The Splendid and the Vile:
A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During The Blitz

By Erik Larson, Crown, 2020, 503 pages
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski

Oh, Olivia Cockett: You would not be happy in 21st century America. Even though you survived the savage bombing of London in World War II, even though you wrote an acclaimed diary describing how you and other Londoners kept stiff upper facial features through the Luftwaffe’s leveling of targets large and small, your method of coping would make you a present-day pariah.

From Page 314 of “The Splendid and the Vile”: For a degree of relief from the blackout and the other new burdens of life, Cockett turned to smoking. “One new habit since the war – enjoying cigarettes,” she wrote. “Used to smoke occasionally, but now three or four a day regularly, and with pleasure! Inhaling makes the difference, and the nicotine-treat which just detaches one’s mind from one’s body for a second or two after each breath.”

(Memo to you health nazis who are tsk-tsking violently and wondering why she didn’t do Pilates instead: Ms. Olivia Cockett faced the real Nazis, so she’s not going to be fazed by your self-righteous scorn. Better yet: She lived into her mid-80s; that must really piss you off.)

Olivia is a real charmer, making periodic appearances in this Erik Larson opus that takes a creative angle on World War II. It’s not a comprehensive account of the war, nor is it an analysis of battles or generals or weapons. Rather, Larson, who has written an impressive number of nonfiction books about mostly forgotten or little-known history, focuses on Winston Churchill’s first year (1940-41) as British prime minister.

(I know; you just stopped reading this review, sighing, “Jeeeeeezzz, Stasiowski, another 500 pages about Churchill? Is that really necessary?” Please, keep reading. Please? I’ll buy you a Snickers.)

Although the spine of the book is, yes, another 500 pages about Churchill, this one is more personal than any I’ve read. Readers get to know feelings, emotions, good behavior and bad not only of Churchill, his wife Clementine, his son Randolph (he accounts for a lot of the bad behavior), his still-teenaged daughter Mary (often silly and sentimental, but she ends up commanding an anti-aircraft battery, so stop scoffing), but also of a gaggle of British characters, some familiar, some obscure, some goofy, all splendid, who scurry in and out of history’s unforgiving gaze.

Further, Larson also charts the moves of the vile: Göring, Goebbels, Hess and, of course, Hitler. Again, readers mostly get inside the moods and attitudes of the Nazi thugs.

Larson isn’t the most stylish of writers, and I can pick out some absurdities – a couple of rogue uses of “whomever,” a “reticence” that probably should be “reluctance,” a “fulsome” that, as usual, makes no sense in the context – that mar otherwise competent writing.

Wisely, he mostly relies on the eloquence of his countless sources, such as the nicotine-rhapsodist Cockett, who kept diaries of those terror-filled days and nights as they sheltered from German bombers. The profusion of diaries was no coincidence. Larson wrote that they were the product of “Mass-Observation, an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with the goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life.”

(The candid entries in Cockett’s diary were compiled into a stand-alone book, “Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary 1939-42.”)

As valuable as Mass-Observation diaries were to Larson, what really invigorates his otherwise pedestrian prose is that he had as his central character World War II’s living, breathing, walking, orating, lisping, maddening, smoking, drinking, preposterously entertaining human anecdote. This Churchill moment is from the White House memories of Inspector Walter Henry Thompson, who was the ever-present bodyguard of that solitary savior of “This fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war, … this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”:

At Churchill’s direction, Thompson answered (the knock on the door) and found the president (FDR) outside in his wheelchair, alone in the hall. Thompson opened the door wide, then saw an odd expression come over the president’s face as he looked into the room behind the detective. “I turned,” Thompson wrote. “Winston Churchill was stark naked, a drink in one hand, a cigar in the other.”

The president prepared to wheel himself out.

“Come in, Franklin,” Churchill said. “We’re quite alone.”

The president offered what Thompson called an “odd shrug,” then wheeled himself in. “You see, Mr. President,” Churchill said, “I have nothing to hide.”

Despite its many illuminating moments, Larson’s book feels gimmicky. The tale he tells is familiar, and although he uncovers plenty of inspiring human responses to the stresses of ultimate distress, the microscopic focus on the Churchills is a gossipy intrusion – Randolph’s debauchery; his wife, Pamela’s, infidelity; Mary’s botched engagement – into scenes that easily could have remained private without any damage to our grasp of history.

Cataloguing the Churchills’ weaknesses strikes me as celebrity-themed titillation. I prefer titillation more on my lower-crust social stratum, such as that publicly proclaimed by a brilliant performer in a supporting role:

Sex became a refuge, but that did not guarantee that the sex would be fulfilling. Mass-Observation diarist Olivia Cockett, in the midst of an affair with a married man, noted in passing that during a weeklong bout of lovemaking, she and her lover had sex six times, but “only one complete for me.”

(Anyone else blushing?)

A disappointment, yes. But the bloke did bring the cigarettes, din’t he?