Action, which has since been remarked as being typically Churchillian. He advised Edward to go home to Windsor Castle, close the gates, and leave them guarded by his father’s physician, Lord Dawson of Penn (who was, in point of fact, far too decrepit for this sort of work), and his own Physician in Ordinary, Lord Horder. Thus an ingress would be denied to all busybodies with clear-cut notions about marriage and the monarchy, presumably including Stanley Baldwin. With his notable zeal for combat, Churchill then advocated a delaying fight that would “allow time for the battalions to march.” This would culminate, it appeared, in a monster engagement to see who was stronger — Baldwin or Edward VIII.
The King instead chose abdication, and Churchill, with a splendid bustle of energy, helped him write a suitably eloquent address of farewell. Edward composed the first draft, but Churchill stuck in any number of majestic phrases, and smoothed it all up. When the King broadcast the famous speech, which began, “At long last I am able to say a few words of my own,” everybody agreed that it was a noble and emollient effort. Churchill heard it on his radio at Chartwell and modestly commented on the impressive literacy of the King. Then he went up to his workroom, where he resumed his invention of majestic phrases for Marlborough.
Winston Churchill: An Informal Study of Greatness Page 34
