Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  And there, as the saying goes, is where minds divide. There are those who love to think about their childhood and youth and those who cannot wait to grow up and forget all about it. The school C.S. Lewis loathed was a school his brother loved. Orwell, who was at Eton with Cyril Connolly, once derided his old friend in ‘Inside the Whale’ (1940) for his Theory of Permanent Adolescence which (it must be admitted) fits Wodehouse like a glove. For some writers, Connolly had written, school experiences are ‘so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.’ That made Orwell’s lip curl. When you read that, he remarked scathingly, you begin to wonder if there is a misprint – perhaps a ‘not’ left out. No old school loyalty, evidently, between Orwell and Connolly. ‘Then you realise he means it.’ In other words, middle-class life can be so soft that ‘five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery can stay with you for the rest of your days.’ Such writers, says Orwell, who by then had been down-and-out in Paris and London and a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, utterly failed every existential test. ‘Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, manual labour – hardly even words.’ It all helped, he thought, to explain the Intellectual Left. No wonder such writers glibly condoned the Soviet purges. They were ‘gloriously incapable of understanding what it all meant.’

  The claim is perhaps rash. A school boarder might easily experience hunger, hardship and solitude; and the charge (as Orwell would be the first to agree) is in any case weightless when applied to Wodehouse, since no one would have dreamed of seeking his opinion of Stalin’s purges. In Performing Flea he makes even a year’s internment in a Nazi camp in Upper Silesia sound amusing. It is rather that men like Auden, Isherwood and Spender were Wodehouses without knowing it, their devotion to a worker-revolution being ‘a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.’ Wodehouse, who did not want to know, escapes all censure here. He was more like Noël Coward, who also had a hungry time in Greenwich Village in his young days and triumphed by demonstrating that triviality, though endlessly difficult to achieve, is endlessly worth cultivating. Anyone, in that view, can sign up and join a cause. It is a talent to amuse that is as rare as rubies.

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  Coward was an adult sophisticate. Wodehouse, by contrast, remained an adolescent in everything but technique. He refused, so to speak, to grow up. It is a choice we are all allowed to make, but it is highly unusual to make enduring works of art out of it. There was a brief age at the beginning of the century, however, when it happened again and again. The most famous instance is James Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), in which children refuse to age. Four years later another Scotsman, Kenneth Grahame, who was nothing less than secretary to the Bank of England, published The Wind in the Willows(1908), which opens with Mole spring-cleaning his underground home; but hearing the sounds of spring above him, he flings down his brush and goes out to find Rat in his boat and a world of adventure. A few years later, in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Somerset Maugham told the story of a London stockbroker who, Gauguin-like, abandoned a desk-job to paint in the South Seas, leaving his wife with nothing more than a curt note of farewell; and the theme of walking out or riding away was a favourite of D.H. Lawrence, as in Aaron’s Rod (1922). Work and family can suddenly look a total bore, and all over the Western industrial world in the early years of the century, in an age before daily toil acquired the immutable dignity it now possesses, grey-suited men moving reluctantly in the rain between home and office were longing not to have to do it. Joy meant not having to go to work.

  Wodehouse, starting with Mike in 1909, had been among the first to write about such joy. Seven years before he had achieved it himself, leaving his dull little job in a London bank in the certain knowledge that the only way he wanted to earn a living was by writing endlessly about people who did not want to earn a living. His fictional Nirvana has nothing to do with self-fulfilment, as it would now, or Doing Your Thing. What he adored, and what his readers seem to have adored, was the prospect of endless leisure with a private income acquired through inheritance, like Bertie Wooster, or a rich wife, like Bingo Little, or (what his time in California had encouraged him to think was much the same thing) a Hollywood contract. Wodehouse wrote endlessly for sixty years and more about doing nothing with loads of money and doing it in style. Odd to think it was in New York – that busy, workaholic place – that he succeeded at it, first in theatre and then in books; odder still when you reflect that he was a workaholic himself. Wodehouse was the supreme heretic. He adored work and gloried, when he wrote, in despising it. Art, as somebody said, is anti-destiny. It is as improbable a birth for Jeeves as any you can think of.

  19. The Forgotten Churchill

  He stares defiantly at the camera, a bulldog surprised, and everyone knows what he has in mind. It is December 1941, just after Pearl Harbor, and Winston Churchill is defying Hitler. Seated in Ottawa in the panelled room of the speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, he has just given one of the great speeches of history – the one about England’s neck being wrung like a chicken – ‘some chicken, some neck’ – and Canadian parliamentarians have roared back their sympathy and their support. A few hours earlier Roosevelt’s doctor, full of doubts, had visited him at the White House. But he looks fit, at the age of sixty-seven, and he has just given the performance of a lifetime.

