Memories of The Great and The Good (20 page)

C
HURCHILL, WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER
: Statesman, soldier, journalist, amateur bricklayer and painter. Nobel Prize for Literature, 1963. Knighted, 1953.
b
. Nov. 30,1874 in the ladies' cloakroom of Blenheim Palace, to Lady Randolph Churchill (b. Jennie Jerome, New York City), who, against her doctor's orders, was attending a ball. Son of Lord Randolph, grandson of 7th Duke of Marlborough. Bottom of class at Harrow but passed with high honors from Sandhurst and was commissioned in Fourth Hussars. In all, served in nine British regiments (notably in last British cavalry charge, with 21st Lancers, at Battle of Omdurman, 1898, and in command of battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers on Western Front, France, 1915-16). War correspondent, Boer War, captured, imprisoned, escaped and capitalized on sudden fame, at age of 25, with lecture tours (of United Kingdom, United States and Canada), thereby setting up a modest fortune which he would supplement with a lifetime of prolific journalism.

Entered parliament in 1900 as a Conservative but soon switched to Free Trade Liberals, and in 1908 campaigned successfully for unemployment allowances, national sickness insurance, a miner's eight-hour day, unsuccessfully for compulsory education till 17 and abolition of House of Lords. Same year, married Clementine Hozier, by whom he had one son and three daughters.

He was in parliament for more than forty years, changing parties three times, to the vexation of most party loyalists. As First Lord of the Admiralty he modernized the navy and, on his own initiative, mobilized it for action six days before the British ultimatum to Germany in August, 1914. For twenty years, he was held responsible for many disasters of policy, wrongly for the Dardanelles fiasco in the First World War, rightly for the General Strike in 1926 and the mischievous urging of “a King's party” during the abdication crisis of Edward VIII.

Throughout the late thirties, he was resented by all parties, mainly for the boring frequency of his warnings about the menace of Nazi rearmament. In May 1940, when after eight months of the “phoney war” Hitler invaded Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium, Chamberlain was discredited and Churchill, surprisingly, became prime minister of a Coalition government as the only politician the Labour Party would serve under. He braced a listless, and still war-weary, Britain to believe it was heroic, and under his leadership, it became so.

In the 1945 election, after the victory in Europe, Churchill, indifferent to peacetime social reforms, was defeated in a Labour landslide. Six years later, in his late seventies, he returned as Conservative prime minister and, increasingly apathetic and senile, resigned in 1955. Ten years later he died, at the age of ninety, and was accorded a dramatic state funeral, for which he had written the meticulous script.

A
nyone who reads much biography must come to be struck sooner or later by the volatility of great men's reputations—a capriciousness quite as unpredictable as the ups and downs of Xerox, IBM, or Gulf & Western. Indeed, since publishers, through their absorption into conglomerates, have had to think and act as trading partners in “the book business,” the time may not be far off when they will circulate internal memos alerting the staff to the biographical market trends: Rousseau up, Scott Fitzgerald down fifteen points, Virginia Woolf (like oats and wheat) steady.

Only a year or two ago, it seemed, everything that could be usefully written about Winston Churchill had been written and published. His finest hour—if he is to be considered as an object of public acclaim, and hence as a literary growth stock—came soon after the evacuation from Dunkirk, on the day that the French sued for an armistice. In that moment, Churchill was symbolized for two continents in David Low's cartoon of a British Tommy, valiant on a storm-drenched rock and waving his fist at a flight of Heinkel bombers: “Very well, alone!” Since then, there have been scores of books about Churchill, over forty of them published since the 1960s. Most of them, from Davenport and Murphy's early little rhapsody to Elizabeth Longford's ritual tribute, have been frank celebrations of an immortal. Sharper and more perceptive judgments have come from A. J. P. Taylor and C. P. Snow and from Violet Bon-ham Carter's affectionate but incisive memoir. The best of them are concerned to isolate—from a compound of successes and blunders, rooted beliefs, set policies, and brilliant guesses—the essential elements of Churchill's character and his leadership. None of them seriously chips away at the monolith. True, in 1970 Brian Gardner assembled a formidable anthology of parliamentary assaults on Churchill's conduct of the war during the disastrous year of 1942.

Meanwhile, as books about Churchill poured from the presses, the definitive assessment of the great man's life was begun, under the supervision of a trust, by his son, Randolph. He had finished two volumes, and brought the story down to 1914, when he died, in 1968. The official life was thereupon taken up by Martin Gilbert, the Oxford historian who was to complete it in nine volumes, along with all the relevant documents. But already, Churchill, dead since 1965, has achieved the sort of marmoreal reputation that is fixed, not subject to revision—bound in morocco and permanently installed on library shelves alongside Izaak Walton's Donne, Forster's Dickens, Marshall's Washington, and Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee.

It ought to be enough to deter any intending biographer, but it did not deter William Manchester, who has put out the first of two promised volumes, a 973-page whopper,
The Last Lion—Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory
, which begins with a survey of the late-Victorian society into which Churchill was born, in 1874, and ends in 1932 with Lady Astor in Moscow assuring Stalin that Churchill is
“finished”
—”Chamberlain is the coming man.”

