In a profound sense, he himself always remained the underdog. All his life he suffered spells of depression, sinking into the brooding depths of melancholia, an emotional state which, though little understood, resembles the passing sadness of the normal man as a malignancy resembles a canker sore. The depressive knows what Dante knew: that hell is an endless, hopeless conversation with oneself. Every day he chisels his way through time, praying for relief. The etiology of the disease is complex, but is thought to include family history, childhood influences, biological deficiencies, and—particularly among those of aggressive temperament—feelings of intense hostility which the victim, lacking other targets, turns inward upon himself. Having chosen to be macho, Churchill became the pugnacious, assertive fighter ready to cock a snook at anyone who got in his way. That was why he began carrying a Bren gun in his car when he became prime minister, then took bayonet lessons, and insisted that his lifeboat on the wartime Queen Mary be equipped with a mounted machine gun. But in peacetime he often lacked adequate outlets for his aggression. The deep reservoir of vehemence he carried within him backed up, and he was plunged into fathomless gloom.
Depression is common among the great; it may balance their moods of omnipotence. Among its sufferers have been Goethe, Lincoln, Bismarck, Schumann, Tolstoy, Robert E. Lee, and Martin Luther. To these should be added Churchill’s father and five of the seven dukes of Marlborough, his ancestors, for it should be remembered that genes, too, play a depressive role. The personality traits are unmistakable; it is impossible to imagine Franklin Roosevelt offering blood, toil, tears, and sweat, but the expression would have come naturally from Lincoln. We first encounter Churchill’s awareness of his illness in a letter, written when he was twenty, complaining of “mental stagnation” and a “slough of despond.” The note is sounded again in his second book, a novel. The hero drops into a chair and asks himself: “Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what?” Later, “a sense of weariness, of disgust with struggling, of desire for peace filled [the hero’s] soul. The object for which he had toiled so long was now nearly attained and it seemed of little worth.” An echo of this is heard more than a half-century later. It was Churchill’s birthday. Glasses were raised to honor his accomplishments. He muttered to his daughters Diana and Sarah: “I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end.”28
“What a creature of strange moods he is,” Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, wrote, “always at the top of the wheel of confidence or at the bottom of an intense depression.” In times of disappointment, rejection, or bereavement, feelings of hopelessness overwhelmed him. Thoughts of self-destruction were never far away. He told his doctor: “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything.” He also disliked sleeping near a balcony. He explained: “I’ve no desire to quit this world, but thoughts, desperate thoughts, come into the head.”29
To a remarkable degree he coped successfully with “Black Dog,” as he called his depressive spells. He sought flamboyant, stimulating, zestful company. He avoided hospitals. And like Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, he found solace in incessant activity. He told Violet Asquith* that unless he was perpetually active he relapsed into “dark moments of impatience and frustration.” Sir George Riddell wrote in his diary in January 1915 that Churchill “is one of the most industrious men I have ever known. He is like a wonderful piece of machinery with a flywheel which occasionally makes unexpected movements.” He would tell his family, “A change is as good as a rest,” and then set about laying bricks at Chartwell or painting landscapes at Marrakesh. After the Dardanelles he crossed into France, fought in the trenches as a battalion commander, and set up his easel just behind the front line. And he always pursued acclaim. Depressives, more than most people, are dependent upon external sources of self-esteem. Churchill was never bashful about soliciting applause. As a youth, mailing a manuscript to his mother, he sought from her what she had not given him in childhood. He wrote: “Write to me at great length about the book and be nice about it. Don’t say what you think, but what I… should like you to think.” If friends suggested that this book or that speech might be improved, he reproached them: “You are not on my side.” He expected total, uncritical loyalty. And he reciprocated. Brendan Bracken, one of the few who stood by him in the 1930s, said: “He would go to the stake for a friend.”30
Nothing, however, could match the satisfaction of directing his hostility outward, toward a great antagonist, a figure worthy of massive enmity. But as the years rolled by and he approached old age, the possibilities of finding such an object became remote. The strain began to tell. Anthony Storr writes: “In day-to-day existence, antagonists are not wicked enough, and depressives suffer from pangs of conscience about their own hostility.”31 Then Churchill’s prospects were dramatically altered. Adolf Hitler entered his life. It would be fatuous to suggest that the Nazi dictator’s only significance for Churchill was as an answer to an emotional longing. Churchill was no warmonger. He was a statesman, a humanitarian, a thinker in cosmic terms; he would have been profoundly grateful if Hitler had strangled on his own venom. But the Führer’s repeated lunges across the borders of peaceful neighboring states did arouse a Churchillian belligerence far beyond the capacity of ordinary men. His basic weakness became his basic strength. Here, at last, was pure evil, a monster who deserved no pity, a tyrant he could claw and maim without admonishment from his scruples. By provoking his titanic wrath, the challenge from central Europe released enormous stores of long-suppressed vitality within him. In the beginning Hitler responded in kind. He, too, was a hoarder of rage, and he was a great hater. He may have felt that Britain’s prime minister met an ache in him, too. As it turned out, he needed Churchill the way a murderer needs a noose.
