BOOKS
Sweet war man
Michael Howard
NEVER DESPAIR: WINSTON S. CHURCHILL 1945-1965 by Martin Gilbert It would be a churlish reviewer who did not begin by offering Martin Gilbert the sincerest possible congratulations on the completion of his mammoth biography of Sir Winston Churchill. Initially in col- laboration with Randolph Churchill but for the bulk of the time on his own, Gilbert has devoted 25 years of his life, off and on, to his huge task, producing many disting- uished works of his own in the process. Now this is completed with the publication of Volume VIII of the biography: 1365 pages of text covering the last 20 years of Churchill's life from 1945 to 1965. Com- pleted, that is, unless we can expect a companion collection of documents such as provided such welcome complements to some of the earlier volumes. But in view of the amount of documentation included in the text of this one, it seems unlikely.
. In view of the amount of documentation included in the text. There's the rub. For if it would be churlish not to congratulate Martin Gilbert on completing the work, it would be less than frank not to express a deep disappointment at the quality of this final volume. Mr Gilbert himself quotes a contemporary comment made by Malcolm Muggeridge on Churchill's history of the second world war: What has happened about his own memoirs, and why he was so troubled, is that in truth 7 he has lost interest in them and has simply been stringing together masses of documents Which he had written in the war.
Whether or not Martin Gilbert has also lost interest in the same way, the end result looks like it. He has presented us with a simple scissors-and-paste job. The person- al documents from the Churchill archives, trivial and significant bundled indiscrimi- nately together, are present in strict Chronological order, literally day by day, together with contextual quotations from the published diaries of Sir John Colville, Lord Moran, Harold Macmillan and other easily accessible sources. Some Cabinet minutes are cited, but no other official records. As much, if not more space is devoted to details of Churchill's holiday arrangements, his negotiations with his Publishers and the process of writing his books as to his activities as a statesman. Page after page is taken up with otiose and Oleaginous congratulatory letters, often from members of his own family. Corres- pondence with the Palace, all of predict- able triviality, is meticulously transcribed. We are spared nothing except laundry bills; which Churchill probably never saw anyway.
All this takes up the space which might
Heinemann, £25, pp. 1438
have been used to describe, however brief- ly, what was actually going on in Britain and the world in the post-war decade. The economic and social situation in Britain at the end of the war; the policies of the Attlee Government; the manner in which the Conservative Party regrouped and counter-attacked; the task which lay before the Second Churchill Administration in 1952 and how it coped with it; the unfold- ing events in the Middle East leading to the British decision to withdraw from Egypt — these are barely touched on. And if the explanation for these omissions is that Churchill himself was bored by and did not notice them, preferring to bury himself at Chartwell with his research assistants, is this not in itself cause for biographical comment?
Mr Gilbert has in fact performed very ably the task of research assistant which he took up for Randolph Churchill 25 years ago. He lays out the raw materials from which the biographer must select so as to present a balanced, lively and insightful portrait of his subject: materials inert until they are brought to life by a critical and creative historical imagination. Mr Gilbert can do it if he tries. He did it in some of the earlier volumes, when he dealt with Chur- chill's life during the first world war and the interwar years. In those the back- ground was described, we were shown how Churchill fitted into it and interacted with his colleagues, and a just balance was preserved between private and public life. It is in the two books dealing with the second world war that we see the begin- nings of the sterile approach which stulti- fies this one. But Churchill lived the war. He had virtually no existence outside it. Every document of any importance sooner or later passed over his desk. Mr Gilbert's self-effacement was acceptable, although even then some critics commented on it unfavourably. But such a technique ap- plied to these final years does not work. There is too much trivia to be excused, too much of importance going on in the world which these documents do not describe or explain. Churchill after 1945 may have been a tired old man, increasingly out of touch with events, but his declining years deserve better treatment than this.
Do we learn anything from this volume that we did not already know from the diaries of Colville and Moran, from which Mr Gilbert copiously and uncritically quotes? Not much. In spite of his astound- ing energy and the experience accumulated over half a century of public life, Churchill was tired when he took office in 1951 and rapidly became physically and mentally unfit to retain it. He stubbornly clung on, partly because he mistrusted the ability of Eden to govern the country and of the Americans to run the world. In both cases his instincts were sound. The tragedy of Eden has been fully recounted by Evelyn Shuckburgh and Robert Rhodes James; and Mr Gilbert has little to add. As for the Americans, there certainly emerges from the documents an interesting picture of Churchill's gradually changing attitude, from welcoming Truman's America as the necessary preserver of world peace to dreading that of Dulles (whom he heartily detested) as its potential destroyer. His motive in staying close to the Americans was not only to retain their support but to restrain their belligerence. He was not the last British Prime Minister to view the 'Special Relationship' in this light.
The Soviet Union Churchill always saw both as threat and opportunity. There were moments when (in opposition) he played with the idea of pre-emptive war, but in general his position remained consistent: the West must rearm, but in order not to fight but to talk to the Russians, whose rights as a partner in governing the affairs of the world and whose sufferings in two terrible wars he generously recognised. But only he, believed Churchill, could effectively do the talking. Again, he was not the last elderly Western leader who, having started from a position of doctri- naire anti-Communism, came to think that he alone, in dialogue with a new Soviet leader, could bequeath to the world the benefits of lasting peace.
A historian who is prepared to take a deep breath, dive into Mr Gilbert's ossuary and make these dry bones live will find here all the material for a magnificent study of this greatest of Englishmen; a man of truly heroic stature, sustained even into extreme old age by the impetus of his genius, baffled by a world in which every- thing he had stood for seemed to be disintegrating, fighting to preserve what he could of his achievements, raging against the dying of the light. It is, to repeat, deeply disappointing that Mr Gilbert should not have done this himself, and written the book for which he has done all the donkey-work.
Such a definitive biography would have to show, not least, what a sweet man Churchill was; funny, self-deprecatory, properly deferential to his cats and above all as much in love with his wife in old age as he had been when he wooed her 60 years earlier. His letters to her are enchanting, and Mr Gilbert certainly deserves our gratitude for printing them. Has any coun- try, at any time, ever produced a leader at once so great and so lovable?
Previous page
