Posts Tagged ‘Bill Deakin’

Good try, but no photo can catch the perfection (Photo: Baryonic Being)

When, oh when, will the third volume of William Manchester‘s The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm come out?

I know, I know.  It’s going to be written not by Manchester, who died in 2004, but by Paul Reid, and everyone is wondering if it will be up to snuff.  So much so it’s a wonder that Reid doesn’t just hide under his bed and refuse to write anything at all.

Such a course of action would not, of course, be in the spirit of Churchill, who was an indefatigable writer.  I wrote about that here.  As Manchester wrote in volume 2: “Only after entering his employ will [his assistant] Bill Deakin discover, to his astonishment, that Churchill lacks a large private income, that he lives like a pasha yet must support his extravagant life with his pen. The Churchill children are also unaware that, as [his daughter] Mary will later put it, the family ‘literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.’ Her mother, who knows, prays that each manuscript will sell.”

His daughter had a lot more to say when I visited his home for 40 years, Chartwell, in Kent, over the weekend.  Mary Soames wrote in her introduction to Chartwell’s guidebook:

“While Winston and his children – Diana, Randolph and Sarah (and later myself) loved Chartwell unconditionally, Clementine (his wife) from the first had serious practical reservations about the whole project. Her prudent Scottish side judged the renovations (involving largely rebuilding the house), and the subsequent cost of running the whole property would place a near intolerable strain on the Churchill’s somewhat fragile financial raft.  She was to be proved right, and over the years her pleasure in the place was seldom unalloyed by anxiety.”

She worried.

No photo can quite do justice to the exquisite ponds and gardens – not much to see in wintertime, except Clementine’s pruned rosebushes, the signs where Sweet William and herbs like chervil grew.  Oh yes, and giant rhubarb, “Gunnera manicata.”  But the green expanses flecked with autumn trees on a crisp and flawless November day must be what heaven is like.  I even saw one of the black swans he painted, spreading its wings in the shrubbery.

I am still munching on the apples from the property, sold for donations – a cooking apple called “Bramley,” and a dessert apple.

Other signs of his labor:  His large painting studio on the property, filled with his canvases.  The small hut for butterfly breeding.  The walls he created as a bricklayer.  Even space for a small pet graveyard, walled off from visitors, but which contained a few white benches for solemn meditation.  Alas, however the house is closed to visitors over the winter – I never saw the heavy-beamed studio I described in the earlier post, where he wrote.

And the books did pretty well, apparently.  When I visited Cambridge, I was told that the Churchill family had endowed Cambridge’s Churchill College.  More than 20 of its members have won Nobel prizes – in keeping with its founder, who was awarded the Nobel literature prize in 1953.

Time Magazine‘s list of “bests” are often a pile of rubbish – but I was gratified to see one personal favorite given pride of place in “All-TIME 100 Best Non-Fiction Books“:

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 (published in 1988) was William Manchester‘s sequel to The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (published in 1983). Alone picks up the story with Churchill cast into the political wilderness and entering what the author believed was the most crucial period of the politician’s extraordinary life — his “finest hour,” if you will — which culminated in his becoming Prime Minister of Britain in 1940, his country once again at war with Germany. Churchill, as Manchester poignantly puts it, “resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been.”

I read this unforgettable book some years ago – stunning, in its step-by-step revelation of Winston Churchill‘s dogged, determined, and humiliating journey through the 1930s to warn a resistant England of the growing dangers of Hitler’s Germany. The war weary U.K. was famously allergic to evidence and eloquence, leading it to the brink of annihilation when Hitler finally attacked.

His study at Chartwell

Partly it was in Churchill’s nature to be so.  In his first book he wrote: “Nothing is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result” and “There are men who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of danger and ruin, as others from success.” But the fortitude to face humiliation, rejection, and loneliness is never nature alone.

I was so impressed by Manchester’s book, his last, that I gave a copy to Toyko rock star, and peacenik Agnes Chan when she took her PhD at Stanford in 1994 (she’s the UN Goodwill Ambassador for Japan).  It is at once a depressing and a fortifying work for the peacemakers of the world, but offers a salutary lesson: Peace without justice is no peace, and, as Augustine said, “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”

But something else impressed me.  Few know that Churchill made his living as a journalist.  Every night, in his magnificent Norman-era estate Chartwell, after the nightly dinner party with tuxedos and evening gowns, silver buckets of champagne, the Gruyère, the pâté, soup, oysters, caviar, after the port, brandy, and cigars were finished, he would shuffle up to his study at about 11 p.m. and begin his working day in his slippers, “entering through the Tudor doorway with its molded architrave…”

Churchill's desk at Chartwell

Manchester writes:  “Only after entering his employ will [his assistant] Bill Deakin discover, to his astonishment, that Churchill lacks a large private income, that he lives like a pasha yet must support his extravagant life with his pen. The Churchill children are also unaware that, as [his daughter] Mary will later put it, the family ‘literally lived from book to book, and from one article to the next.’ Her mother, who knows, prays that each manuscript will sell.”

“…he enters the room in his scarlet, green, and gold dressing gown, the cords trailing behind him. Before greeting his researcher and the two secretaries on duty tonight, he must read the manuscript he dictated the previous evening and then revise the latest galleys, which arrived a few hours earlier from London. Since Churchill’s squiggled red changes exceed the copy set – the proofs look as though several spiders strained in crimson ink wandered across the pages – his printers’ bills are shocking. But the expense is offset by his extraordinary fluency. Before the night is out, he will have dictated between 4,000 and 5,000 words. On weekends he may exceed ten thousand words.”

I envy the fluency.  I envy the output. I even envy the study, in the oldest, 11th century part of Chartwell.  And above I envy the courage, bravado, and style.  I do not envy the pâté de foie gras, the trout, the shoulder of lamb, lobster, dressed crab, Dover sole, the roast beef, and the endless gin.  It’s an astonishment they all did not perish before 30.