Two Gentlemen on the Beach

by Köhlmeier, Michael; Martin, Ruth;

  He was afraid his daughter Sarah might fall prey to the same addiction as his mother. The fact that, like her brother, she was drinking excessively before she had even reached the age of twenty, didn’t trouble him; the fact that she couldn’t look at a man without everyone knowing what was on her mind, did.

  This makes his letter to Chaplin all the more surprising. Of course, Winston was aware of his friend’s reputation in Hollywood, and beyond. After all, when they had first met, some very ugly allegations were being made against Chaplin, and the newspapers were spreading the most scandalous rumours.

  There isn’t a single letter from Churchill in the papers Chaplin left behind, nor is there a letter from Chaplin in Churchill’s. However, two “drafts” were found among Churchill’s papers. I place the term in inverted commas because it is impossible to tell whether these really are drafts, or finished letters that simply weren’t sent – or sent in another form, and subsequently destroyed by the recipient. The letter I am talking about here was produced on a typewriter – a surprising fact, because if Churchill wrote at all, as opposed to giving dictation, then it was always by hand. Considering the letter’s content, we can rule out the possibility that he dictated it to a secretary who typed it up from her shorthand. William Knott says that – for whatever reason – Churchill typed the letter himself, and as evidence of this he cites the many typographical errors – which I have corrected here.

  (I found the letter among my father’s documents, a copy of a copy of a copy, faint and barely legible in places. William Knott sent him the pages at his entreaties, but only after extracting from him a promise not to quote so much as a single sentence from them, no matter where. The promise wouldn’t have been necessary; my father was a discreet man. His interest in the letter-writer was different to mine – although we could have chosen the same title for this interest: Saving the World. But I was more preoccupied with the question of how, before saving the world, the saviour had saved himself, and from what. And there is no sense in being discreet here. No, I drag everything out into the light. When I come home late at night after my performances, my wife routinely asks: “You’ve smashed everything again, haven’t you?” and I routinely reply: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”)

  Dear Charlie,

  My daughter Sarah has just been in to see me. She visited me in my study. She often has trouble sleeping. She is terribly downhearted. She wants to become an actress. She told me she has already auditioned for several theatres. I didn’t know. She acted in a play at just sixteen. I didn’t know. It was a small role in an unimportant play in a small theatre. She auditioned and they liked her. She gave them a false name and date of birth. But the truth came out. The impresario wanted to have new posters made up with her real name and mine – my name twice the size of hers. He was expecting a full house and a long run. But Sarah refused. So he dismissed her.

  She says that acting is her life. She says she hates the name Churchill because it’s ruining her life. She says that in England, the daughter of Winston Churchill is never going to be judged on what she is, and what she is capable of. She wept. I told her that the Americans have no prejudices, neither aristocratic nor plebeian; they’re pragmatists. I told her about you, Charlie. Take Charlie Chaplin, I said, he was among the poorest of the poor, at the bottom end of the lower classes, he stood no chance in England, just as you stand no chance for the opposite reason. I was so very moved by her anguish! I’m sure you understand. I said: try your luck in America. I believe I managed to console her. She is brimming with plans. Perhaps, after the great general and statesman Marlborough, the Churchills are destined to produce a great actress, just as all the Chaplins before you, Charlie, were destined to produce the Tramp. I told her: people won’t say, that’s Winston Churchill’s daughter; they’ll say, that’s Sarah Churchill’s father. They’ll say it in America first, and then all over the world, and one day they’ll say it in England, too.

  In days gone by parents chose wives for their sons and husbands for their daughters. And that was all right. I can find no reason to deviate from this custom. In days gone by the barriers between the classes were insurmountable, and that was all right. Today, hard work and success count for something, and that is better.

  Do you remember our evening, the three of us, at the Biltmore? Sarah was so entranced by you! You, Charlie, are a man who is forever young, because as a child you were older than other children. You need a passionate young woman by your side, with knowledge of your vocation. Sarah brings everything with her to guarantee a happy match. Let your heart decide, but first listen to the arguments of reason, the heart’s secretary.

  Sarah will travel to the United States, to the country of her grandmother’s birth. I am worried for her. Protect her, Charlie! I do not need to mention that I am in your debt to the end of my days, but I would like to say that there is nothing I would rather be than your debtor.

  Yours,

  Winston

  24

  On top of everything else, he was an author. He was a third of the way through his biography of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough; he had promised the publisher two hundred thousand words, and it looked like it was going to be a lot more (in the end, it would be five times as many). The advance was the highest that had ever been paid in the history of English publishing, but it didn’t even cover his expenses. Three secretaries stood ready to work at all times, taking dictation in shifts. A doctoral student from Oxford marshalled half a dozen students to search for sources in public and private libraries; Churchill never used a document without checking it himself for credibility and importance. “His historical knowledge was boundless,” as Martin Gilbert, one of England’s leading historians, said simply.

