The first volume of William Manchester's biography of Winston Spencer
Churchill, "The Last Lion," packed a freighted load in 1983. Subtitled
"Visions of Glory, 1874-1932," it presented his lonely childhood; his
early military and literary exploits in India, Afghanistan and South
Africa; his precocious entry into politics and rapid rise; his equally
rapid fall after the disastrous Dardanelles campaign of World War I; his
abandonment of the Liberal Party; and his resignation from the Tory
leadership over a difference of opinion on granting India a small degree
of sovereignty.
In a second volume, Manchester planned to unleash the whirlwind of Churchill's legendary prime ministership during six years of total war, stage his return to power in 1951 and document his long, aimless decline. Instead, "Alone, 1932-1940" (1989) covered just his eight years as a political pariah, a period when he fulminated against Gandhi, wrote to make ends meet and vainly tried to get England to meet the rising threat of Hitler. Both volumes were masterly narratives, filled with close-ups and unexpectedly revealing historical digressions. But readers were left awaiting the main event, the war foreshadowed in the opening pages of "The Last Lion."
England's new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England's decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. . . . Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue . . . a believer in the supremacy of his race . . . an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people—a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great chunks of bleeding meat. . . . Such a man would be England's last chance.
In London there was such a man.
By the end of "Alone," 1,700 pages later, the stage was set, and Churchill was fidgeting in the wings.
The first two volumes had taken four years apiece, and Manchester had mapped out the third, "Defender of the Realm," in over 100 "clumps." These were oversize pages, scotch-taped with choice quotes from secondary resources and interviews and annotated with handwritten notes, color-coded by theme. Yet having gotten as far as the Battle of Britain, he suddenly found that he was unable to continue. The year after the publication of "Alone," he turned his attention to writing a popular history of the Middle Ages. And then, silence. Finally, in 2001, Manchester publicly admitted that he had lost the ability to finish the grand narrative he had begun so auspiciously. Not long before his death in 2004, he invited a journalist named Paul Reid to complete the work.
Though he signed his letters "Bill," he was always "Mr. Manchester" to me. As long as I can remember, he, his wife and three children were fixtures at our family Thanksgivings (we spent Christmas at their house). This friendship, casual at first, was forged in 1966. That year, Jackie and Robert Kennedy turned against him over the mammoth manuscript of "Death of a President," his authorized account of the events leading to JFK's assassination. The book was held hostage by proliferating demands for petty cuts, and when Jackie filed an injunction against publication, Manchester hid out from the press at our house, just a few doors from his own on High Street in Middletown, Conn.
In the years that followed, hanging shyly around the edges of grown-up dinner parties, I was often his only audience. "All he talks about is himself," I overheard one faculty spouse complain. This was only partly true. He had no small talk. Eschewing the endless round of Wesleyan cocktail parties, he spent entire nights in his office captive to whatever moment or great man in history he was writing about—the Krupp industrial dynasty, Douglas MacArthur and finally Churchill.
I was a student at Cambridge University when, in 1980, he wrote to ask if I would undertake some initial research for what would become "The Last Lion." I immersed myself in Adm. John Fisher's papers at Churchill College, Lady Astor's diaries at the House of Lords, and reams of cabinet papers at the Public Record Office at Kew. I sent him handwritten notes filled with details I found interesting, but I'm not sure he ever used them. My one coup was arranging for him to have a private tour of Churchill's wartime bunker. When the first volume of the biography appeared in 1983, I read in the acknowledgments that he thought me "as reliable as the sturdiest English oak." He would never have said so in person.
Eight years later, not long after "Alone" was published, we worked together again. A publisher had paid him a tidy sum to write the text for a commemorative book on the Magnum photographers. When he was unable to produce an acceptable manuscript, he unhappily signed his name to mine. Later still, I became his editor and tried to get him to pick up his pen again. After nearly agreeing to work with another writer, Manchester changed his mind in the spring of 2002 and asked for a new editor. Not long after that, I left publishing and periodically heard news of him through my parents.
Sir Martin Gilbert, the author of the marmoreal nine-volume authorized biography of Churchill, once decried the "cult" that surrounded the man, one initiated by British wartime propaganda, fanned by Churchill's best-selling memoirs and sustained, it must be said, by William Manchester. Yet in the early days of the war on terror, even Mr. Gilbert fell prey, writing in 2004 that George W. Bush and Tony Blair might "with the passage of time . . . join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill." The leaders of the English-Speaking Peoples (a phrase coined by Churchill) preen themselves on this very possibility, casting themselves as prophets, tarring their political adversaries as appeasers, their military ones as Hitlerian, confident that history will reward their dark percipience and commemorate their wars on behalf of liberty. All follow the Churchillian script.
