Winston and Clementine
Soames, Mary
Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills Edited by Mary Soames Houghton Mifflin / 702 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas T here are certain people who possess nature's...
...Lord Randolph Churchill never attained to the prime ministership, but died instead, syphilitic and insane, at the age of forty-five...
...Private misery is the frequent companion to public accomplishment and acclaim...
...Only Mary Soames married happily and lived long...
...There is no such ambiguity about the mother of Clementine Hozier (1885-1977): Everyone agrees that Lady Blanche Hozier contributed generously to the pleasure of many, not least herself...
...Elected a member of Parliament in 1901, he had caused a stir by bolting the Tory Party for the Liberal three years later...
...played a very respectable game of polo into middle age...
...Politics is part of their bond—an essential part—but it is not the only thing they have...
...Clementine writes to ease his despondency at the loss of life in the Dardanelles and throughout Europe, and offers periodic reassurance that his political career is not finished...
...The demands of public business never let up, and they can easily break a marriage...
...And in the waning days of the epoch of Dogpatch Love, one thinks particularly of politicians...
...Later that year their two-year-old daughter Marigold died of a fever...
...She was a candidate of a sort, and a successful one...
...It is a choice selection of their letters to each other, winnowed from some 1700 that they wrote, and the volume is edited reverently, frankly, and superbly by Mary Soames, their youngest daughter and sole surviving child, now in her late seventies...
...Clementine had been engaged three times: twice in secret to an earnest young man who wanted her with an intensity she could not return, and once aboveboard to a wealthy older man whom she did not want very much at all...
...Churchill and Clementine have had an "interchange" at lunch that day, and, although he is sure nobody else there noticed any unpleasantness, he wants to make amends for what might have seemed to her a cross word, signing the missive, "yr penitent apologetic & ever loving W." The fate of the world must wait for a moment, while he thinks of his love...
...Winston Churchill first met Clementine Hozier at a ball in 1904...
...Then he quickly proceeds to the other thing on his mind: He has just been appointed president of the Board of Trade, a Cabinet post, and he has to defend his parliamentary seat in a by-election...
...He was a member of Parliament for most of his adult life...
...Happy domestic tranquillity underlies steely martial will in the greatest statesman of democratic times, and in his wife...
...One could hardly ask for more auspicious beginnings...
...There were a couple of odd touches to her looks —her nose was almost comically sharpened, and her chin was evidently borrowed from a prizefighter who could really take a punch —but the overall effect was nevertheless stately and stunning...
...Old age was especially hard...
...Four months later they were engaged.44 Britain wouldn't have been the same without him, nor he without her...
...Hours after this outburst, she writes again and instructs him to forget what she just blurted out "at a moment of sadness uncertainty & agitation...
...It is astonishing that, from such extravagant wretchedness, two spirits should emerge hopeful and undaunted and capable of loving each other devotedly for as long as they lived...
...served two terms as prime minister...
...Churchill, given a second chance, did not let the opportunity slip...
...held various Cabinet posts...
...His gratitude is nowhere more evident than in a note he writes her as he is flying overnight to Moscow to meet Stalin in 1944...
...However, the unfortunate in love sometimes enjoy pleasing compensations...
...The letters written during the First World War constitute the most moving chapter in their correspondence...
...Randolph gambled wildly, drank, and made an enemy of everyone he met...
...He had fought gallantly in the imperial wars in northwest India, the Sudan, and South Africa, and had further made his name by writing brilliant and popular histories of those wars...
...However, it is more than that...
...beauties of her day and a father who everyone thought would become prime minister...
...From November 1915 to May 1916 he served as an officer in the trenches of France and Belgium...
...In the poem "Faith Healing," Philip Larkin, the arch-poet of blighted longing and rueful coming to terms, considers the feeling everyone has that life might have been lived altogether otherwise if only one had been lucky in the crucial thing: In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love...
...I am interested, geared-up & happy...
...Clementine and her three siblings were most likely the children of Blanche's sister's husband...
