Deed and word
Shortly before Christmas 2006 the Nobel Museum opened an exhibition of Winston Churchill’s paintings. There were portraits, still lifes and landscapes: the artist with his palette in his hand, an arrangement of empty bottles and cigar boxes, his house at Chartwell in the snow. Everything is done with skill, but without personality in the draughtsmanship and colours. The style varies, changing from work to work. There is something laborious about the careful depictions
The opening was attended by the artist’s daughter, Mary Soames. She has been interested in her father’s painting and has even written a book about it, Winston Churchill: his life as a painter (1990). But when she spoke in Stockholm she promptly made a distinction. She stressed that her father was an amateur painter, but that he was a professional writer.
The remark immediately illuminates a widespread prejudice, namely that Churchill as a writer was also an amateur, a statesman who patched together his memories and who received the Nobel Prize for Literature because the members of the Swedish Academy—like so many other people worldwide—felt gratitude towards this political leader who had overcome the Third Reich. Lady Soames’ distinction provides the opportunity of nailing the widespread prejudice, indeed it provides an opportunity of attempting to grind it into the dust.
It is certainly true that Winston Churchill was seriously committed as a political leader. He was elected to the House of Commons in 1900, just 25 years old, and remained (with a break from 1922 to 1924) as an MP up to his death in January 1965. He became a member of the government for the first time in 1908, and over the following 30 years he held many different ministerial posts: Minister of Trade, Home Secretary, Navy Minister, Munitions Minister, Minister of War, Air Minister, Minister for the Colonies, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Minister of Defence and Prime Minister. He formed two governments, between May 10, 1940 and July 27, 1945; and between 1951 and 1955.
I am not attempting to draw up a CV, but the duration of the political commissions should be borne in mind when one considers the literary works purely quantitatively. And the works should also be considered quantitatively. Churchill published his first book in 1898, The Story of the Malakand Field. There, in roughly 300 pages, he depicts a revolt in north-west India. Later he will write more about India in book form, but also about other trouble spots in the British Empire, such as the Sudan and South Africa. In 1900 he published his only novel, Savrola: a tale of the revolution in Laurania. He achieved a breakthrough as a historian in 1906, with a biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill. The two volumes comprise more than 800 pages. Between 1933 and 1938 he also published a biography of his ancestor, Marlborough. The Duke, who lived from 1650 to 1722, is presented in four volumes, the original edition of which totalled 2,000 pages. Three multi-volume works on more comprehensive topics are also voluminous: The World Crisis (1923–1931), a history of the First World War in five volumes totalling 2,500 pages, later reworked and published under the title The Great War (1933–1934); The Second World War (1948–1954), a history of the war in six volumes totalling 5,000 pages, and A History of the English-speaking Peoples (1956–1958), a history of the homelands of democracy in four volumes totalling 1,500 pages. Less comprehensive, without being exactly slender, is Churchill’s possibly most read and most loved book, the autobiography My Early Life (1930), which depicts his own experiences up to the age of 30.
Churchill wrote a great deal. The books I have mentioned are merely the highlights of his vast bibliography. One driving force was financial. When he became an MP, members received no pay. Later in life he had acquired habits which rendered his fees for public appearances inadequate. The financial driving force helped his style. It immediately places him at a safe distance from the politician of accepted prejudice plodding away at his memoirs. Initially Churchill wrote to gain readers, so that he could sell books. Sales provided income from royalties.
Admittedly, other driving forces are immediately distinguishable. Churchill should not be confused with someone who simply churns out what the public want, someone who has customer focus and nothing else. He wanted to gain readers, but not merely to gain readers. Churchill always has a message, something he wants to disseminate, something that causes him to burn with an eagerness to narrate and convince, an eagerness to carry his readers along with him and get them to understand and perceive, to see the world through his eyes. A driving force of this kind is, of course, most manifest when he writes of the historical periods in which he himself was an important actor. As so often he has produced from the sleeve of his smoking jacket a cogent phrase which sums this up: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
The decisive factor in assessing the value of an author’s work is nevertheless not quantity but quality. In order to substantiate my high opinion of Churchill as an author I will concentrate on the mature work which in my view comprises the high watermark of his authorship, the History of the Second World War, primarily its first two volumes, which deal with the origins of the war, its outbreak and course up to 1941.
Churchill’s place in the great British narrative tradition of the 19th century is clear even from the titles of the volumes and their mottos. The omniscient narrator summarises effectively and allows us to understand how he thinks and interprets, how he views the course of events that is to be presented in all its fascinating detail and twists and turns. The first volume is called The Gathering Storm and has as its motto: “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm.” The second volume is called Their Finest Hour and has the motto “How the British people held the fort alone till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready.” The third volume is called The Grand Alliance and has the motto: “How the British fought on with hardship their garment until Soviet Russia and the United States were drawn into the great conflict.” The fourth volume is called The Hinge of Fate and has the motto: “How the power of the Grand Alliance became preponderant.” The fifth volume is called Closing the Ring and has the motto: “How Nazi Germany was isolated and assailed on all sides.” The sixth volume is called Triumph and Tragedy and has the motto: “How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.”
