January 17, 2009

A Harmony of Interests, Explorations in the Mind of Winston Churchill

by Manfred Weidhorn
Precis by the Author
Finest Hour 77

(NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992, 192 pages with notes, bibliography and index)

There is no end to the writing of books about Sir Winston Churchill. The potential reader of a new tome on the subject has every right to ask what could possibly be said that is new. The man led, to be sure, an extremely long, varied, and exciting life; he amassed as many experiences and achievements as it would take a dozen merely talented individuals to do. Still, the number of volumes about him has been proportionally high.

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What may justify this book is that it does not fit into any of the categories to which the other works of Churchilliana belong. It is not a biography, a chronological survey of his plans and deeds. It is not a book of memoirs or a collection of reports from individuals who either knew him intimately or whom he brushed by on his numerous rendezvous with history. It is not a monograph on one facet of his personality, such as his relations with the Irish or the Jews, or on his performance at the Admiralty in World War I or at the helm in World War II. It is not a study of his writings – neither a chronological one which records the changes in his outlook during various personal and historical phases, nor a synoptic one which collates his abiding themes, regardless of the niceties of chronology.

It is, rather, a study of his sensibility, an attempt to portray the ineffable mental processes at the border of thought and feeling, through a scrutiny of Churchill’s written and spoken words, as well as of the inferences drawn by acquaintances, critics, and historians. The operations of a unified imagination are traced in his ideas about politics, warmaking, international relations.

Since Churchill was as much as professional writer with awesome accomplishments in print as he was a perdurable politician and statesman, I begin at the juncture of literature and politics. His writing and speaking careers, his sensitivity to the resonance of names, words, and phrases, his proficiency in the forging of powerful sentences, images, witticisms, and his production of a large number of multi-volumed works placed him in the company of literary artists, literally as well as figuratively. The subject of his relations with the literary eminences of his age – and his age stretches from late Victorian to neo-Elizabethan, encompassing some two or three generations – has been scarcely broached. Of special interest are his relations with the literary quartet – Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw – that dominated British letters in the first
decades of the century.

Since the discussion of his literary tastes inevitably touches on his politics, the second chapter examines Churchill’s conservatism, a topic which is, unlike that of the first chapter, all too familiar. My aim is to show that by ignoring chronology and by making distinctions among different fields of interest, one comes up with something other than the conventional answers.

No delineation of Churchill’s political sensibility and of the vagaries of his putative conservatism can avoid becoming bogged down in the quagmire of his apparent love of war. Everyone has noticed that there was something curious in his attitude to combat, and nearly everyone, depending on his own disposition and ideology, has praised or blamed him accordingly. No one has, however, tried to bring together virtually all the relevant facts and anomalies lying about in the historical and biographical records. The subject requires such treatment because on it turns nothing less than one’s reading of human nature and one’s definition of civilization.

Churchill’s obsession with war and warmaking crystallized in his lifelong interest in his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough. Though he had had, after all, more peaceable ancestors, he was fascinated by John Churchill because he was fascinated by war, and vice versa. That that interest should tie the biography he wrote about Marlborough to his own world war memoirs, written both before and after the biography; that the eighteenth century career should in some way be – or seem to be – duplicated in the twentieth century; that pipe dreaming should become indistinguishable from prophecy; that history writing should look forward as well as back, in a personal fashion – all these notions are touched on by the obiter dicta of students of his career, but no one has until now worked out the eerie parallels in chapter and verse and their psychological ramifications. At issue here are the inmost stirrings of the soul. Although the man himself was probably only half-aware of these, the parallels are none the less real. That Churchill was destined to be a Marlborough – or doomed to try in vain to emulate the Duke – was something that haunted his imagination; it also sometimes inspired, and more often irritated, his contemporaries.

If Churchill was highly conscious of being the descendant of Marlborough, he was hardly any less aware of being the son of an American mother and of having a mother’s land as well as a fatherland. No exploration of his psyche can be complete that does not include his thoughts about America and about the Anglo-American mystique and that does not see these as being as important as his ventures into the literary forum, his ambiguous conservatism, his ambivalence toward war, and his Marlborough connection. The large subject of Churchill and America is in fact the subject of two books, but one is an anthology of quotations and the other is an anecdotal chronicle. This is the first systematic attempt to define his ideas and to place them in the historical context.

The sense of uniqueness which comes from being, as few Englishmen are, a descendant of Marlborough and a semi-American, as well as from being the son of Lord Randolph and someone who seemed called upon to play a special role on the stage of history abetted those archaic tendencies in Churchill which were inclined to see history as shaped by Great Men. Yet his thoughts on the subject were buffeted by the winds of experience, and a survey of Churchill’s changes of mind on this problem in the philosophy of history makes for an interesting study of the interplay of theory and experience and traces the impact of twentieth-century events on one’s sensibility.

These circumstances and influences interweave. Because of his ineptness at classics, he was made to learn English instead, gaining along the way a mastery of his native tongue and a love of its literary heritage. His enjoyment of toy soldiers and his mediocre school record closed off all careers for someone of his circle except the military one. His proficiency in writing now fused with his prowess as a soldier and brought him fame as warrior and writer. This success in turn combined with his aristocratic origins to ease the entry into politics, and those origins kept the ship of his political thought tilting to the right even when veering to the left during the most radical storms. The coming of large wars meshed with his Marlborough roots and his perennial interest in combat. The informal British alliance with America in two world wars endowed the son of a Brooklyn-born woman with a sense of special mission and a personal pride. And through it all, the writer produced a stream of essays and books, making literature, studying it (albeit fitfully and selectively), and pronouncing on it, at least when it touched on politics and history. Literature, conservatism, war, Marlborough, America, the Great Man – he who undertook to know Churchill and who knew his thoughts on only these topics will have encompassed most of his project. For this “harmony of interests” (Churchill’s phrase) formed his own peculiar song, or set of songs.