"Visions of Glory" takes 108 pages to arrive at Churchill's birth: The lengthy 1940 preamble is followed by an even longer prologue that begins not with some illustrious Churchill ancestor but with a "melancholy martinet with spaniel eyes," Gen. Garnet Wolseley. This is a signature Manchester turn, an unexpected narrative diversion that summons an entire world. Wolseley (1833-1913) was shot in the leg in the Second Burmese War, lost an eye to a shell in the Crimea, helped put down the Indian Mutiny of 1857, captured two forts during a set-to with China in 1860, suppressed a Canadian insurrection and led campaigns against Boer guerrillas, Zulus and Ashantis. Like "Clive, Stamford Raffles, Chinese Gordon, Richard Burton and, of course, Cecil Rhodes," Wolseley's life, in Manchester's words, showed "how men of courage and determination could shape the destiny of that noblest achievement of mankind, the Empire." Central to such men's code of valor, he held, was "Last Stand immortality," the forthright embrace of martyrdom when the tide of battle turns.
The British Empire, as Manchester described it, was "a lurching, reeling contraption, riddled with contradictions and inequities," that nonetheless offered countless exotic venues for glory. "Only by understanding the spell of the Empire, particularly the Raj, can one begin to grasp the Churchillian essence." Manchester, like Churchill, had read Thomas Babington Macaulay at an impressionable age. In his memoirs, Churchill described Macaulay as a "prince of literary rogues," a historian who preferred "the tale to the truth." Something similar might be said of Manchester's approach. Though conceding the fashionable distrust of the White Man's Burden, Manchester evoked the bygone glamour of Viceregal lodges, chota pegs and cork-lined topis, of tiger hunts and punkah wallahs, with nearly as much delight as Churchill had. The empire was of course "a stupendous confidence trick," he wrote, but he could not resist adding: "And yet the thing worked."
For those who might ask, "For whom did this 'thing' work?," Manchester would insist that history "can never be put in the dock" and that, before considering the questions raised by the British Empire, "one should clear the mind of cant." This isn't the straightforward stance it appears to be, something we can see clearly now that "Defender of the Realm" has been completed eight years after Manchester's death. For no one was a greater producer of cant, more theatrical a dissembler while purring his innocence, than Winston Churchill. Yet all too often Mr. Reid gives Churchill the last word. "We are all worms," Churchill said, "but I do believe I am a glow worm." A glow worm, fine; an indomitable lion buoying Britain during its darkest days, certainly; but, also, to his Churchillian core, a Diehard, stubbornly clinging to British imperial possessions even when England's fate hung in the balance.
All three volumes of "The Last Lion" rely largely on published diaries, self-serving memoirs, interviews and newspapers rather than deep archival research. Mr. Reid's prose style is more restrained than Manchester's, but, following Manchester's lead, he dutifully includes both the admiring and disparaging remarks of Churchill's colleagues and contemporaries, presenting everyone's take with equanimity. "He was as contradictory as the criticisms leveled against him," we learn, but he was also "as he appeared." In the wake of Pearl Harbor and the disastrous loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse battleships, rashly dispatched without air cover, "overnight [Churchill] embraced carriers with enthusiasm," displaying "his lifelong ability to learn fast." Yet, as Mr. Reid also makes clear, the Japanese had developed carrier tactics years before. He frankly ascribes Churchill's and the Admiralty's shortsightedness to racism. Nonetheless, "although [Churchill] could never bring himself to entirely give up the old, when the facts demanded, he embraced the new . . . almost literally overnight."
Does Churchill seem to be enjoying the war overmuch? Here is his somber quote on its horrors and here is his witticism on its delights. Did Churchill regard the Normandy invasion as one option among many until late in the game or was he committed from the start? "In fact, it was both." Manchester managed to keep the spinning plates of critical judgment aloft by the pure energy of narrative stagecraft, but there is little of that here. Too often what passed as evenhanded evocation of Churchill's contrariness in the first two volumes becomes, in Mr. Reid's attempt at mimicry, evasive or downright incoherent.