  How are we to explain the fact that sensible people who knew Churchill well – unlike Hitler, who didn’t know him – described him as workshy, at the very least? (Hitler insulted him from Berlin, calling him a “drunkard and a laggard of the first order”.) How are we to explain the fact that he never shook off a reputation for being dissolute, a charlatan, a pretender, an also-ran? How are we to explain the fact that even the greatest recognition bestowed upon him lacked warmth? My father was so taken by these questions he wrote an essay on the subject. It is one of numerous essays he wrote about Winston Churchill, most of which were never published. Some were, though this was the only one that appeared in an international journal, The English Historical Review. Doubtless William Knott put in a good word for him; the EHR has printed precisely three articles by German authors over the course of its hundred-year history. The title was: “Good-For-Nothing or Saviour. Work and Mission in the Lives of Churchill and Hitler”. The essay was lauded and quoted at length in The Times. A back-translation into German was published in the Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, with a foreword by the German-American historian Hans Rothfels. My father writes that Churchill radiated such a strong aura of conviction in his metaphysical destiny that people’s expectations of him could never be fulfilled, not even by a god-like being – which naturally led to disappointment. As a mirror image to the expectations which raised him to a supernatural level, the disappointment dragged perceptions of him downwards into the banal. With Hitler, it was the other way round. The whole world knew he came from an uneducated family, was a failed artist, rejected by the Academy in Vienna, and until just a few years before he was deified as the mighty Führer, had been residing in a men’s hostel. Expectations were low, and the surprise therefore all the greater. The way both men were judged was founded on a hope of salvation that probably arose from and continued to be driven by the dismal economic and political situation, though for the ultimate cause, we must look to the (shocking) absence of any transcendent interpretation of the modern world. Both men had become the focus of this hope of salvation. In Churchill’s case, the words were: We have a saviour among us; in Hitler’s, they were: We have been sent a saviour. The first phrase strengthened the British belief in one’s own power, one’s own people, one’s o
wn nation; the second strengthened a belief in what Hitler himself called “providence”. A saviour who is not much different from you and I enjoys only transient trust; salvation sent from a metaphysical realm, on the other hand, is absolute. Democratic elections in 1945 put an end to Churchill’s career as a saviour; Hitler himself put an end to his, through suicide.

  Spring 1932 – the Churchill family was on holiday, travelling across the Netherlands and heading south up the Rhine, to Hesse and Bavaria. For little Mary, Germany was a strange, fairy-tale country where grandmothers were eaten by wolves. For Clementine, Sarah, Diana and Diana’s fiancé, it was terra incognita; they knew more about Australia, Newfoundland, the Falkland Islands or the Sudan. Any associations they could make with this country were not good ones; they were coloured by war and a stupid monarch who was, embarrassingly, related to their own royal family. Whenever their eyes met, Sarah smiled at her father with the full weight of her eighteen years, which charmed (and depressed) him. At home, she had rummaged in her father’s library until she found a book containing a picture of Wilhelm II. That was how she imagined Germany, she said: stupid and ugly and pompous. But Sarah was the one who let out cries of delight as they sailed up the Rhine, past the vineyards to the Lorelei rocks. She had never seen such a beautiful landscape, she sighed. She asked if somebody could get her a book of German poetry; she wanted to learn some off by heart, even if she didn’t understand a word of it. She had drawn conclusions about the German landscape from the face of the Kaiser, and now she was drawing conclusions about German poetry from the landscape. Her mother told her she was much too old for such nonsense, and in any case German was a language splintered with consonants, like the battlefield at the Somme. It was not beautiful. But Sarah was determined, and Winston was on her side.

  At Koblenz they left the ship and continued their journey in a special carriage attached to a Reichsbahn train. They spent a few days in Blindheim, Swabia. In August 1704, it had been the site of the famous Battle of Blenheim, the decisive encounter between the armies of John Churchill and Prince Eugene of Savoy on one side, and the French troops of King Louis XIV and Elector Maximilian II Emanuel’s Bavarian soldiers on the other. Why not make use of the holiday to visit the former battlefields of the Duke’s campaign? Winston had studied the battle at home, and with every detail imprinted on his mind, he could now lecture on location. He had convinced Frederick Lindemann, an old friend of the family known as “the Prof ”, to join them for at least part of the holiday. Lindemann was a professor of experimental physics at Oxford University, and an icon of sanity. He advised Churchill on matters of military technology – and he spoke German and enjoyed acting as interpreter. He insisted on purchasing a volume of German ballads in a bookshop in Stuttgart, and handed it to Sarah with a straight face. This permanently sullen man who always smelled of ambergris, and obstinately maintained the Bohemian tradition of scorning any kind of audience, taught her with the “patience of a donkey” (this was the German expression for it, he said), what the words meant and how they were pronounced. Sarah learned Heinrich Heine’s “Loreley”, the “Erlkönig” by Goethe, “Die Bürgschaft” by Schiller, and Ludwig Uhland’s “Der gute Kamerad”. From then on, half an hour after dinner in the hotel was reserved for her recitations. Before she started, she would tell them what each ballad was about. These were the most pleasant evenings of the trip, her father would tell his very private private secretary years later, his delight still evident even then. The second verse of “Der gute Kamerad” moved him to tears every time. And the prime minister would close his eyes and recite – in German:

  A musket ball comes flying,

  Is it meant for him or me?

