The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (7 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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T
hroughout 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.”
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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:
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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.”
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