In 1930, Winston Churchill was heading into the worst part of his political career, doomed to criticize his party’s leadership on foreign affairs only to be ignored, marginalized, disdained. At the same time, he was fast approaching his greatest achievement as a writer, the biography of the ancestor who founded his family, John Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, which would occupy him throughout the decade we call “the wilderness years.”
That year, however, he published an account of his youth in the Victorian era, My Early Life, to remind England that he was her dutiful son, though never the favored one. A man in his mid-50s, he was also in a position to contemplate the possibility that he was at the end of his political career, after the Conservatives were thrown out of office in 1929. Something of a liberation that—in taking account of himself he shows a humanity most politicians lack. His self-reflection has depth and is free of the affectation of talented people, not to say celebrities.
Since it is not possible to be a great man without knowing that one is great and without reflecting on greatness (vanity or the spurious honors of the media do not enter into the matter), the only concern being the origin of greatness. Churchill accordingly adopts as his own the opinion of everyone who met him in his youth: that he wasn’t much to look at, that much could not be expected of him, and that it would stand him in good stead to be less arrogant.
Writing guided by this ironic modesty is fun, but unusually difficult for our times, because we combine a belief in honesty with remarkable arrogance—the relative importance of deeds and speeches has become completely confused, as well as their difference from writings—because we assert for ourselves a right to speak as we please, without forethought or a structured plan.
With us, unlike with Churchill, reading is not adventurous. The reader today may innocently accept Churchill’s invitation, therefore, to condescend to him, and thus misconstrue a comedy as self-mockery. Further, the English talent for acting and putting on a show is also misunderstood now, at least half-forgotten, so that it is difficult for readers to interpret it correctly, the made-up honesty of literature as the act of generosity it is.
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The story of My Early Life is in three parts: the introductory chapters follow Churchill’s education, then move on to his military service (much the largest part of the story), and conclude briefly with his entry into politics at the election of 1900. The conversational style is playful and charming—it stands comparison with Rudyard Kipling’s deathbed autobiography, Something of Myself, 1937—and never more so than when we stop to consider that we are being invited into a certain intimacy with the great man of the century.
Churchill recommends the work to his audience as a reminder of the vanished Victorian Age, whose child he was. His humor as much as his discretion are testimony to that moral education, and so also are his earnestness and confidence in the ability to connect decency to government policy—the good conscience with which he writes is a correlative of the good conscience with which he governed the empire. In admitting that he is not above being laughed at in various instances in his youth, he is also certain of having lived a blameless and admirable life, and therefore being a fit object for the public gaze.
Churchill has the advantage of most young men because he knew when young that he wanted to be a politician, like his famous father, who had been lord chancellor, the most important man in the party after the prime minister. Through all the uncertainties of youth, he has this purpose in mind to steady him. But with regard to achieving his purpose, he shares with most young men a strange confusion. First of all, school doesn’t fit with his boyish innocence—he’d rather be doing anything else. Sitting still in class and obeying the endless demands for preparation is a little like dying.
Like Kipling, Churchill gives evidence in his account of his youth of the price one has to pay to become a gentleman, a member of that class that can rule an empire. He was perhaps as much his dear nanny’s child as his adored mother’s, which will shock American readers but might also serve to salve the bad conscience of women who spend more time on their careers than on their children. He suffered the discipline and punishment of the school, one almost wants to say, mutely, but earned his freedom by a certain good character that exceeds decency, such that he is free also of resentment. He obeyed the demands because he admired the men who, like his father, made such demands, and because he hoped to be like them, as did his peers. In other words, even the indignities were somehow ennobling.
Like Kipling, too, Churchill lost his faith young. One of his famous quips of adulthood settles this matter—he is like a buttress, supporting the church but from the outside. There is much to ponder in the relationship between politics and faith there. In his boyhood, that meant religiously attending service in the school chapel; in his adulthood, it meant praying for deliverance in moments of deadly danger—as we say, there are no atheists in foxholes. Altogether, religion meant to him not the scrutiny of one’s conscience, the pursuit of salvation in fear or trembling, but the steady reliance on divine providence in the conduct of affairs and in the friendship a great man must entertain with his people.
Whereas he could agree with the divines that man reckons everything by his soul, Churchill could not agree with the various respectable or enlightened authorities of the Imperial Age that mankind had truly achieved Progress. His comments on modern schooling are revolutionary and make him the true leader of our “homeschooling” movement: He’d rather have boys free to work and pursue healthy, dangerous activities than be cooped up and lectured at. He understands in a way even our dissenters do not that we do not demand of youth any reliance on experience, and thus we overturn the relationship between deeds and speeches at the moment we ask of children to trust precisely those things which they, then, cannot comprehend.
As with the other great imperialists, therefore, Churchill is only ambivalently in favor of modern life and its discipline; to some extent, empire is freedom for those who find the conformism of our society intolerable; compared to school, the military was more honest and more just, because it gave a man a horse in return for his obedience, and the horse is the noblest animal in God’s creation. Churchill turns to his readers and advises them to set their children on horseback and never mind the luxuries of the modern world, a sentiment worthy of his American mother and the world of Arizona cowboys out of which she emerged.
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A reader who starts with these reflections will be able to grasp Churchill’s greatness as it emerged. It requires sensitivity and a kind of love of the boy such that it’s possible to put aside the prejudices instilled in us by our unprecedented powers and follow him on his path. Those who do have the right to expect that they will learn more of what freedom means for a man and that they will accordingly become freer as they deal with life’s uncertainties by the twin compasses of noble endeavor and skepticism of the things people proclaim loudest.
We owe a new edition of this wonderful autobiography to Prof. James M. Muller, who has produced new editions of most of Churchill’s early histories and is also working on Churchill’s rather entertaining novel, Savrola, a public service that is unusually timely and for which we owe him a debt of gratitude. For those who love history or war, it’s hard to find a more helpful education, especially in a time when there is nothing left available to inspire or guide young men in our public life. Prof. Muller has also appended to his edition Churchill’s strangest story, The Dream, an encounter with the father he lost young that explains better than anything else he wrote the essence of patriotism.