  As the picture was being taken, though, he was not thinking about Hitler at all: Yousuf Karsh, the Canadian photographer who snapped him, has told the story. Churchill had been smoking a cigar in that panelled room, and the photographer, with the briefest of apologies, had just reached forward and snatched it from his lips. The speech is given, to tumultuous applause, but he is wondering what has happened to his cigar. The performance itself survives on film, and it is a masterpiece of theatrical timing, with a long dramatic pause between ‘some chicken’ and ‘some neck’ as the old stager slowly rotates his entire body nearly a hundred and eighty degrees while a gentle chuckle swells into a roar, a roar into cheer. That is the Churchill everyone knows – a consummate actor who could capture the mood of millions – and no one who saw it could ever forget it or wish it forgotten.

  A lot about Churchill is forgotten, for all that, except by professional historians. He had been a politician for more than forty years when he gave that speech, and he had switched parties at least twice, sitting in the Commons after 1904 for twenty years as a Liberal before he consented to call himself (once again) a Conservative. The grandson of a duke, he was distrusted by his elders as a turncoat and not always acceptable as a dinner-guest. First elected to Parliament in the autumn of 1900, he entered the cabinet at Asquith’s invitation in April 1908. In the same year, after being refused in marriage by Ethel Barrymore (among other ladies), he married Clementine Hozier; then came two world wars that changed many lives, and especially his.

  What is forgotten, above all, is his role as a social reformer and a founder of the British welfare state. In 1908, as president of the Board of Trade, Churchill invited a young William Beveridge on to his team: Beveridge was a Scottish civil servant who would one day design the National Health Service. Nowadays, however, those who gaze at the carved slab inside the door of Westminster Abbey that reads ‘Remember Winston Churchill’ seldom remember any of that. Even in 1965, when the slab was unveiled by the Queen, a few months after his death, all people remembered was the man who spoke for a nation – a war-hero who defied Hitler, with or without a cigar.

  Sitting in the smoking room of the Commons in his last years, after he had retired from his second premiership, Churchill would call the Asquith government of 1908-16 ‘the best government I ever served in.’ A belligerent, mischievous look would come into his face, and he would bark and repeat two words, ‘by far,’ shouting in biting sarcasm to a group of Conservative members. For years, as they knew, he had led a party he despised. The Conservatives, under the dynamic influence of Joseph Chamberlain, Neville’s father, had turned protectionist early i
n the century, and Churchill was a free trader to his dying day. In his fifteen years as Tory party leader (1940-55) he had striven endlessly to bring Liberals back into Parliament. He had tried, in 1950-1, to persuade the Conservatives not to contest fifty parliamentary seats, and his party had rejected the idea. He had prevailed upon a Yorkshire constituency to give Asquith’s daughter, Violet Bonham-Carter, a free run against Labour, but the votes were not there. By his second premiership in 1951-5 he was a failing man, known to his impatient cabinet colleagues as the Old Boy and repeatedly urged by doctors and a loving wife to accept retirement. By then he was as famous as any man alive; the defeat of Hitler had ensured that. But he was subject to deep fears, black depressions and a sense of having lived a life without a party and without a cause.

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  He dreamed an Edwardian dream. The short reign (1901-10) of Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, can be extended without undue strain at either end, from the death of the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 to the outbreak of war in 1914. It is still a short space, easily overlooked. The British, with the defeat of the Boers in 1902, had conceived a world design. Colony after colony would follow Canada, New Zealand and Australia into independence or dominion status, as South Africa did in 1910, and an assembly of nations would show the world an example of parliamentary government and the rule of law. To translate into terms that have since become familiar, an empire would become a commonwealth. That was the dream Churchill had shared. Europe was not part of it. Europe was a place where problems were hatched and ancient enemies lurked. It was in the wider world – in ‘the nation and the race dwelling all around the globe’ – that help would be sought and solutions found. Such states would be parliamentary and devoted above all things to social welfare, in which by the 1930s Britain was already a world leader.

  In 1908, when Asquith became prime minister, there were almost no models of state welfare anywhere on earth. The exception was Bismarck’s Prussia, which to the dismay of German Social Democrats had instituted compulsory health insurance in 1883. That created a sudden panic on the Left. Karl Marx had died weeks before, so the socialist leader August Bebel consulted Marx’s friend Friedrich Engels, who insisted that socialists should vote against it, as they did. The first welfare state on earth was created against socialist opposition.

  By the new century Prussia was setting a lonely example. Lloyd George and Churchill, as members of Asquith’s cabinet, went there to watch state welfare in action; Churchill, the more studious of the two, read published reports. In 1909 he collected his speeches in Liberalism and the Social Problem, where he made a case for seeing state welfare as an essential prop to a free economy. The Left had good reason to fear it, as he knew: welfare promotes initiative, initiative promotes growth, and ‘where there is no hope, be sure there will be no thrift.’

  State welfare, by then, had an imperial dimension. The Boer War had been won with a volunteer army, and the nation had been shocked to hear of the high incidence of ill health among recruits. An empire needs troops. There was nothing socialist about state welfare, in fact, and socialists were right to fear the spectre of a national health service. They continued to fear it, and when years later the Beveridge report appeared, in December 1942, it proved a bestseller but was roundly condemned in a letter by Beatrice Webb, an old Fabian, as a disastrous proposal – though fortunately, as she added, very unlikely to be acted on. In the event Labour was the last of the three parties to accept a National Health Service, and William Beveridge, whom I knew as a neighbour in his last years, was endlessly bitter about the derision Labour leaders had once heaped on his ideas.