Hitler’s archenemy was not a man of small ego. It is an egalitarian fiction that the great are modest. They haven’t any right to be, and they aren’t. He said to Attlee: “Of course I am an egotist. Where do you get if you aren’t?” In 1940 he believed that he had been destined for the extraordinary role he must now play. He declared to Lord Moran: “This cannot be accident, it must be design. I was kept for this job.” It didn’t surprise him. Determined to prove himself unworthy of parental neglect, he had lived much of his life in a world of fantasy centered on the conviction that something special lay ahead for him. He wasn’t vain; merely self-centered. As a young war correspondent in the midst of combat he called to the soldiers around him: “Keep cool, men! This will make great copy for my paper!” Later, he liked to lie in bed listening to recordings of his speeches. Once he and his valet had words. Afterward Churchill rumbled: “You were rude.” His manservant, forgetting his station, said, “You were rude, too.” Churchill pouted. After a moment he said: “But I am a great man.” His idea of a good dinner, he said, was to dine well and then “to discuss a good topic—with myself as chief conversationalist.” After one meal his son, Randolph, was trying to make a point. Churchill broke in with a comment of his own. Randolph tried to pick up the thread of his argument. His father barked: “Don’t interrupt me when I am interrupting!” In 1945, after the collapse of the Third Reich and his electoral defeat, he said: “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”32
Some of the most moving passages in his historical accounts pay tribute to England’s common man, but he never really understood his constituents’ minds, and in fact he didn’t much care. During one campaign he described his audience as “a sea of hard little hats on hard little heads.” Lloyd George, who cared very much about the voters’ dreams, was saturated with class consciousness; Churchill, as Attlee onc
e observed, would have been content in a feudal society. He never grasped the revolution of rising expectations in the Birmingham mills and the bazaars of New Delhi. He thought Labour unfit to govern, and his early appeals for laborers’ votes were almost absurd in their condescension. (In 1900 he told them: “I like the British working man and so did my father before me.”) This insensitivity is one explanation for the periodic eclipse of his political fortunes. It is indeed singular that a man so remote from commonality, so completely out of touch with his times, could have become a national hero. Eventually he became beloved for his courage, his humor, his bulldog image, and such touches as his V-for-Victory sign, his ritualistic circumcision of cigars, and his deliberate mispronunciation of Nazis—it came out of the Churchill euphonium as “Nahrzees.” But he never mastered the British political mood. Instead, he repeatedly misjudged it. Except in national emergencies, at the hour of fate or the crack of doom, he was largely ignored. People didn’t identify with him because he never reciprocated.33
In his personal life he was the complete patrician. F. E. Smith said: “Winston is a man of simple tastes. He is always prepared to put up with the best of everything.” Churchill’s wife, Clementine, told Lord Moran that at home “Winston is a pasha.” If no servant responded when he clapped his hands upon entering the house, he would immediately call for his valet. The valet dressed him right down to the pulling on of his socks, and ran his bath—twice a day—almost to the brim, at a precise temperature. Churchill’s nanny had begun ministering to him; she had been succeeded by his manservants, batman, wife, secretaries, footmen, doctors, and attendants. He was inconsiderate of them; impatient, arrogant, unfeeling. Why did they put up with it? Dr. Storr suggests that “men who demand and need a great deal of attention from others are manifesting a kind of childlike helplessness, which evokes an appropriate response, however difficult they may be.” Churchill could be very difficult. When a plane was preparing to land and the NO SMOKING sign flashed on, he would light up a cigar. If he found himself driving in a traffic jam, he wheeled his car out on the shoulder or sidewalk and drove to the head of the line. He rarely traveled with fewer than sixteen pieces of matched baggage. Once, according to Vincent Sheean, he arrived by himself at Maxine Elliott’s Riviera villa and told her: “My dear Maxine, you have no idea how easy it is to travel without a servant. I came here all the way from London alone and it was quite simple.” She murmured: “Winston, how brave of you.”34
Reminiscing, he once said: “I was not twenty at the time of the Cuban War, and was only a Second Lieutenant, but I was taken to an inspection at West Point and treated as if I had been a General. I was brought up in that state of civilization when it was everywhere accepted that men are born unequal.” This explains, in foreign affairs, the ferocity of his attacks on bolshevism well into the 1920s, long after his intransigence had become embarrassing to the government, and in domestic politics it accounts for his distrust of Labour. Late in life he read that Christopher Mayhew, one of Attlee’s junior ministers, had walked out during the arena scene in the film Quo Vadis. Winston ordered the picture screened at Chartwell and intently watched the scenes of mayhem in the arena. After it was over, he rose and told his family: “Do you know why Mr. Mayhew walked out? It was because his socialist, egalitarian principles were outraged. There was one poor lion who hadn’t got a Christian.”35
