Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill Read online

  1. True / False

  Churchill was a polo champion.

  2. True / False

  Churchill was a fencing champion.

  3. True / False

  Churchill owned a champion racehorse.

  4. True / False

  As a youth, Churchill hounded his mother for money.

  5. True / False

  As a youth, Churchill paid for his former nanny’s funeral and the upkeep of her grave.

  6. True / False

  At age twenty-seven, Churchill was one of the world’s highest-paid newspaper reporters.

  7. True / False

  Churchill was offered £10,000 to write a screenplay.

  8. True / False

  When Churchill was captured by the Boers in 1899, it was General Louis Botha, leader of the Commandos and later South Africa’s first Prime Minister, who took him prisoner.

  9. True / False

  Churchill’s mother married a man sixteen days older than her son.

  10. True / False

  Churchill’s mother married a man three years younger than her son.

  11. True / False

  Churchill never attended a university.

  12. True / False

  Churchill won the Nobel Prize in literature.

  13. True / False

  Churchill didn’t see Hamlet until he was in his late seventies.

  14. True / False

  Churchill altered his war memoirs to avoid antagonizing President Eisenhower.

  15. True / False

  Churchill was a Freemason.

  16. True / False

  After being blackballed at an exclusive club, Churchill founded his own.

  17. True / False

  Out of superstition, Churchill insisted that a champagne bottle be passed to the left around a table.

  18. True / False

  Churchill had a daughter who died as a child.

  19. True / False

  Churchill had a daughter who became a chorus girl.

  20. True / False

  Churchill had a daughter who committed suicide.

  21. True / False

  Churchill’s great-granddaughter was one of Princess Diana’s wedding attendants.

  22. True / False

  Churchill’s family nickname was “Pig.”

  23. True / False

  Clementine once threw a bowl of spinach at her husband’s head.

  24. True / False

  Clementine once wrote a Prime Minister to beg him to find Winston a place in the government.

  25. True / False

  Clementine once sold a necklace to pay household expenses.

  26. True / False

  When Clementine learned that Winston had been injured, she rushed to the hospital without putting on her shoes.

  27. True / False

  When Churchill returned in 1939 as First Lord of the Admiralty, a message flashed out to all ships: “Winston is back.”

  28. True / False

  Churchill was dressed each day by a valet.

  29. True / False

  Churchill wore pale pink silk underwear.

  30. True / False

  Churchill was accused of homosexual misconduct.

  31. True / False

  One of Churchill’s closest associates was an effeminate aesthete.

  32. True / False

  Churchill was rumored to have an illegitimate child.

  33. True / False

  Churchill was accused of accepting a bribe.

  34. True / False

  Churchill hated paper clips.

  35. True / False

  Churchill demanded that the British civil service substitute “Yes” for “The answer is in the affirmative” in official communications.

  36. True / False

  When reports indicated that Germany was preparing to bomb Coventry, Churchill refused to jeopardize intelligence sources by sending aid.

  37. True / False

  Churchill supported the policy of bombing German civilians.

  38. True / False

  Churchill preferred white wine to red wine.

  39. True / False

  At a conference in Egypt, Churchill wanted Egyptians excluded from his hotel.

  40. True / False

  Churchill sent £2 each month for fifty years to a former Indian servant.

  41. True / False

  Churchill refused the offer of a dukedom.

  42. True / False

  As First Lord in 1940, Churchill traveled with a suicide pill in his pen in case of capture.

  43. True / False

  Churchill pioneered the concept and development of the tank.

  44. True / False

  Churchill pioneered the concept and development of floating landing harbors.

  45. True / False

  Churchill pioneered the establishment of the British Air Force.

  46. True / False

  Churchill worked to ensure that Air Force officers were drawn from the social elite.

  47. True / False

  Churchill once traveled on a holiday with eight hundred pounds of luggage.

  48. True / False

  Churchill was the savior of his country. Churchill made the following statements:

  49. True / False

  “I have a keen aboriginal desire to kill several of these odious dervishes.”

  50. True / False

  “I do not care so much for the principles I advocate as for the impression which my words produce and the reputation they give me.”

  51. True / False

  “No one can travel even for a little while among the Kikuyu tribes without acquiring a liking for these light-hearted, tractable, if brutish children, or without feeling that they are capable of being instructed and raised from their present degradation.”

  52. True / False

  “I only wish I were more worthy of you, and more able to meet the inner needs of your soul.”

  53. True / False

  “We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”

  54. True / False

  Of the Navy: “Traditions! What traditions? Rum, sodomy—and the lash!”

  55. True / False

  “I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment, and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second I live.”

  56. True / False

  “As to freedom of the press, why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”

  57. True / False

  “A universal suffrage electorate with a majority of women voters will have shown themselves incapable of preserving those forms of government under which our country has grown great.”

  58. True / False

  “It is said that famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood.”

