Post #149: KBO (Churchill)

9 Oct. 2024

“I've lived too long, I'm in the ruck,

I've drunk too deeply of the cup,

I cannot spend, I cannot fuck:

I'm down and out! I'm buggered up!”

—Churchill quoting Pushkin in The Gathering Storm, 2002

     Even by the standards of more colorful times, Winston Churchill’s life stood out. He was born into one of the great houses of Britain, but the title went to his uncle and cousin. The Marlboroughs had a history of producing wastrels; Churchill’s father, whom Winston idolized, was not immune to the family curse, but he seemed to rise above it quite spectacularly for a while, all the way to the second spot in government. He made a bid for the first—Marlborough against Cecil—and lost; then went on to “die by inches in public,” still only in his forties, from tertiary syphilis.

     Winston’s American mother, considered a spectacular beauty at the time, benefited freely from her natural and social advantages. Her son did not see much of his “Morning Star” and adored her from afar. She had other concerns and eventually married twice more, both times men twenty years her junior: first at forty-five again at sixty-four. She must have really been something.

     Churchill’s school record was uneven, to put it charitably, but at least he was remarkably well-behaved by the standards of his social circles. No misdemeanors of note have been reported, and he must have been nearly unique among his peers in saving himself for marriage, as the quaint phrase goes, until thirty-four. To the temptations of the flesh he was largely immune; truly close friendships he had few, if any. (Even the bottled ones, said to have been among his most intimate, were uneven: “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” Truly devoted drinkers do not water down their whiskey as much as Churchill did; but what the romance lacked in depth, he made up for in steadiness. Though he was not often noticeably drunk, he never went far without a glass in his hand.)

     As a cadet he did much better; as a subaltern better still. He developed a keen instinct for where in Britain’s vast Empire to betake himself at the right moment, and he possessed the social connections to make it happen, even if not much else by way of family support. It was not the bloodshed that drew him, needless to say, but the stage for displays of valor and gallantry. Still he did his share of the killing, and it helped his enthusiasm that he was never the one who got hurt (except in accidents, of which he had a few nasty ones, most notably when he got himself run over by a car, on a visit to New York in 1931, after looking the wrong way before crossing Fifth Avenue). War had made his family’s fortune; it served Winston, in the early years especially, by making for excellent copy before a public hungry for romantic tales of jingo glory. He gained the publicity he sought, sold his stories at record rates, and charged top dollars in person, literally, when he earned a thousand bucks a lecture in America—an incredible sum at the turn of his century.

     In the years before 1914, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, he acquired a memorable nickname: “the condottiere.” It was not always meant as a compliment, even when it was said with respect.* Piqued by an admiral who dared to accuse him, at a strategy meeting in 1913, of impugning the traditions of the Royal Navy, he shot back, “And what are they, pray tell? Rum, sodomy, and the lash!” Yet, in all but exceptionally vexed or downcast moods, he celebrated anything that set Britain above all other nations—a point on which he was never in any lasting doubt, any more than about his own unique greatness. Overcompensation, no doubt, from the early years, but always a most pronounced aspect of his character. Throughout his long life, he could be exceedingly charming when he wanted, but no less reliably bumptious and insufferable.**

     His unfailingly imperious and condescending manner did not endear him to others. When FDR, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, first met Churchill in 1918, he pronounced him a “stinker.”*** Much of a like nature, and less complimentary still, must have been said about him over the years, but most of it got edited out of respectable reminiscences in retrospect. By the time battered Britannia was desperate enough to turn to him as her last shield and pillar, Churchill’s contemporaries were willing to make ample allowances: “We are all worms,” he declared, but I am a “glowworm.” Accordingly, he lashed out at his subordinates (almost everyone) for trifling lapses, then “forgave” them eventually, the closest he ever came to apologizing; they forgave him much more. Thus he inspired more respect and affection than love, and presumably would not have had it any other way. Those nearer his social and political position, he honored with his wit or scorched with his scorn, case by case; only Hitler he hated with a passion and contemned supremely. The feeling was mutual.

