Churchill’s feeling for the English tongue was sensual, almost erotic; when he coined a phrase he would suck it, rolling it around his palate to extract its full flavor. On first meeting Violet Asquith he told her that words had “a magic and a music” all their own. That was what troubled Lloyd George, another critic of his rhetoric; he protested that to call Mussolini’s conduct in Ethiopia “at once obsolete and reprehensible,” as Winston had, was meaningless. Unchastened, Churchill replied, “Ah, the b’s in those words: ‘obsolete, reprehensible.’ You must pay attention to euphony.” He said, “I like short words and vulgar fractions.” When short words hit hard he used them. Needing military equipment after Dunkirk, he told the United States, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” He did not declare that the Allies had “consented to a coalition” or “agreed to cooperate.” Instead, they had “joined hands.” But on other occasions he did not hesitate to dip into his enormous vocabulary. Once he dictated a note to the Admiralty: “Must we have his lugubrious ingemination of the news of our shipping losses?” At first the sea lords thought his secretary had mistyped “insemination.” Then they consulted the Oxford English Dictionary and found that ingemination means “redundancy.”40
Like all writers, he had his favorite words: unflinching, austere, somber, squalid. He said aircraft, not aeroplane, and airfield, never aerodrome. He also liked to gather his adjectives in squads of four. Bernard Montgomery was “austere, severe, accomplished, tireless”; Joe Chamberlain was “lively, sparkling, insurgent, compulsive.” He would open a speech with a sluggish largo tempo, apparently unsure of himself; then he would pull out his organ’s Grand Swell and the Vox Humana, and the essence of his prose would be revealed; a bold, ponderous, rolling, pealing, easy rhythm, broken by vivid stabbing strokes. It gained force by its participatory character. He himself was part of the great events he described; he could say, with Aeneas, “Quorum pars magna fui.” It is an advantage given to few, and those few have usually bungled it, resorting, among other things, to euphemisms, which Churchill scorned. He derided bureaucrats who called the poor the “lower income group,” or lorries “commercial vehicles,” or homes “accommodation units”—once he astonished the House of Commons by bursting into song: “Accommodation unit, sweet accommodation unit, / There’s no place like accommodation unit.” One of his first acts when he took over as prime minister in 1940 was to change the name of the “Local Defense Volunteers” to the “Home Guard.” Words like adumbrated and coordination do not appear in his work. Of an MP who strung together phrases of jargon, Churchill said: “He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.” Of another, who had been defeated at the polls, he said, “Thank God we’ve seen the last of that Wuthering Height.”41
He loved books and wrote of them: “If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them—peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.” But he hated verbosity. “This paper, by its very length,” he told a cabinet meeting, “defends itself against the risk of being read.” And he despised pedants. A junior civil servant had tortuously reworded a sentence to avoid ending with a preposition. The prime minister scrawled across the page: “This is nonsense up with which I will not put.” His profound knowledge of Latin and Greek was acquired through translations; he had been a miserable classics student. Labour MPs, most of whom lacked public-school educations, objected to classical phrases in the House for the very sensible reason that they couldn’t understand them. During a discussion of this Churchill rose to a point and began, “As to the chairman of this committee, he should be not facile princeps, but primus inter pares, which for the benefit of any…” He paused while the Opposition MPs, anticipating insult, struggled to their feet. Then he broke up the House by continuing, “… for the benefit of any Old Etonians present, I should, if very severely pressed, venture to translate.” His insularity, his feigned ignorance of all foreign tongues, was a source of popularity with the masses and served as antidote to his elitism. He told Jack Seely, later Lord Mottistone, “Jack, when you cross Europe you land at Marsai, spend a night at Lee-on and another in Paree and, crossing by Callay, eventually reach Londres. I land at Marsales, spend a night in Lie-ons, and another in Paris, cross by Calase, and come home to London.” He believed that of all languages, English was incomparably superior. On his tongue, it was.42
