Yours Ever (39 page)

He composes his own last words home at six-fifteen p.m., October 31, 1918, preserving, with eerie immediacy, the conditions in which he writes them: “So thick is the smoke in this cellar that I can hardly see by a candle 12 ins. away, and so thick are the inmates that I can hardly write for pokes, nudges & jolts.”

The Armistice was signed on November 11, the day Susan Owen received a telegram announcing that her son had been killed a week earlier. The power of his letters is such that one almost forgets it was their
enclosures
—the poems he sent with them—that made Wilfred Owen the Great War’s one truly imperishable writer.

LATE IN THEIR
long married life, Winston Churchill marveled to his wife, Clementine, about “all we have crashed through together.” He could hardly overstate the matter: the Churchills’ letters include public events from the
Titanic
to
Sputnik
as well as every phase of their own fifty-seven-year joint march from ardent youth to be-medaled decrepitude. “Je t’aime passionnément,” writes Clemmie (who feels “less shy in French”) in 1908; four decades and five hundred pages later in their collected correspondence, she’ll be “so distressed about the truss” that’s now a bother to Winston.

From the first, Winston Churchill understood that he could present himself to his wife without “the slightest disguise.” His letters, however self-deprecating and full of affection, admit to a character “so devoured by egoism” that he “wd like to have another soul in another world & meet you in another setting, & pay you all the love & honour of the gt romances.” But it was for this world that he was entirely made: “6 o’clock is a bad hour for me,” he writes during one period of exile from the political center; “I feel the need of power as an outlet worst then.” He falls behind in his letter writing only when too little, not too much, is going on around him.

For epistolary output and bumptious eloquence, his only American equivalent is Teddy Roosevelt, but Churchill’s greatness as a letter writer is due in part to the kind of two-track character that made Pepys and Boswell his own nation’s foremost diarists. Like them, he is wholly onto every appetite and piece of foolishness in his makeup but sometimes quite unable to squelch their appearance on paper. There is, for example, the trouble he has dislodging catchy tunes from his head. Several years after the Second World War, having been introduced to an applauding crowd in Morocco “to the strains of Lilli Marlene,” he confesses to Clementine that he’s “terrified of this getting into my mind again. I have several antidotes ready.”

He emerges as the more likeable partner in the marriage. Clementine has high spirits, but no real silliness. She reassures her husband that the “tumultuous” life he gave her, all the “colour & jostle of the high-way,” is a relief from the “straitened little by-path” she trod before meeting him, but it is her half-century-long lot to buck him up and rein him in—from extravagance (in rebuilding their country house, Chartwell), from too much closeness to questionable company (the newspaper baron, Lord Beaverbrook) and, especially, from hasty political choices. Oral spats are frequently patched up on paper, sometimes through the “house post,” written communications from one room to another.

The couple fought fifteen election campaigns together, and Clementine’s letters show her advice to be specific, shrewd and frequently indispensable. The more socially liberal of the two, she is
Winston’s equal at sizing up his friends and foes: Lloyd George “is a barometer, but not a really useful one as he is always measuring his own temperature.” During the early days of World War I, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill takes the fall for the ill-starred Dardanelles campaign, descending to a level of political disgrace from which he might never have recovered without his wife’s counsel. The letters they exchange after his decision to go as a soldier to the Western front are a blend of patriotism, ambition and mutual tenacity—really the heart of their long correspondence. In fact, it’s these letters that mark Winston and Clementine as true heirs to the duke of Marlborough and Sarah, that eighteenth-century pair we now call “the first Churchills.”

Sitting in the trenches, writing his letters “in a battered wicker chair within this shot-scarred dwelling by the glowing coals of a brazier in the light of an acetylene lamp,” Churchill feels nothing like Owen’s gathering horror. He pronounces the front a sort of personal therapy: “Amid these surroundings, aided by wet & cold, & every minor discomfort, I have found happiness & content such as I have not known for many months.” A reader ends up believing him chiefly from Clementine’s responses. She, too, contrasts politically poisonous Westminster with the supposed nobility of the battlefield, using the sort of hygienic terms favored by Rupert Brooke in his war sonnets: “The atmosphere here [in London] is wicked & stifling. Out where you are it is clean & clear.”

