Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  On the other hand, consider the deeply thoughtful remark of Mark Twain after he’d been a month or two in England: “The English countryside is too beautiful to be left out of doors; it should be put under glass.”

  I hope this is enough to show why humorists are lovable, wits never. Think of some of the renowned wits of our century: Bernard Shaw, Ambrose Bierce, Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Gore Vidal. They have been called many things, but lovable is not one of them.

  This country seems to abound with witty women, some of them terrifyingly so. Fran Lebowitz is always, and rightly, called “acerbic.” I think Florence King may be the funniest writer alive, in the English language, but she is an arch misogynist who hates the human race and writes—not without good cause—books with such apt titles as Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye and With Charity toward None. I admire her extravagantly, so long as she’s whipping other people, but I should hate to have her take off on me.

  However, none of this is true of Erma Bombeck, who has just died in San Francisco in her seventieth year. She was a columnist for most of her life and put together several cherished collections, cherished, I should say, by a very large middle-class audience, of women I should guess more than men. Her titles were such as When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, If s Time to Go Home and If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, Why Am I in the Pits ?

  She was born Erma Fiste in a small town in Ohio, German on her father’s side. He has been variously described as a crane operator or a construction worker. (Erma would have preferred the older, if less exact, word: bricklayer.) He died of a heart attack when Erma, an only child, was nine, and she and her mother went off to live with a grandmother. At about the age of twelve, she began writing a humorous column for her junior high school paper, got out of high school toward the end of the Second World War, became a copy girl on the nearby big-town newspaper, in Dayton, graduated as a bachelor of arts from that city’s university and all in the same year married William Bombeck, a sportswriter who later became a high school headmaster. For her remaining forty-seven years, he was her one and only husband, favorite subject of wonder and (whenever she felt herself mean enough to turn into a wit instead of a humorist) her favorite object!

  Her career was that of her generation—brace yourselves!—mother and housewife. She was born too soon to hear, from the savvy young feminists, that “you can have it all”: man, children, executive job, law practice. When, later in life, she did hear it, she didn’t believe it.

  But if that passing wind of change didn’t knock her off her pins it left her a touch unsteady. It was the 1960s, and Erma Bombeck was in her thirty-eighth year. One day she was sitting in her kitchen “looking out the window,” she wrote, “watching women like Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Golda Meir carving out their own careers, and I decided it wasn’t fulfilling enough to stay cleaning water taps with a toothbrush. I was too young for Social Security, too tired for an affair. I decided it was my time to strike out.” The last of her three children were now off at school. “Striking out” meant a daring decision: to write a column—for a newspaper. She persuaded a small suburban newspaper to pay her three dollars a column. “I was on my way,” she said. The next year, the editor of the big-city paper, the Dayton Journal-Herald, no less, spotted her stuff and made her the fabulous offer of fifteen dollars a week for three columns! She grabbed it. The rest is—worldwide syndication.

  Later on, people used to ask her: how did you choose the subject of your column? Simple, she said, “being a housewife was the only thing I could discuss for more than four minutes.” That, indeed, is mostly what she did discuss in her columns, for the following thirty-one years. You’d think she must have plowed a grinding, monotonous furrow. It is the predictable fate of most humorists who have to be funny twice a week no matter how they’re feeling. But, astonishingly, to the end, Erma Bombeck was rarely mechanical or predictable, even though she was writing about the most familiar domestic joys and woes: husband, children, the measles, kitchen stoves, holidays, yearning for holidays, love of home, boredom with home, fascinations and horrors of teenagers, a husband’s capacity to sit immobile watching football (“when a man watches four consecutive football games, he can be declared legally dead”)—about her second-favorite household chore, ironing (“my first being banging my head on the bedpost till I faint”).

