‘The Splendid and the Vile’ – A Masterful and Idiosyncratic History

This superb work by Erik Larson portrays the opening year of Britain’s fight for its very survival at the beginning of WW II.  Larson cleverly and suspensefully weaves the war details along with the saga of the Churchill family, friends, and Churchill’s colleagues while documenting the indisputable:  Churchill was a man for the moment, giving credence to the argument that this man made the times as much as the times made the man.  He rose to the occasion, leavened by his uncanny and eloquent oratory skills. As Larson points out, and documents on many occasions in the book, he had the ability “to deliver dire news and yet leave his audience feeling encouraged and uplifted.”  Through the darkness of those days he buoyed the spirits of the British people.

Larson makes use of many types of primary source documents including Mary Churchill’s diary. His youngest daughter’s insights cast not only details on the Churchill’s family life, but a feeling of what it must have been to live through those times. He also makes use of the network of “Mass-Observation” diarists, “an organization launched in Britain two years before the war that recruited hundreds of volunteers to keep daily diaries with a goal of helping sociologists better understand ordinary British life. One volunteer wrote ‘if I had to spend my whole life with a man I choose Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked.’“  These sources give Larson’s work as special kind insight and personalization, often lacking in historical works.

The writing is exquisite, such as when Larson describes Hermann Göring who became, among many titled positions, the Chief of the Luftwaffe, who had promised Hitler that his air force could single-handedly destroy Britain. Larson says Göring was “large, buoyant, ruthless, cruel [and] had used his close connection to Hitler to win this commission, deploying the sheer strength of his ebullient and joyously corrupt personality to overcome Hitler’s misgivings.” He gleefully went about the task of introducing hell on earth first in London, and then in smaller UK towns to break the will of the British people. Massive incendiary bombings preceded the heavy bombings to light the way for the German bombers.

The Luftwaffe had developed a guidance system which a young Dr. Reginald Jones discovered, and he was unexpectedly whisked into a Churchill Cabinet meeting to present his evidence. Here Larson writes a suspenseful narrative:  “Churchill listened, wrapped, his fascination for secret technologies in full flare but he also realized the bleak significance of Jones‘s discovery. It was bad enough that the Luftwaffe was establishing itself at bases in captured territory just minutes from the English coast. But now he understood that the aircraft at those bases will be able to bomb accurately even a moonless night and in overcast weather. To Churchill, this was dark news indeed ‘one of the blackest moments of the war.’…Until this point he had been confident that the RAF could hold its own, despite being, as air intelligence believed vastly outnumbered by the Luftwaffe….If the German planes could bomb accurately even in heavy overcast and on the darkest nights, they would no longer need their swarms of fighter escorts and no longer be restrained by the fighters’ fuel limits and they could traverse the British Isles without restriction, a tremendous advantage and laying the groundwork for invasion.”

London was always one of my favorite places to visit, and I did so frequently either on my way to the Frankfurt Bookfairs or attending the London Bookfairs and seeing our selling partners there and arrange for co-publishing projects with several British publishers.  So many personal landmarks are conjured up by this work and in my mind’s eye I can see them and imagine how they would have been then, Piccadilly, the British Museum, Hyde Park, the financial district, the River Thames, Covent Garden, and London’s wonderful underground system, which was used as bomb shelters, not always successfully.  Frequently, Londoners would have to choose whether they might potentially be buried alive or allow it to fate to stay in their homes.

The first time we stayed in London was the early 1970’s at the Dorchester. Larson reveals the Dorchester was highly sought after by ambassadors during the war because it was a poured concrete building and billed as “bombproof,“ although people evacuated the top floor during the heaviest bombings.  He describes a debutante party at Grosvenor hotel, also facing Hyde Park, the Dorchester only blocks away to the south. The ball -- where Mary Churchill had been “presented“ the year before -- took place in May 1940 on a night when there was one of the heaviest bombings and Larson spares no detail regarding the horror of that night, even decapitations, people fleeing for the safety of the Dorchester. I just had no idea until reading this work that where I stayed only thirty years later that this was part of its history..

Churchill knew that Britain was at the end of a tenuous string, that it was imperative on the one hand he impress FDR with his people’s resiliency, but on the other hand signal their need for massive help from the U.S.  FDR’s hands were tied by the election, the cry for isolationism at home, and Larson amusingly paints a picture of Churchill’s puzzlement:  if he is the President of the US, why can’t he just do it?  Ultimately, Pearl Harbor, which occurs after the purview of this book, resolves the issue of the USA’s involvement, a great relief to Churchill, but in the interim it was the Lend Lease Act which helped to fortify Britain’s resolve.

