The Works of WSC
A guide to the Churchill canon
The CanonThe appearance of the Memoirs of the Second World War was, by any standards, a monumental publishing event. The total first edition print run for the individual English and American volumes was in excess of 1,900,000. The work was serialised extensively, going so far, in the case of The New York Times, as to reproduce more than a third of the text - which itself ran to over two million words.
Of all Churchill's works the memoirs have also generated the most controversy, as one would expect. They were written with unprecedented access to government papers and while the events described were still fresh in the readers' mind. Selective as they are (little mention of the concentration camps, Dresden or Nuremburg for example), they have generated enormous debate as to their quality as 'history'. Churchill, of course, was always careful to deny that they were intended to be history, but in that he was, perhaps, being a little disingenuous. I do not intend here to reproduce all the arguments. I do however, suggest that anyone seriously interested in the creation of the memoirs obtain a copy of David Reynold's In Command of History(Allen Lane 2004).
However, setting aside the historical debate, perhaps the most important aspect of the memoirs is also the most obvious. They made Churchill rich. While never poor, by any definition of the term, he had lived beyond his means all his life. His childhood letters to his mother are incessant pleas for more money, and his sense of financial entitlement never waned through adulthood. He told people later in life that he had simple tastes and was always easily satisfied with the very best. When he retired to Chartwell at the beginning of the 'wilderness years' to start up the literary factory that was to churn for almost a decade, his primary intent was to make money, but by 1938 his financial affairs were so precarious he briefly put Chartwell itself on the market. The memoirs changed all that. The American arrangement alone was worth in excess of two million dollars - probably the equivalent of well over twenty million dollars in today's money. To the best of my knowledge Cassell's arrangement for the English rights has yet to be revealed. After half a century the self-imposed burden was lifted from Churchill's back.
The memoirs are one of the few cases where the American edition takes precedence over the English counterpart. The reason is not difficult to find. In 1948 the post-war British publishing industry was still struggling with the problems of paper rationing. The Americans faced no such issue and besides, their print run for The Gathering Storm of 75,000 paled into comparative insignificance beside the English print run of 221,000. However, there was a price to pay for being first. Churchill was having enormous difficulty in declaring the work complete and was flooding Houghton Mifflin with corrections, even after the electroplates were made. Eventually Houghton Mifflin drew the line at further changes and proceeded to go to press. Although their edition took precedence it suffered, nonetheless from being an incomplete, and therefore inferior text. Cassell's edition, which appeared four months later is generally considered to be the 'approved' one.
The remaining volumes apeared over the next six years. Originally the work had been planned to span five volumes but in typical Churchillian style, reminiscent of the growth of Marlborough and causing equal consternation to his publishers, the original canvas proved too small and a sixth volume was added. In 1959 the complete work was abridged by Dennis Kelly, one of Churchill's 'research' team, to a single volume, and it is this abridgement which comprises the most popular appearance today, particularly for translations.
In the introduction to In Command of History Reynolds writes that the memoirs were published in fifteen countries and eleven languages. This is an extremely conservative estimate. The current count is a minimum of twenty-two languages, being as follows. Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croat, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
