Authors’ finest hour

Winston Churchill and words go together like Churchill and World War II. Each did wonders for the other. Language was Churchill’s arrow, and his oratory and pen generated millions of words in speeches, books and articles that remain a joy to read 40 years after his death.

Apparently that wasn’t enough. Writing about Churchill remains a vibrant cottage industry in both Britain and the United States, where no matter how many books are published on the man and his extraordinary life there always seems to be another author popping up, waving a book contract and claiming just one more thing to say.

“Well, it certainly feels like an industry to me,” says Celia Sandys, Churchill’s granddaughter, sitting in a London apartment just down the road from the epicenter of the great man’s career at Westminster. “After all,” she laughs, “I had three Churchill books of my own out in six weeks this spring.”

Sandys’ contributions to the canon are “Chasing Churchill,” an anecdotal memoir of teenage travels with her grandfather in his declining years; “We Shall Not Fail, the Inspiring Leadership of Winston Churchill,” written with Jonathan Littman; and the snappier “Churchill,” a condensed biography heavy on pictures and published to accompany a forthcoming British television documentary.

But her works will have to claw for space on the shelves of collectors. The last two years have seen Churchill books cascade out of publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic, with no sign of anyone turning off the tap. There are studies on Churchill and leadership. On Churchill and appeasement. On his wit, his wife, and his love affair with America. There are short biographies and thick ones that run to more than a thousand pages.

All of which raises the question: How much can the market bear, even for the man who so stubbornly defended civilization at its darkest hour and saw off the Nazis?

“Oh, I think he’ll keep selling without any difficulty,” says Andrew Roberts, the British historian and author of this year’s “Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership” (Weidenfeld). “Churchill fanatics tend to be well off, they’re proud of their Churchilliana, and like those who are fans of Lawrence of Arabia or Marilyn Monroe, they’ll buy every single book. I’ve been in homes where they’re piled up, floor to ceiling,” he says. “Just books on Churchill.”

But this is more than a British cult of leadership. Roberts’ book, for example, is slated to be translated into six languages. Including Korean. Nor is it related to another book publishing artifice: the anniversary of a birth, death or career highlight.

The source of the fascination, some of the authors say, lies in part with Sept. 11 and the sense of doom it cast. The search for solace in how previous generations coped with peril is what revived curiosity about Churchill, they argue (though many of the current books were in the works before the terrorists struck). It certainly sent politicians from George W. Bush to Rudy Giuliani scurrying for their Churchill quotation anthologies. Sept. 11 also revived the old Anglo-American axis, that lopsided “partnership” that is still viewed in the more chauvinistic quarters of Britain as “the special relationship,” in which Britain stood tall alongside the U.S. in the fight for freedom.

“Every prime minister since then has hankered after re-creating that Churchill-Roosevelt partnership, which was a great show even if it was in reality a bumpy relationship at times,” says David Cannadine, director of the Institute of Historical Research at London University and author of the newly published “In Churchill’s Shadow” (Penguin).

Cannadine’s collection of essays is a social study on how modern Britain remains stunted by the weight of its past greatness and its icons -- none more so than Churchill. (“I know David’s book is about a wider subject than Churchill, but it is significant he managed to get the name into the title,” says Geoffrey Best, another academic whose “Churchill: A Study in Greatness” was well received when it was published in 2001.)

Margaret Thatcher in particular had a strong sense of identification with the wartime Tory leader, notes Cannadine, seeing Britain in similar need to be rescued from decline and always musing aloud about “what Winston would have done.”

Getting the first word in

The basis of that enduring fascination with Churchill and World War II stems in part because the first draft of that history was written by Churchill himself. “He understood how much getting your own version of events on the record mattered,” Cannadine says. Churchill wrote the history of that war in six volumes -- “History of the Second World War” -- “six extraordinary works in which he is the shining star,” Cannadine says. “His account holds the field right up until the 1960s. It’s amazing, actually. He fights the war and then tells everybody how they should feel about it” (so amazing that David Reynolds, a professor at Cambridge University, is now writing a book about how Churchill wrote those books).