In Sweden we usually admire Strindberg’s short story, “Half a Sheet of Paper” for its evocative concentration. Can the titles and mottos of the six volumes of Churchill compare with Strindberg? Here too hidden depths open up; of implied meaning, of an implicit view on life and of concepts of reality. It is not only or even primarily through the number of pages that Churchill deserves respect and admiration.
Churchill’s epic world may to an unusually high degree correspond with an external reality, but the external reality is in itself never a narrative. The author creates tension, draws lines and apportions stresses. He debates environments and breathes life into his dramatis personae. The stage is alive with detail, but we never lose sight of the main plot and that to which the main plot intends to bear witness. The entire literary machinery is mobilised in every volume to focus on an experience, a lesson.
In the first volume it is the 1930s. Here a solitary truth-teller appears who believes in calling a spade a spade, a man on a collision course with his contemporaries. In the House of Commons he takes every opportunity to present facts and views about the new order, Germany’s rearmament and strength, about its political ideals and probable ambitions. The political pragmatists regard him as an irritating fly. They sneer at him. They mock him and slander him. They marginalise him and outmanoeuvre him. But he does not give in. He goes on talking. Tirelessly.
Towards the end of the story stands the narrating present. There it is the solitary truth-teller who is seen to be right. Events turned out as he claimed they would. He reminds us of the attitudes of the pacifists, the idea that justice should prevail, that every nation should have the right to a military force as strong as all the others, an idea which meant a demand for a reduction in the military forces of Great Britain and France and the encouragement of rearmament in Germany. Justice would achieve peace. Churchill, for it is of course Churchill who is the solitary truth-teller, could only be horrified at such irresponsible gullibility. Horror was also what he felt when Germany began to make territorial claims, and the pacifists rushed to satisfy them, to the applause of the pacifist general public.
Churchill is very judgemental of some of those in power in Great Britain. Baldwin, Conservative party leader from 1923 to 1937, several times Prime Minister, comes off worst. Churchill considers that Baldwin in fact realised that the solitary truth-teller was telling the truth, but that he repressed this realisation for career reasons. The pacifist public did not want to hear the message of the solitary truth-teller. It had been seduced by the wishful thinking of the pacifists. Justice would achieve peace, and it was the pacifist public which formed the electorate. Look how elegantly Churchill in the present of the narrative passes sentence on Baldwin: “Moreover, as a profoundly astute party manager, thinking in majorities and aiming at a quiet life between elections, he did not wish to have my disturbing aid.” Chamberlain, Baldwin’s successor as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, escapes more lightly. He never acted, says Churchill, in defiance of any insight. Chamberlain was himself held prisoner by the pacifists’ wishful thinking. He harboured an “all pervading hope” of going down in history as “the Great Peacemaker.”
The attentive reader will note how Churchill plays up his theme so that it achieves a reach far beyond the individual situation. There is nothing of the particularity here in the statesman patching together his memoirs. Churchill’s reasoning can easily be used to shed light on today’s political situation. Now we have pacifists who consider that Iran should, of course, acquire nuclear weapons. Israel has them after all. Justice will achieve peace. Nor would it be particularly difficult to point out politicians who defy facts and insights in order to comply with wishful thinking and in this way win elections. Churchill’s epic world is concrete and not abstract, but it invites us to ponder things that are general and not particular.
In the second volume the Second World War has broken out. The German war machine is crushing all resistance. In a Great Britain that risks standing alone, and which soon in fact did stand alone, the solitary truth-teller is elevated to become Prime Minister. He has to keep his despair in check. He goes on talking. Tirelessly. Now he is not warning any longer. He is encouraging, emanating courage. Bringing out good examples. Preparing for the worst, but stressing that even if the worst should happen, it would not be the end. When France has fallen and the Battle of Britain has begun Churchill explains that, even if Germany were to occupy London and the entire island the struggle would continue. The strength of Great Britain lies in its fleet, and the fleet will not fall into Germany’s hands. It will instead continue the fight from those harbours around the world that are still controlled by the British Empire.
