Books: Glowworm

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CHURCHILL: YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY (1874-1915) by Ted Morgan

Simon & Schuster; 607pages; $22.50

"I am often struck at the limitations with which men of power pay the price for their domination over man kind." So remarked Henry James after being snubbed at a 1915 dinner party by Winston Churchill. Then 40 years old, the bumptious First Lord of the Admiralty seemed fated to become the youngest Prime Minister in modern English history. But as the old novelist suggested, the cost of rising was exorbitant. Before the year was out, the promising Cabinet Minister was forced from government and self-exiled to the trenches in France as a common line officer. Destiny, observes Biographer Ted Morgan, was on holiday.

This richly documented chronicle of Churchill's first four decades by the versatile biographer and journalist (Maugham; Rowing Toward Eden) catches Churchill on all fours. Here, the world statesman is still a vote-grabbing politician, and the supreme war strategist a romantic blunderer. The omnipresent cigar, the V sign and the stentorian voice on the wireless are a World War away.

Winston inherited from his father Randolph a gift for contentious politics and the tactics to prevail. Winston's beautiful American mother, née Jennie Jerome, provided another legacy: absolute self-absorption. By one account, she took 200 lovers, and after Randolph's early death from syphilis married a former Scots Guardsman 16 days older than her son. As a boy, Winston made few friends at Harrow or Sandhurst, but his self-confidence remained unshaken. At 32, the young Under Secretary of the Colonial Office stated, "We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm."

The glowworm rode straight into controversy. He covered the Cuban revolution in 1895 as a journalist, fought at the Khyber Pass, and joined the last great cavalry charge in British history with Kitchener in the Sudan. Captured by Boers in South Africa, Winston was confined to a prison camp. His escape was neoclassic Churchill. He used a route fellow officers had worked out, but went alone. He had read his Nelson carefully. The admiral advised that victory depended on being there a quarter of an hour before the other fellows.

That phrase might have served on Churchill's coat of arms. Back home, in Parliament, he became a master of publicity. Violence in Belfast surrounded his preachings for Irish home rule. Even his worst notions drew attention. He offered a bizarre plan to incarcerate and sterilize the mentally ill. "Feebleminded girls," he said, "are the easy prey of vice and hand on their own insanity with unerring and unfailing fertility." The scheme was unworkable; the controversy precedented.

As Morgan shows, Churchill was never disturbed by such failures. Legislation was only his interest; language was his love. The famous oratorical style was not, as he liked listeners to think, a British invention. It was derived from an obscure Tammany Hall politician Churchill met in 1895 in the U.S. on his way to Cuba.

New York Irishman Bourke Cockran (who had been one of Jennie's lovers), wrote Churchill, was the best speaker he ever heard, "in point, in pith, in rotundity, in antithesis and in comprehension."