Posted Monday afternoon, June 29, 2020.
One thing Donald Trump does have in common with Winston Churchill: A sadistic bully for a father determined to crush the self-respect and sense of self-worth in his son. Trump dealt with it by becoming like his father. Churchill by identifying with his mother and turning his old man into a supporting character in his life story. Detail from a portrait of Lord Randolph Churchill by Edwin Long L. Long, 1888. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, via ArtUK.
From the Department of Serendipitous Reading:
Ok, not Churchill’s own. That’s a click-bait title. Churchill appears to have been comfortably heterosexual. I don’t know what his personal or political views were on homosexuality. The pride is that of Fr James Alison, an openly gay Catholic priest, who recounted his own struggle toward pride and away from the self-loathing that tortured him growing up in a conservative political family in Britain in the 1960s and 70s in a talk he gave at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York City last June on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. That talk was adapted into an essay for the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, "Facing Down the Wolf", and I came across a link to it accidentally via Father James Martin’s Facebook page. You should read the whole essay, but as it happened this passage caught my attention for a reason apart from Alison’s theme: the name Roy Jenkins...
Only decades later did I learn the family context of the world into which that nine-year-old was feeling his way: that Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, one of the involuntary protagonists and heroes of the campaign to legalize homosexuality in England, had been a lifelong friend of my father’s, their having been at schools together throughout their childhoods (this fact was confirmed when Montagu introduced himself to me deliberately and with great warmth at my father’s funeral); that my beloved aunt had once been the lover of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary who had pushed through the legalization of homosexuality in 1967 against her brother’s (my father’s) own vote in Parliament…
As it happens, Roy Jenkins’ name has been staring out at me from the stack of books on my desk. He’s the author of the biography of Churchill I’ve been spot-reading the last month, one of the about thirty books I’m in the middle of. To me, Jenkins is an historian and biographer, and from what I’ve read in “Churchill”, an excellent writer. I knew from his author biography that he’d been a politician (He died in 2003. “Churchill” was published in 2001.), but I didn’t know how prominent he’d been or what his politics were or of his achievements. Knowing what I know now makes me more admiring of him but also makes me fonder of the book, which, my opinion of the author as a human being, isn’t or, at any rate, shouldn't be a basis for judging a book as a literary work. Even more subjectively, that fondness for Jenkins and his book has extended to Churchill himself. I like him the better for his biographer’s sake, and I already like him too much.
Somewhat more objectively, I like Churchill for the use that can be made of him as an example with which to contrast and criticize as a leader and human being the maroon in the White House, which I did when I posted this passage from “Churchill” at the beginning of the month after his, ahem, “Churchillian” march across a pacified Lafayette Square to his photo op in front of St. John’s.
But, getting back to Churchill and Father Alison. Like I said, I don’t know what Churchill’s opinions on homosexuality were. I imagine he’d have a lot to say about the legalization Jenkins helped bring about, but he died four or so years before it happened. He and Alison do have something in common, though. And it’s not a personal history of self-loathing. If anything, Churchill was too self-approving. (That’s not to say he wasn’t un-self-critical and free from self-doubt, another way he was not like you know who.) What Alison and Churchill have in common is that they both had politician fathers who worked to undermine their sons’ senses of self-worth. Alison’s father appears to have been a decent and well-meaning person who didn’t know what his politics and religious beliefs were doing to his son, because Alison determinedly hid it from him. Churchill’s father was a sadistic and possibly insane bully who made it a hobby and a pleasure to belittle young Winston and crush his spirit. Churchill’s defense was to re-write his father as a much more benign and well-intentioned character and identify with his vivacious, accomplished, socially and personally admired and celebrated mother, Jennie, who was a not always attentive parent herself and whom Churchill also re-wrote, often to her face.
“Language,” Bill McKibben wrote in a post at the New Yorker, “was Churchill’s greatest ally.”
McKibben prefaced that observation with this one: Language is “Trump’s enemy.”
McKibben’s post is about the superficial things Churchill had in common with Trump and the profound ways he was nothing like him. But the two had this in common, which McKibben doesn't mention: Trump’s father was a sadistic bully who worked hard at making his sons feel miserable about themselves.(Trump’s mother appears to have been cold and withdrawn and Trump often seems to have forgotten she existed.) The son Fred Trump was hardest on was his eldest, Fred Jr., an unambitious---by Fred Sr.’s lights. Fred Jr. didn’t think making money for money’s sake the be-all and end-all---alcoholic. (Fred Jr.’s daughter’s memoir is going to be some soap opera of a book.), But given young Donald’s behavior problems as a kid, I’m sure he came in for it too. He wasn’t packed off to military school for a vacation.
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That’s all for now. Be sure to read Alison’s essay. And I recommend Jenkins’ “Churchill,” but keep in mind I haven’t read all of it. It's over 1000 pages long. McKibben’s post is also worth the time. I haven’t read Erik Larson’s new book about Churchill during the Blitz, “The Splendid and the Vile,” which my supposed friends and loved ones forgot to give me for my birthday and Father’s Day, but I’m looking forward to placing it in my stack of books to read soon, even if I have to give it to myself.
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