Only three people have won the Nobel Prize in Literature for writing history. This
is quite the disappointment to someone such as myself, for whom history is by
far the most interesting branch of literature. (If you find Herodotus more
interesting than either Homer or Plato, then you and I just might have something
in common).
The first
of these three special Nobel Laureates was a now-obscure German named Theodor
Mommsen, who won the 1902 prize for his monumental History of Rome. The
second is a bit more famous – his name was Sir Winston Churchill.
Few
people realize it these days, but Churchill was a writer before he was a
politician. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Churchill was already
well-known in both Britain and America for his work as a journalist and for his
memoirs of his youth as a cavalry officer in the wars in Sudan, India, and
South Africa.
Churchill
also had a seat in Parliament, but that was mainly because he entered public
life at the tail end of the time when the life of the aristocracy included sitting
in Parliament pretty-much as a hobby. Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph
Churchill, was an important enough fellow to see to it that his boy got elected
to represent Oldham a week before his 26th birthday. But until he
joined the cabinet during the First World War, the younger Churchill was famous
mainly as a writer.
When the
war ended, so did Churchill’s first experience in government. During his years
as a back-bencher in the 1920s and ‘30s, he found time to start composing his
mature works: The World Crisis, a five volume history of World War I,
and Marlborough, His Life and Times, a four volume biography of his
famous ancestor John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough.
In the
late 1930s, Churchill began his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a
four volume epic endeavouring to unite the stories of Britain and all her daughter
countries, most importantly the United States. But he didn’t get to finish it
as soon as he would have liked, since beginning in 1939, he was occupied with
other affairs, and then with writing the six volumes of his History of the
Second World War, which saw print between 1948 and 1953. It was also in
1953 that he received his Nobel Prize in Literature.
Churchill
was 80 years old when he retired from his second premiership in 1955, and over
the next three years he finished and published the History of the
English-Speaking Peoples. It was to be his final significant work.
There are
four volumes; each runs for about 300 pages and is divided into three books,
making twelve books in all. Book I tells the story of Britain from prehistoric and
Roman times to the Saxon dynasty founded by Alfred the Great. Book XII begins
with the rise of Disraeli and Gladstone in the 1860s and ends with the death of
Queen Victoria in 1901. The four volumes are entitled The Birth of Britain (prehistory
to 1485), The New World (1485 to 1689), The Age of Revolution (1689
to 1815), and The Great Democracies (1815 to 1901).
Reviews
at the time described Churchill’s prose as “scintillating.” I myself would not
go so far; Churchill isn’t a boring writer by any means, but his writing doesn’t
draw attention to itself, and when one is spanning such a long period one has
got to be laconic on most occasions. At the same time, Churchill manages to
bring his characters to life in a way that all too many historians don’t.
A word is
in order concerning who those characters are. Churchill’s work is primarily a
military and political history. If you are a monarch, MP, general, or admiral,
you will likely figure prominently in his tale. (If you are John Churchill,
First Duke of Marlborough, then you get to be the hero of Book VII – nobody
else in the whole work comes in for even half as much praise).
Otherwise,
little will be said about you. Do not go to Churchill if you are trying to
educate yourself about the economic, industrial, scientific, literary, or
religious goings-on of England and America’s past. Thomas Cranmer, John Milton,
Isaac Newton, James Cook, and Thomas Edison, to name just a few, are figures
who get only a single sentence, or none at all.
But I am
not going to characterize this as a mistake on Churchill’s part. There is only
so much you can do when you squeeze two millennia of history into 1200 pages. If
Book XI, which covers American history from 1815 to 1865, spends only twelve
pages on events before 1850, while devoting nearly 80 to the four years of the Civil
War, then that is very much by intent. Battles and parliamentary debates were
what interested the author, so battles and parliamentary debates were what he
wrote about – and he wrote about them well.
There are
three more factors in Churchill’s work which I think deserve mentioning simply
because they differ from what many of my readers may be used to seeing in a
historical work. The first is Churchill’s lack of excessive moralization. History
as he tells it has heroes and villains, as English history has always had;
Alfred the Great is a hero, Richard III is a villain, and so forth. But
Churchill does not feel the need to flatten out every event into a simple
battle of good and evil. In his telling, most of the conflicts – Roundheads vs.
