Reader's Choice

The theme of Churchill‘s magnum opus is the development by the English-speaking peoples of democratic ideals and democratic institutions. In this connection it is worth glancing at a very early book of Churchill’s, his only attempt at fiction, which has recently been reissued. Savrola (Random House, $3.50), written when Churchill was twenty-two, is a Ruritanian political romance somewhat reminiscent of the stilted novels of another great British statesman, Benjamin Disraeli. What is striking about it is that it brings into vivid relief the first principles in which Churchill’s political philosophy has remained rooted to this day.

The novel traces the fortunes of a magnetic liberal leader who stages a revolution against an autocratic ruler and falls in love with the tyrant’s exquisite young wife. Savrola only resorts to violence after he has exhausted the possibilities of negotiation and honorable compromise; and when victory has been won, his stand in favor of moderation results in his being driven into exile by the fanatics among his followers. Savrola is a romantic in whom, paradoxically, there exists a strong sense of realism; and the central tension of the novel is that his ardent dedication to freedom is matched by his respect for order and his awareness of the horrors to which extremism leads. Now this is precisely the spirit that colors Churchill‘s history of the English-speaking peoples, and it epitomizes, surely, the Anglo-Saxon genius in politics.

For some three quarters of a century, the dominant schools of historical thought have interpreted history as the product of vast impersonal forces and have minimized the role of the great individual. Churchill, characteristically, takes the opposite tack. “Almost every critical turn of historical fortune,” he writes, “has been due to the appearance in an era of confusion and decay of one of the great figures of history.” As Isaiah Berlin noted in a brilliant study of Churchill published a few years ago in the Atlantic: “His eye is never that of the neatly classifying sociologist, the careful psychological analyst, the plodding antiquary, the patient historical scholar.” The past presents itself to Churchill in sharply outlined images, simpler and larger than life and painted in primary colors. In his chronicle, history assumes the semblance of a pageant marching past the mind’s eye of the reader.

The episodes most crucially related to Churchill’s theme are the beginnings of trial by jury under Henry II; the signing of the Magna Carta; the crystallization of English common law, under Edward I, into the tradition that by and large governs the English-speaking peoples to this very day; and the summoning of “the Mother of Parliaments” by Simon de Montfort in 1265. While these developments are treated with clarity and force, Churchill is at his best in the compact and eloquent portraits, and in the masterly accounts of the great battles such as Crécy and Agincourt. Here is a representative sample of the portraiture: —

He [Henry VI] was feeble alike in body and mind, unwise and unstable in his judgements, profuse beyond his means to his friends, uncalculating against his enemies. . . . Flung like a shuttlecock between the rival factions; presiding as a helpless puppet over the progressive decay of English society and power; hovering bewildered on the skirts of great battles; three times taken prisoner on the field; now paraded with all kingly pomp before Parliament, armies, and crowds, now led in mockery through the streets, now a captive, now a homeless fugitive, hiding, hunted, hungry, ... he endured in the fullest measure for nearly fifty years the extreme miseries of human existence, until the hand of murder dispatched him to a world which he was sure would be better and could hardly have been worse than that he had known.

With its emphasis on great men and its delighted celebration of great deeds; its recounting of romantic legends (which “tiresome investigators have undermined ” but which “should find [a] place in any history worthy of the name”); its vigorously expressed concepts of public and private good — Churchill’s book reminded me somewhat of the picture of English history implanted in me in an English preparatory school. Churchill has written a magnificent– in fact, an ideal — schoolbook. By that I mean not to disparage his history, which is certainly a magistral feat of re-creative chronicling, but rather to point up the special character of its vision of the past — heroic, highly colored, and of a commanding simplicity. Readers who have had their fill of history dominated by sociology, ideology, or theology will be relieved to find in (Churchill’s pages a historical narrative that is continuously enthralling. And Churchill’s view of history — the view enshrined in the dictum “History is what Alexander did and suffered” — though it has been heavily attacked by the social sciences, remains as defensible as the rival hypotheses.

