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PARTISAN R'EVIEW
I have called Churchill an anachronism, though very often he
is that consciously, and antiquarian would seem to be the juster term.
His antiquarianism sometimes expresses itself in odd ways. When
Churchill first came to write to Stalin, casting about for a suitable mode
of address (for Stalin then held no official post in the Soviet Govern–
ment) , he fell back upon the language of the old diplomacy and
called him Monsieur. Monsieur Stalin is something of a shock at first, but
in the end one finds it charming and even appropriate in the pages of
his present work. For it is entirely in this Old World spirit that his ac–
count of the Second World War
is
written, to which the outmoded
eloquence of Churchill's Gibbonian periods is perfectly suited. Here
history exists in its antique form of men and deeds and nothing more;
here history is human wisdom and folly-there are no "forces," no
"laws" of history dictating the "inevitable." When Roosevelt was seeking
a name for the Second World War, Churchill promptly suggested "The
Unnecessary War." The cause of the Allies he calis, with deliberate
unsophistication, the "Righteous Cause," turning his back on anything
smacking of such modern notions as democracy and totalitarianism.
The theme of the first volume, he devotes a separate page to announcing,
is "how the English-speaking peoples, through their unwisdom, careless–
ness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm." Hitler is "wicked,"
"evil," "that bad man."
Churchill properly disclaims the name of history for his work and
calls it merely a "contribution." Only the first volume, which is also
the best one that has so far appeared, is worked up into anything
like history. The succeeding volumes tend more and more to become
a series of documents connected by a few lines of text. As a military
and especially a naval historian Churchill is at his best (we knew this
long ago from
The World Crisis).
Such set pieces as the descriptions of
the hunting down of the
Graf Spee
and of the chase of the
Bismarck
constitute some of the finest writing in the work. But the principal
interest of these volumes is as memoirs, which is what of course they
really are-the method he has followed, Churchill tells us, is that of
Defoe's
Memoirs of a Cavalier,
"in which the author hangs the chronicle
and discussion of great military and political events upon the thread of
the personal experiences of an individual."
It
is already becoming rare for politicians to be able to write their
memoirs (or even to have any), for this implies a degree of cultivation
that they less and less possess; what passes for memoirs these days are
hodgepodges of journalistic "revelations" and gossip.
In
this country
we can see how the whole tendency of modern, "mass" politics is to
