After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  At the beginning of November 1939, Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary: ‘They are saying, “The generals learned their lesson in the last war. There are going to be no wholesale slaughters.” I ask how is victory possible except by wholesale slaughters?’39 In fact, the really immense casualties of war did not begin until Hitler authorized the invasion of Russia in 1941. Certainly during the Phoney War any death was still regarded as something notable. The amateurism on the part of the British, verging on the downright incompetent, was terrifying.

  The British attempt to invade Norway inflicted great losses on the German navy – three cruisers and ten destroyers were sunk. But German air power made it impossible for an invading force to land in the fjords and the venture which began in the middle of April led to an ignominious retreat two weeks later. The failure of the Norwegian campaign in spring 1940 could very well have been seen as primarily the responsibility of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill himself. And yet it was the debate about this fiasco, and the vote of confidence in Chamberlain in the House of Commons (the government’s majority of 240 fell to 81), which, by an extraordinary sequence of events, led to the resignation of Chamberlain as Prime Minister. There was now a choice for him. He could recommend to the king that he make Lord Halifax prime minister, or he could recommend Churchill.

  Quintin Hogg, one of the men of Munich, looked back on that strange summer and said this: ‘Cardinal Newman used to say that he looked in vain for the finger of God in history. It was like looking in a mirror, expecting to see his own face, and seeing nothing. The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history, is Churchill’s arrival at the Premiership at that precise moment in 1940.’40

  But another perspective is that of Chips Channon, who had been an arch-appeaser, a friend of Ribbentrop’s, and who disliked Churchill heartily. He sneered: ‘We might as well have Macaulay or even Caruso as Prime Minister.’41 This is meant to be damaging, but it is sort of right. The question of the future of Europe, and the future of the British Empire, and perhaps the future of civilized values themselves, could no longer be reduced to a question of diplomatic niceties, or treaties, or even to a question of common sense. It was precisely because Churchill, in his extraordinary hybrid rhetoric, saw life as a tuppence-coloured history drama, or even, to extend Channon’s metaphor, to an opera, that he was right. But civilization could not afford many more blunders like Norway. And Britain, as everyone knew, could not really sustain a campaign against Germany without the help of America. A decade earlier, in an undated letter, Clementine Churchill had written to her husband hoping he might rise further in the Conservative party, perhaps even replacing that ‘animated cardboard marionette Austen Chamberlain’ as leader. She added, however, with what seems an extraordinary judgement in the light of his subsequent life: ‘I am afraid your known hostility for America might stand in the way.’42

  * By contrast with the extermination camps which were set up after the outbreak of war, outside Germany.

  26

  The Special Relationship I

  Laurel and Hardy first appeared together in a silent film called A Lucky Dog (1917),1 but it was far from being an instant partnership. When Churchill met Roosevelt in Newfoundland in 1941, he made a gracious speech about how delighted he was to be encountering the President for the first time. Roosevelt replied that they had actually met before in 1918, at Gray’s Inn, in London. Roosevelt was too gracious to point out that the meeting had not been a success. ‘He acted like a stinker at a dinner I attended, lording it over us,’ Roosevelt recalled in a conversation with Joseph Kennedy.2

  The ‘special relationship’ between Churchill and Roosevelt began in Newfoundland twenty years after their actual first meeting, and the film partnership between Laurel and Hardy began in earnest a whole decade after A Lucky Dog, being sponsored by the inspired midwifery of the Hal Roach studios from the mid- to late Twenties onwards. Both Laurel and Hardy brought very different gifts to the partnership. The magic of the films is drawn from more than one source, which is surely why they are so much funnier than the monochrome mimetic Chaplin – whom Stan Laurel had understudied in his twenties when working for the Fred Karno Performers. Oliver Hardy (1892–1957) had been born in Harlem, Georgia, and studied at the Atlanta Conservatory of Music. He was in part a serious person, and much of his seriousness is retained in the films; his exasperation with Stan Laurel stems in part from an eternal optimism, a wish that life could be better. The themes of their best films are the stuff of which many dramatists make not farce but tragedy – the inability of human beings to transcend their fate, whether they are a fat man and a thin man trying to carry a piano up a very long flight of stone steps (The Music Box, 1932 – the only one of their films to win an Oscar), or just two honest men trying to better themselves by converting a thriving wet fish business into a disastrous venture by which they catch, as well as sell, their own fish (Towed in a Hole, also 1932). Written by Arthur Miller, the same story would reduce audiences to the depth of despondency.

