4 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 30

Arms and the Man

_MESSRS. CASSELL have placed the public greatly in their debt by now making Sir Winston Churchill's memoirs of the Second World War available in twelve paperbacked volumes. One says 'memoirs' and not `history' deliberately, for no one is more aware than Sir Winston that no one man, writing out of his own experience and still so close to the tremendous events he describes, could hope to achieve the detachment and impartiality to which history aspires. Per- haps, indeed, he would not have wished to achieve them even if he could; for his book is the work of one who, at the time of writing, was an active party politician, his career still un- finished, and, like Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion, his memoirs were as much a political act as a literary or historical exercise. They have the deliberate intention and hope, not only of recording the past, but of providing a guide to the future. The author himself, in his original introduction, readily admitted this; he claimed his book was 'a contribution to history that will be of service for the future.'

No one, not even Sir Winston's most severe critic, is ever likely to challenge this modest claim; indeed, the critics might say that the claim was all the more justified because the book displays all Sir Winston's faults just as plainly as his virtues. And this is, of course, one of the book's greatest merits; as its publishers say, without exaggeration, 'here, full and un- abridged, is the greatest Englishman of our time,' and both in their conscious and unconscious revelations of character these memoirs are an inexhaustible treasure trove to anyone who wishes to study the astounding capacities and weaknesses of human nature. Perhaps the greatest tribute one could pay to Sir Winston would be to say that his personality is in no way overshadowed by, but stands out in greater relief against the grandeurs and miseries of the events he describes. One can' be assured that his memoirs will be read as long as English is.

This being so, one is ready to forgive the violence which Sir Winston does to English as a living and spoken language, even though what is bad even in him becomes pernicious in its influence on his many imitators. There are many moments when, reading these twelve volumes, one wishes that Sir Winston commanded the simplicity of a Caesar or a Grant rather than the rotundities which come so easily and natur- ally from his pen. If he did, this might have been an even greater book; but it would bear less unmistakably the stamp a Sir Winston's baroque and flamboyant genius, so that however high a value one may set upon literature, one can hardly regret that in this case style has been sacrificed to the man.

GORONWY REES