The role of Churchill’s deliberations at Chequers, the country house of the Prime Minister, about 40 miles NW of London, on most weekends except when there was a full moon leaving it vulnerable to night bombing, the locale then shifting to Ditchley Park, owned by a friend, and located in Oxfordshire, a home that was more difficult to see from the air, cannot be understated.  In these places Churchill would “hold court” with his entire staff, generals, ambassadors, anyone involved in the war effort, to talk openly and until late at night frequently his family also residing there.

It was there that Churchill befriended and impressed FDR’s personal emissary, Harry Hopkins who in turn became an important intermediary to persuade FDR.  One night Hopkins stayed up till 4:30 in the morning and writing FDR “the people here are amazing from Churchill down and if courage alone can win – the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately and I’m sure you will permit nothing to stand in his way.” Hopkins continues: “Churchill held sway over the entire British government and understood every aspect of the war….I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person with whom you need to have a full meeting of the minds. This island needs our help now Mr. President with everything we can give them.“  This ultimately led to the Lend Lease Act.

A leitmotif in the work is the personal letters of so many of Churchill’s associates such as those of John Colville, one of Churchill’s secretaries, who expresses throughout the period his endless unrequited love towards Gay Margesson, a student at Oxford.  Or the unusual relationship Churchill had with a “longtime friend and occasional antagonist Max Aitken –Lord Beaverbrook – a man who drew controversy the way steeples draw lightning.”  He had made his fortune in newspapers, but Churchill recognized a special kind of genius, appointing him as Minister of Aircraft Production, a new position to get around the red tape of the military.  Churchill knew that building the RAF was the key to defending Britain and production had lagged.  He needed a trusted mover-and-shaker and Beaverbrook was it.  His friend made enemies, circumventing traditional channels, but he significantly increased fighter production.  On a number of occasions, he tried to resign but Churchill was able to inveigle him back to the yoke and gave him more and more responsibility for a number of projects.

Throughout it all his wife Clementine was a steadying keel and did not hesitate to be outspoken with guests, be they ambassadors or the military, and of course with her husband.  She too did not suffer fools lightly and managed the family life (not tolerating their son Randolph’s drunkenness and gambling).

There are so many “players” in this history that reads like a novel, too many to mention.  Larson answers one of the questions that came to my mind before reading this work.  Why?  There are so many books about the period and Churchill.  9/11 had something do to with Larson’s motivation.  He got to wonder how Londoners could endure the never-ending shock of the war.  He endeavored to rely on more than the standard histories: “I set out to hunt for the stories that often get left out of the massive biographies of Churchill, either because there’s no time to tell them or because they seem too frivolous.  But it is the frivolity that Churchill revealed himself, the little moments which endeared him to his staff, despite the demands he placed on all.”  Larson captures those moments along with the grand and frightening story.  He also thanks, by name, the entire publishing staff of Random House and Crown who brought this insightful book to life.  It was wonderful reading the hardcover edition, so handsomely designed, a treasure to keep. 

 

That Infamous Day 20 Years Later

I’m hardly able to write about that day as its memory is still raw.  Also now with hindsight there is the realization it hastened what had already been underway:  economic and political forces tearing away our society from within.  Today we are left with things spiraling out of control and now we are even unable to come together to fight a virus that has claimed the lives of three hundred times the number of people who died on 9/11, almost as many American lives who died in all wars since the American Revolution.   We have a vaccine and the ability to impose mask mandates, yet corrosive politics and culture wars have weakened American resolve and unity, an attribute that was in full bloom during WW II and briefly, oh so briefly, after that fateful day of 9/11.

As I am so disheartened by the reality of what is and what might have been, not to mention, where we are going as a nation, I prefer to borrow and edit some of my prior writings about this day and its consequences, including a small portion of my book Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense.

World Trade Center Bicentennial 1976

Although it seems like yesterday, we all (of a certain age) remember where we were at that moment.  The only comparable instant in my life is remembering where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky.  We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers.  To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity.  Did this really happen here?  My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC.  They lost 685 employees on that fateful day.  Jonathan decided to take another job.  Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes?  Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day.  One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”  May we never forget:

“9/11/2001

By Chris Hagelstein

Terrorist troops and bodies strewn

in Twin Tower screams, destruction loomed.

News stations on a journalistic mission

under our Flag's lost transmission:

America's Death.

 

Judgement of Religious Decree

driving Boeing bombs with air fuel

circulating vultures from above the sea,

smashing their prey

on this plain sun-filled day.

 

Television digital debris rained on video,

Looping the same sequence of carnage.

The surgery of media controlled the flow

but the State of Blood remained unknown.

 

Prayers beneath each citizen’s eyes

were blessed wells now, for those who died.

No ceremony or speech could render a conclusion:

Those wired images played seemed like an illusion.