And yet it is to politics that both she and Churchill know he must return. Winston urges her to “Keep in touch with the Government. Show complete confidence in our fortunes.” While tending his fires on the home front, Clementine presses him to take command of a battalion instead of a brigade (it will look more modest) and, above all else, not to return too soon: “The present Government may not be strong enough to beat the Germans, but I think they are powerful enough to do you in, & I pray God you do not give the heartless brutes the chance … I could not bear you to lose your military halo.” There is no surer sign of her love for Churchill’s essential nature than the way this mother of three young children urges her husband to stay in the trenches. Her confidence “in your star” is so
long-range that she implores him not to post the ill-considered letter he’s written to the
Times
’s Lord Northcliffe: “If it goes it will form part of your biography in after times …”

During the next several decades, whether he’s “in” or “out,” Churchill’s star remains the correspondence’s chief theme and emotional focus. There is a great deal of domestic delight and discord—their son Randolph’s impetuous electoral forays; their daughter Sarah’s impetuous marriages—but nothing long distracts the letter writers from Churchill’s own political life and its vast dramatis personae. In 1928, Churchill notes in the two-year-old Princess Elizabeth “an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant;” he calls the Duchess of Windsor “Cutie.” The Windsors’ own correspondence—that sick-making pablum of baby talk and self-pity—could not provide more of a contrast to the Churchills’. Winston and Clementine may have their own pet names for each other—he’s her “Pig” or “Pug,” she’s his “Cat”—but after a bit of epistolary cuddling it’s always back to business.

Winston Churchill’s manly, buoyant style is displayed to great effect in every decade. He moves easily between lofty parallelism (“How easy to evacuate. How hard to capture”) and playful bombast: “I hope the Burgundy has reached you safely & that you are lapping it with judicious determination.” Clementine, at her own most stylish moments, can bring Nancy Mitford to mind. Describing a fountain in the Italian Garden at Blenheim, the first Churchills’ palace, she writes Winston: “The whole group now looks like a Pagan representation of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary attended by fallen members of the Salvation Army.”

The early portions of the correspondence are the most orderly, sustained volleys of one letter replying to another. Later on, especially during the Second World War, dictation, haste and the need for secrecy take their toll. The two-way coded cable traffic between “Colonel and Mrs. Warden” is nothing like so absorbing as those exchanges from the Great War two decades earlier. “
ALL WELL HOPE YOU ARE NOT GETTING MUCH BOMBARDMENT
,” Churchill telegraphs from Naples in August 1944.

Mary Soames, the couple’s youngest daughter and the editor of
their letters, admits that during the later years “Winston himself could be maddening, and on occasions behaved like a spoilt child; but now there were times when Clementine harried him too much, and could be unreasonable and unkind.” Still, the case for their uninterrupted devotion—through his second prime ministership, which took him past eighty, and through the pair’s even later dramas of illness and enfeeblement—remains overwhelming. “Everyone has his day,” Churchill told the House of Commons in 1952, “and some days last longer than others.”

TO TURN ONE’S ATTENTION
from Winston and Clementine’s letters to the wartime correspondence of Mirren Barford and Jock Lewes is to move from a kind of practical royal marriage to a twentieth-century version of courtly love, in which neurosis mixes with ardor, and self-parody threatens to overrun self-sacrifice. Barford, a language student at Somerville College, Oxford, first encounters the twenty-six-year-old Lewes, a member of the British Council newly enlisted in the reserves, at a wedding in August 1939. After two meetings, they begin an exchange of letters that quickly takes on an intense, disorienting life of its own. At its plainest, their correspondence concerns Mirren’s uncertainty about whether she should remain at university and Jock’s eagerness to leave off training (with the Welsh Guards and then a commando unit) in order to see some action. But above these sublunary questions the two conduct a frantically Platonic romance, a substitute for the actual affair that circumstance and temperament won’t permit them to have.