  59. True / False

  “India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”

  60. True / False

  “Thus the world lives on hopes that the worst is over, and that we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”

  61. True / False

  “The greatest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine.”

  62. True / False

  “Kindly remember I am Winston Churchill. Tell the station master to stop the train.”

  63. True / False

  “We have now reached the dawn of what is called the sixteenth century, which means all the years in the hundred years that begin with fifteen.”

  Answers: All true, except for 8, 27, 36, 54, and 61. These well-known Churchill stories are apocryphal.

  36

  THE TRAGEDY OF WINSTON CHURCHILL, ENGLISHM
AN

  The Meaning of His Life

  Within Churchill’s ordinary human existence—an epigram thrown off during debate, a hernia operation, a whiskey before lunch—a spontaneous work of art reveals itself. For when we consider his life in literary, rather than human, terms, we see that it measures up to the strictest standards of composition, those required by tragedy. His biography is like a Greek drama made of facts literally true.

  While it might seem that imposing the literary construction of tragedy on his life would obscure its truth, it is the devices of art that plunge the mind into reality. It is the presence of this hidden, formal beauty diffused through the record of facts that distinguishes Churchill’s life from the lives of other great figures; it gives his story a fatefulness, and a transcendent power, almost never found in real life.

  Pliny wrote, “Of all the blessings given to man by nature none is greater than a timely death.” Had Churchill died at the end of the war, he’d have died a hero. He’d been voted out of office, but no one denied that he’d played a matchless part. The world loaded him with honors and adulation.

  But for two long decades after the war, he watched as the Empire dwindled, as Britain turned Socialist, as the Soviets dropped their iron curtain across Europe. This long anticlimax crowned Churchill as another kind of hero—a tragic hero, who enacted, in his individual life, a tragic drama of such pure and perfect construction as to stagger belief in its reality. He wasn’t the kind of tragic hero who appears in newspaper headlines (MAILMAN DIES IN TRAGIC FIRE) but one who meets the rigorous formal test of the most exacting, and traditionally the most exalted, of all literary forms: tragedy.

  After twenty-five hundred years, tragedy remains clouded in mystery. What, precisely, are its elements? Why does tragedy exhilarate us with the spectacle of suffering? Is modern tragedy possible? And how could Winston Churchill, in his actual, day-to-day life, personify a tragedy?

  In its essentials, tragedy demands a hero who commands our attention and goodwill. Usually, though not necessarily, this figure has high rank and intellectual depth. A tragic hero comes into his fate at a time of change—in a melancholy twilight when one world is dying (and with it, the old ways and values) and another, rising.

  The hero is brought to disaster by some hamartia (“error,” “flaw”), a willful pride or obsession that brings about his downfall. Often, this flaw takes the form of hubris (“insolence,” “pride”). The hero’s hubris deceives him; knowing himself to be strong, he believes he can overcome any obstacle and hurtles himself toward destruction. In his overweening commitment to a single purpose, he fails to understand the true relationship between himself and . . . what? The gods, fortune, destiny, necessity, binding obligation, inevitability, history, eternal nature, laws beyond human understanding. And yet, despite this flaw, a tragic hero exhibits a greatness of spirit, a force or sensitivity or representativeness, that enthralls us.

  The tragic hero is driven, with an uncompromising will, to achieve an urgent and significant purpose. The actions taken in fulfillment of that purpose—and this is tragedy’s fearsome crux—necessarily and inevitably condemn the hero to suffer. Here is the formal perfection of tragedy: doom waits from the first moments of the hero’s struggle, and the consummation of his purpose fulfills his pitiful destiny. King Lear demands to learn how much his daughters love him . . . and he does.

  The tragic hero’s high position and power heighten the pity and fear roused by his downfall; his worldly and spiritual powers allow him to fight more tenaciously and, in defeat, to suffer more deeply. Tragedy is larger than life, to rouse our emotions.

  Rarely does actual life attain the clarity and inevitability of literature—especially that of tragedy, a form that exists on the high plane of symbol and archetype. Churchill’s life does.

  Churchill exactly embodies the traditional tragic hero: aristocratic, eloquent, and in high office not by inheritance but by having seized supreme powers. His language was princely and his tears, noble, because commonplaces wouldn’t express his passions. He lived his life not in private but in public, a commander destined to rule others. He overflowed with energy: a statesman and writer, and also war hero, painter, polo champion, pilot, bricklayer, the head of a family. He was a son searching for his lost father. In his world and time, he knew everyone and was part of everything that happened. Isaiah Berlin described him: “A man larger than life, composed of bigger and simpler elements than ordinary men, a gigantic historical figure during his own lifetime, superhumanly bold, strong, and imaginative . . . a mythical hero who belongs to a legend as much to reality, the largest human being of our time.” And yet his cigars and champagne, his five children and his debts, remind us of his bonds to the physical, the earthly, the actual; he is greater than us, but one of us.

