Great Man's Plaything

SAVROLA (241 pp.) -- Winston S. Churchill--Random House ($3.50).

This novel is the work of a high-spirited Hussar officer of 23, caught temporarily between campaigns. It would not be uncharitable to say that its author should adopt some other line of work. This, to the great benefit of history and humanity, is what the author did.

Wittily, the publishers have decorated the book jacket of this literary curiosity with the novelist's figure in its more recent frame--sitting before his goldfish pond at Chartwell, with his back firmly turned. The frontispiece shows the face of a younger, less imposing man, who had just become a Member of Parliament in the year (1900) in which his first and only novel, a highly romantic work of historical fiction, was first issued in book form.

Legend Persists. Even more wittily, the novelist himself has supported the publisher's proud claim that this new edition carries a "new foreword by the author" in a neat 76 words. Thus at 81, Winston Churchill shows himself more garrulous by 29 words than in the original note in which the young officer of the IVth (Queen's Own) Hussars was moved to submit the book "with considerable trepidation to the judgement or clemency of the public.'' The aged Knight of the Garter adds for the current edition: "The intervening fifty-five years have somewhat dulled though certainly not changed my sentiments on this point."

Savrola is a rollingly romantic tale of "revolution in Laurania," and Churchill some years later, after noting that it "yielded about seven hundred pounds" (not more than $3,500), confessed: "I have consistently urged my friends to abstain from reading it." The legend, though denied by son Randolph, persists that Churchill tried for a time to buy all outstanding copies of Savrola, to reinforce his friends' abstention.

When Winston Churchill's novel was published, an American of the same name had greater fame.* Few now read the other Winston Churchill's Richard Carvel or The Crisis, good books though they are, and their author said of them what the English Churchill might have said of his Savrola: "I wrote for pleasure or adventure."

Savrola, though, has more than just curio value: it contains a boy's vision of a kind of greatness that the boy grew up to fulfill. Here is not an echo, but the beginning whispers of a voice that was to become mighty.

Toy World. Before he had a real world to play with, Winston Churchill created the toy world of "Laurania" in which a "dictator" is overthrown by a liberal revolution; then, as happened often enough later, the liberals find that they have set sinister forces in motion. Before they are suppressed, Laurania is rent by explosions, duels, gunshot and high-flown mayhem, all set forth in an absurdly magnificent style:

" 'Go on,' shouted the President, striking the table with his open hand, and the man fled from the room."

The great Savrola, savior of his country, confronts the "sombre-clad" assassin who has slain the Dictator. The act offends his nobility. "Vile scum!" Savrola cries, and he slashes the culprit across the face with his stick.

Not a far cry is Laurania's noble and indignant Savrola from Britain's Churchill, who grew up to call Hitler a "bloodthirsty guttersnipe" and Mussolini a "whipped jackal," with a tongue that slashed far deeper than a stick.

There are chuckles to be found in the naive and childlike honor that abounds in every page of Savrola, but knowing what the author went on to do in reality for his country gives a tingle to the simple declaration with which a young man's fantasy ends: "The chronicler ... will rejoice that, after many troubles, peace and prosperity came back to the Republic of Laurania."

* Early in the two writers' careers, the British Churchill wrote to the U.S. Churchill (no kin) and proposed that one change his name to avoid confusion. The U.S. Churchill claimed seniority and the British Churchill conceded it, agreed henceforth to sign himself Winston S. (for Spencer) Churchill.

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