...Sarah was arrested for public drunkenness on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Winston, who throughout his youth had endured his father's contemptuous cold fury, was twenty when Lord Randolph died...
...Clementine learned to live with them...
...His was a long life, maybe too long...
...Both had been in love, or in something like love, before...
...The two deserved their happiness, yet happiness was not all they had...
...They did not meet again for four years...
...the campaign was his brainchild, but the fiasco was not his fault...
...Yet a couple of times he brags that he has written this letter "with [his] own paw...
...Twenty years on she was to develop a disturbing resemblance to John Cleese in full screaming travesty...
...wrote essays on all manner of subjects, hundreds of newspaper columns, a novel, and ten works of history (four of them monumental, any one of which would be the crowning achievement of an ordinary man's life work...
...Churchill for his part was leveled by episodes of profound depression, which he called his "black dog...
...He loved one woman, and love made all the rest possible...
...They discuss his ambitions and the political scene in England...
...so when he asked his mother to introduce him to an appealing young woman he had spotted across the ballroom, nobody expected him suddenly to lose the power of speech in her presence...
...His debility made it necessary for him to dictate most of his letters...
...prized a good smoke...
...Her brother killed himself in 1921...
...And if he did not exactly whip Hitler, he held him off valiantly until reinforcements arrived...
...Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills Edited by Mary Soames Houghton Mifflin / 702 pages / $35 REVIEWED BY Algis Valiunas T here are certain people who possess nature's gifts in enviable abundance yet whom one would never expect to be happy in love...
...those with a notable talent for wrecking the lives of the people they profess to love most are often especially adept at winning the admiration of the rest of the world...
...Beauty tended to command Churchill's attention, and Clementine had it...
...Clementinewrites back that she is excited by his excitement: "I know how you are feeling—tingling with life to the tips of your fingers...
...yet some love well enough to overcome it...
...It is hard to be a hero all the time, and even harder to be a hero's wife...
...As Churchill writes after forty years of marriage, "I send this token, but how little it can express my gratitude to you for making my life & any work I have done possible, and for giving me so much happiness in a world of accident & storm...
...was familiar with the pleasures of food and drink (rebelling 72 June 1999 • The American Spectator against the severe diet Clementine has imposed on him in 1954, he writes, "I have no grievance against a tomato, but I think one should eat other things as well...
...in such a man, famed chiefly for his prowess in war, love might appear to be beside the point...
...As her husband was dead set against having children, she contrived to procure them elsewhere...
...As for Churchill, he was no more handsome in his prime than he would be in his old age...
...Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was born in Blenheim Palace, his grandfather's digs, to a mother who was one of the leading ALG1S VALIUNAS is a writer living in Florida...
...liked casinos...
...Churchill had wooed the beautiful daughter of a prominent Anglo-Indian official (she wound up marrying an earl), the still-more beautiful daughter of a ship owner (she reportedly thought Churchill's prospects rather dim), and the supremely beautiful actress Ethel Barrymore (she told him that being a political wife was not for her...
...Biographers disagree about her sexual nature: Some suggest she had an insatiable appetite for young male flesh, while others aver that she really didn't like sex enough to sleep around that much...
...No other man in the twentieth century lived more fully...
...learned to fly a plane at a time when planes were still a rarity (he gave up this perilous enjoyment at Clementine's behest...
...Churchill evidently knew nothing about it...
...he is not the only nominee for the position of Clementine's uncle-daddy, but there are no others whom the title fits so nicely...
...painted pictures with enthusiasm and considerable skill...
...Life just seems to have stacked the deck decisively against them in this one respect, and they have a knack for losing their hearts to other people similarly disadvantaged...
...S everal months after their wedding, she is cajoling him to knock off work a day early and join her for country pleasures: "It is perfectly lovely but I can't enjoy it properly without you, whereas Lloyd George can quite well manage his Disestablishment Bill alone...
...then they wound up sitting next to each other at a dinner party neither wanted to attend...
...fell again and broke his hip...
...Clementine completed him...
...was sapped slowly by stroke after stroke...
...Diana became mentally ill, and committed suicide in 1963...
