During the next several decades, whether he’s “in” or “out,” Churchill’s star remains the correspondence’s chief theme and emotional focus. There is a great deal of domestic delight and discord—their son Randolph’s impetuous electoral forays; their daughter Sarah’s impetuous marriages—but nothing long distracts the letter writers from Churchill’s own political life and its vast dramatis personae. In 1928, Churchill notes in the two-year-old Princess Elizabeth “an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant;” he calls the Duchess of Windsor “Cutie.” The Windsors’ own correspondence—that sick-making pablum of baby talk and self-pity—could not provide more of a contrast to the Churchills’. Winston and Clementine may have their own pet names for each other—he’s her “Pig” or “Pug,” she’s his “Cat”—but after a bit of epistolary cuddling it’s always back to business.
Winston Churchill’s manly, buoyant style is displayed to great effect in every decade. He moves easily between lofty parallelism (“How easy to evacuate. How hard to capture”) and playful bombast: “I hope the Burgundy has reached you safely & that you are lapping it with judicious determination.” Clementine, at her own most stylish moments, can bring Nancy Mitford to mind. Describing a fountain in the Italian Garden at Blenheim, the first Churchills’ palace, she writes Winston: “The whole group now looks like a Pagan representation of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary attended by fallen members of the Salvation Army.”
The early portions of the correspondence are the most orderly, sustained volleys of one letter replying to another. Later on, especially during the Second World War, dictation, haste and the need for secrecy take their toll. The two-way coded cable traffic between “Colonel and Mrs. Warden” is nothing like so absorbing as those exchanges from the Great War two decades earlier. “ALL WELL HOPE YOU ARE NOT GETTING MUCH BOMBARDMENT,” Churchill telegraphs from Naples in August 1944.
Mary Soames, the couple’s youngest daughter and the editor of their letters, admits that during the later years “Winston himself could be maddening, and on occasions behaved like a spoilt child; but now there were times when Clementine harried him too much, and could be unreasonable and unkind.” Still, the case for their uninterrupted devotion—through his second prime ministership, which took him past eighty, and through the pair’s even later dramas of illness and enfeeblement—remains overwhelming. “Everyone has his day,” Churchill told the House of Commons in 1952, “and some days last longer than others.”
TO TURN ONE’S ATTENTION from Winston and Clementine’s letters to the wartime correspondence of Mirren Barford and Jock Lewes is to move from a kind of practical royal marriage to a twentieth-century version of courtly love, in which neurosis mixes with ardor, and self-parody threatens to overrun self-sacrifice. Barford, a language student at Somerville College, Oxford, first encounters the twenty-six-year-old Lewes, a member of the British Council newly enlisted in the reserves, at a wedding in August 1939. After two meetings, they begin an exchange of letters that quickly takes on an intense, disorienting life of its own. At its plainest, their correspondence concerns Mirren’s uncertainty about whether she should remain at university and Jock’s eagerness to leave off training (with the Welsh Guards and then a commando unit) in order to see some action. But above these sublunary questions the two conduct a frantically Platonic romance, a substitute for the actual affair that circumstance and temperament won’t permit them to have.
The Australian-raised Lewes is so handsome that when another male visits Mirren’s room in Oxford, “he turns your photograph down because he says you look like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.” Making his own movie comparisons, the pure, dutiful Jock expresses a preference to be Ashley Wilkes instead of Rhett Butler with “his licentious ways.” He lectures Mirren on the need to avoid “moral deterioration” and to persuade everyone “that we will and can fight not to the end but until we win.” They must “cleave fast” to their “impractical ideals of understanding, generosity, beauty, love,” the last of which can help to remake the world: “Whatever we touch will be hallowed for us and for those who see us.”
It’s not easy to imagine this paragon in the barracks, except perhaps in a bed short-sheeted by his fellow soldiers. Things would be better, he insists, if “half that mental energy and spiritual devotion … which we lavish on the pursuit of humour, comfort and convivial living” were put into training instead. Jock detaches himself from his comrades’ “sordid” existence by reading the Life of Johnson and Clarissa, and he holds off reading Mirren’s words until he can get a step or two away from the madding crowd: “I kept your letter till after dinner for I had seen the first sentence in the dim light of the hurricane lanterns and it was so like meeting you again in a dear dear garden at home that I almost recoiled from it there in that ribaldry.”
Jock can write with such overelaborated lyricism that it’s difficult to extract his meaning from the lofty tangle of clauses. Also prone to abstraction and treatise, he’s liable to address his girl as if she were a foreign minister with whom he’s conducting a bilateral negotiation: “I am here attempting to record in order that, quite apart from any intrinsic value in the record itself, we may be able to bring our minds to bear on the crux of the intricate and extremely important problems which now confront us both.”
