May 13, 2013

FINEST HOUR 142, SPRING 2009

BY ROBERT PILPEL

Mr. Pilpel is the author of Churchill in America (1976). His “What Churchill Owed the Great Republic” (FH 125) won the FH Journal Award for the best article of 2005. In this piece he has “refrained from dilations on the many arresting similarities between Orwell and Churchill, not to mention their diametrical differences.”

ABSTRACT
A GENTLE ACCOLADE, FROM ONE GIANT OF OUR HERITAGE TO ANOTHER ON THE OPPOSITE END OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM, MAKES MY EYES MIST OVER. 

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Let us now praise an unreconstructed Tory and a self-proclaimed Man of the Left. The former was a Harrovian, the latter an Etonian. No great difference there. The former was of noble lineage, the latter lower middle class. The former thought he had lived too long for his own good, the latter died far too soon. The former was a statesman/politician, the latter a philosopher. The former was father to five children, the latter adopted one. The former was a Nobel Laureate in literature, the latter had trouble getting published. Oddly enough, that almost covers their differences. Consider now their similarities.

Both were truth-tellers—veracity’s fools. Both had the ability, in Orwell’s words, to face unpleasant facts. Both were deemed traitors to their class. Both were exiled from their political circles. Both had been fugitives. Both saw action in combat—Churchill in India and Africa, Orwell in Spain. Both were partial to tobacco, if you can call Orwell’s lung-scorching Woodbines tobacco. Both were chronically short of money, though on slightly different scales. Both had awe-inspiring physical and moral courage. Both felt that their fathers regarded them as disappointments. Both had only one son. Both flirted with suicidal thoughts. And both, above all, were children of the Enlightenment.

We know little about Churchill’s opinion of Orwell, although late in life he told his physician that he’d read 1984 and found it so remarkable that he planned to read it again. But, Nobel Prize notwithstanding, Churchill was hardly a litterateur, and in the years before Orwell’s death in 1950 his focus was on a return to power. He was also a luminary of monumental proportions by then, an icon of Western civilization, while Orwell’s contributions to human progress have become pillars of our intellectual heritage only in the decades since his death. It’s not strange, accordingly, that Orwell had far more to say about Churchill than Churchill did about him. So in order to gauge the symmetry between their basic values it is to Orwell’s works we must turn—hardly an onerous task.

The “hero” of 1984, George Orwell’s chilling prediction of a totalitarian future, is Winston Smith. Mere coincidence? No. The names of fictional characters are never chosen haphazardly, especially when the characters in question are prime protagonists, and most especially when the author and the characters’ eponyms are contemporaries.

But the question for us Churchillians is not Orwell’s literary motivations. There has been endless speculation about this subject, most of it endlessly gaseous. Suffice it to say that Orwell had many layers of irony in mind when he dubbed his hero “Winston.” But far more interesting is his view of Churchill: the person, persona and personality.

As a political analyst Orwell often had occasion to express himself on the subject of our paragon. By contrast, Churchill’s only known reference to Orwell comes from Lord Moran’s “diaries,” wherein WSC, on the eve of his second premiership, age 76—and of Orwell’s untimely death, age 46—told his physician that he’d just read a “remarkable” novel that he was planning to reread.

It will come as no surprise that Orwell’s feelings about Churchill were decidedly ambivalent. Although he was a self-described man of the Left, he was also far too clear-sighted and intellectually honest to accept the standard left-wing view that Churchill was a right-wing grotesque. But in common with many of his countrymen he’d had just about enough of Churchill by the summer of 1942. In the wake of the shocking losses at Namsos, Norway, followed quickly by France, Crete, Dieppe, Singapore, the Prince of Wales, the Repulse and Tobruk, and numerous other Britannic disasters, he noted in his war diaries that his friends were delighted with his quip that it might be best for England if WSC, en route back from Russia, were torpedoed and sunk, like Kitchener in 1915.

But in most respects this comment was uncharacteristic. It reflected the widespread sense of disaffection that pervaded public life in Britain when the auspicious formation of the Grand Alliance in 1941 led only to a continuation of the calamity-of-the-month scenario in 1942. The stunning U.S. naval victory at Midway had received only the sketchiest press coverage, lest America’s achievement in deciphering Japanese radio codes be inadvertently divulged. And the momentous turning points of Stalingrad and Alamein were still months away. From the average Briton’s viewpoint, therefore, 1942 hadn’t heralded a new dawn but only a dreary continuation of British incompetence, of which Churchill was presumably the impresario.

But if we review Orwell’s comments about WSC during and after the war the clear impression we get is one of grudging admiration and even reluctant affection. (Granted, Orwell’s self-awareness was so acute that he was capable of writing that he’d never managed to feel much animosity toward Hitler personally, although “I would certainly kill him if the opportunity arose.” His affection for Churchill involved no such homicidal undertones.)

Because of Churchill’s prominence—nay, preeminence—Orwell was often stimulated to refer to him in the context of both praise and blame. But perhaps the embodiment of his commentaries came near the end of his far-too-brief life, when he reviewed Churchill’s account of his own and Britain’s epitome in the second of his World War II volumes, Their Finest Hour. In this short essay Orwell demonstrated the broad expanse of perspective characteristic of WSC himself. Rising far above ideological
issues and taking an almost Olympian stance, Orwell reached across the vast political chasm separating him from his subject and saluted a fellow child, and evangel, of the Enlightenment:

The political reminiscences [Churchill] has published…have always been a great deal above the average, in frankness as well as literary quality….His writings are more like those of a human being than of a public figure….and whether or not 1940 was anyone else’s finest hour, it was certainly Churchill’s….One has to admire in him not only his courage but also a certain largeness and geniality which comes out even in formal memoirs of this type….The British people have generally rejected his policies, but they have always had a liking for him, as one can see from the tone of the stories told about him….At the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, for instance, it was rumoured that what he actually said, when recording his [House of Commons] speech for broadcast, was: “We will fight on the beaches, we will fight in the streets…we’ll throw bottles at the bastards; it’s about all we’ve got left!” One may assume that this story is untrue, but at the time it was felt that it ought to be true. It was a fitting tribute from ordinary people to the tough and humorous old man whom they would not accept as a peacetime leader [in 1945] but whom in the moment of disaster they felt to be representative of themselves.

Speaking as a considerably less tough and more sentimental old man, I confess that this gentle accolade from one giant guardian of our heritage to another on the opposite end of the political spectrum always makes my eyes mist over. I offer this confession willingly, even cheerfully, happy in the knowledge that many readers of this splendid journal—no matter what their age—may actually go me one better and shed a tear.