Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Read online

  A two-year-old Churchill leans against his mother, Jennie. Later, he would recall that she shone for him as a child like the “Evening Star.”

  A two-year-old Winston leans against his mother . . .

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  With his sailor suit, Churchill, aged seven, wears a surprisingly supercilious expression for such a young child.

  With his sailor suit, Churchill, aged seven . . .

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  1895. Churchill, a subaltern, in the ornate full-dress uniform of the Fourth Hussars.

  1895. Churchill, a subaltern, in the ornate full-dress uniform . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  Churchill, a flying enthusiast, stands beside an early aircraft with Clementine in 1914. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill introduced an Air Arm into the Navy.

  Churchill, a flying enthusiast, stands beside . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  In July 1925, Churchill is dressed for a polo match between the House of Commons and the House of Lords (Churchill’s team won). Churchill continued to play polo until he was more than fifty years old.

  In July 1925, Churchill is dressed for a polo match . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  1939. Churchill confers with the main proponent of the appeasement policy, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

  1939. Churchill confers with the main proponent . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  September 1940. Winston and Clementine inspect bomb damage to London docks. This famous picture was one of their family’s favorites.

  September 1940. Winston and Clementine inspect . . .

  Photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos

  November 1964. On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, dressed in a green velvet siren suit, Churchill greets well-wishers from his window.

  November 1964. On the eve of his ninetieth birthday . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  September 1940. Churchill—an instantly recognizable silhouette—reviews wartime defenses of England.

  September 1940. Churchill—an instantly recognizable silhouette . . .

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  August 1941. Roosevelt and Churchill lead hymn singing during divine service aboard HMS Prince of Wales, when the two world leaders met secretly at Placentia Bay.

  August 1941. Roosevelt and Churchill lead hymn singing . . .

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  August 1941. Back in England, Churchill acknowledges the farewell cheers of the crew of HMS Prince of Wales.

  August 1941. Back in England, Churchill acknowledges . . .

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  Soon after returning from his meeting with President Roosevelt, Churchill for the first time brandishes the “V for victory.”

  Soon after returning from his meeting with President Roosevelt . . .

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  February 1945. The “Big Three” at Yalta share a moment of jovial informality. Their casual air hides the dissension, which worsens as peace nears.

  February 1945. The “Big Three” at Yalta . . .

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  On the evening of victory, May 8, 1945, upon his return from Buckingham Palace, Churchill addresses a huge crowd: “In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this.” Two months later, Churchill would be voted out of office.

  On the evening of victory, May 8, 1945 . . .

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  In Berlin, July 1945, amid the wreck of Hitler’s chancellery, Churchill’s Russian guides show him Hitler’s smashed chair.

  In Berlin, July 1945, amid the wreck of Hitler’s chancellery . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  January 1950. A seventy-five-year-old Churchill paints a scene in Funchal, Madeira.

  January 1950. A seventy-five-year-old Churchill paints . . .

  Photo © Bettman/CORBIS

  April 1955. Churchill holds the door for the Queen as she leaves 10 Downing Street after attending a small dinner. This was Churchill’s last night as Prime Minister.

  April 1955. Churchill holds the door . . .

  Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

  1965. After a service commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain victory, Queen Elizabeth unveils a memorial stone to Churchill in Westminster Abbey. Clementine and family stand beside pilots who fought in that battle. The marble tablet reads, “Remember Winston Churchill.”

  1965. After a service . . .

  Photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos

  27

  CHURCHILL AS THE HERO OF A NOVEL

  The Imagined and the Real

  A life doesn’t make a good story: it’s messy, themeless, with a predictable beginning and end. Nevertheless, readers of biography expect not only the discipline and reality of truth but also the artistry of novels.

  Many of the most successful biographers make their subjects into almost fictional characters, with motives, symbols, motifs. (“A human life is always made up of a number of such motifs,” ventured André Maurois, who found a flower motif in Disraeli’s life; “when you study one of them, it will soon begin to impress itself upon you with a remarkable force.” Ordered this way, the subject’s life becomes consistent and meaningful.

  This kind of biography is very satisfying—but is it more like fiction, with particular facts weighted to supply plot, unity, and moral? Like fiction, in which someone’s imagination has imposed a pleasing shapeliness on the messy stuff of life?—a shapeliness that may or may not be true. And yet generally this is the kind of biography that seems most true.

  The impulse to turn Churchill into a literary character is almost irresistible. The facts of his life adapt so easily to the devices of fiction: irony, suspense, paradox, foreshadowing, reversal, allusion, heightened diction, desperate causes, even witty banter. His story has a remarkable artfulness, so beautiful in design with its portents, symbols, and themes: it is these qualities that have etched Churchill the hero so deeply in memory. (Of course, Churchill himself encouraged his transformation. His cigars, his phrases, all simplified himself for public sight.)