Among the minor figures in American history, there can be few whose careers were as extraordinary as that of Daniel Edgar Sickles. 18190 -1914 (some sources place his birth in 1825), currently the subject of a highly entertaining biography: Sickles the Incredible (Scribner, $(6.00) by W. A. Swanberg. Lawyer, politician, soldier, diplomat, dandy and libertine, murderer, and friend of five Presidents — Sickles played a gaudy part in public affairs for approximately live decades. He was, in his biographer‘s apt phrase, “the most spectacularly successful failure of the century.”

Sickles, a New Yorker, entered Congress in 1857 with his sights set on the Presidency. He possessed in abundance the qualities conducive to success. He was, however, unscrupulous in money matters, prone to violence, and an incorrigible philanderer. Two years after his election to Congress, Sickles shot and killed his young wife’s lover, Philip Gordon Key, a few blocks from the White House, having previously forced his wife to sign a humiliating confession which he proceeded to publish in the newspapers. The confession won him an acquittal, but he appeared to be a totally ruined man.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, however, Sickles raised a brigade of volunteers and commanded it with such dash and distinction that he won Lincoln’s admiration and was promoted to major general. At Gettysburg, disobeying Meade s orders, he placed his troops well ahead of the line assigned to them — a decision which has been interpreted both as a catastrophic blunder and as a move which saved the day for the Union. Sickles, who lost a leg in the fighting, succeeded in propagating the latter view, and to the end of his life savored the glory of being a Civil war hero.

After serving as Reconstruction Commander in the Carolinas, Sickles was appointed Minister to Spain, in which position he provoked the ire of the Spanish government by becoming the lover of the exiled Queen, Isabella II, then living in Paris. Later, Sickles won fame and fortune by forcing that, formidable buccaneer, Jay Gould, to relinquish control of the Erie Railroad; and at seventy-four — having bolted and returned to the Democratic Party — he again got himself elected to Congress.

My chief reservation about Mr. Swanberg’s book is that much of the Civil War material is so familiar it could profitably have been condensed. But that does not prevent Sickles the Incredible from being an unusually fascinating biography.

(Oxford University Press, $6.75) by Edmund Wilson — subtitled Studies in Four Civilizations” —contains accounts of visits to the Pueblo of Zuñi in New Mexico (1947), to Haiti (1949), to Soviet Russia (1935), and to Israel (1954). Mr. Wilson has fused elements of travel writing, history, and anthropology with literary, political, and human-interest journalism to produce a durable and highly individual brand of reportage which I find vastly more rewarding than the product of professional newsmen.

The essay on the Zuñi centers on their extraordinary tribal religion, and describes in detail the spectacular Shálako festival, whose highlight is sacred dances of barbaric splendor. The Haitian section dwells on literature, voodoo, the admirable work done by UNESCO, and the peculiarities of the social framework. Wilson was exhilarated to find in Haiti– despite the complicated snobbery of the elite and the infantile polities — a spirit which is not merely international but also interracial, and which has produced, on the highest levels, “a type of mind irreducibly first rate.” A fascinating discussion of the differences between Genesis in English and in Hebrew (which Wilson learned to read in his fifties, not to be outdone by his grandfather, a Presbyterian minister) prefaces the pages on Israel, whose main focus is on the strong survival of Biblical tradition. The negative aspects of this heritage, Wilson suggests, are cultural exclusiveness, a certain moral ruthlessness, and a damaging conflict between a reactionary rabbinate and the policies of a progressive state. The positive aspect is “the faith that keeps Israel going.”

The report on Russia (nearly half the book) was written in 1935, when Wilson, who soon afterward became a vigorous anti-Communist, was still sympathetic to the Soviet Union. A certain amount of material has been added between brackets, but the original text has not been altered. Wilson observes in a Postscript that his Protestant training — though he emerged from it a rationalist without religious faith — bequeathed to him “a special susceptibility to the affirmation of the power of the [human] spirit.” He thought he saw in Lenin “a prophet of human self-dependence and competence,” and was predisposed to find these virtues in Russia.

Moscow duly struck him as “the moral top of the world"; and he concluded that an American had more in common with the Russians than with the English, for the Russians were living through a heroic pioneer period akin to that which, in the United States, followed the Revolution. Despite such glaring misjudgments, there is no end of absorbing stuff in Wilson’s far-ranging picture of Soviet life. It is climaxed by an unusual close-up — a description of six weeks spent in a Soviet hospital.

