One Man
One man, not quite alone
The River War, My African Journey and My Early Life by Winston S. Churchill; Lord Randolph Churchill by Lord Rosebery; Guilty Men by ‘Cato’; Churchill Digest, with a foreword by Lord Attlee; Churchill: His Life and Times by Malcolm Thompson; Churchill as Historian by Maurice Ashley; Five Days in London, May 1940 and Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian by John Lukacs; Churchill by John Keegan; Churchill by Roy Jenkins; Mr Churchill’s Profession by John Clarke; and Young Titan by Michael Sheldon
A young officer in India, bored and allaying that boredom and the long afternoons by reading. What would one read about in such a situation? Would one read Gibbon and Macaulay and get a good marinating in English historical writing on an immense scale? Having gone to Sandhurst and not to one of the universities, later even exaggerating one’s lack of educational entertainment – is that what one would read? Something makes a man like that while away the pointless wastes of time that army life inflicts on so many men: and to do so reading more than in other pursuits.
Churchill was, possibly above all other things, a writer. A writer of speeches which children in Britain used to be able to quote from memory. A writer of books that I have read but which most other people might once have claimed to have read yet now do not. How many children of my generation inherited copies of Churchill’s history of the Second World War in youth after the premature deaths of grandfathers, as I did? More than a handful. Churchill also quite notably wrote the story of his own life: in a memoir like My Early Life, which is wonderful; in fiction, in ‘The Dream’, which is heartbreaking; and in constant flurries of correspondence and memoranda.
The author of his own life: it’s a phrase people sometimes say at funerals. But it can’t often be true. For Churchill, it might be the case. Arthur Balfour called Churchill’s six volumes of The World Crisis a ‘brilliant autobiography, disguised as a history of the universe.’ One telling story is that when a young Churchill gave an early speech, either as a new member of parliament or as a journalist aspiring to the House, he gave a copy of his remarks in advance to The Times. In it, in anticipation, he had interrupted his own monologue with cheers from the audience.
If I may, I’d like to write about a book few others have: My African Journey, a pre-First World War record Churchill wrote of his tour of Africa undertaken as undersecretary of state for the Colonies. It is written leisurely and without a great deal of overt shaping. I imagine – although I do not know – that it was composed as a series of despatches, either as letters or as memos or as newspaper correspondence. This is not Churchill at his best, but it does show some of his characteristics.
A fondness, for instance, for the big declaration: for determining a vast sweep of events, and telling the reader precisely what is happening or will soon surely happen even as time and chance take their course. Another is interest in the telling anecdote. The book is full of overland journeys and longueurs on ships, and a little hunting, and going to the colonial mansions and interrogating the local men on the spot and so on. There is some of Africa’s boundless, bounteous natural landscapes. There are trains – the railhead is a constant feature of The River War, too – and there are plans, marvellous plans, for the coming on of Africa in the near future. This was a time when it was thought that the British government was good for something – even if only abroad.
People in Britain have been at the very least interviewed by the police under caution for reading from The River War in public, so I will not tell readers of mine what Churchill says in it, lest the ‘some kind of Gestapo’ Churchill inaptly predicted in 1945 come to interview me. But you can imagine the kinds of judgements that come from a young man who has just fought a violent expedition in Sudan against a fanatical faction truly believing that its leader is the Mahdi come to commence the end of the world at the instigation of Allah the most beneficent, the most merciful.
We depart from Churchill’s own works. Some of these books by others are about Churchill’s methods as a writer. Maurice Ashley was one of the bright young men who made up the Churchill literary factory between the wars and after it. He and others like G. M. Young wrote digests of the accepted research that Churchill then turned into the sprawling epics which defined his later career: his Second World War and The History of the English-Speaking Peoples. The latter of which especially is an entertaining read, full of colour.
Churchill’s own history of his times could not be more admiring of self than John Lukacs was of his subject: it is all one gush, quite well argued at points, not worth throwing out by any means. But one does sometimes wonder where authors like this believe they have made a distinctive contribution to the studies of such an imposing figure. Roy Jenkins determines that Churchill was a great man, but possibly only in those areas where Churchill reminded the author of a certain other man not far away. Michael Sheldon, slotting neatly into a period before the one terminating in Robert Rhodes James’s very famous Churchill: A Study in Failure, says that Churchill was titanic even in early adulthood. One wonders how true that could possibly be, even when written of a man who was so intent on authoring a grand life, his own.
And there was always also the business of money. Lord Rosebery, hearing that Churchill was getting close to producing a two-volume biography of his father, Lord Randolph, put out his own little book – elegant but insubstantial – in advance to capture some of the sales and the attention. Peter Clarke considers writing Churchill’s source not of life itself, but of paying the immense bills that he seemed to attract like fruits attract flies. What room, on the great cash treadmill, for greatness?
The young man languishing in the Indian summer heat in the Victorian age knew who he was; he was an aristocrat, grandson of a duke. But he did not know, then, what he would become. What grave and great matters would concern his life to come.