  Sons of the Desert (1933) saw Ollie and Stan as childishly naughty husbands momentarily escaping the domestic tyranny of two termagant wives, and two suburban houses so identical that one man can walk in on the wrong one and not know he’s done so. Nothing in fact demonstrates their infantilism so vividly as this boys’ away-trip in Sons of the Desert to the quasi-Masonic convention in Chicago. (Ollie’s ashes, incidentally, were interred in 1957 in the Masonic Garden of Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.) But although in that famous film they are depicted as errant husbands, in nearly all the rows and scrapes which embroil them, Laurel and Hardy are emblems of the impossibility of two human beings doing the simplest thing together without having a row: and to that extent they are paradigms not of grown-up chums but of childhood siblings or married partners. In Sons of the Desert they are supposedly middle-class, but in most of the best films they are bums, hoodlums, victims of the Depression, unable to find employment, and when they do so – as in the surreally brilliant Busy Bodies (1933), in which, as saw-mill operatives, they end up sawing their own car in half and driving away with it in two – always bringing mayhem.

  Deadly as it might be to explain humour, one of the ingredients of the success is that both Laurel and Hardy are stooges. There is not one straight man and one funny man with comedic or the closely related demagogic power. They are both straight men at variance, not with a comic partner but with comedic fates. If Ollie, with the semi-tragic dignity of the very fat, came from the American South, and from an aspiration to make serious music, Laurel, whose real name was Arthur Stanley Jefferson (1890–1965), came from the almost Dickensian world of English music hall. He had been born in Ulverston, in the north of England, and his father was an actor-manager. One sees this background emerging in one of the most delightful scenes in the history of cinema, in Way Out West (1937), when the two friends, employed as messengers by an Eastern law firm, go to Brushwood Gulch, a one-horse town in the West, to tell an innocent young woman that she has inherited a gold mine. Mary Roberts, the innocent, is working as a drudge in a sleazy saloon, where the squint-eyed villain James Finlayson is the proprietor and the magnificent Sharon Lynne his flamboyantly tarty and unscrupulous wife Lola. Such practical questions as why the lawyer has chosen two such chumps to deliver an important message, or why he hasn’t paid them their rail-fare, do not matter. They emerge on the road as two timeless wanderers with a pony, who could be travelling clowns in the age of Shakespeare or picaresque eccentrics encountered by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The innocents abroad manage to offend the sheriff of the place before they have arrived – accused preposterously of trying to touch up his ample wife in the stagecoach which squeezes them in for a lift on their last leg into town. Then they walk into a group of cowboys sitting on the steps of the saloon and singing, ‘Commence yer dancin’, commence yer prancin’.’ Suddenly these two men, one thin, fey, not of this world, the other enormously stout with patches on his trou
sers, both wearing bowler hats, break into dance. It is not symbolic of anything. It isn’t an expression, as it would be if it happened in a film nowadays, of homosexual love. Like a song sequence in a Shakespearean comedy or like such interludes in the music halls it is simply a piece of exuberant nonsense. Stan Laurel in this sequence is visibly the heir of Dan Leno (1860–1904), the surreal, manic genius of the late Victorian music halls in London. Within minutes, the chumps have entered the bar and blabbed the secret about Mary’s rightful ownership of a gold mine; within a few more highly satisfactory minutes, everyone is running round in frenzied circles, as Sharon Lynne nabs the deed of ownership, squint-eyed Finlayson reaches for his gun, and Stan and Ollie hurl pillows and feathers. When they’ve escaped, Mary Roberts and Ollie discover they are both from the South. Stan surprises his friend by claiming the same. ‘You’re not from the South,’ says Ollie indignantly. ‘Sure I am. The South of London.’