"Keep Buggering On" was Churchill's wartime motto, and Mr. Reid complies. To keep the narrative trotting along, he must rush from one crumbling front to another, from secret summits to bibulous dinners, from the 1945 elections that ushered Churchill from power to those that brought him back in 1951. Where Manchester looked for openings to step back and reflect, Mr. Reid appears too much in a hurry or is too overwhelmed to think of changing lenses. When one at last arrives at Churchill's state funeral in January 1965, the scene is nearly perfunctory, and one is left with the sense that the book is missing something vital. Manchester, at least, would have pulled out all 27 stops on the grand organ of St. Paul's Cathedral.
More critically, Mr. Reid seems painfully unaware of postcolonial scholarship on the war. Given Churchill's views on India, this is a missed opportunity. When Mr. Reid does weigh in on Churchill historiography, he chooses instead to replay 1980s-era, Cold War debates over the war's endgame. There is endless second-guessing on the vexed question of who was responsible for the unhappy postwar fate of Eastern Europe. One can't help thinking that Mr. Reid was too dependent on a 30-year-old bibliography and source notes.
For a generation now William Manchester's Churchill has been America's, and with the publication of "Defender of the Realm" we seem to be stuck with it for the foreseeable future (much like that bronze bust on loan to the White House). The publisher of "The Last Lion" is treating its completion as a major event, and the book will doubtless find its way to the best-seller lists. Yet the question of why Manchester stopped writing remains.
The last time I saw him he was confined to bed amid a nest of newspapers, kept company by a cocker spaniel and a Russian nurse. The television was muted: Talking heads mouthed animated opinions on a newly launched war in a former British possession and the looming prospect of another. Manchester was unsettled by Messrs. Bush and Blair's appropriation of Churchill as their standard-bearer. He was a Roosevelt Democrat and a Marine who fought in the Pacific. Further, he had served his literary apprenticeship with H.L. Mencken, that caustic and quintessential American, not Thomas Babington Macaulay.
I like to imagine that, once Manchester began to look closely at the war Churchill waged—the compulsive desire to be at the front and court a violent death, the frenzied outrage at those commanders and senior officers who ignored cabled orders to die for the glory and honor of empire—his heroic vision of Churchill began to falter. Perhaps he realized, as Roosevelt, the Allied command and all of England eventually did, that in the quest for his own last stand, Winston Churchill was fully prepared to bring everyone else down with him.
In a second volume, Manchester planned to unleash the whirlwind of Churchill's legendary prime ministership during six years of total war, stage his return to power in 1951 and document his long, aimless decline. Instead, "Alone, 1932-1940" (1989) covered just his eight years as a political pariah, a period when he fulminated against Gandhi, wrote to make ends meet and vainly tried to get England to meet the rising threat of Hitler. Both volumes were masterly narratives, filled with close-ups and unexpectedly revealing historical digressions. But readers were left awaiting the main event, the war foreshadowed in the opening pages of "The Last Lion."
Defender of the Realm
Beginning like all great epics in medias res, "Visions of Glory" had summoned that fateful hour in 1940 when nearly 220,000 Tommies faced their doom at Dunkirk—England's "greatest crisis since the Norman Conquest." The sublime mood established, Manchester continued in mock Churchillian cadences, describing the call of destiny that Winston Churchill had spent his life waiting for.England's new leader, were he to prevail, would have to stand for everything England's decent, civilized Establishment had rejected. . . . Like Adolf Hitler he would have to be a leader of intuitive genius, a born demagogue . . . a believer in the supremacy of his race . . . an artist who knew how to gather the blazing light of history into his prism and then distort it to his ends, an embodiment of inflexible resolution who could impose his will and his imagination on his people—a great tragedian who understood the appeal of martyrdom and could tell his followers the worst, hurling it to them like great chunks of bleeding meat. . . . Such a man would be England's last chance.
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By the end of "Alone," 1,700 pages later, the stage was set, and Churchill was fidgeting in the wings.
The first two volumes had taken four years apiece, and Manchester had mapped out the third, "Defender of the Realm," in over 100 "clumps." These were oversize pages, scotch-taped with choice quotes from secondary resources and interviews and annotated with handwritten notes, color-coded by theme. Yet having gotten as far as the Battle of Britain, he suddenly found that he was unable to continue. The year after the publication of "Alone," he turned his attention to writing a popular history of the Middle Ages. And then, silence. Finally, in 2001, Manchester publicly admitted that he had lost the ability to finish the grand narrative he had begun so auspiciously. Not long before his death in 2004, he invited a journalist named Paul Reid to complete the work.