     When the Great War came in 1914 (meant to be the last, fated to be the first), others saw the lights go out all over Europe. For Winston, the lights came on; he welcomed the news with relish, at least initially.† Though not always so sanguine (or sanguinary), he never quite overcame the excitements and seductions of his “love-affair with war, as Jon Keegan puts it, though he saw its tragedies and horrors as clearly as anyone. Perhaps he summarized it best himself: “Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid…” It was most characteristic of his outlook that when, a sadder and wiser man twenty years later, he was shown footage of what the Anglo-American air-campaign meant on the ground (in June 1943), he was deeply disturbed and disgusted: “Are we beasts?” It was not a thought that could take root, however, or that could get in the way of his praising the great achievements of Bomber Command in public.††

     Churchill earned his lasting fame, his undying glory perchance, by presenting to his people a highly idealized picture of themselves at a time of great peril, when they might easily have become demoralized. Inasmuch as he helped to turn the course of the war and to avert what a Nazi victory would have meant, not only for Britain but for all of Europe, Germany included, and for the rest of the world, we all have cause to be thankful for him. Still it was a highly romanticized image of Brain, bordering on fiction, utterly self-serving and saturated with island conceits from beginning to end. To be sure, he stood firmly on the right side of history, at last; but it could have gone quite differently, nor could it last much longer. If the war against Hitler vindicated his vision, temporarily and with qualifications, Suez buried it for good only a decade later.

     But this is not the place for attempting any grand assessment of a great man, say what one may in his favor or against. The question of his strategic genius, or lack thereof, in both world wars, I leave to others; likewise his complex part in the politics of Britain in the teens and twenties of the young, but already old twentieth century. Let us fast-forward past the Crash of 1929, in which he lost much of the money that he had made so assiduously and copiously by the power of his pen. His position in the Conservative party that he first left in 1904, then rejoined in 1925, had long been a complicated one, his politics always beyond easy classification—except to say that they left much room, in the shifting constellations of the day, for finding himself in one political wilderness or another. He knew something of the bog of despond, both climbing out and sinking back in; so intimate was he with his spells of gloom that he gave them a pet name: his “black dog,” he called them. It was in these moods that he liked to quote Pushkin, and he had plenty of occasion at different stages in his life.

     At the time Hitler took power in 1933, Churchill was far from fashionable—a well-known but marginal figure, considered outdated and passé by many, even an embarrassment by some. A determined few stood by him nonetheless, sometimes from a sense of duty, other times for reasons of their own; either way, his stature grew steadily as his warnings about the Nazi menace, which initially were thought overly alarmist and impolitic, became more and more difficult to refute until, when it was too late, they were altogether unanswerable. Only then, at the very last, was the country ready for its cranky bulldog to start barking orders at Downing Street.

     What Churchill understood so well, and what his life illustrates in such vivid colors (though the principle is just as much at home in humbler settings) is the need, even in a life as rich as his in triumphs, to carry on and “face fate alone” if necessary—or as he liked to put it, to keep buggering on (KBO, see #9). Nobody’s sojourn in this vale of tears can be a charmed one throughout. The storms in Churchill’s times gathered with particular ferocity, and we may hope to be spared their like; but it cannot be all sunshine and love for us either, or for anyone.

     Churchill has been spuriously quoted, on t-shirts and the like, as declaring success to be nothing other than going from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm. It’s an excellent line, and one whose spirit Churchill would certainly have approved, even if there is no evidence that he ever uttered these exact words (#46)—and if he would have immediately added something witty to the effect that enthusiasm too cannot always be counted on. Sometimes to keep going at all, when one’s course looks like one defeat after another, is already success enough, and not to be scoffed at.

     Not many of us, however doggedly we may plod on, will arrive at 10 Downing Street twenty-odd years after being written off as a serious contender, or perhaps never having been considered fully suitable for the job at all, as being too much of a crank. Nor will the culmination of our ambitions mean having to fight a world war, let us hope, or any other kind of shooting war. (The phony kind is a human universal and not to be avoided.)

     For most of us it will be a far less glorious affair, this KBO, not only along the way, but also in its final results: no treasure at all, perhaps, to be found at the end of our rainbows, and certainly no state funeral attended by the Queen against all established tradition. But that is where we might remember how far from glamorous even Churchill’s journey was for much of the way. Had European events not taken such a nasty turn, he might be remembered mostly for his bumptiousness, for Gallipoli, or for the disdain in which he held “that half-naked humbug” (Gandhi) and his cause (Indian independence: a no-starter for Churchill).††† Such a memory would be as unfair to him as the more egregious lionizations are too grandiose.