  It cuts him down, and dying,

  At my feet he’s lying,

  Just like a part of me.

  And William Knott would say: “You are a warrior, sir.”

  And Winston Churchill would reply: “That is my vocation.”

  25

  Another warrior: his ancestor, John Churchill. He had a bad reputation, despite having saved Europe from the tyranny of a megalomaniac. In the chronicles of the nation, the Earl of Marlborough was painted as a man you couldn’t rely on, a man you could just as easily imagine fighting for the other side, the evil side. And as the historians remembered it, he had in fact spun his intrigues on that side, for a little while at least. Ever since he was a boy, Winston had felt at once attracted and repelled by this character.

  John went to court as a page at fifteen. The king took a liking to him, advanced his career, kept him close, and finally offered him his friendship. James II wanted England to return to Catholicism, and he wanted to become an absolute monarch in the French mould. But his daughter Mary and her husband, William III of Orange, had powerful friends who organised an uprising, toppled the king and drove him into exile in France. John Churchill, the protégé, wasn’t at his king’s side, but in the rebels’ ranks.

  Nobody loves a traitor, not even a traitor acting in the country’s best interests. But he might still be forgiven by later generations, if among their historians he finds a skilful defender who discerns a tragic struggle between friendship and patriotic duty behind his betrayal. But if he commits treason a second time, nobody will care about his motives. The art of rhetoric, be it his own or his defence counsel’s, will be no help to him then. And John Churchill did commit treason again, this time against William of Orange. He reportedly wrote a letter to his former master during the latter’s exile in France, warning him of an attack on the French fleet at Brest.

  But Winston had discovered that this portentous letter didn’t exist: the only copy was a forgery, and he could prove it. Even the historians who opposed him (in the guild, he was seen as a cocksure dilettante, another Heinrich Schliemann, except that he wasn’t claiming to have found Troy) had to admit he was right. Finally he was permitted to speak out and show his hero as he had wanted to see him since he was a boy. John Churchill, his ancestor, was neither an opportunist nor a scoundrel on the make. He was a clever, pragmatic politician. And he was on the right side. He led the English army against Louis XIV. He saved Europe from the worst kind of tyranny.

  Winston dictated the foreword to the first volume of his Marlborough biography while he was visiting the battlefield at Blenheim, outside in the April sun:

  In 1688 Europe drew swords in a quarrel which […] was to last for a quarter of a century. Since the duel between Rome and Carthage there had been no such world war. It involved all the civilized peoples; it extended to every part of the accessible globe; it settled for some time or permanently the relative wealth and power, and the frontiers of almost every European state.

  The first volume of Marlborough: His Life and Times was published in 1933 – the same year Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor.

  Churchill dictated for at least two hours a day – outdoors whenever possible. The secretaries were busy with things other than listening to him – namely writing – but he still required an audience for his off-the-cuff speeches, even if it consisted of just two ears and two eyes, so friends and family members took turns to listen. After just a few days of this, they began to duck out. And finally, ten-year-old Mary was the only one left. She loved nothing better than listening to her father. And he liked nothing better than telling her about her long-ago ancestors. He could see Mary looking at history as if she were leafing through a picture book, and he came to look at history like Mary. He dictated calmly and steadily, directing his words into the hand and pencil of his secretary “Mrs P.”, and the wide eyes of his daughter.

  Many years later he wrote a column in The Times about these afternoons: first of all, he said, the girl made him express himself in terms she could understand; and secondly, she made him emphasise the narrative and hold back on the ruminations. Following this experience he re-wrote the previous chapters, and if critics today (he penned these thoughts after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize) praised the fact that his Marlborough biography (for which it
had been awarded) read like an exciting novel, then this was thanks to none other than his daughter Mary, who had always asked the right questions, and who was less interested in history than in the story. “World history, as bombastic as it sometimes appears, is merely the scenery before which one person, or two, or half a dozen, live a part of their lives. One can only tell the stories of individuals; history as a whole cannot be told.” He wanted to use this – a quote from his own article – as the motto at the start of his six-volume History of the Second World War (published in 1954), but he left it out after a friend – Frederick Lindemann, in fact – warned him that wicked tongues might say the book should actually have been called: Me, Against the Backdrop of the Second World War.

  The Marlborough biography was “too successful” according to Rilana Jamchy, who was the features editor of the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz in the early seventies. But she wasn’t talking about the book’s literary quality. You could see Louis XIV as Hitler, she said. The Sun King had been made to serve as a prototype for that singular mass-butcher. In truth, she said, the biography was not an academic work of history, but a roman à clef. What nonsense, considering when the book was written – the whole thing completed before the outbreak of war, and a third of it before Hitler even took power! But true nonetheless. John Churchill is Winston; the Frenchman is the Austrian.