  It was only three years later that Laurel and Hardy made a very different film, in its way no less memorable, but the only film in the oeuvre, as far as I am aware, in which the English origins of Stanley are made much of, and having bubbled to the surface, destroy the dream. Beneath some good comic moments, A Chump at Oxford (1940) contains an explicit theme which isn’t really funny, merely embarrassing. By abandoning in early career his real name, which was that of one of the most famous American presidents, Stan had paradoxically ceased to be English and become an American evergreen. In 1940 the American chump discovers that he is actually an English lord, Lord Paddington, and the minute he makes the discovery he starts acting, as Churchill had done to Roosevelt in 1918, like a stinker.

  A Chump at Oxford (directed by Alfred Goulding) was originally produced as a ‘streamlined feature’ to run for 42 minutes for the American market. A 20-minute prologue was added for the European market so that the film could be shown as a full-length feature. The prologue is classic Depression comedy of the kind Laurel and Hardy did best. Entering the employment agency, they say:

  ‘We’d like a job.’

  ‘Anything you’ve got missis. We’re down to our last six bucks, aren’t we, Ollie?’

  In the employment agency they sit between a man with a cloth cap and a thin man in a bowler hat who looks like Lord Halifax, who became British ambassador to Washington in the year the film was released, 1940. While they are sitting around waiting they hear a rich woman ring up in despair in need of a maid and a butler. It is a rare (unique?) moment when in the next sequence the butler and maid arrive at the rich man’s house and we see Stanley in drag; he is the maid in a frilly wig. Ollie makes a good butler from the visual point of view but his irrepressible friendliness diminishes the dignity of the dinner. ‘There’s everything from soup to nuts, folks – come ‘n get it.’

  ‘What kind’v a joint is this?’ asks Stan. ‘He wants me to serve the salad undressed.’

  It ends with the apoplectic and squinting employer, James Finlayson of course, taking a gun to them as their clumsiness wrecks the dinner party. It is familiar Laurel and Hardy territory. But then the mood shifts.

  ‘Well, here we are at last,’ says Ollie, ‘right down in the gutter.’

  ‘You know what the trouble is, we’ve never had no education. We’re not illiterate enough.’ (Stan).

  They are reduced to sweeping the streets, but it is in so doing that just for once they meet a smiling Fortune. Chucking a banana skin away during his lunch break, Stan manages to trip up an escaping bank robber, and the chairman of the bank, as a reward, offers the two friends ‘the finest education money can buy’.

  (‘Whaddya mean, 3 Rs?’

  ‘Reading, writin’ and figurin’.’)

  The rich man exports them from America to Oxford. (‘Well, it’ll save us the trouble of goin’ to night school.’) It is there that by a series of wildly improbable sequences it turns out that Stanley is really the long-lost Lord Paddington, who knocked his head on the window-lintel and thereby lost his memory. When the doltish innocent Stan knocks his head again, he turns into the lofty aristo, full of scorn for poor Ollie, whom he starts calling Fatty and forces to work as his valet. The foppish, cruel English students, a youthful Peter Cushing among them, having tormented the two American dolts on their arrival, turn into a really nasty mob chanting:

  Fee, fi, fo, fum,

  We want the blood of an American.

  We’ll chew them up like chewing gum,

  Fee, fi, fo, fum,

  And chase them back where they came from! Etc.

  A heart-broken Ollie turns to his friend – ‘Why, Stan, don’t you know me? Don’t you remember – we used to sweep the streets together?’

  ‘Meredith,’ replies Lord Paddington to his other servant, ‘show this common person the egress.’ Stan is by now sporting a chequered smoking jacket, an eyeglass and a cigarette holder. The dean of the college comes grovellingly to Lord Paddington, who has already won all the sporting events, to announce: ‘Professor Einstein’s just arrived from Princeton, and he’s just a bit confused about his Theory. He wondered if you could straighten him out?’