  The forgotten truth about health provision is that socialism and state welfare are old enemies, and welfare over-spending is characteristic of advanced capitalist economies. Nobody doubts that California is capitalistic, and its public debt is notorious; the People’s Republic of China, by contrast, is a major creditor in international finance. When the two Germanies united after 1990 the social provision of the capitalist West was more than twice that of the socialist East, and the cost of unification to West Germany proved vast. Talk of socialised medicine was always misleading if socialised implies socialist, and the very word probably guaranteed that confusion. The National Health Service of 1948, like the Canadian version that followed it twenty years later, always allowed for a flourishing private sector – a sector that tended to grow with the years. It neither banned private medical care nor discouraged it. Only a competitive economy, what is more, is likely to generate a tax base big enough to maintain and improve public hospitals, pensions and schools. In short, a free economy needs state welfare, and state welfare needs a free economy.

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  Churchill’s Nobel prize for literature was apter than the world knew: although he is said to have wanted the Peace Prize he was always from early adulthood a man of letters. His earliest books, before he entered parliament, were records of his African adventures, and in 1900 he wrote a novel called Savrola in the manner of Anthony Hope, the author of The Prisoner of Zenda. In 1906 he produced a biography of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, and a quarter of a century later a four-volume life of his ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough. They are disappointing books, needlessly extensive and devoid of any sense of personal weakness or vice, though he excelled at vivid portraits of remembered friends and adversaries, as in Great Contemporaries (1937). I have never knowingly met anyone who read his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which appeared in four volumes in 1956-8. No doubt it comforted his declining years.

  That leaves the oratory, and in academic schools of literature oratory is by far the most neglected of all literary forms. I doubt if any department of English on earth boasts a single class or a single doctoral thesis on the subject. Somehow, and for some deeply buried reason that defies scrutiny, students of literature do not study speeches. The notion that literature could ever change the world or seek to change it – the idea of a literature of power – is widely felt to be obsolete, and the charm of being useless dominates debate wherever literary degrees are sought or won.

  It was not always so, and Churchill would not have countenanced such neglect. He would no doubt have concurred with Thoreau, who in 1844 wrote: ‘Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed: it is nobler when it is a deed.’ Churchill’s own education was exceptionally belated and wildly haphazard. Asquith’s daughter Violet, who first met him as a teenager at a dinner party at Ten Downing Street, loved to tell how she had persuaded him to read the odes of Keats, of whom (even in his thirties) he was ignorant, and fostered in him a belated love of fine letters. It was a love that grew with the years. I happen to own the first edition of Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) with his bookplate in all six volumes, and perhaps he read it. My most vivid recollection relates to a moment in a London theatre in 1950 when, seconds before the curtain rose on a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, with Claire Bloom as Viola, he suddenly appeared with his wife from a side door, causing the whole audience to gasp with astonishment and rise to its feet: the world-famous pair was spirited away at the interval and again at the close. He knew the language of Shakespeare and treasured it, and would have agreed that if the speeches of Demosthenes or Cicero mean little to students of classical literature, or the speeches of Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke to students of English, the loss is ours.

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  He lived to be ninety, and biographers have never got to the end of him and never will. Nigel Nicolson used to tell how at first meeting in the Commons he had asked the old man in his second premiership what the most important quality was in public life; Churchill replied ‘Mettle’ and returned to his racing paper. His wit was so acidic that it became legendary, like Oscar Wilde’s; and as with Wilde, witty remarks first uttered by others were freely attributed to him. His mind, early and late, was untiring in spawning bright ideas: state-sponsored labour exchanges, state pensions, action against sweatshops. In March 1
911 he proposed to the Asquith cabinet a scheme to federate the British Isles in order to settle the Irish problem, with parliaments for Scotland, Wales and the English regions. In 1915 he had sponsored the Gallipoli expedition, and several years later the Allied attack on the Bolsheviks after the October revolution in Russia. His mind was endlessly inventive of triumphs and disasters.

  When he died in January 1965 his life looked suddenly simple, as lives do when they end. There was a state funeral in London, by royal command, and the coffin, which had lain in state for three days in the Palace of Westminster under a Union flag, was placed on a special train at Waterloo and greeted by silent crowds all the way to Bladon in Oxfordshire, where he was laid to rest among his ancestors in a village churchyard. The silent crowds were in no doubt what it was all about. To them, or most of them, he was not the leader of a party; nor was he one of the founders of the welfare state, or a federated British Isles, or labour exchanges. To them he was the man who, with or without a cigar, had defied Hitler and won. A controversialist all his life, he was remembered for one rare moment in the summer of 1940 when he ceased to be a heretic and spoke for a nation. In the end, or so it seemed, and in total silence as a nation wept, it was as simple as that.