Zigzag Lightning in the Brain

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE LAST LION, WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL: VISIONS OF GLORY, 1874-1932 by William Manchester; Little, Brown; 973 pages; $25

By 1904, when he was 30, Winston Churchill had already accomplished more than most men do in a lifetime. He added luster to the family name in the Caribbean as a daredevil correspondent covering the Cuban insurrection. At Omdurman, he rode in the British army's last great cavalry charge during Kitchener's campaign to reconquer the Sudan. He became a national hero by escaping from his Boer captors in South Africa in 1899. The following year he was prepared to greet the new century as a Member of Parliament, a novelist and traveling lecturer. In America, Mark Twain presented him with a limited edition of his works inscribed, "To do good is noble; to teach others to do good is nobler, and no trouble."

The Missouri wit missed the salient point about Lord Randolph's son. There is little indication that Churchill distinguished between his deeds and his words. Both were manly forms of action and both could, and usually did, cause trouble. Perhaps his father's early and humiliating death from syphilis made him fear that time would run out before his own destiny could be fulfilled. "How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!" he told Violet Asquith. But if Churchill saw death as an obstacle to ambition, his follow-up remark to the Prime Minister's daughter suggested a way to meet the unavoidable. "We are all worms," he said morosely. "But I do believe that I am a glowworm."

William Manchester is the latest in a line of biographers to agree. His first of a planned two-volume study takes Churchill from birth in 1874 to 1932. This was the year after he quit politics over the question of self-rule for India and withdrew to Chartwell to write, paint, build brick walls and rumble warnings about an excitable Austrian named Adolf Hitler.

Unlike previous Churchill biographies, notably last year's brisk Young Man in a Hurry by Ted Morgan, The Last Lion is especially rich in historical and social contexts. There are no loud revisionist notes in Manchester's harmonious reorchestration of his subject's first 58 years. He is the familiar Winnie who loved soldiering, political argument, the best wines and good English. He was a frequently absent though apparently constant husband to Clementine Hozier, whom he wed in 1908. The sexual adventurers in the family were his father and, especially, his mother, American-born

Jennie Jerome. Manchester does offer a few correctives to the Churchill legend that will undoubtedly be treated more fully in the concluding volume. He asserts that the Last Lion's daily intake of alcohol has been grossly exaggerated, and that he did not know in advance that Coventry would be destroyed by the Luftwaffe on Nov. 14, 1940. Some World War II historians have contended that the pugnacious Prime Minister sacrificed the city and its inhabitants to keep the Germans from realizing that England had broken their code.

Behind the blunt talk and manner, Churchill was something of a puzzle. Manchester taps lightly on the core of the great man's personality. He suggests that he was a rare type that C.G. Jung defined as an "extroverted intuitive." Colleagues have testified that Churchill's decisions often sprang from impulse and uncanny insight, by what one called his "zigzag streak of lightning in the brain."

Judiciously, Manchester pays only lip service to psychobiography. Despite his brilliant and remote father, his libidinous mother and a poignant attachment to his nanny, Churchill is a poor candidate for the couch. Judging from his military, political and literary exploits, it is evident that young Winston's favorite subject was himself. But he saw that self as an unbreakable link in a glorious tradition. It was a romantic legacy in which England's language and institutions are brandished like Crusaders' swords against the Turk, the Hun and the Bolshie.

Churchill's career ambitions never fully account for his actions. Would a greasy-pole climber expose himself to the perils of learning to fly in 1913? Would a former First Lord of the Admiralty reject a safe job to lead a battalion in the trenches of World War I? Winston's physical courage was surpassed only by his luck, an element that is usually overlooked by biographers because it is impossible to explain. Risk and near misses seem to have held off the "black dog," Churchill's pet phrase for the depressions that attended his failures and rejections.

If his zest for battle does not convince the reader that he was a war lover, there are his speeches. To junior officers in France: "War is a game that is played with a smile. If you can't smile, grin. If you can't grin, keep out of the way till you can." The lieutenant colonel who spent much of his childhood alone in a roomful of toy soldiers brought his heated imagination to the real thing. He devised new fortifications, pioneered the development of the tank and foresaw the role of airpower. His plan to force the Royal Navy through the Dardanelles and shorten the Great War was soundly conceived, Manchester argues, but was poorly executed by others.

By 1920 Churchill the glory hound was seeing more black dogs. Surveying the first two decades of the century, he asked rhetorically, "Can you doubt . . . that mankind is passing through a period marked not only by an enormous destruction and abridgement of human species, not only by a vast impoverishment and reduction in means of existence but also that destructive tendencies have not yet run their course?" His zigzag lightning of intuition was in top form. The next decade would see worldwide depression, strikes, more strife in Ireland and Palestine and the gathering storm of fascism.

Volume I of this biography has its own momentum: the flow of power moving relentlessly toward confrontation and combat. American Caesar, Manchester's life of Douglas MacArthur, also had that quality, but The Last Lion adds a grand dimension. Its hero ruled with his pen as well as his sword, the reason why the sun never sets on Winston Churchill.

--By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.