Mr. Manchester begins with an incomparable social survey of Victorian England. It usually suffices to place the young Churchill in the high society into which he was born or to exploit the shameful contrasts between Disraeli's “two nations.” But Mr. Manchester has surveyed the whole range of British society without forced pathos or any more irony than the juxtaposed facts invite: the habits, prejudices, economic resources, rituals, games, chronic diseases of Britain's classes and innumerable subclasses, from hymn-singing Methodists to hunting peers; the social pecking order of the Guards regiments; the comparative wages of a landowner, a private soldier, and a coal miner; the contraceptive habits of the aristocracy and the working classes; the social distinctions of dress flaunted along the scale between a bank clerk and a duke. Against this teeming sociological background Mr. Manchester has mounted in the forefront an impressionist picture of the vast influence of the empire when more than half the world's maritime vessels flew the red ensign, when one civil servant was overseer for every two hundred thousand Indians, when one lone Englishman in Borneo had his own flag and national anthem, and when—outside the quarter of the world that was the acknowledged imperial domain—the inspector general of Chinese customs was Irish, the military adviser to the sultan of Morocco was a Scot and “foreign governments were told where to build new lighthouses.”

Mr. Manchester then moves on to the boyhood and youth, a dullish period commonly summarized in the boy's devotion to his nanny, the kindly and mountainous Mrs. Everest; his poor marks at Harrow; a cool relation with his father and the wistful contemplation of his mother as “the evening star—I loved her dearly, but at a distance.” But Mr. Manchester gives more than a hundred pages, alive with the most engrossing research, to present the record of a boyhood that is pitiable when it is not heartbreaking. The son of an adored and highly neurotic father who disliked him from the start and of a glittering socialite to whom motherhood was a calling as alien as the priesthood, he arrived at Harrow an emotional orphan. He reacted as a spirited boy bereft of affection might be expected to: he demanded attention by becoming a show-off, a practical joker, and the despair of his surrogate parents, the teachers. Deciding to despise the regular syllabus—math, Latin, Greek, and French—he holed up alone to memorize bits of Shakespeare and Macaulay, and soon found himself at the bottom of his class. All the while, he received peppery, scolding letters from his father. He wrote pleading little letters to his mother (“Please write something kind to me”), and she responded, rarely, with the irritability of a fashion model cursed with a squalling brat. In his ten years away at school—whether in health or in dire sickness—he had only one visit from each parent. Even in a period and a country in which upper-class boys were kept under permanent house arrest in the nursery before being exiled to their public school, the brilliant, the beautiful, the appalling Jennie Jerome was the most uncaring of mothers. Apart from her chronic annoyance at her son's well-maintained status as the dumbbell of the school, the only strong emotion she appears to have felt for him was disgust at his having passed on the measles to her favorite lover.

So the education of Winston began in his twenty-second year at an unlikely time and in the most improbable place: the intellectual barren of a fashionable cavalry regiment posted to India—for a nine-year stretch of duty!—in the twilight of the Victorian age. Before his troopship sailed, he heard a friend use the word “ethics.” Arrived in Bangalore, he wondered about it: “But here … there was no one to tell me about Ethics for love or money.” Later, he overheard a man drop the phrase “the Socratic method.” He wondered again. He was told that Socrates was an argumentative Greek hounded by a nagging wife into suicide. He had been dead, Churchill discovered, over two thousand years, yet some “method” of his was still being debated. “Such antagonisms,” he wrote, “do not spring from petty issues. Evidently Socrates had called something into being long ago which was very explosive. Intellectual dynamite! A moral bomb! But there was nothing about it in
The Queen's Regulations”
He wrote to his mother and asked her to ship out to him Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
, to be followed by Winwood Reade's
Martyrdom of Man
, a translation of Plato's
Republic
, and twelve volumes of Macaulay. Through the burning Indian days, he devoured these books “till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour” of his other passion, polo. His mother responded with uncharacteristic alacrity, for once her son had chosen to be a soldier and was comfortably removed to India, safe from intrusion on her unflagging round of house parties, balls, love affairs, foreign cruises, and the like, she was able to begin to express some concern for him as an individual rather than as a family pest. And when he made it clear, in insistent letters home, that he meant to make his mark in politics she warmed to an ambition as impatient as her husband's and used her beauty to wheedle, nudge, hector, and even seduce some of the most influential men in England in the cause of her son's lust for preferment.

Much of this has been recounted over and over, not least by Churchill himself, though with such extreme filial respect that he suppresses even a whisper of complaint against his wretched parents. But the story is usually told skimpily and sentimentally, as an object lesson in the doltishness of parents and schoolmasters who failed to recognize what we, the latter-day seers, could have told them—that they had on their hands a genius in embryo. Mr. Manchester, however—gratefully admitting that he has been privileged to work “in tandem” with Martin Gilbert—has had at his disposal such an abundance of letters, documents, onlooking comments and opinions that he can afford not to anticipate an event, a quirk of character, or a sign of approaching maturity. His mastery of this huge file of research enables him to introduce us, by way of new and dramatic emphases, to many startling things we thought we knew. It is the same with the rest of Churchill's youthful life abroad: his time as a cavalry subaltern, his dashing off to cover the guerrilla warfare in Cuba, his vaulting over the officer establishment to be present at the Khyber Pass and the Battle of Omdurman, his capture by the Boers and the chronicle of his escape and aimless wandering in search of sanctuary. From Mr. Manchester's account of this five-year safari, we become freshly aware of one of those un trammeled Victorian adventurers, usually highborn but inexplicably inured to discomfort, whose curiosity moves them to treat continents as obvious maps of the Old Boy network and treks into deserts or remote mountain villages as suburban excursions. The young Churchill, who appears to have transformed a frail physique into a tough one by an exercise of free will unknown to physical therapy, was at home in rancid heat and paralyzing cold, on battlefronts, in filthy trains, on a horse or a mule or on foot in the harshest landscapes. (It is a reminder of this vanished type that the most serious accident of his life occurred when he looked the wrong way as he stepped off a New York sidewalk and was knocked down by an automobile.)