  He compromised with no one in his pursuit of his goal: the advancement of England. Whatever he did, he did for England. Naught shall make us rue, If England to itself do rest but true. “His spirit is indomitable,” noted an associate in 1940, “and even if France and England should be lost, I feel he would carry on the crusade himself with a band of privateers.” Like every tragic figure, Churchill was true to his fault; he held back nothing and refused to surrender. He recognized this quality in himself. In his one novel, Churchill described the character Savrola, his double: “The life he lived was the only one he could ever live; he must go on to the end.”

  As if his story were written for the stage, there was a precise moment, on June 4, 1940, when Churchill called down his tragic destiny: “We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be.” It’s this pronouncement that hurls Churchill into the ranks of tragic heroes. It was then, at the dizzying apex, that his fortune began its inexorable descent. He couldn’t see this, but we can.

  The trap was perfect. (Consider Oedipus or Macbeth, for whom similar traps were laid by prophecy.) Churchill swore to preserve the Empire he loved—we shall go on to the end, he promised; we shall never surrender, whatever the cost may be—and in saving it, he set it speeding toward its demise. The vast expense of the war, as well as the social forces it accelerated, caused Britain to relinquish its supreme position. But had Churchill foreseen that outcome, what would he have done differently? He had to choose and couldn’t choose well. If he’d made a bargain with Hitler, the Empire he loved wouldn’t have survived. All Europe would have been crushed beneath the Nazi boot and Britain reduced to a German satellite—if that. Even if he’d known the cost of his victory, he would never have made a compromise peace with Hitler, or withdrawn from the war once the United States and Soviet Russia had joined, or husbanded resources from the fight to safeguard the Empire’s position after the war. Instead, under Churchill, Britain impoverished itself by spending massively to defend its Empire in the Middle East and Far East—the very Empire Britain would relinquish soon after the war’s end.

  Churchill was lionized as the only man who could have unified England against Hitler, the only man who could have led the fight to victory; and therefore, he made himself the chief architect of the Empire’s undoing. That is the tragic paradox: the hero gets what he wanted, but at a price he never imagined, and he could make no better choice. Churchill’s climactic moment—In all our long history we have never seen a greater day than this—contained the turn of the wheel. He would survive to fight helplessly the consequence of the events he himself had put in motion.

  His bitter destiny attended his very nature and his first hopeful actions. “In great or small station, in Cabinet or in the firing line, alive or dead, my policy is, ‘Fight on.’ ” What was he fighting for? “I have always faithfully served two public causes which, I think, stand supreme—the maintenance of the enduring greatness of Britain and her Empire, and the historical continuity of our Island life.”

  Churchill lost his struggle. “We answered all the tests,” he said. “But it was useless.” A few years before he died, he told his daughters, “I have achieved much to achieve nothing in the end.” He confided
, “In the end it has all been for nothing. . . . The Empire I believed in has gone.” Perhaps the reason he lost the 1945 election is that the British people perceived his relentless will and knew that he was still fighting to save something they knew was already lost, something they didn’t wish to keep.

  The fact of Churchill’s tragedy doesn’t mean it was regrettable that his Empire fell, but even the onlooker who rejoices at its end feels the passion of Churchill’s resolution. The tragedy inheres in his struggle and pain, not in the merit of the object for which he suffered. Would we say to Antigone, Why throw your life away for your dead brother? Would we say to Ahab, Stop hunting the whale and save yourself? We accept the hero’s world and, with it, the hero’s purpose.

  Churchill chose his course. He suffered a defeat within his victory, but that defeat was also a sublime fulfillment. The Empire he believed in had gone. But still, good had won over evil.

  Generally, a tragedy’s resolution makes us feel that the hero’s suffering has restored the world’s disturbed order. Tragedy sends us away comforted; somehow, despite the frightening tumult of our existence, we feel that “life is at bottom indestructibly joyous and powerful,” as Nietzsche described it. This, the stark tragedy of Winston Churchill accomplishes. The very familiarity of his story—with its spectacular rises and falls—deepens the satisfaction it gives; no shock of actual surprise distracts us from the tragic spectacle.

  Churchill’s tragedy exalts us, too, because of the nature of his enemy. No tyrant—though he may have killed, enslaved, or tortured as many or more—horrifies us as Hitler does. Germany had been democratic, highly educated, cultured, prosperous, and ruled by law, and it was Hitler who led the German people’s descent into barbarism. Having risen higher, they fell further. Churchill opposed this threat from its earliest moments. He, and perhaps only he, rose to the level of events. He pledged everything to the fight, and in the end, he gave everything.

  As befits a tragic hero, his tragedy was not private—it was endured in public and engaged a nation. On one hand is the spectacle of a great people, led by their champion, fighting for freedom, until the end. On the other is the immense vision of a mighty Empire sinking: of course it’s true—it must be true—that one of Churchill’s greatest influences was Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.