...Five years later, his mother married an elegant blade renowned as the handsomest man in England, and who happened to be the same age as Winston...
...Winston and Clementine shows how much he needed her...
...Numerous artists, actors, and tycoons come to mind...
...Another man swept her off to The Correspondence of Love and War The American Spectator Jun e 1999 71 dance, and that appeared to be that...
...To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved...
...bred uncommon pigs and prize racehorses...
...but there is something bracing about the way the Churchills look aside from their personal grief and turn their attention to the public matters of the day...
...Clementine saw it through with him to the end...
...Specialists learned in intimacy issues would demur...
...Is it not horrible to be built like that...
...It is not a reproach, but a reminder of what he is laboring to protect...
...In response Churchill tells her he has spent the day considering whether a battleship's electric gun turrets ought to be replaced by hydraulic ones, says a word about the strike, and closes by noting that it must be hard for her to be bedridden...
...Life did not spare them...
...Love is not what Winston Churchill is known for...
...Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and some families are inventive as Hieronymus Bosch devils at the art of inflicting pain...
...Maybe nobody entirely escapes this particular sadness...
...As the First World War is poised to break over Europe, Churchill writes, "Everything trends toward catastrophe & collapse...
...Clementine, for her part, knows how deep is his desire to be a great man, and she too wants him to be one...
...but he was dashing, gracious, witty, captivating...
...And he was soon in love...
...a year afterward Churchill writes, "Poor lamb—it is a gaping wound...
...Great Britain would not have been what it was without Churchill, and Churchill would not have been what he was without Clementine...
...Can this be love...
...she was divorced in due course, and in due course she married someone else, three years younger than Winston...
...Their children Diana, Randolph, and Sarah were all divorced at least once...
...When she was fourteen, the Colonel tried to kidnap her, and the terrified girl had to run for it through the streets of a French port town, until he abandoned the pursuit...
...After seeing Clementine again, he writes his first letter to her, pays her the compliments every woman sure of her beauty wants to hear: "what a comfort & pleasure it was to me to meet a girl with so much intellectual quality & such strong reserves of noble sentiment...
...But it is every politician's conviction that his country cannot manage without him, and so his wife will have to...
...yet in fact familial circumstances were noticeably less than wholesome, and it would have been no surprise had the young Churchill turned out not quite right— in the manner of, say, Jack the Ripper...
...regularly exercised a legendary wit...
...In 1915 Churchill was sacked as First Lord of the Admiralty when the Dardanelles campaign became a fiasco...
...was a peerless orator...
...She also mentions how much their young children miss their father...
...Clementine, in her reply on the eve of the election, takes the direct way into her man's heart: "I feel as much excited as if I were a candidate...
...The love of heroism and the heroism of love are inseparable...
...At twenty-nine, he was well on his way, and esteemed particularly for his oratory...
...That he was a tender, faithful, passionate husband, who was loved equally in return, might seem but an unexpected sidelight to the matter of real importance...
...Clementine found herself intermittently prostrate from exhaustion, and even she was not exempt from the familial waywardness...
...After concisely describing her feelings about a miscarriage in 1912—Churchill was by then First Lord of the Admiralty, and was often gone from home—Clementine abruptly veers away from her own sorrow, and asks him about the coal miners' strike that is the big news of the moment...
...In perhaps the most poignant of his letters, written in1959, he relates that a friend of his has given him a gold locket to secure his table napkin on his chest and thus to prevent him from dropping food on his coat front...
...In 1935, on a long cruise around the Pacific without Churchill, who had other things to do, she had a shipboard affair with a comely gent several years younger than she...
...Churchill fell and cracked a vertebra...
...After Colonel Hozier and Lady Blanche were separated—each accused the other of adultery, with good reason—Clementine bounced around here and there, ending up in her mother's custody...
...Nobody gets off that easy...
...M any were broken by the Great War, but Churchill seemed to increase in strength...
...the campaign has been "quite Napoleonic," and quite consuming...
...Yet sometimes all that is forgotten: "I have ceased to have ambitions for you—Just come back to me alive that's all...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