Cavaliers, William III vs. the Jacobites, Yankees vs. Confederates, the French
Revolutionary Wars, and even the Boer War in which he himself fought – feature
fully drawn characters on both sides.
The
second factor is the view of the American Revolution from the losing side,
which makes up much of Book VIII. We Americans aren’t used to hearing our
nation’s founding story presented as less of a heroic struggle for liberty by brave
colonists than a tale of blustering incompetence on the part of British
generals and statesmen grown overconfident after their successes in the (now-obscure)
Seven Years’ War. But to a patriotic Englishman like Churchill, that is what it
was.
And the
third factor is simply the natural sense of pride in one’s national heritage, a
pride which went unnoticed in Churchill’s time, but nowadays is exceptional
enough to be noteworthy. Thus a (patriotic) historian in modern Britain will
devote much of his work to explaining things like the British Empire’s role in
extirpating the slave trade. Churchill doesn’t do this, for the simple reason
that, in his days, the superiority of European civilization was sufficiently
uncontroversial that nobody felt a conscious desire to push back against the
white-man-bad version of history.
On the
whole, Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples is worth
taking a look at. I would never recommend it as someone’s only source on
Anglo-American history – there are simply too many things that get glossed over
– but if you are going to add another perspective to your body of historical
knowledge, then you could certainly do worse than taking the time to see the
history of England and her most famous colony through the eyes of Sir Winston
Churchill.
As a Churchill buff myself, I found this a pleasure to read. I would add a couple of more observations about Churchill, that makes the man himself also a pleasure to read: his self-awareness, his self-deprecation, and his sense of humor. When I have a tutee who is 'good at history', but no so good at mathematics, I read him or her Churchill's account of his own encounter with mathematics, at a 'crammer' preparing him for application to his country's military academy, as described in MY EARLY LIFE:
ReplyDeletees: “When I look back upon those care-laden months, their prominent features rise from the abyss of memory….We were arrived in an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ world, at the portals of which stood ‘A Quadratic Equation.’ This with a strange grimace pointed the way to the Theory of Indices, which again handed on the intruder to the full rigours of the Binomial Theorem. Further dim chambers lighted by sullen, sulphurous fires were reputed to contain a dragon called the ‘Differential Calculus.’ But this monster was beyond the bounds appointed by the Civil Service Commissioners who regulated this stage of Pilgrim’s heavy journey. We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the Delectable Mountains, but into a strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called Sines, Cosines and Tangents. Apparently they were very important, especially when multiplied by each other, or by themselves! They had also this merit—you could learn many of their evolutions off by heart. There was a question in my third and last Examination about these Cosines and Tangents in a highly square-rooted condition which must have been decisive upon the whole of my after life. It was a problem. But luckily I had seen its ugly face only a few days before and recognised it at first sight. “I have never met any of these creatures since….they passed away like the phantasmagoria of a fevered dream. I am assured that they are most helpful in engineering, astronomy and things like that. It is very important to build bridges and canals and to comprehend all the stresses and potentialities of matter, to say nothing of counting all the stars and even universes….I am very glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all of this; like great chess-players who play sixteen games at once blindfold and die quite soon of epilepsy. Serve them right! I hope the Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded. I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths.”
Continued ....
ReplyDeleteAnd when an American, feeling a bit of despair about his own country's ability to face up to the terrible challenges we are now encountering, I read him or her Churchill's account of how he learned about Pearl Harbor, and his feelings:
"Silly people, and there were many, not only in enemy countries, might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand bloodletting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyse their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like ‘a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate. Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."
And I agree with respect to Plato vs Herodotus. At the risk of sounding stupider than I am, Plato is like abstract algebra, and Herodotus is simple algebra with most of the variables filled in. You can make judgements about Herodotus ... is this plausible, does this fit with what we know about that people from other sources. With Plato, you're always trying to translate his (already-translated, unless you're reading the original Greek) words into something that makes sense. What is a "Form", for instance? Hard work, and you're not sure if you've got it right when you're done. Oh, yes, not to mention that all of Plato's writings will soon be burned, he being pro-slavery.