  ‘Einstein!’ exclaims Ollie. ‘If it wasn’t for that bump on the head he wouldn’t know the difference between Einstein and a Beer-Stain.’ Paranoia grows in self-hatred. One of the fascinating things about the film is that while resenting, it rather appears to endorse the anti-American prejudices of the British which undoubtedly existed at the time. It is truly paranoid, hinting that in his brief period as Lord Paddington, Stanley is not merely claiming superiority but doing so with justice. He really is a sporting genius who can correct little Einstein in his spare time. (‘My husband’, remarked Mrs Sumner, wife of the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, when introduced to Lindemann (‘the Prof’), ‘my husband always says that with a First in Greats you can get up science in a fortnight.’)

  When Ollie’s temper cracks under Lord Paddington’s intolerable patronage the languid aristo says: ‘Only trying to help you out, old dear.’ Ollie’s reaction is the understandable one of ‘Back to America for me!’ The film breathes the isolationist sense that dear, friendly, doltish old America, embodied in the obese, clumsy Ollie, is better off not getting mixed up in camp, devious, cruel, effete Europe. To this extent, different as it is in atmosphere and treatment, A Chump at Oxford is very much a rerun of the old Henry James themes.

  Luckily, devious, lofty Lord Paddington hits his head on the window once again and turns back into the American dolt with whom we all feel at home. The film ends with the two old friends united once more, and clasped in deep embrace. Funnily enough, after this film Laurel and Hardy lost their touch, and although they continued to work together for a decade, something had gone out of the magic.

  In September 1940, the House speaker, William Bankhead, died and the presidential train left Washington DC for the funeral, held in Bankhead’s home town of Jasper, Alabama. The train contained Franklin Delano Roosevelt and many members of his cabinet. When they reached Jasper, temperatures were in the nineties. Sixty-five thousand people attended the funeral, and as soon as it was over the presidential entourage returned to the capital.

  Among those on the train was the Undersecretary of State, Sumner Welles, who, aged twelve, had been a page at FDR’s wedding to cousin Eleanor Roosevelt. Welles, like FDR, had been educated at Groton and Harvard. He balanced snobbery and Anglophilia in personal style with a political distrust of British governments and institutions. Thus, while clothing his tall frame in Savile Row suits tailored for him in London, and his long feet in polished shoes made to measure at Lobb’s, he did almost more damage to Anglo-American political relations than the profoundly anti-English ambassador in Britain, Joe Kennedy. He was a good linguist, and a close adviser of the President’s on international affairs. Welles had been the pioneer of the Good Neighbor policy with Latin America. (He was largely responsible for establishing Fulgencio Batista’s long tyranny in Cuba.) He was, a little reluctantly but in the end decisively, a Zionist. And he had
been used by Roosevelt as a sounding-board on European affairs. Many spoke of him as an obvious successor to the ailing Secretary of State Cordell Hull, if the President was able to win a third term in the November 1940 elections.

  It could be said that this presidential election was one of the decisive political events of the twentieth century. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not merely an ideological liberal, but far less isolationist than his Republican opponents. The American public would need some persuading of the importance of interesting themselves in the European tragedy which was unfolding on the other side of the Atlantic. And of course we can say that, once Pearl Harbor had been bombed on 7 December 1941 by the Japanese, any American president, Democrat or Republican, would have been involved in the world war. But Roosevelt’s sympathy for the anti-Nazi cause in Europe, though he approached the whole matter with agonizing caution and slowness as far as Britain was concerned, and not without ambiguity, was certainly closer to support for the Allies Britain and France than anything which would have been offered either by the Republicans or by the members of his own Democratic cabinet.

  Undersecretary of State Welles, on the swelteringly hot train, could very easily have caused a scandal which would have secured a Republican victory in the polls had his behaviour that night come to public notice. Welles was a drunk, and a secret bisexual, addicted to his work and trapped in a miserable marriage. In a desperate letter, found among his papers after his death, his wife pointed out that she saw him ‘exactly ten minutes each day at breakfast, or passing upstairs to your bath’. She begged him not to drink or work so hard. ‘Oh Sumner, for you in your position, it will get you yet, my dear. I can’t help you. It’s you I care for, not the Under-Secretary of State. God help us both, but there is no God. Just you and me and this unhappy life and struggle.’3