Throughout his youth, he once said, “it was my only ambition to be master of the spoken word.” He glittered as a young MP, speaking after elaborate preparation but—like his father before him—without a note. Then one spring evening, in the middle of an address on a trade-union bill, he discovered that he couldn’t recall a word of his peroration. Speechless, he sank down on the bench and buried his head in his hands. Thereafter, when delivering a major speech, he came armed with everything he was going to say, including the pauses and the pretended fumbling for the right phrase in the first few sentences and anticipating “Cheers, ‘Hear, hears,’ ” “Prolonged cheering,” and even “Standing ovation.” He said accurately, “I am not an orator. An orator is spontaneous.” William Hazlitt wrote that the first duty of an orator is to echo back the feelings of his audience. Pitt translated a Latin epigram: “Eloquence is like a flame: it requires fuel to feed it, motion to excite it, and it brightens as it burns.” But Churchill was no echo; he needed neither fuel, motion, nor reflected glow. His speeches were one-way. Their luster owed nothing to his listeners. F. E. Smith said: “Winston has spent the best years of his life writing impromptu speeches.” Many of them were written in the bathtub. Norman McGowan, one of his valets, was surprised on his first day to hear his master’s voice rumbling from the bathroom. He put his head in and asked: “Do you want me?” Churchill rumbled, “I wasn’t talking to you, Norman. I was addressing the House of Commons.” Harold Nicolson congratulated him upon a remark to a small audience, apparently improvised as he left the podium. Churchill snapped, “Improvised be damned! I thought of it this morning in my bath and I wish now I hadn’t wasted it on this little crowd.”43
He estimated that the preparation of a forty-minute speech took between six and eight hours. The actual writing of it wasn’t writing at all, at least not by him. He made his living, he said, “from mouth to hand.” He prowled back and forth in his study, head down, hands clasped behind his back, dictating to a secretary at a typewriter. That became the first of several drafts, the basis for his preliminary revisions. Scissoring and pasting came next. He despised the thump of staplers—the only sound he hated more was whistling—so in fastening pages he used a paper punch and threaded tape through the holes. He called the punch his “klop” or “klopper.” “Bring me my klop,” he would tell a secretary. (There was a memorable day at Chartwell when a new girl left and returned staggering under the weight of Onno Klopp’s fourteen-volume Der Fall des Hauses Stuart.) Eventually, when the address reached its penultimate form, he would add the asides and “RHGs” (Right Honourable Gentlemen), underlining certain sentences, capitalizing others, and spacing the lettering to indicate words which were to be stressed or spoken slowly. In the last stage a special typewriter with large type was wheeled out. The speech was ready to be set down in what the staff called “psalm form” because it looked as though it were being pointed for singing. This is what Churchill would see when he stood in the House, arranged his two pairs of spectacles, and glanced down at the final draft:44
We cannot yet see how deliverance will come
or when it will come.
but nothing is more certain
than tt every trace of Hitler??
?s footsteps,
every strain of his infected
and corroding fingers,
will be sponged and purged
and, if need be, blasted
fr the surface of the earth.