  It must be obvious that by the time, almost twenty years ago, she was syndicated in more than nine hundred newspapers around the world, she had long ago ceased to be a household slave, or what we used to call a housewife, though she blithely used the title to the end. She earned something short of a million dollars a year for many years, and for the last two decades had lived in a valley out west, in the Arizona desert. So most of her later stuff, the themes of maybe three-quarters of her output, were exercises in remembrance of things past. But they were never memories recalled in the luxury of later life. Until the last year, when she was very ill, she did her own shopping, all but the heaviest housework, she checked the price tags on everything; and when her illness began to overwhelm her, she kept up her spirits with odd recollections and instant jokes about marriage in all its stages. She banged out what came to mind, and it caused the joy of chuckling or the wince of recognition especially in her huge, far-flung audience of women: on dirty ovens (“If it won’t catch fire today, clean it tomorrow”); on sibling rivalry (“Who gets the ice cream sundae with the lone cherry on top?”); a warning to wives—”The light in the refrigerator is blinding to the male of the species.” Women, she reflected, especially married women, never cease fantasizing: “All over the country housewives are fantasizing their husbands taking the kids to the fair or something and leaving them alone for four days … the other day, an exterminator knocked on my door asking for directions, and I wondered—Ts he the one?’ “

  If Erma Bombeck is the only woman humorist (Fm eager to receive other applications), you may wonder why this should be so. Well, as I said in another way at the beginning, there are enough talented men who are secure in the scheme of things to feel free to make fun of themselves. I don’t believe that in our civilization women have yet achieved sufficient sense of emotional equality to be eager to help men make fun of them. By the complementary reason, all the funny women I know are wits—all too grateful for their ability to strike back.

  So why now should Erma Bombeck appear? It is a puzzle, but I hazard a solution. She was, from the accounts of all her friends, a winning, happy woman. She watched her husband with steady affection, so often the stumbling victim of her pieces, but she was confident enough of her own fallibility to make herself an equal butt. I believe this happy balance was due first to her temperament, a sanguine temperament, allied to her God-given gift (she wrote as simply as St. Luke: “And the word went out that all the world was to be taxed. The Democrats won again!”). The happy state of her marriage gave the gift and the temperament together free rein to express her humor. Twenty-five years ago, she told an interviewer: “The good years of my life began with my marriage. The rest has been gravy.”

  22

  The Last Victorian

  (1983)

  CHURCHILL, WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER: Statesman, soldier, journalist, amateur bricklayer and painter. Nobel Prize for Literature, 1963. Knighted, 1953.

  b. Nov. 30,1874 in the ladies’ cloakroom of Blenheim Palace, to Lady Randolph Churchill (b. Jennie Jerome, New York City), who, against her doctor’s orders, was attending a ball. Son of Lord Randolph, grandson of 7th Duke of Marlborough. Bottom of class at Harrow but passed with high honors from Sandhurst and was commissioned in Fourth Hussars. In all, served in nine British regiments (notably in last British cavalry charge, with 21st Lancers, at Battle of Omdurman, 1898, and in command of battalion of Royal Scots Fusiliers on Western Front, France, 1915-16). War correspondent, Boer War, captured, imprisoned, escaped and capitalized on sudden fame, at age of 25, with lecture tours (of United Kingdom, United States and Canada), thereby setting up a modest fortune which he woul
d supplement with a lifetime of prolific journalism.

  Entered parliament in 1900 as a Conservative but soon switched to Free Trade Liberals, and in 1908 campaigned successfully for unemployment allowances, national sickness insurance, a miner’s eight-hour day, unsuccessfully for compulsory education till 17 and abolition of House of Lords. Same year, married Clementine Hozier, by whom he had one son and three daughters.

  He was in parliament for more than forty years, changing parties three times, to the vexation of most party loyalists. As First Lord of the Admiralty he modernized the navy and, on his own initiative, mobilized it for action six days before the British ultimatum to Germany in August, 1914. For twenty years, he was held responsible for many disasters of policy, wrongly for the Dardanelles fiasco in the First World War, rightly for the General Strike in 1926 and the mischievous urging of “a King’s party” during the abdication crisis of Edward VIII.