For her part, Mirren indulges in a few girlish outbursts, and she does remind Jock of her need for social activity and even the company of other young men. But mostly the poor thing struggles to stay on the path of purity. She can’t pay attention to Michael de Chair, another suitor, when Jock is hovering like some gauzy “conscience” in a cartoon:
between the two of you, somehow you make me feel like a very superior and refined prostitute. Mike gives me lovely presents because he adores to do it, yet, because you have rammed your nose in between Mike and me, the presents make me feel ashamed. I would rather be with you than with Mike, and those presents seem so like a less crude form of payment than bank notes. I try specially hard to be good with Mike; I make myself tolerate a rather sticky hand in the cinema. And why? Because Mike knows very well that he has slipped down a rung, but would rather have some signs of affection than the frigidity part of me wants to show him.
Mirren’s effortful letters explore such matters as why intellectual work suits her better than the snares of art; Jock then critiques the letters as if they were term papers. She strains after sophistication and complexity, but her idea of honesty is very much a young person’s: “You and I are so honest with each other, it becomes agony at times. But all the same, it leads to complete understanding which is a precious thing.”
After a while the reader would like to go back in time, to some weekend when Jock has a pass, in order to get them drunk and book them a hotel room. But the results of such intervention would be uncertain, given Mirren’s embarrassment about standing naked in front of Jock’s photograph, and with Jock such a stickler for chastity that he wishes to proceed by “deliberate choice and not merely the dictation of desire.” He defends to Mirren the ideal of male virginity, even though two women he consults don’t think much of the concept, and despite what unfortunate imagery it leads him into: “I have not yet finished the forging of this ideal, though I have had it on the anvil often enough.”
The Jock-Mirren letters are full of extended, tormented metaphors (Mirren’s own virginity is a “Christmas stocking” not to be opened until the special day), as well as literary allusion. Jock will sign off as “Paris,” and Mirren, depending on situation and mood, declares herself ready to be “Helen,” “Penelope” or “Cassandra.” Joy Street (the eventual title of their published correspondence) runs through a Bunyan-like terrain mapped out by the two of them; it’s the cryptic capital of their emotional geography. By Jock’s reckoning, the lovers’ landscape also contains Casual Corner, Self Alley and Sentimental Gardens, not to mention a blue-leather corridor and some puzzling aquatic precincts. The correspondents’ latter-day editor says he first guessed Joy Street to be �
�an allegorical representation of a specific place,” before deciding “it described Mirren and Jock’s individual meetings.” (The street’s “beggar priest,” he further concluded, is Lust.)
Those individual meetings are so few that the whole relationship becomes a sort of allegory, a massive psychological displacement in which the flesh is made word after word after word. Both lovers, to some extent, recognize this: Jock refers to a “grand game … playing the hide and seek of intention and expectation” from behind the “safety curtain of absence.” All the sailors and soldiers and airmen, those former civilians that Mirren knew, seem to have “disappeared,” their whereabouts just vaguely known, their persons “all so hopelessly unobtainable.” She conducts her correspondence in a sort of fitful afterlife, and Jock himself comes to regard “a letter that arrives as something that has always existed, like a fossil that I come on in the desert, a message from another world.”
Only the merest fragments of that other, real world—glimpses of Oxford, or of Mirren’s alcoholic mother, or even just her own messy room—manage to penetrate the letters’ separate realm. When Jock is sent with a commando unit to defend Tobruk in northern Africa, we do see him wearing khaki shorts and writing as he fights “a million flea bites;” but the military censors and his own taste for abstraction tend to dry up his chronicle. At the height of the Blitz, Mirren focuses for a moment on the real world’s smashed houses and mad scramble for survival—the telephone “is always engaged because the family spends its time ringing up different members to make quite sure that no one is dead”—but she soon shifts attention to the infrastructure of her letter: “I’m sorry about those smudgy marks but I spent an anxious minute or so changing the ribbon.”
By the middle of 1941, as Jock gets closer to the action—training parachutists for the desert winds by having them jump from the back of trucks—some of what he writes becomes more direct. There’s even one astonishing eruption about “fucking” (“I wonder if we’d do it well; not at first I think”), and some decidedly more-ardent-than-usual endearments:
To press you to me till I feel the very nipple of your breasts and the firmness of your thighs and sense the gracious gesture of their parting, to feel the agony of the longed for pain of passion, that nothing can satisfy but you. To lead you silently and through the dark to bed and there to enter, smooth and warm and thrilling until the madness of love’s ecstasy engulfs us and sighing sleep into a world made whole.
One senses his new urgency in the frustration he expresses over the slow and erratic delivery of Mirren’s letters: “when you think how you can change in a week …”
Mirren tries to speed up their exchange by exercising a kind of telepathy: “John, how could I reach your mind across these leagues of sea and desert? Somehow you’ve got to know, now, at once, how important it is that you should send a cable.” The intensity of emotion seems to grow, and to the reader it begins at last to feel genuine. Mirren prepares herself for the worst (“If you die before we have had time to be together, at least I shall have the faith and love you have given me”), and Jock allows personal suffering to shatter his jutting, glass-jawed dutifulness:
in the streets of Cairo the other night as I walked away from the film “Lady Hamilton” I cried in the dark; just for a moment tears and great baby sobs took hold of my throat and face and wrenched away my manhood. And when I had mastered them I went into a great shop and spent two lovely hours choosing two pieces of cloth for you. A flaming red velvet for Helen from America and an English silk and cotton print for Penelope.