 

An Eye of some god was seeing us All

for each one's Blindness, was another’s Call,

and in the skies above Manhattan, masked in smoke

exhumed old gods of hatred and hope.

 

If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life,

It could not compete with what witnessed, I:

Buildings falling and heroes crushed:

As day burned to night

and life --- to dust.

 

Still, yet, in my hearts dismay,

Born here, I stand, no less bleeding

than those who survived this day:

For America is my body and my sea

executed on the stage of history.”

His poem is a first-hand emotional account of the horror and the hope.  This is how we all felt and I remember our country briefly coming together.  Unfortunately, Trump “remembers” it divisively, saying,” Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering….It was on television. I saw it.”

I give President Bush credit for going to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. less than a week after the tragedy to deliver a speech "Islam is Peace" to the American people and to reassure Muslim Americans.  It is the easy path to foment racial hatred after such an event as Trump did and still does, but Bush had a different message: “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.“

By the time President Obama was elected the economy was already deteriorating and political divisiveness, such as the rise of the Tea Party, was beginning to build to a crescendo and that’s about the time I innocently started my writing, more for personal reasons, but it quickly morphed into a mission to present the observations and views from the grassroots.  I’ve written it for 14 years now, albeit with decreasing frequency.

Since 9/11 I’ve deliberately avoided films, documentaries, non-fiction and fictional works about that day.  It and its consequences are just too terrible to relive.  But nonetheless, it was unavoidable that my reading would lead me to that day, this happenstance out of the blue.  And it was from an unexpected source, my favorite writer, John Updike.  What I didn’t know, but found out later, that he was visiting family in Brooklyn Heights, and watched the event unfold from there.  Typical Updike, his real life experience became conflated with his fiction in his last short story collection, My Father’s Tears.  

So it was with some trepidation when I realized that his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.”  The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights.  To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety.  Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day.  One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to be a source of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegaard, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?

As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.”  And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.”  How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God?

 

Look to “Letters From An American”

 

When I began this blog it very quickly found its way into political matters.  Maybe it was the path of least resistance or the topic that most “needed” my opinion.  It led to my first book, Waiting for Someone To Explain It; The Rise of Contempt and the Decline of Sense.  Although I had to explain the mysterious title (Eugene Ionesco once wrote “as the world is incomprehensible to me, I am waiting for someone to explain it”), the subtitle, chosen during the reign of Trump, is self explanatory.

Over the years, my writing interests changed and, in fact, I became downright cynical trying to write about our increasingly fractious body politic and as divisive voices swelled I mostly withdrew from the conversation.  Also, writing in the COVID era became oppressive.  All the theatre and live music we loved disappeared, and these acrid politics leaked into public health, one exacerbating the other. 

Still there are topics I just cannot ignore and although I know little about Afghanistan, I know who to turn to and that is Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who set out, in a way like I did, to write a “journal.”  There are vast differences, though.  She approaches each topic in a scholarly fashion, documenting her opinions, and is extremely disciplined, writing each day on Substack in the form of an email to her subscribers.  It’s free unless you want to post comments.  I’ve come to rely on her analyses as a source of the facts behind the events. 

Richardson’ posting about August 26 (see the entire entry by subscribing with your email address) is a fully understandable discussion, to the point, of the quagmire called Afghanistan.  Here is the essence of her argument as she puts it:

I confess to being knocked off-keel by the Republican reaction to the Kabul bombing.

The roots of the U.S. withdrawal from its 20 years in Afghanistan were planted in February 2020, when the Trump administration cut a deal with the Taliban agreeing to release 5000 imprisoned Taliban fighters and to leave the country by May 1, 2021, so long as the Taliban did not kill any more Americans. The negotiations did not include the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the time Biden took office, the U.S. had withdrawn all but 2500 troops from the country.

That left Biden with the option either to go back on Trump’s agreement or to follow through. To ignore the agreement would mean the Taliban would again begin attacking U.S. service people and the U.S. would both have to pour in significant numbers of troops and sustain casualties. And Biden himself wanted out of what had become a meandering, expensive, unpopular war. Letters From An American © 2021 Heather Cox Richardson

The devil is in the details so best that it be read in its entirety.

Meanwhile, I fear that the self righteous Republicans, who only recently were criticizing Biden for not withdrawing from Afghanistan sooner, will gleefully use this as a fulcrum to “steal” the Midterm elections.  On the surface it is a blunder of major proportions, not to mention the cost to innocent lives and more of our troops.  But as all things historical, retrospect with a political motive is a different lens than clearly seeing events as they unfold.  No doubt they (especially the Trumpublicans) will make hay while the sun is shining on their hypocritical countenance.  As usual, nothing tells it as succinctly and dramatically as a political cartoon, this one from the Palm Beach Post August 27.