Memories of The Great and The Good (21 page)

This rousing drama, told always with a sure sense of what mattered to Churchill at the time, inevitably slows down and becomes at once more mundane and more debatable when the twenty-six-year-old settles into Parliament. But here, again, in dealing with Churchill's early and middle political career—with material that has been exhaustively mined—Mr. Manchester makes constant use of the one advantage that all good historians ought to exercise in writing about the life of a nation that is not their own. As an American, he takes nothing for granted, he investigates what the natives assume to be common knowledge, he probes into the origin of institutions as recondite as the parliamentary code of behavior and as ordinary as the bicycle craze, the “pea souper” fog, and WH Smith's newsstands. I doubt whether any English historian would have bothered to describe, for example, the grades of power implicit in the physical layout of the House of Commons, or, having bothered, would have done it in six sentences:

These accumulated merits, of scrupulous research, sustained narrative lucidity (he is very fine on the Dardanelles), unabashed inquisitiveness, seem to me to outweigh most of the errors—of judgment, mainly—that Mr. Manchester can be charged with: that he overrates Churchill's political importance in his early parliamentary career; that he has a shaky grasp of Irish politics; that he fails to set against a rapacious, mercantile view of the empire the labors of a generation of able and humane administrators inspired by the example of Lord Lugard, the pioneer colonial administrator of Nigeria, of whom there is no mention. Certainly misgivings about Mr. Manchester's judgment in general creep in when he gives equal credence to, say, the transcript of a parliamentary debate and Frank Harris's ludicrous account of how Lord Randolph picked up syphilis. Harris was a bold and imaginative editor, but his testimony on sexual shenanigans—his own or anyone else's—has long ago been discredited as mischievous fantasy. I suppose a book so packed with new and old documentary material on so many well-rehearsed themes is bound to provoke a fuss of pedants. But on the main theme, on Churchill himself, Mr. Manchester is hospitable to every pro and con, every admiring or malicious comment, every shred of damning or vindicating evidence. As he did in his MacArthur biography, he demonstrates that he is unperturbed by the sharpest and most contrary judgments of his subject. He accepts the largest contradictions in behavior, evidently adopting as an elementary duty of a biographer Shaw's maxim “No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him.” The equanimity of this approach is rare, especially in biographies that come to be accepted as classics. One thinks of Sandburg's Lincoln, of Catherine Drinker Bowen's ludicrous life of Justice Holmes, of many of the cameo portraits in Bruce Catton—instances in which the biographer is so tenderly concerned to establish the integrity, if not the canonization, of the subject that sinister rumors are derided, critics are routed, the exposition of the passage from the womb to the tomb becomes a celebration of the guaranteed good life. As a technical matter simply—a flaw in contriving the dramatic movement of a biography—this approach steadily deflates all suspense, because the author is telling you in advance of any provocation how to feel. It is an anxiety rather like that of the directors of movies who hasten to allay a fear (that we are not getting the emotional point) by introducing the persuasion of sobbing violins. From this common but fatally slackening trick Mr. Manchester is almost totally free. He shares the advantage that A. J. P. Taylor has over most scholarly biographers in daring to move, with a fresh, unblinkered eye, into territory that the academics have staked out as their very own, which they contemplate with the unction of long familiarity, and into which they deeply resent the invasion of squatters.

What we have, in the end, is the phenomenon of an impenitent Victorian who, while never ceasing to yearn for the high noon of imperial Britain, had an intuitive feel for the next lurch of history and was able, with the old weapon of his now deeply felt oratory, to goad a sleeping nation to meet it. Many of his convictions, early and late, are now embarrassing to read about: his contemptuous view of Gandhi; his abhorrence of the “unnatural” idea of the women's vote; his love of war and tolerance of it in even its grisliest aspects (the rodents in the trenches of the First World War “played a very useful role in eating human bodies”). But much of this embarrassment is the shame of seeing a man out of his time, like finding a strong vein of hypocrisy in Jefferson's protestations about liberty from the fact of his owning slaves. Along with much Victorian cant, Churchill had, and carried from early manhood into the conduct of the Second World War, Victorian virtues that exhilarated or exasperated his colleagues and overawed his subordinates: a habit of inexhaustible industry; a relentless attention to the details of political and military action; an impatience with small talk; the assumption that twenty-four hours a day are hardly enough for the discovery of the marvels of the world we live in. To these he added some formidable virtues of his own: the acceptance of humiliating defeats as episodes natural to the wielding of power; a tough but generous relationship with political rivals; immediate magnanimity toward a defeated enemy; a willingness to experiment beyond the accepted wisdom of the professional (to invent the tank, to suggest floating landing piers, to declare common citizenship with the French). Above all, in the supreme crisis of national survival, his absolute refusal—unlike many good and prudent men around him—to compromise or surrender.