He was never a man for small talk, and during his early, awkward years, the cut and thrust of House debates found him wanting. Painfully aware of this weakness, he blamed it on his lack of a university education, during which such skills would have been developed and honed. His manner, haughty even then, invited merciless attack. Arthur Balfour taunted him: “The Right Honourable Gentleman’s artillery is very powerful but not very mobile.” Slowly Churchill realized that while he was a born writer, he would have to make himself a great parliamentarian. He did it by practicing endlessly in front of mirrors, fashioning ripostes to this or that parry. He would never be comfortable listening to others speak, but over the years he came to relish Question Time in the House. And though his monologues were always more brilliant than his exchanges across the aisle, he developed a wit which has become an authentic part of his legend. It was not always good for him. As Harold Laski pointed out, people were so anxious to remember what he said that they didn’t drive him to defend his positions. Yet we can only be grateful to them for setting down his gibes. He shone and would have shone in any company—Falstaff in Eastcheap, say, or Ben Jonson at the Mermaid, or Johnson and Burke at the Mitre. Watching him build up to a quip was an entertainment in itself. Hugh Massingham recalls: “One always knew it was coming. His own laughter began somewhere in the region of his feet. Then a leg would twitch; the bubble of mirth was slowly rising through the body. The stomach would swell; a shoulder heave. By this time, the audience would also be convulsed, although it had no idea what the joke was going to be. Meanwhile, the bubble had ascended a little further and had reached the face; the lips were as mobile and expressive as a baby’s. The rich, stumbling voice would become even more hesitant. And finally there would be the explosion, the triumphant sentence of ridicule.”45
Like all true wits, he knew the tickling quality of the unexpected. One day in the White House, according to Harry Hopkins, Churchill stepped naked from his bathroom just as Roosevelt was wheeling his chair into the room. This was always happening to him; the maids in his household and at No. 10 had grown accustomed to his nudity. In this case FDR apologized and turned to go, but Churchill held up a detaining hand. He said solemnly: “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the President of the United States.” Before the battle of El Alamein, he summoned General Montgomery and suggested that he study logistics. Montgomery doubted that he should become involved in such technical matters. “After all, you know,” he said, “they say that familiarity breeds contempt.” Churchill replied: “I would like to remind you that without a degree of familiarity we could not breed anything.” On his seventy-fifth birthday a photographer said: “I hope, sir, that I will shoot your picture on your hundredth birthday.” Churchill answered: “I don’t see why not, young man. You look reasonably fit and healthy.” On his eighty-fifth birthday a back-bencher in the House, assuming that Churchill was out of earshot, told the MP beside him: “They say the old man’s getting gaga.” Without turning, Winston said: “Yes, and they say he’s getting deaf, too.”46
More in character, his wit was usually aggressive. Sometimes he chose the rapier. Lady Astor neither gave nor asked for quarter, and she got none from him. At a dinner party she told him: “Winston, if I were your wife I’d poison your soup.” He replied, “Nancy, if I were your husband, I’d drink it.” But he was at his best baiting public men who crossed broadswords with him. It was Churchill who called John Foster Dulles “the only bull who brings his own china shop with him,” and who coined the progression, “dull, duller, Dulles.” The austere Sir Stafford Cripps was a favorite target. In North Africa in World War II the prime minister said: “Here we are, marooned in all these miles of sand—not one blade of grass or drop of water or a flower. How Cripps would love it.” After Cripps gave up smoking cigars, Churchill remarked that he was sorry to hear it: “The cigar was his last contact with humanity.” As leader of the Opposition, Attlee could hardly escape, though the Labour leader, with his strong ego, enjoyed Churchill’s jabs at him. When Attlee was in Moscow, Churchill said of the Labour MPs he had left behind, “When the mouse is away, the cats will play.” He called Attlee “a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” and “a modest man with much to be modest about,” and he drove a sharp needle into Labour policy one day when he met him in the House’s men’s room. Attlee, arriving first, had stepped up to the urinal trough when Churchill strode in on the same mission, glanced at him, and stood at the trough as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill said: “That’s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”47