  In fact, Winston Churchill, the fictional character, would be unconvincing; the rich episodes of his history aren’t lifelike. When a young Churchill asks for a dog, what novelist would be so unsubtle as to write that Winston demanded a bulldog—as he did? Or who, after Freud, could invent a hero, neglected by his mother and disdained by his father, who called his beloved nanny “Woom”? This extraordinarily literary—that is, constructed—quality to Churchill’s life helps explain its deep resonance in the public mind. Literary flourishes are not historical facts, and yet the mind seizes on them; and somehow that Churchill loved whiskey or that he wept in public seems to convey as much as a chapter from his official biography. Real life is often less real than fiction, but the facts of Churchill’s life penetrate with all the intensity of an allegory.

  There is something melodramatic—legendary—fantastic about Churchill, a figure galloping out of the past. Even his name has a Dickensian aptness: sacred and lofty, with decisive, alliterative elements. Can the facts be true? Could he really have been a man who was not only a prominent world statesman but also rode to hounds, fenced, flew airplanes, played polo, owned racehorses, painted, farmed, and collected tropical fish? Who, without a university education, was a celebrated war correspondent, novelist, historian, and biographer—whose books were not only best-sellers but also won their author the Nobel Prize in literature, in the same year, it might be added, he accepted the Order of the Garter? He was the only person to serve in the War Cabinet in both World War I and World War II; he served in the Army, Navy, and Air Force. At Sandhurst, he’d learned how to ride bareback and to mount and dismoun
t a trotting horse. At age seventy, in a shooting contest with General Eisenhower and guards officers, Churchill hit nine shots in the center of a bull’s-eye and one on the fringe.

  The story of Churchill’s life is weighted with heavy-handed dramatic ironies: Churchill’s father raging about his son’s “total worthlessness”; Churchill writing in despair in the 1930s, “My career is a failure; it is finished. There is nothing more to offer”; and on May 21, 1940, just days after Churchill had become Prime Minister, an MP predicting, “Winston won’t last five months! Opposition from Tories is already beginning.” These pronouncements gratify the reader with the thrill of an impending reversal. Other prophecies came true: Harold Nicolson wrote, “He is a man who leads forlorn hopes, and when the hopes of England become forlorn, he will once again be summoned to leadership”; when asked in the late 1930s whether she thought Churchill would ever be Prime Minister, Clementine answered, “No, unless some great disaster were to sweep the country, and no one could wish for that”; on October 24, 1940, Churchill said as people cheered him, “I represent to them something which they whole-heartedly support: the determination to win. For a year or two they will cheer me,” and as it happened, a few years later, those admiring crowds voted him out of office. The pleasure given by Churchill’s story is all the greater, without the distraction of real suspense.

  At the dramatic moments of Churchill’s life, supporting characters also obligingly deliver their lines with cinematic flourish or arrange themselves in symbolical tableaux. After Churchill’s humiliating ejection from office after the Dardanelles debacle, his longtime critic Field Marshal Lord Kitchener pronounced, “There is one thing at any rate they cannot take from you. The Fleet was ready.” Decades later, on August 16, 1939, Churchill visited France’s Maginot line and, in typical Churchill fashion, drove within shouting distance of Nazi troops on the Rhine’s far side. Near them was a sign: EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FüHRER. On the French bank: LIBERTé, éGALITé, FRATERNITé. On May 10, 1940, the day that Churchill would become the wartime Prime Minister, he received the simple note, “His Majesty the King wishes to see you at six P.M.” Ordinary life rarely supplies these climactic moments, but in Churchill’s life, they were commonplace.

  Churchill even spoke like the leading character from a Noël Coward play, as he tossed out witty lines that sound too good to be true. When Lady Astor snapped, “Winston, if I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee,” he retorted, “Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.” In 1939, after reading a memo from Admiral Pound, Churchill expressed his disagreement with a single word—“Pennywise.” He remarked that Ramsey MacDonald possessed “the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought.”

  Churchill biographers—like all biographers—decide their stories and include facts to support them. Someone portraying Churchill as the savior of his country chooses certain facts; someone debunking the Churchill myth chooses others. In deciding what facts to relate—where each detail must stand in for hundreds of omitted details—biographers act like novelists, using theme, irony, motif, metonymy, description, symbolism, morals, and the like to shape a particular image of their subject.

  This shaping is easy, because merely mentioning a fact freights it with meaning: a gesture becomes suggestive, an incident turns symbolic. The telling detail has awesome power. That Churchill wore pale pink silk underwear suggests one view of the man; that he shot several men in the face at close range, another; that he loved butterflies, another. By using these devices, biographers give their subjects the reassuring coherence associated with fiction. Biographers must be accurate, of course, but the very facts that restrict them allow them to invent.