An old English friend who served in the British embassies both in Washington and Moscow was always “put off by his [Churchill's] brutality, his contempt for the lesser breeds without the law, his lust for war, and so on”; nevertheless, he thought of him as a hero “because I think he saved our lives, and I expect that under my old chief Lord Halifax we should have made peace in 1940 and been successfully invaded after, or before the defeat of Russia.”

This heroic period—the spring and summer of 1940—is what everybody now takes for granted and is indeed just about the only thing popular historians and television docudrama directors know about him. It makes his salvation—and ours—all the more marvelous if we recall the prevailing view of him, in the House of Commons and in the country at large, throughout the two decades during which he was looked on as an eccentric and disillusioned political chameleon who had never fulfilled the promise of his youth.

So early as 1921, when Churchill was forty-seven, a London journalist, Harold Begbie, famous for the perceptiveness of his character sketches of politicians, wrote this remarkable passage:

This could just as well have been written at any time within a year or two of the outbreak of the Second World War, except that nothing remarkable was any longer expected of him. His career would be said to end with a three-year stretch during which he became something of a nuisance and a bore, a man with a bee in his bonnet about the threat of the Nazi air force. Then came the tenth of May, 1940, when, “at the outset of this mighty battle [the Nazi invasion of the Lowlands and France, the true beginning of the war] I acquired the chief power in the state, which I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.”

Despite some dramatic oversimplification and some disturbing eruptions of bloodshot prose, Mr. Manchester's work has such control over a huge and moving narrative, such illumination of character, and such a steady acceptance of the contrariness of a remarkable man seen in the round, that he can claim to have assembled enough powerful evidence in support of Isaiah Berlin's judgment of Churchill as “the largest human being of our time.”

J
ONES, ROBERT TYRE JR
. Lawyer, engineer, scholar, amateur golfer.
b
. March 17, 1902. Son of Robert Tyre Jones, lawyer. For first five years was enfeebled by a puzzling disease. But at age six, won Atlanta East Lake Club's children's championship. At fourteen, was Georgia amateur champion and went through to quarter final of U.S. Amateur championship. In following two years, won Southern amateur. Throughout 1918, the sixteen-year-old toured in exhibition matches on behalf of the Red Cross and War Relief.
ed
. public schools of Atlanta till age of fifteen, when he entered Georgia Institute of Technology. Graduated three years later with degree in mechanical engineering. At age eighteen, in 1920, began to enter open golf championships, and continued to play in them for next eight years, during the summer vacations from his studies. 1923, honors degree in English literature, Harvard; won his first U.S. Open championship. After a brief fling at real estate, in 1926 he entered Emory University Law School and after three semesters passed Georgia bar examination. He consequently withdrew and set up law practice, which he maintained for most of his life. He was essentially a weekend golfer, in the fall and the spring. In 1924 he married Mary Rice Malone, of Atlanta. They had three children.

Between 1923 and 1930, Jones entered twenty major championships, won thirteen and came second in four. During that time, the leading two professionals of the day, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, never won a British or United States Open that Jones entered. In eight years of Walker Cup competition, he won all his singles matches. In the summer of 1930, he won in succession the U.S. Open, the British Open, the British Amateur and the U.S. Amateur, subsequently called “the Grand Slam,” a feat never performed before or since. Jones thereupon retired from competitive golf at the age of twenty-eight. In 1930, a group of friends purchased an abandoned southern nursery, which had served as the fruit farm for the Confederate armies. On these 360 acres, Jones, with the help of Scottish architect Dr. Alister Mackenzie, designed the Augusta National golf course. With financier Clifford Roberts, he founded the Augusta National Golf Club and a Jones's invitational tournament, later called (against Jones's wish) the Masters.