His niche in history—it is a big one—is secure. And so is his place in our affections. He will be remembered as freedom’s champion in its darkest hour, but he will be cherished as a man. He was a feast of character, a figure emanating parochial grandeur like King David, and he also belonged to that rare species, the cultivated man of action, the engagé intellectual. Attlee said: “Energy and poetry… sum him up.” But nothing sums him up. He was too many people. If ever there was a Renaissance man, he was it. In the age of the specialist, he was the antithesis, our Leonardo. As a writer he was a reporter, novelist, essayist, critic, historian, and biographer. As a statesman he served, before becoming His Majesty’s first magistrate, as minister for the colonies and for trade, home affairs, finance, and all three of the armed forces. Away from his desk he was at various times an airplane pilot, artist, farmer, fencer, hunter, breeder of racehorses, polo player, collector of tropical fish, and shooter of wild animals in Africa. One felt he could do anything. That was why he seemed inevitable in 1940. Bernard Shaw said: “The moment we got a good fright, and had to find a man who could and would do something, we were on our knees to Winston Churchill.”48
It is pointless to expect balance and consistency in genius. Churchill was not made like other men. Among his many traits was a kind of built-in shock absorber which permitted him to survive his repeated defeats and concomitant depressions. Going through his papers one is struck by his resilience, his pounding energy, his volatility, his dogged determination, and his utter lack of humility. He said: “I am not usually accused, even by my friends, of being of a modest or retiring disposition.”49 In the thousands of photographs of his face you will find every expression but one. He never looked apologetic. He had the temperament of a robber baron. As Walter Bagehot said of Palmerston, “His personality was a power.” In World War I John Maynard Keynes singled out as his most striking virtue his intense concentration on the matter at hand—precisely the quality which, in the opinion of William James, identifies men of genius. In games he was a consistent winner. Like his distant cousin Douglas MacArthur, he was satisfied by nothing short of victory.
He was formidable, but he was also cherubic. That was what made him lovable even to those who recoiled from his benevolent despotism. He said, “All babies look like me.” They did, and he looked like, and sometimes acted like, them. He enjoyed a child’s anthropomorphism—finishing a book, he would put it aside and say: “I don’t want to see his face again.” His chief playthings were his seven-inch cigars, Romeo y Julietas and La Aroma de Cubas. Most of the time they were unlit; he liked to chew and suck them anyway, and when an end grew soggy, he would fashion mouthpieces—“bellybandos,” he called them—from paper and glue. Mornings he worked in bed wearing a scarlet and green-dragon silk bed jacket, with papers strewn around him, and his play in the bath was an important part of his daily ritual; on long flights his luggage included a portable canvas bathtub. Dictating, or just puttering around his study, he wore a bright quilted dressing gown, which had been originally designed for a character playing Pooh-Bah in a production of The Mikado, and gold-embroidered slippers bearing his initia
ls, a gift from Lady Diana Cooper. In his Siren Suit, Lady Diana recalls, he looked “exactly like the good little pig building his house with bricks.”50
He was the absolute romantic. His paintings reflect this. There are no monotones—each stroke of his brush added shimmering light and color. And everything he painted or wrote, his very gestures, was invested with emotionalism. “I’ve always been blubbery,” he said. No man wept more easily. His tears flowed at the mention of gallantry in battle, the thought of “invincible knights in olden days,” victims of anti-Semitism, Canadian loyalty to the Empire, the death of George VI, Elizabeth II’s kindnesses toward him, or the name of Franklin Roosevelt—“the best friend Britain ever had.” He never tried to hold back the teardrops because he never knew any inhibitions. In the middle of a 3:00 A.M. wartime conference at Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, his generals took a smoking break. One started playing “The Blue Danube” on a piano, and to their amazement their host, all alone, started waltzing dreamily around the floor. His feelings about his family were laced with sentimentality. His home was an independent kingdom, with its own laws, its own customs, even its own language. “Wow!” one of them would say in greeting another. When Churchill entered the front door he would cry: “Wow! Wow!” and his wife would call back an answering “Wow!” Then the children would rush into his arms and his eyes would mist over. Except when they lived at Chequers, their closest moments were at Chartwell. He tried never to miss a weekend there. It says much for his belief in privilege, and for his staff’s unquestioning acceptance of it, that No. 10 observed two distinct standards at Christmas, 1940. He was asked if the staff would have any time off. He said, “Yes, an hour for divine services.” Then they all applauded as he flourished his V sign and left to spend a working holiday with his family.51