In these four seemingly disconnected reports, which make a remarkably interesting book, there does exist a unifying element. In all of them one finds Wilson asserting “the supremacy of moral force and human will over . . . the worldly situation, the conditions of life”; and implicit throughout is his conviction that “spiritual power resided, not in temples or altars or tombs, but in the person of the man who possessed it.”

The Abode of Love (Scribner, $3.50) by Aubrey Menen is subtitled “The conception, financing and daily routine of an English harem in the middle of the 19th century described in the form of a novel.” In most essentials, Menen’s bizarre and indeed incredible story follows the recorded facts about the career of a heretical Victorian clergyman, Henry James Prince — one of the most singular of the charlatans who have harnessed the Holy Ghost to their ambitions and appetites.

Prince was one of t hose born charmers who go through life magically dominating their fellow men and women. He first married an elderly lady who, after financing his theological studies, obligingly passed away; and later a well-born beauty who deserves a place of honor in the pantheon of understanding wives.

His revivalist zeal led to a break with the Established Church, and he started preaching on his own. The turning point in his life was his meeting with the five Notlidge sisters, daughters of a wealthy businessman.

To these susceptible spinsters Prince revealed that he had been selected by God to be the perfect man, incapable of sin, infallible, immortal. For those who became his disciples sin was abolished; and to enjoy this dispensation one had only to assign to Prince all of one’s financial assets. The sisters, whose father died leaving them a fortune, joyfully complied with this requirement. Lavishly provided for by the Nottidge capital and other donations, “The Beloved” now constructed for his flock a sumptuous pleasure dome, The Agapemene or Abode of Love. And there he spent the rest of his long life, taking unto himself, at periodic solemn ceremonies, a succession of “brides” from among his followers.

There is sometimes an archness in Mr. Menen‘s prose, a tendency to be cutely cynical, which I find distinctly irritating. All in all, though, he is an extremely polished and amusing writer; and his latest novel is a marvelously entertaining affair.

The Sleepless Moon (Atlantic– Little, Brown, $4.00) — a novel by H.E. Bates set in an English country town in the nineteen-twenties centers on the marriage, never consummated, of two profoundly incompatible persons. It follows Constance Turner through a rapturous but eventually tragic love affair with the young pianist of the local cinema; and her husband, Melford, through an equally ill-starred affair with the daughter of an innkeeper. As usual, Mr. Bates’s storytelling has a compelling quality. His novel is superb in its picture of English country life. It contains one masterly characterization — that of Melford, “gentleman grocer” and mayor of the little town, a wondrously insensitive man whose life is governed by his passion for hunting, shooting, and fishing. Unfortunately, Bates appears to have gone out of his way to stack the cards against his characters. One feels that a philosopher of gloom lurking within this fine writer has ruthlessly taken command.

I share with many reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic the conviction that Marcel Aymé, who so far has had a limited following among American readers, is one of the best French writers now in business. His current novel, The Green Mare (Harper, $3.00), is a sardonic picture of the life of a French village — the family feuds, the political conflict between reactionaries and liberals, the earthy amours. While the period is that following the FrancoPrussian War, it is easy to see that M. Aymé’s gaily malicious scrutiny of manners and mores has a more lasting application. At once subtle and robust — and certainly too bawdy to be commended to decorous-minded readers — The Green Mare is vintage Gallic comedy.

And here, to wind up, is an off-beat item which I greatly enjoyed — a first novel by a pseudonymous author, Jocelyn Davey, who has fused murder, comedy, and philosophy into an original and highly literate whodunit. A Capitol Offense (Knopf, $3.00) has as its engaging hero a bearded Oxford don, Ambrose Usher, whom the Foreign Office borrows for delicate assignments. Shortly after his arrival at the British Embassy in Washington, the assistant Air Attaché, who is really a cloak-and-dagger man, is murdered in the Embassy garden in the course of a party. Mr. Davey’s philosopher-hero now starts playing detective in a mystery involving possible treachery and Communist skulduggery, intraEmbassy love affairs, an enigmatic and seductive French lady diplomat, and a cat called Palmerston. At the novel’s end, Ambrose is sent off to South America on another mission, and I hope that presages a second appearance in print.