The Australian-raised Lewes is so handsome that when another male visits Mirren’s room in Oxford, “he turns your photograph down because he says you look like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.” Making his own movie comparisons, the pure, dutiful Jock expresses a preference to be Ashley Wilkes instead of Rhett Butler with “his licentious ways.” He lectures Mirren on the need to avoid “moral deterioration” and to persuade everyone “that we will and can fight not to the end but until we win.” They must “cleave fast” to their “impractical ideals of understanding, generosity, beauty, love,” the
last of which can help to remake the world: “Whatever we touch will be hallowed for us and for those who see us.”

It’s not easy to imagine this paragon in the barracks, except perhaps in a bed short-sheeted by his fellow soldiers. Things would be better, he insists, if “half that mental energy and spiritual devotion … which we lavish on the pursuit of humour, comfort and convivial living” were put into training instead. Jock detaches himself from his comrades’ “sordid” existence by reading the
Life of Johnson
and
Clarissa
, and he holds off reading Mirren’s words until he can get a step or two away from the madding crowd: “I kept your letter till after dinner for I had seen the first sentence in the dim light of the hurricane lanterns and it was so like meeting you again in a dear dear garden at home that I almost recoiled from it there in that ribaldry.”

Jock can write with such overelaborated lyricism that it’s difficult to extract his meaning from the lofty tangle of clauses. Also prone to abstraction and treatise, he’s liable to address his girl as if she were a foreign minister with whom he’s conducting a bilateral negotiation: “I am here attempting to record in order that, quite apart from any intrinsic value in the record itself, we may be able to bring our minds to bear on the crux of the intricate and extremely important problems which now confront us both.”

For her part, Mirren indulges in a few girlish outbursts, and she does remind Jock of her need for social activity and even the company of other young men. But mostly the poor thing struggles to stay on the path of purity. She can’t pay attention to Michael de Chair, another suitor, when Jock is hovering like some gauzy “conscience” in a cartoon:

Mirren’s effortful letters explore such matters as why intellectual work suits her better than the snares of art; Jock then critiques the letters as if they were term papers. She strains after sophistication and complexity, but her idea of honesty is very much a young person’s: “You and I are so honest with each other, it becomes agony at times. But all the same, it leads to complete understanding which is a precious thing.”

After a while the reader would like to go back in time, to some weekend when Jock has a pass, in order to get them drunk and book them a hotel room. But the results of such intervention would be uncertain, given Mirren’s embarrassment about standing naked in front of Jock’s photograph, and with Jock such a stickler for chastity that he wishes to proceed by “deliberate choice and not merely the dictation of desire.” He defends to Mirren the ideal of male virginity, even though two women he consults don’t think much of the concept, and despite what unfortunate imagery it leads him into: “I have not yet finished the forging of this ideal, though I have had it on the anvil often enough.”

The Jock-Mirren letters are full of extended, tormented metaphors (Mirren’s own virginity is a “Christmas stocking” not to be opened until the special day), as well as literary allusion. Jock will sign off as “Paris,” and Mirren, depending on situation and mood, declares herself ready to be “Helen,” “Penelope” or “Cassandra.” Joy Street (the eventual title of their published correspondence) runs through a Bunyan-like terrain mapped out by the two of them; it’s the cryptic capital of their emotional geography. By Jock’s reckoning, the lovers’ landscape also contains Casual Corner, Self Alley and Sentimental Gardens, not to mention a blue-leather corridor and some puzzling aquatic precincts. The correspondents’ latter-day editor says he first guessed Joy Street to be “an allegorical representation of a specific place,” before deciding “it described
Mirren and Jock’s individual meetings.” (The street’s “beggar priest,” he further concluded, is Lust.)