Though he signed his letters "Bill," he was always "Mr. Manchester" to me. As long as I can remember, he, his wife and three children were fixtures at our family Thanksgivings (we spent Christmas at their house). This friendship, casual at first, was forged in 1966. That year, Jackie and Robert Kennedy turned against him over the mammoth manuscript of "Death of a President," his authorized account of the events leading to JFK's assassination. The book was held hostage by proliferating demands for petty cuts, and when Jackie filed an injunction against publication, Manchester hid out from the press at our house, just a few doors from his own on High Street in Middletown, Conn.
In the years that followed, hanging shyly around the edges of grown-up dinner parties, I was often his only audience. "All he talks about is himself," I overheard one faculty spouse complain. This was only partly true. He had no small talk. Eschewing the endless round of Wesleyan cocktail parties, he spent entire nights in his office captive to whatever moment or great man in history he was writing about—the Krupp industrial dynasty, Douglas MacArthur and finally Churchill.
I was a student at Cambridge University when, in 1980, he wrote to ask if I would undertake some initial research for what would become "The Last Lion." I immersed myself in Adm. John Fisher's papers at Churchill College, Lady Astor's diaries at the House of Lords, and reams of cabinet papers at the Public Record Office at Kew. I sent him handwritten notes filled with details I found interesting, but I'm not sure he ever used them. My one coup was arranging for him to have a private tour of Churchill's wartime bunker. When the first volume of the biography appeared in 1983, I read in the acknowledgments that he thought me "as reliable as the sturdiest English oak." He would never have said so in person.
Eight years later, not long after "Alone" was published, we worked together again. A publisher had paid him a tidy sum to write the text for a commemorative book on the Magnum photographers. When he was unable to produce an acceptable manuscript, he unhappily signed his name to mine. Later still, I became his editor and tried to get him to pick up his pen again. After nearly agreeing to work with another writer, Manchester changed his mind in the spring of 2002 and asked for a new editor. Not long after that, I left publishing and periodically heard news of him through my parents.
Sir Martin Gilbert, the author of the marmoreal nine-volume authorized biography of Churchill, once decried the "cult" that surrounded the man, one initiated by British wartime propaganda, fanned by Churchill's best-selling memoirs and sustained, it must be said, by William Manchester. Yet in the early days of the war on terror, even Mr. Gilbert fell prey, writing in 2004 that George W. Bush and Tony Blair might "with the passage of time . . . join the ranks of Roosevelt and Churchill." The leaders of the English-Speaking Peoples (a phrase coined by Churchill) preen themselves on this very possibility, casting themselves as prophets, tarring their political adversaries as appeasers, their military ones as Hitlerian, confident that history will reward their dark percipience and commemorate their wars on behalf of liberty. All follow the Churchillian script.
"Visions of Glory" takes 108 pages to arrive at Churchill's birth: The lengthy 1940 preamble is followed by an even longer prologue that begins not with some illustrious Churchill ancestor but with a "melancholy martinet with spaniel eyes," Gen. Garnet Wolseley. This is a signature Manchester turn, an unexpected narrative diversion that summons an entire world. Wolseley (1833-1913) was shot in the leg in the Second Burmese War, lost an eye to a shell in the Crimea, helped put down the Indian Mutiny of 1857, captured two forts during a set-to with China in 1860, suppressed a Canadian insurrection and led campaigns against Boer guerrillas, Zulus and Ashantis. Like "Clive, Stamford Raffles, Chinese Gordon, Richard Burton and, of course, Cecil Rhodes," Wolseley's life, in Manchester's words, showed "how men of courage and determination could shape the destiny of that noblest achievement of mankind, the Empire." Central to such men's code of valor, he held, was "Last Stand immortality," the forthright embrace of martyrdom when the tide of battle turns.
The British Empire, as Manchester described it, was "a lurching, reeling contraption, riddled with contradictions and inequities," that nonetheless offered countless exotic venues for glory. "Only by understanding the spell of the Empire, particularly the Raj, can one begin to grasp the Churchillian essence." Manchester, like Churchill, had read Thomas Babington Macaulay at an impressionable age. In his memoirs, Churchill described Macaulay as a "prince of literary rogues," a historian who preferred "the tale to the truth." Something similar might be said of Manchester's approach. Though conceding the fashionable distrust of the White Man's Burden, Manchester evoked the bygone glamour of Viceregal lodges, chota pegs and cork-lined topis, of tiger hunts and punkah wallahs, with nearly as much delight as Churchill had. The empire was of course "a stupendous confidence trick," he wrote, but he could not resist adding: "And yet the thing worked."