  A biographer with a flair for symbols could exploit the fact that Churchill loved champagne and Hitler hated champagne; or that near the end of World War II, Churchill peed on the Siegfried line; or that he owned an American Indian chief’s feathered warbonnet, bloodstained and hung with scalps. Despite his reverence for Empire, he never visited Australia or New Zealand and never set foot in India after 1898. He opposed allowing television cameras inside Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation ceremony. He enjoyed playing pinball and cheated when he could. He loved gambling, picnics, card games, swimming and turning somersaults in his pool at Chartwell, and driving at high speeds. He bred racehorses and registered under his father’s racing colors, chocolate and pink, and was elected to the Jockey Club. He disliked freshly squeezed orange juice; the smell of wax; the sounds of whistling, cowbells clanging, loud voices, ticking clocks, or telephones ringing. He was so bored by the movie Citizen Kane that he walked out. Churchill rarely went to church, but he did enjoy christenings; he traced his American roots back to two forebears who fought against the British in the Revolutionary War and to an Iroquois woman; the “most overworked word” in his vocabulary, according to his secretary, was “prod.”

  Imagined with the help of fiction’s devices, Churchill sometimes seems less a personality than a personification of a theme: the ancient fighting soul of the British. (It’s true that Churchill is romanticized in memory; he strove to be romanticized.) But he can’t be allowed to dissolve into archetype; it’s more extraordinary that he actually lived. Churchill’s story, remembered in the trappings of art, achieves mythic scale. How could his story be true? Yet it was.

  28

  CHURCHILL’S DESTINY

  How He Saw Himself

  To understand Churchill, we must understand how he viewed himself: a man chosen by Fate to achieve a noble destiny. And while we might scoff at his superstitious egoism, there’s the inescapable fact that, looking at his life, he does appear to have been a man chosen by Fate to achieve a noble destiny. His American mother, his injured shoulder, the rider on the pale horse, the telegram sent by the general, the years in the wilderness, the reckless vow to fight to the end—all played their part.

  For many great figures, the path to success rises gradually upward, as they overcome temporary obstacles to arrive at their peak. Not for Churchill. His jagged career mixed great successes with seemingly insurmountable reverses. Falling from office after the Dardanelles, during the isolation of the wilderness years, after the shocking defeat in 1945—Churchill somehow fought his way back into a public role each time. It was his absolute faith in his great destiny that allowed him to persevere against setbacks that would have defeated most people.

  At the same time that Churchill believed destiny was preserving him to fulfill some historic role, however, he was also haunted by a premonition that he’d die before he could fulfill his ambitions. Asked why he expected to die young, he explained that his father had died at age forty-six. This was a powerful combination for a leader: a sense of invulnerability, of election, and also of burning urgency.

  Trust in his destiny made Churchill fearless. He wrote to his mother in 1897, while he was still in uniform, “I am so conceited I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.” Decades later, he wrote to his wife from the trenches, “Above all don’t be worried about me. If my destiny has not been already accomplished I shall be guarded surely.”

  Churchill can perhaps be excused for his credulity. Even putting aside his survival of the normal risks of the battlefield and of prosaic geriatric health problems, Churchill withstood mortal danger a surprising number of times.

  Twice, in March 1886 and again in 1943, he fought dangerous bouts of pneumonia.

  At age eighteen, playing tag, Churchill jumped from a bridge thirty feet from the ground; he tried to grab a treetop but fell. He ruptured his kidney, was unconscious for three days, and received a spine injury that gave him a slight stoop for the rest of his life.

  Only a few months later, he nearly drowned during a holiday in Switzerland.

  In 1899, aged twenty-five, he helped to rescue an armored train under attack by enemy fire and was captured by the Boers. He soon escaped from the war camp and, with a price on his
head, managed to make his way to safety.

  While still in South Africa, he was thrown by his bolting horse as Boer riflemen drew near. A mounted British scout on a pale horse appeared just in time—“Death in Revelation, but life to me!”—and Churchill mounted up beside him and rode to safety.

  Not long after, as a commissioned officer disguised in civilian clothes, he carried an urgent military report through Johannesburg. If he’d been stopped and searched, he’d have been shot where he stood.

  Just a week after arriving at the front in 1915, Churchill received a telegram from a general requesting a meeting. When Churchill returned after walking for miles in the mud, angry because the meeting hadn’t actually taken place, he learned that his shelter had been destroyed by a shell five minutes after he’d left it.

  Characteristically eager to tackle any challenge, Churchill took up flying and survived several near misses in early airplanes. One plane caught fire; another flipped after takeoff; another crashed after the guiding stick failed. He finally ended his lessons after a crash landing seriously injured his flight instructor.

  At age fifty-seven, in 1931, he suffered serious injuries after being hit by a car on Fifth Avenue, in New York City.

  Brushes with death never cowed Churchill. When a sniper shot at him during a 1944 visit to Greece, Churchill’s reaction was to exclaim, “Cheek!”