  Throughout the late thirties, he was resented by all parties, mainly for the boring frequency of his warnings about the menace of Nazi rearmament. In May 1940, when after eight months of the “phoney war” Hitler invaded Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium, Chamberlain was discredited and Churchill, surprisingly, became prime minister of a Coalition government as the only politician the Labour Party would serve under. He braced a listless, and still war-weary, Britain to believe it was heroic, and under his leadership, it became so.

  In the 1945 election, after the victory in Europe, Churchill, indifferent to peacetime social reforms, was defeated in a Labour landslide. Six years later, in his late seventies, he returned as Conservative prime minister and, increasingly apathetic and senile, resigned in 1955. Ten years later he died, at the age of ninety, and was accorded a dramatic state funeral, for which he had written the meticulous script.

  Anyone who reads much biography must come to be struck sooner or later by the volatility of great men’s reputations—a capriciousness quite as unpredictable as the ups and downs of Xerox, IBM, or Gulf & Western. Indeed, since publishers, through their absorption into conglomerates, have had to think and act as trading partners in “the book business,” the time may not be far off when they will circulate internal memos alerting the staff to the biographical market trends: Rousseau up, Scott Fitzgerald down fifteen points, Virginia Woolf (like oats and wheat) steady.

  Only a year or two ago, it seemed, everything that could be usefully written about Winston Churchill had been written and published. His finest hour—if he is to be considered as an object of public acclaim, and hence as a literary growth stock—came soon after the evacuation from Dunkirk, on the day that the French sued for an armistice. In that moment, Churchill was symbolized for two continents in David Low’s cartoon of a British Tommy, valiant on a storm-drenched rock and waving his fist at a flight of Heinkel bombers: “Very well, alone!” Since then, there have been scores of books about Churchill, over forty of them published since the 1960s. Most of them, from Davenport and Murphy’s early little rhapsody to Elizabeth Longford’s ritual tribute, have been frank celebrations of an immortal. Sharper and more perceptive judgments have come from A. J. P. Taylor and C. P. Snow and from Violet Bon-ham Carter’s affectionate but incisive memoir. The best of them are concerned to isolate—from a compound of successes and blunders, rooted beliefs, set policies, and brilliant guesses—the essential elements of Churchill’s character and his leadership. None of them seriously chips away at the monolith. True, in 1970 Brian Gardner assembled a formidable anthology of parliamentary assaults on Churchill’s conduct of the war during the disastrous year of 1942.

  Meanwhile, as books about Churchill poured from the presses, the definitive assessment of the great man’s life was begun, under the supervision of a trust, by his son, Randolph. He had finished two volumes, and brought the story down to 1914, when he died, in 1968. The official life was thereupon taken up by Martin Gilbert, the Oxford historian who was to complete it in nine volumes, along with all the relevant documents. But already, Churchill, dead since 1965, has achieved the sort of marmoreal reputation that is fixed, not subject to revision—bound in morocco and permanently installed on library shelves alongside Izaak Walton’s Donne, Forster’s Dickens, Marshall’s Washington, and Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee.

  It ought to be enough to deter any intending biographer, but it did not deter William Manchester, who has put out the first of two promised volumes, a 973-page whopper, The Last Lion—Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory, which begins with a survey of the late-Victorian society into which Churchill was born, in 1874, and ends in 1932 with Lady Astor in Moscow assuring Stalin that Churchill is “finished”—”Chamberlain is the coming man.”