In the narrating present it is emphasised that Churchill really meant what he said in the present of the narrative. There is to be no gap between conviction and statement. As a political leader the solitary truth-teller is value-based, not strategic. If he had been strategic, he would have made peace with Germany in the late summer of 1940. Why should Great Britain alone and at its own expense attempt to save the world from Nazi claims to supremacy? His favourite poet Kipling had in “The Question,” a poem from 1916, accused the USA of entering the First World War two years seven months and four days too late and having exploited the delay in order to earn money. Great Britain fell into debt, and the world was forced into a logic which sowed the seeds of the next war. In order for Great Britain to be able to pay its debts to the USA, exorbitant war reparations were forced upon Germany. In 1940 everything seemed to repeat itself. The USA again supplies war materiel and demands payment in gold and dollars. Money moves from London to Washington. And not merely from London. The South African gold reserves are used up. Individual Britons who own American shares are forced to sell them for pounds, so that the government can use the shares as means of payment. But the solitary truth-teller now subordinates himself to an economic cost benefit calculation to as small an extent as he had some years earlier subordinated himself to a party tactical vote-maximisation calculation. When the British Foreign Office, in the late autumn of 1940, spells out the diplomatic situation, Churchill cuts the discussion short with: “The ideas set forth in the Foreign Office memo appeared to me to err in trying to be too clever, and to enter into refinements of policy are not suited to the tragic simplicity and grandeur of the times and issues at stake.”
The first volume of The Second World War is the story of someone who is speaking the truth; the second volume is the story of someone who stands firm.
Churchill, assuredly also the historical personage but in this context primarily the literary figure, belongs to a system which is foundering, which at all events will founder. If he loses the war, he loses. If he wins the war, then he also loses. Churchill knows that the struggle against Nazi Germany, even if it ends in triumph, will result in Great Britain being placed in a financial situation which will make it impossible to maintain the Empire. And his world has been the British Empire and those values which he has associated with this, for example truthfulness and steadfastness instead of popularity and pragmatism. Either a victory or a defeat will sweep everything away. He knows this. Nevertheless he fights with an intensity without human parallel. The victory he eventually wins in the war is the farewell gift of the old world, a gift of conservatism to liberalism.
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The narrator in The Second World War is not unfamiliar with the transitory nature of triumphs and their tragic dimension. Churchill found time not merely to save the world and create an authorship. He was also well read. Fiction and not least poetry furnish him with reference points. And he readily makes comparisons between the historical situation in which he finds himself and other similar situations which he is familiar with from books.
Plutarch is as natural to him as Kipling. His attitude is completely attuned to the tradition of learning. Even if one does not wish to do so, it is difficult not to compare him with those Swedish politicians who today fill the media with their worried expressions and jolly officiousness, those who are all too preoccupied to find time to read and far too important to acquire anything as simple as a brilliant prose style. Churchill’s relaxed dignity derives from the fact that he never became so preoccupied and so self-important. Over several thousands of pages he never lets slip a single vulgarity of the kind that Göran Persson strews about him in his rehearsed conversations with Erik Fichtelius. Nor does Churchill mirror himself in other powerful men.
Among the heartening features of The Second World War are on-the-spot accounts of individuals at the periphery who stand the test and show their worth. Churchill moves these individuals into history, into the history which would otherwise merely be the history of those in power and of the anonymous masses. When the western powers in the autumn of 1938 finally betray Czechoslovakia and deliver the country to the discretion of Germany, there is an individual to point to: “There was in Prague at this moment a general of the French army named Faucher. He had been in Czechoslovakia with the French Military Mission since 1919, and had been its head since 1926. He now requested the French Government to relieve him of his duties, and placed himself at the disposal of the Czech Slovak Army. He also adopted Czech citizenship.” When the entire British population in July 1940 is expecting German troops to land at any time, there is a line to be seized upon: “As the commissionaire at one of the service clubs in London said to a rather downcast member, ‘anyhow sir, we’re the final, and it’s to be played on the home ground.’” The critic who rejects such a line as anecdotal knows nothing either about life or about narrative technique.
Churchill’s stylistic devices are seldom subtle, but are always effective. Thus his irony, as when the storm clouds are gathering in the summer of 1939: “In England, just as in 1914, care-free people were enjoying their holidays and playing with their children on the sands.” Thus his imagery, as when the Soviet Union and Italy go out in search of the prey left by Germany: “To join the Jackal came the Bear.” Thus his brutal directness, as when he finds cause to refer to “very stupid people”: “a category which is heavily represented in every country.” Thus his robust words of wisdom, as when he isolates the demands on leadership in war: “There is no room in war for pique, spite or rancour. The main objective must dominate all secondary causes of vexation.” Thus his emotional summing up, as when he is able to declare that Germany will never set foot on British soil: “Hope and within it passion burned anew in the hearts of hundreds of millions of men. The good cause would triumph. Right would not be trampled down. The flag of freedom, which in this fateful hour was the Union Jack, would still fly in all winds that blew.”
Yes, Winston Churchill is truly a worthy Nobel Prize-winner in literature, perhaps not on a par with the greatest—a Rudyard Kipling, a Thomas Mann or a William Faulkner; but much superior to the negligible prizewinners—a Sully-Prudhomme or a Dario Fo. From a literary standpoint he is an equal of the competent majority, a Hermann Hesse, a TS Eliot, an Ernest Hemingway, an Albert Camus or a VS Naipaul.
Translated by Phil Holmes
Docent i litteraturvetenskap.