The reader, knowing what’s coming as surely as they do, finally gives himself over to these two young people trying so hard to act grown-up in the catastrophic place and time they’ve been assigned. Their needs and affinities and bravery become real only pages before the telegram arrives. Jock Lewes is killed on December 30, 1941, after his commando unit makes a raid that succeeds in destroying two German planes.
Little more than a month later, Mirren writes to his brother, David, a new doctor, telling him how Jock “seemed to charm all the shabbiness and mistrust” out of her. She reassures Dr. Lewes that she’ll “have dozens of children and you can be godfather or whoosh out their adenoids for them—or do both. Take this letter for what it is worth and remember I was writing it”—at a quarter to two in the morning—“to me as well as to you.”
Pain has awakened Mirren from her allegory; her writing seems suddenly straight ahead and clear-eyed, shocked into calmness and simplicity, like a person whose hair has gone white overnight. On March 4, 1943, she tells Jock’s parents that she is ready to “live whole-heartedly again” now that she has subdued their son’s memory and made it a “friend, philosopher, and guide.” She announces plans to wed an American named Dick Wise and pledges “to call our first son Christopher John—do you like that?”
She kept her promise, and she kept the letters, in the back of a drawer. Michael T. Wise, the younger brother of Jock’s namesake, published them three years after his mother Mirren’s death in 1992.
“THE ECONOMIC SITUATION will hardly be improved by having a few million Poles for breakfast,” writes a quietly disgusted Helmuth James von Moltke to his wife Freya on August 23, 1939. Having been drafted into the German Intelligence Service, this pious, aristocratic lawyer (only six years older than Jock Lewes) will just have to cope with it. “At bottom,” he writes Freya seven months later, “my attitude to this war is that of an executor who is horrified to see heirs fighting over an inheritance that grows less and less because of the dispute.”
Raised on a thousand-acre Silesian estate, this fastidious son of a Prussian count keeps himself as distant as possible from Nazi colleagues in the Abwehr. Moltke’s collateral descent from Bismarck’s most famous field marshal helps make possible his refusal to wear the military uniform that his colleagues favor. He tries to prevent violations of an international law that the regime employing him regards as a joke, and he attempts to arrange that those being subjugated by German conquest come under the control of the more civilized Wehrmacht instead of the SS.
By 1939, Moltke and Freya Deichmann, a banker’s daughter, have been married for ten years. His letters home to her at Kreisau, the estate he’s inherited, have a kind of bizarre double-agentry. The reader moves from the heading “Berlin, 25 August 1941” to a sentence noting how “Churchill has made a really great speech.” The disjunction is reflected in Moltke himself and in the modern-day reader’s constantly conflicted reaction to what he’s reading: the letter writer seems both admirable and deluded, daring and craven, sometimes in the space of a paragraph. In July 1940, watching a “squabble of the various offices over the booty in the occupied territories,” he can convince himself that he is “personally uninvolved in it” and thereby able to “enjoy … this clash of the vultures.” Struggling, in the early days of the war, to limit pillage and deportation, he takes satisfaction in having “prevented so much evil and achieved so much good,” knowing that to his superiors each of those words now means the opposite and that his success depends on no one’s detecting what mercies he’s been able to effect.
Constantly overrun by events, he continues at his post, stiff but moderately subversive, trying to convince himself that his conscience remains intact:
This morning Schmitz and I fought hard in the Academy for German Law for the rights and status of the Poles in the area we occupy. Some really incredible theses were put forward, and Schmitz and I took turns responding. It was simply shocking. It’s no use, unfortunately, but at least our honour was saved …
If this takes the idea of “working within the system” to a sleepwalking extreme, Moltke’s occasional encounters with like-minded officials help to keep the bubble of denial from bursting within him. In August 1940, he finds himself in just-conquered Paris with General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military commander for northern France and Belgium:
He is an outstanding and courageous man and we talked mostly about the economic situatio
n of Belgium, our spoliation of the country and its economic and political consequences. Finally he told me where he sees the limits of his collaboration and the point at which he will refuse to take any further part. From a human point of view it was all very encouraging …
Moltke himself decides not to shop in the occupied city.
By the following summer, the Final Solution begins to be discernible. “Again and again one hears reports that in transports of prisoners or Jews only 20% arrive.” Moltke tells Freya that a whirlwind of “blood-guilt” is on its way to the German nation, but his moral response can only struggle to grow beyond the small, impotent gesture. On November 5, 1941, he takes a food parcel to “the last Jew I know” and declares that mankind’s only chance lies in “maintaining the fundamental moral laws laid down in the 10 commandments.” Still, the only specific prescription with which he can conclude this letter to Freya is that their sons begin saying grace at meals: “I think it would also improve table manners.”
He expects the worst, for himself included. Noticing the deportation of ten thousand more Jews, he remarks that the “bearing of these people was good to see, and I can only hope that ours will be no worse when our turn comes.” Yet he seems to stand still, like an animal caught in a blizzard. He fantasizes about a “secure peace” based on the rule of law, but must sometimes mock his own futile efforts during the catastrophe that is preceding it:
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