  Mr. Manchester begins with an incomparable social survey of Victorian England. It usually suffices to place the young Churchill in the high society into which he was born or to exploit the shameful contrasts between Disraeli’s “two nations.” But Mr. Manchester has surveyed the whole range of British society without forced pathos or any more irony than the juxtaposed facts invite: the habits, prejudices, economic resources, rituals, games, chronic diseases of Britain’s classes and innumerable subclasses, from hymn-singing Methodists to hunting peers; the social pecking order of the Guards regiments; the comparative wages of a landowner, a private soldier, and a coal miner; the contraceptive habits of the aristocracy and the working classes; the social distinctions of dress flaunted along the scale between a bank clerk and a duke. Against this teeming sociological background Mr. Manchester has mounted in the forefront an impressionist picture of the vast influence of the empire when more than half the world’s maritime vessels flew the red ensign, when one civil servant was overseer for every two hundred thousand Indians, when one lone Englishman in Borneo had his own flag and national anthem, and when—outside the quarter of the world that was the acknowledged imperial domain—the inspector general of Chinese customs was Irish, the military adviser to the sultan of Morocco was a Scot and “foreign governments were told where to build new lighthouses.”

  Mr. Manchester then moves on to the boyhood and youth, a dullish period commonly summarized in the boy’s devotion to his nanny, the kindly and mountainous Mrs. Everest; his poor marks at Harrow; a cool relation with his father and the wistful contemplation of his mother as “the evening star—I loved her dearly, but at a distance.” But Mr. Manchester gives more than a hundred pages, alive with the most engrossing research, to present the record of a boyhood that is pitiable when it is not heartbreaking. The son of an adored and highly neurotic father who disliked him from the start and of a glittering socialite to whom motherhood was a calling as alien as the priesthood, he arrived at Harrow an emotional orphan. He reacted as a spirited boy bereft of affection might be expected to: he demanded attention by becoming a show-off, a practical joker, and the despair of his surrogate parents, the teachers. Deciding to despise the regular syllabus—math, Latin, Greek, and French—he holed up alone to memorize bits of Shakespeare and Macaulay, and soon found himself at the bottom of his class. All the while, he received peppery, scolding letters from his father. He wrote pleading little letters to his mother (“Please write something kind to me”), and she responded, rarely, with the irritability of a fashion model cursed with a squalling brat. In his ten years away at school—whether in health or in dire sickness—he had only one visit from each parent. Even in a period and a country in which upper-class boys were kept under permanent house arrest in the nursery before being exiled to their public school, the brilliant, the beautiful, the appalling Jennie Jerome was the most uncaring of mothers. Apart from her chronic annoyance at her son’s well-maintained status as the dumbbell of the school, the only strong emotion she appears to have felt for him was disgust at his having passed on the measles to her favorite lover.

  So the education of Winston began in his twenty-second year at an unlikely time and in the most improbable place: the intellectual barren of a fashionable cavalry regiment posted to India—for a nine-year stretch of duty!—in the tw
ilight of the Victorian age. Before his troopship sailed, he heard a friend use the word “ethics.” Arrived in Bangalore, he wondered about it: “But here … there was no one to tell me about Ethics for love or money.” Later, he overheard a man drop the phrase “the Socratic method.” He wondered again. He was told that Socrates was an argumentative Greek hounded by a nagging wife into suicide. He had been dead, Churchill discovered, over two thousand years, yet some “method” of his was still being debated. “Such antagonisms,” he wrote, “do not spring from petty issues. Evidently Socrates had called something into being long ago which was very explosive. Intellectual dynamite! A moral bomb! But there was nothing about it in The Queen’s Regulations” He wrote to his mother and asked her to ship out to him Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, to be followed by Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, a translation of Plato’s Republic, and twelve volumes of Macaulay. Through the burning Indian days, he devoured these books “till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour” of his other passion, polo. His mother responded with uncharacteristic alacrity, for once her son had chosen to be a soldier and was comfortably removed to India, safe from intrusion on her unflagging round of house parties, balls, love affairs, foreign cruises, and the like, she was able to begin to express some concern for him as an individual rather than as a family pest. And when he made it clear, in insistent letters home, that he meant to make his mark in politics she warmed to an ambition as impatient as her husband’s and used her beauty to wheedle, nudge, hector, and even seduce some of the most influential men in England in the cause of her son’s lust for preferment.