But the giddiness faded almost immediately after Churchill’s death in 1965 at age 90. By then, his very Victorian rhetoric sounded jarring to a culture reveling in Beatlemania and the beginnings of Swinging London. “Until then it had been only hagiography,” Best says. “We swallowed Churchill’s version and the faults were not allowed to appear.”

The revision, when it hit with full force in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was harsh. In addition to attacks on Churchill by Holocaust revisionist David Irving, there was a more cogent attack that became known in Britain as the Tory nationalist critique. Led by Oxford professor John Charmley, it argued that Churchill’s refusal to make a separate peace with Hitler in 1941 cost Britain its empire and influence.

“The current phase of Churchill scholarship sees that as fantasy,” says Best, whose book analyzing the pro- and anti-Churchill schools comes down on the favorable side. “Britain could not have lived as a vassal state on the periphery of the Nazi Empire. I think we’ve got it right at last.”

Sandys indignantly claims the revisionist school was nothing but a scam to sell more books. “People think, ‘Ah, if I write a book with Churchill in the title it’ll sell a few copies. And if I say something nasty about him it will -- shock, horror -- sell more.’ ” But Roberts says the burst of Churchill books in recent years sprang from the desire of such eminent scholars as Yale University’s John Lukacs (who published “Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian” last year) to bury the revisionist take.

“We couldn’t have left the debate where it was,” Roberts says. “I now think we’ve put it back in its box.”

If so, the end of the argument has done nothing to cap the publishing output. There seems to be no limit to the different angles to be taken. Masterful war historian John Keegan published a short biography called “Churchill: A Life” (Weidenfeld) last year focusing on how Churchill’s military background influenced his politics. The late Roy Jenkins, a former politician and an acclaimed biographer, wrote sympathetically about Churchill’s struggles to keep his own morale up in the award-winning “Churchill” from 2001.

Finally, there is the family’s contribution to the deluge. Mary Soames, Churchill’s daughter, has published two well-received books on the family, particularly last year’s “Clementine Churchill,” a biography of her mother. Soames is reportedly at work on another book, but the mantle of family publishing leadership appears to be passing to her niece, Sandys.

Meanwhile, Sandys’ cousin, Winston Churchill, has one out of his own this year: “Never Give In: Winston Churchill’s Finest Speeches” (Pimlico).

Relations between the Churchill family and many professional historians have been strained ever since the younger Churchill secured $20 million from the British lottery fund not to sell his grandfather’s private papers to an American university in 1995. The lottery grant was viewed as cultural extortion in many quarters, where the popular understanding had been that Churchill’s papers were supposed to go to the British people. The outrage was further fueled when it turned out that the grandson had kept the copyright, meaning anyone wanting to quote significant chunks of Churchillian passages had to pay for it.

“Winston has brought a great deal of hurt and discredit to his family,” says Norman Rogers, president of the Churchill Society, London. “They are forever cashing in on it -- what is it, 15 or 18 books now? Which is somewhat disreputable.”

The volume of Churchill works is unlikely to diminish in 2005 -- at last a convenient anniversary: 60 years since the war’s end, 50 since Churchill was last prime minister, 40 since his death. There will be a new round of exhibits to honor him at the Cabinet War Rooms in London. And there will be more books, among them “Churchill in America” by Sir Martin Gilbert, whose 1992 “Churchill: A Life” is the official biography and the gold standard on facts to most.

“Martin Gilbert is the bible,” says Sandys, who adds she has “a couple of other Churchill books in mind, which I’m not going to talk about.”

The odds say there will be an audience. Churchill has that kind of pull.

“Sometimes I think: ‘You’re getting so obsessed with one man, why don’t you look at someone else?’ ” says the Churchill Society’s Rogers. “And then I say to myself: ‘My God, what a man.’ ”