March 24, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 38

Summer Book Number – Living Churchill’s Comfortable, Stylish Life

Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill, by Barry Singer. Abrams Image, hardbound, illus., 240pp., $24.95. Member price (inscribed by the author) $20.

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By Richard M. Langworth

The ignorant lament that there is nothing left to say about Winston Churchill is constantly disproved, vide the avalanche of new books in this issue alone. Every time we think that biography, for example, is passé, a new one comes along with a fresh angle. Here is one by Barry Singer, proprietor of Chartwell Booksellers in New York City, an active writer on the arts, who found a niche and filled it: by explaining just how Churchill lived his comfortable, stylish and on the whole enviable private life.

The biography that intertwines through this book is workaday, accurate and unbiased. Neither a Churchill exponent nor critic, Singer tells us what happened in brisk, readable, factual prose. Take the India Act, for example, WSC’s political bête noir of the early Thirties: Churchill’s “essential forbodings about the Muslim-Hindu violence…did prove prophetic…but failed to comprehend Gandhi’s charismatic appeal.” To his credit and unlike most writers on the subject (with the outstanding exception of Arthur Herman), Singer on Gandhi balances Churchill’s “naked fakir” crack with his final magnanimity, quoting his 1935 remark that Gandhi had gone “very high in my esteem since he stood up for the Untouchables.” Finest Hour has been flogging that point for two decades.

But biography is mere backdrop to what the author is really here to say, which he weaves into the story: nine facets of Churchill that form the essence of “Churchill Style”: Autos, Books, Cigars, Dining, Fashion, Friendships, Home, Imbibing, Pastimes. Notes under these subjects appear chronoligically as interlinear interruptions, set off by inset or colored type.

What more do you need to under- stand the essence of Churchill? All right: Aircraft, Children, Enemies, Foreigners, Hotels, Ships, Watering Holes and Women come to mind. But that would create overlaps and make this a much blowsier book. If any of Singer’s selected subjects interests you, you can’t be without this book. True, Cigars, Dining, Homes and Pastimes have already had ink, and even books of their own—but not so much Autos, Books (those Churchill read as well as his own), Fashion and Pastimes (which carry far beyond oil painting and polo).

Take Autos, for years an interesting, elusive subject for this motoring writer: Mr. Singer has researched all the cars Churchill owned and when—well, perhaps he missed a Vanden Plas or two—and they appear seriatim throughout. I was pleased to see the little Wolseley, which FH 154 said was the last car he was seen in behind the wheel—but Singer reports there were two Wolseleys. You won’t get a lengthy treatise on each motorcar, but at the end you’ll know of all that he owned, and this is more than you’ll learn in any of the thousand-odd books already published about him.

Even subjects you think you know something about are full of interesting tidbits. Take Imbibing: Can you believe Churchill once drank Eau de Vie, “a clear, colorless fruit brandy commonly served as a digestive?” Yech! Or Cigars: Lord Randolph warned Winston against them, yet was himself an “eater” of cigarettes—and so was Winston, until he got to Cuba and took his cure.*

Mention of Lord Randolph reminds us that Singer is never lost for the pithy observation. Describing his “wastrel” letter to Winston, when his son failed to qualify for the Infantry, Randolph said he no longer attached “the slightest weight…to anything you may say about your own acquirements & exploits.” Singer observes cannily: “One might well say that Winston Churchill responded to this letter by spending the rest of his life accruing ‘acquirements & exploits’ and then having his own say about them all.”

This is a fine addition to a Churchill library, one you can read through or browse at leisure—a handsome book full of color illustrations (naturally many fine copies of Churchill first editions) printed on heavy stock by Abrams, who are well known for their art books. And if you buy it from the Member Book Service, the author will gladly sign your copy.

*WSC had one known relapse to cig- arettes. Shortly after his failed attempt to bring Turkey into the war in 1943, a staffer was astonished to find the PM serenely puffing a Turkish coffin nail. Explained Churchill: “These are all I ever got from the Turks.”