For those who might ask, "For whom did this 'thing' work?," Manchester would insist that history "can never be put in the dock" and that, before considering the questions raised by the British Empire, "one should clear the mind of cant." This isn't the straightforward stance it appears to be, something we can see clearly now that "Defender of the Realm" has been completed eight years after Manchester's death. For no one was a greater producer of cant, more theatrical a dissembler while purring his innocence, than Winston Churchill. Yet all too often Mr. Reid gives Churchill the last word. "We are all worms," Churchill said, "but I do believe I am a glow worm." A glow worm, fine; an indomitable lion buoying Britain during its darkest days, certainly; but, also, to his Churchillian core, a Diehard, stubbornly clinging to British imperial possessions even when England's fate hung in the balance.
All three volumes of "The Last Lion" rely largely on published diaries, self-serving memoirs, interviews and newspapers rather than deep archival research. Mr. Reid's prose style is more restrained than Manchester's, but, following Manchester's lead, he dutifully includes both the admiring and disparaging remarks of Churchill's colleagues and contemporaries, presenting everyone's take with equanimity. "He was as contradictory as the criticisms leveled against him," we learn, but he was also "as he appeared." In the wake of Pearl Harbor and the disastrous loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse battleships, rashly dispatched without air cover, "overnight [Churchill] embraced carriers with enthusiasm," displaying "his lifelong ability to learn fast." Yet, as Mr. Reid also makes clear, the Japanese had developed carrier tactics years before. He frankly ascribes Churchill's and the Admiralty's shortsightedness to racism. Nonetheless, "although [Churchill] could never bring himself to entirely give up the old, when the facts demanded, he embraced the new . . . almost literally overnight."
Does Churchill seem to be enjoying the war overmuch? Here is his somber quote on its horrors and here is his witticism on its delights. Did Churchill regard the Normandy invasion as one option among many until late in the game or was he committed from the start? "In fact, it was both." Manchester managed to keep the spinning plates of critical judgment aloft by the pure energy of narrative stagecraft, but there is little of that here. Too often what passed as evenhanded evocation of Churchill's contrariness in the first two volumes becomes, in Mr. Reid's attempt at mimicry, evasive or downright incoherent.
"Keep Buggering On" was Churchill's wartime motto, and Mr. Reid complies. To keep the narrative trotting along, he must rush from one crumbling front to another, from secret summits to bibulous dinners, from the 1945 elections that ushered Churchill from power to those that brought him back in 1951. Where Manchester looked for openings to step back and reflect, Mr. Reid appears too much in a hurry or is too overwhelmed to think of changing lenses. When one at last arrives at Churchill's state funeral in January 1965, the scene is nearly perfunctory, and one is left with the sense that the book is missing something vital. Manchester, at least, would have pulled out all 27 stops on the grand organ of St. Paul's Cathedral.
More critically, Mr. Reid seems painfully unaware of postcolonial scholarship on the war. Given Churchill's views on India, this is a missed opportunity. When Mr. Reid does weigh in on Churchill historiography, he chooses instead to replay 1980s-era, Cold War debates over the war's endgame. There is endless second-guessing on the vexed question of who was responsible for the unhappy postwar fate of Eastern Europe. One can't help thinking that Mr. Reid was too dependent on a 30-year-old bibliography and source notes.
For a generation now William Manchester's Churchill has been America's, and with the publication of "Defender of the Realm" we seem to be stuck with it for the foreseeable future (much like that bronze bust on loan to the White House). The publisher of "The Last Lion" is treating its completion as a major event, and the book will doubtless find its way to the best-seller lists. Yet the question of why Manchester stopped writing remains.
The last time I saw him he was confined to bed amid a nest of newspapers, kept company by a cocker spaniel and a Russian nurse. The television was muted: Talking heads mouthed animated opinions on a newly launched war in a former British possession and the looming prospect of another. Manchester was unsettled by Messrs. Bush and Blair's appropriation of Churchill as their standard-bearer. He was a Roosevelt Democrat and a Marine who fought in the Pacific. Further, he had served his literary apprenticeship with H.L. Mencken, that caustic and quintessential American, not Thomas Babington Macaulay.
I like to imagine that, once Manchester began to look closely at the war Churchill waged—the compulsive desire to be at the front and court a violent death, the frenzied outrage at those commanders and senior officers who ignored cabled orders to die for the glory and honor of empire—his heroic vision of Churchill began to falter. Perhaps he realized, as Roosevelt, the Allied command and all of England eventually did, that in the quest for his own last stand, Winston Churchill was fully prepared to bring everyone else down with him.
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