Churchill's early life
I have the opportunity today to recommend to young American men a path to solving their problems: Read Churchill’s autobiography, learn about the great pleasures of war & adventure, go out there & try to take your life in your hands.
Just like the late Victorian era, ours is a very schoolamarming moment, morally opposed to the existence of young men, who are after all half-wild at the best of times & never particularly interested in the sophisticated emotional delights of self-reproof, recrimination, the exquisite enjoyment of suffering—the skillful attack on one’s own confidence or decency.
Boys & young men, however, are very vulnerable to a kind of paralysis, if they are brought up to the habit that anything they do will cause tears or hysteria in the female of the species. “For the woman that God gave him isn’t his to give away” in the words of the witty Kipling. Americans are thus hostages to morality these days. It’s time to break out, to lead an entire generation of men out of this prison, to refresh their eyes & let them fill their hearts or take the measure of their ambitions by what is possible in this world at this time.
That means restoring the natural horizon of noble thought. That’s why I recommend & offer some guidance to reading Churchill, a daring, dangerous man as well as writer. For example, in a moment in his autobiography shocking for his days as much as for ours, Churchill even says one of the advantages of the love of horses of the natural cavalryman is that even when it gets you killed it tends to be a much better death than most. Now that is “cowboy life.”
Here is my review for my friends & Acton, & here are the provocative opening thoughts:
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, 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 & without reflecting on greatness (vanity or the spurious honors of the media do not enter into the matter), the only concern of such a work is 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, & that it would stand him in good stead to be less arrogant.
How come we have this opportunity? Where do all these Churchill books come from? Just now, from St. Augustine’s Press, from Bloomsbury, all of them edited by Prof. James W. Muller, a very gracious man who has dedicated himself to bringing out as many editions of these writings as possible—everything from history to essays to Churchill’s novel, an entertaining political romance, & his autobiography, too.
Here’s Great Contemporaries, a kind of collection that is, again, unimaginable nowadays—Churchill revels in the opportunity to admire on the men held to be great in the earlier part of the 20th c., as a beginning of reflecting on that age & on what it means, as a moment in the grand drama of modernity. That is a high & haughty perspective I cannot recommend too much!
Here, next, is Thoughts & Adventures, Churchill’s collection of essays on modern life—a model of how an intelligent man should think about politics & science.
& finally the book under review, My Early Life, the autobiography, the only chance we really have these days of getting to know a man so famous that he almost defies introduction—& so he decided to introduce himself again to the world... Enjoy!