But if Churchill’s blind spots are often attributable to his aristocratic heritage, so are many of his successes. His career would have been impossible without preferential treatment. His name, not academic competence, got him through Harrow and Sandhurst. Then his mother, finally taking an interest in his affairs, began pulling strings for him. There were a great many available to her. She had been intimate with many influential men in America, on the Continent, in the British establishment; even in the royal family. Theoretically, her son was subject to army discipline in his youth. Actually, he moved around the world as he pleased. There is a stunning line in his book The River War: “With the design of thereafter writing this account, I moved to a point on the ridge which afforded a view of both armies.” Here are two mighty forces preparing to do battle, and here is a lowly subaltern riding off to get the best perspective. A fellow war correspondent in South Africa pointed out that Churchill had the assurance, arrogance, and bravado that one found in the British ruling classes, “the conviction that he belongs to the best group in the world.” He never doubted it. Nor did his mother. In 1900 other Englishwomen yearned to see their sons, off fighting the Boers. Jennie Churchill simply outfitted a hospital ship and sailed down to Cape Town to see how Winston was doing.36
She didn’t pay for the vessel herself. She raised the funds by subscription. Her name wasn’t even among the subscribers’. She couldn’t afford it. She was always just a jump ahead of her creditors. So, for most of his life, was her son. To be sure, neither of them ever came close to a soup kitchen. Winston often complained of being broke, but that did not mean to him what it meant to most of his countrymen. He had expensive tastes, and he always indulged them. Consequently, he was often short of funds. In the desperate 1930s he was reduced to writing, for Collier’s and other popular magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, such pieces as “The American Mind and Ours,” “Is There Life on the Moon?” and “Under the Microscope.” (His most striking idea was an article to be titled “Will There Be a Woman Prime Minister?” Editors vetoed it on the ground that it was too fantastic.) He would ask editors for payment, “if possible, by Monday morning.” Six months before Munich, when he was waiting in the wings to stride out on the stage of history, he was so deep in red ink that he contemplated resigning from Parliament. He—and all he represented—was saved only when a wealthy friend settled his debts. On August 31, 1939, he wrote his publisher, “I am, as you know, concentrating every minute of my spare life and strength upon completing our contract. These distractions are trying.” The distractions were German troop movements along the Reich’s eastern border. That night, as he stood at his high desk in Chartwell, correcting proofs, Hitler invaded Poland.37
At Harrow he had first learned that he had a remarkable memory. Aged thirteen, he recited, without a slip, the twelve hundred lines of Macaulay’s Lays of Rome. And once he had committed something to memory, he rarely forgot it. In the autumn of his life he quoted verses he had read in Punch as a boy. Riding through the Maryland countryside, during World War II, he declaimed the whole of Whittier’s “Barbara Frietchie.” In 1953, after he had suffered a stroke, he recited the thirty-four lines of Longfellow’s “King Robert of Sicily,” which he had last read fifty years earlier, while his doctor followed the text. Moran found that “here and there he got a word wrong: priests became monks and lamps candles; perhaps half a dozen words out of three hundred and fifty.” This writer met him that same year—my stateroom was next to his suite on the Queen Mary—and when he learned that I was a fledgling foreign correspondent on my way to Egypt and India, he reeled off amazingly detailed accounts of his own experiences as a correspondent there in the 1890s. At about the same time he asked Sir David Hunt: “Can you look up the exact words of this quotation from Aristophanes: ‘The qualities required for writing tragedy and comedy are the same, and a tragic genius must also be a comic genius’?” Hunt told him he must mean Aristotle. Churchill indignantly denied it. “Light began to dawn,” Hunt recalls. He checked the Loeb Classical Library in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 and found the line at the end of the Symposium, in Plato’s imaginary dialogue with Aristophanes. Awed, he asked the prime minister how recently he had read it. In Bangalore, Churchill said, in 1896. Hunt notes: “He was then twenty-two; at the time he recalled these words with perfect accuracy he was seventy-eight.” Hunt was among those who suffered through the showing of Quo Vadis but thought it worth it when, later that evening, Churchill recited the entire fourteenth chapter of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. That, too, had been among the books he had read at Bangalore.38
He had also dis
covered at Harrow that he had a flair for the language. Although rated the stupidest boy in the school, he scribbled off essays for classmates who had difficulty writing. His later years as a newspaperman, and his early books, showed him that he could make a good living with his pen. His work was not universally admired; in English Prose Style, published in 1928, the eminent Oxford literary critic Sir Herbert Read declared that it revealed “aggrandisation of the self,” that “such eloquence is false because it is artificial… the images are stale, the metaphors violent,” and that a typical passage “exhales a false dramatic atmosphere… a volley of rhetorical imperatives.” But Churchill wasn’t writing for critics. He was addressing the world, and to that end he had fashioned a soaring, resonant style, sparkling with eighteenth-century phrases, derivative of Gibbon, Johnson, Macaulay, and Thomas Peacock, throbbing with classical echoes of Demosthenes and Cicero, but uniquely his own. It is impossible to imagine him employing a ghost writer. No one but Churchill could write Churchillian prose. The stamp of the man is on everything he wrote or uttered, whether pondering the lessons of the past (“the grievous inquest of history”), or describing Roosevelt’s polio (“his lower limbs refused their office”), or those who feigned contempt for public affairs because they dared not commit themselves (“flaccid sea anemones of virtue who can hardly wobble an antenna in the waters of negativity”). It made Sir Herbert wince, but its author won the Nobel Prize in literature.39