     Churchill stands undiminished as well for a quieter truth that we would do well to heed even in our humbler stations, unburdened by considerations of how history (rather than a close circle of friends and loved ones) might remember us. We never know what the future may bring, and what its demands might turn out to be (#136). Now things may look one way, perhaps so bleak that they leave little room for optimism or confidence of any kind; still we would be well-advised to keep ourselves in readiness. You cannot force the stars to align for you, but you can give them a chance to do so. If Winston Churchill could go on to become Britain’s greatest prime minister from where things stood for him in 1931, then anything is possible in this world.

     The ancient Greeks made much of this—καιρός (kairós)—awaiting the most opportune or decisive moment. We cannot be sure when it will arise, or what form it will take, or that we would even recognize it, were it to happen. Even so, if the moment finds us ready, it may make all the difference, against all odds. Ask Winston’s ghost, may he rest in peace. Wait and see, then, and keep your powder dry. Keep buggering on!

     (To Lo.)

*”That splendid condottiere at the Admiralty,” in the words of Lord Morley (see Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August, Penguin 2014, p. 104)—but not everyone was equally impressed, and one can hardly miss the note of censure in the noun that the adjective is merely meant to soften, not to override.

**”Insufferably bumptious” was a judgment formed early by Churchill’s peers, and never fully retracted, though much qualified later. John Keegan, with whose slim Penguin Life of Churchill (2002) I just refreshed my leonine impressions, calls Churchill a “strange man” and reprises the bumptiousness theme several times, despite all there is to admire (pp. 45, 70, 92, 148).

***Apparently Churchill was in the habit of prancing about stark naked in his private quarters, and he did the same even while he was a guest at the White House for the first time, in December 1941. When President Roosevelt came knocking at the door of his suite, and was called in presumably, he found the British Prime Minister wearing nothing but a smile, a cigar in one hand and a drink in the other. The flustered American excused himself and made ready to leave, but Churchill would not hear of it: “You see, Mr. President, I have nothing to hide.” Churchill was at his best: the two spoke for an hour. (Robert Schmuhl, Mr. Churchill at the White House, Norton 2024, chapter 1.) What was hidden from the Americans, and even from Churchill himself, was a heart-attack he suffered during that visit, the full seriousness of which his doctor did not disclose out of concern that it might undermine Churchill’s morale (Keegan 154).

†William Manchester, in the second of his lionizing volumes, reports the following about Churchill’s initial reaction to the outbreak of war (p. 10): “In 1914, the diarist Frances Stevenson noted that the outbreak of war found the British cabinet sunk in gloom, whereupon ‘in burst Churchill, radiant, smiling, a cigar in his mouth and satisfaction upon his face. “Well!” he exclaimed, “the deed is done!”’ … Churchill himself wrote to his wife: ‘I am interested, geared-up, and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?’” He certainly saw himself as the champion of “peaceful, careless, anti-militarist Britain” (The Gathering Storm, Houghton Mifflin 1985, p. 6), but it never kept him, in Flanders or anywhere else, from rushing to get his senatorial trench-coat stained with the requisite crimson stripe. Whether it would have changed his mind if the blood had ever been his own, we don’t know. Maybe not.

††The passages in question are on pp. 55, 164, 175, and 187 of Keegan’s book.

†††This has led to much predictable wailing, especially in recent years. What the canonization of Gandhi as the saint of Indian independence (or even “the conscience of the world”) has overshadowed, however, is that he was not only as strange a man as Churchill, but as much a product of the British Empire. He donned his loincloth not as a matter of course, but as a sartorial statement, above his barrister’s suit, so to speak; and he was first introduced even to the Bhagavad Gita (which he came to call “his eternal mother”) by English friends who were studying the Sanskrit text alongside a translation and who assumed, mistakenly, that he was familiar with it (1888–89). This is no more the place to pass judgment on Gandhi than on Churchill; my point here is only that they were both highly complex characters ill-served by the tendency of their devotees to reduce them to more easily managed, but much flatter dimensions.