Churchill's Black Dog Read online

  Brendan Bracken says five of the last seven Dukes of Marlborough suffered from melancholia;8 but it is difficult to confirm this even from Rowse’s books, which Bracken alleges are the source of his information. There seems little doubt, however, that the cyclothymic temperament, that is, the tendency to rather extreme swings of mood, was part of the Churchill inheritance.

  Before leaving the question of Churchill’s heredity, we must take a glance at his physical endowment. It is probable, though not certain, that physique and character are intimately connected, and that the structure and shape of the body reflect genetic rather than environmental influences. A man’s cast of mind is largely influenced by the way he is brought up and educated. His physical endowment, though modifiable to some extent, is more likely to be a datum of heredity.

  It is clear that Churchill was possessed of enormous vitality. He survived to the age of ninety; and, by the age of eighty, he had surmounted a heart attack, three attacks of pneumonia, two strokes, and two operations. He habitually ate, drank, and smoked as much as he wanted, and this much was a great deal. Until he was seventy, he hardly ever complained of fatigue. Yet, this extraordinary constitution was not based upon natural physical strength of a conventional kind. Indeed, he started life with considerable physical disadvantages. As Lord Moran puts it: “I could see this sensitive boy, bullied and beaten at his school, grow up into a man, small in stature, with thin, unmuscular limbs, and the white delicate hands of a woman; there was no hair on his chest, and he spoke with a lisp and a slight stutter.”9

  Winston Churchill himself, in a letter from Sandhurst written in 1893, claimed, “I am cursed with so feeble a body, that I can scarcely support the fatigues of the day; but I suppose I shall get stronger during my stay here.”10 His height was only five feet six and a half inches; and his chest measured but thirty-one inches, which, by Sandhurst standards, was quite inadequate. When the poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt met Churchill in 1903, he described him as “a little square-headed fellow of no very striking appearance.”11 The physical courage which he consistently, and sometimes rashly, displayed was not based upon any natural superiority of physique, but rather upon his determination to be tough in spite of lack of height and muscle. His search for physical danger in early youth, and his reckless self-exposure in France, even though his behavior put others in danger, bear witness to the fact that his courage was not something that he himself took for granted, but rather something which he had to prove to himself; a compensation for inner doubts about his own bravery.

  No man is immune from fear; but those who have been endowed by nature with exceptionally powerful physiques are generally less disturbed by physical danger than most of us. Churchill was uncommonly brave; but his courage was of a more remarkable and admirable variety than that which is based upon an innate superiority of physical endowment. He never forgot that, at his second preparatory school, he had been frightened by other boys throwing cricket balls at him, and had taken refuge behind some trees. This, to him, was a shameful memory; and, very early in life, he determined that he would be as tough as anybody could be. When he was eighteen, he nearly killed himself when being chased by his cousin and brother by jumping from a bridge to avoid capture. He fell twenty-nine feet, ruptured a kidney, remained unconscious for three days and unable to work for nearly two months. There is no doubt whatever that Churchill’s physical courage was immense; but it rested upon his determination to conquer his initial physical disadvantages, much as Demosthenes’ skill in oratory is said to have been the consequence of his will to overcome an impediment in his speech.

  There have been many attempts to discern a relationship between physique and character, of which W. H. Sheldon’s is both the most detailed and the most successful.12 Sheldon claimed that he could discern three main components in a man’s physical makeup, to which he gave the somewhat awkward names of endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy. He also constructed a scale of temperament comprising three sets of twenty basic traits which were generally closely allied to the subject’s physique. The three main varieties of temperament are known as viscerotonia, somatotonia, and cerebrotonia.

  When one comes to examine Churchill, it is obvious that his physique was predominantly endomorphic. His massive head, the small size of his chest compared with his abdomen, the rounded contours of his body, and the small size of his extremities were all characteristic. So was his smooth, soft skin, which was so delicate that he always wore specially obtained silk underwear. One would expect a man with this physique to be predominantly viscerotonic in temperament: earthy, unhurried, deliberate, and predictable. Churchill actually does rate high on eleven out of the twenty viscerotonic traits; but he also scores almost equally high on somatotonia—that is, the temperament which is allied to the powerful and athletic frame of the mesomorph. According to Sheldon, men whose temperament differs widely from that which accords with their physique are particularly subject to psychological conflict, since they are at odds with their own emotional constitution.

  Churchill was a very much more aggressive and dominant individual than one would expect from his basic physique. His love of risk, of physical adventure, his energy and assertiveness are traits which one would expect to find in a heavily muscled mesomorph, but which are unexpected in a man of Churchill’s endomorphic structure.

  In other words, we have a picture of a man who was, to a marked extent, forcing himself to go against his own inner nature: a man who was neither naturally strong, nor naturally particularly courageous, but who made himself both in spite of his temperamental and physical endowment. The more one examines Winston Churchill as a person, the more one is forced to the conclusion that his aggressiveness, his courage, and his dominance were not rooted in his inheritance, but were the product of deliberate decision and iron will. “I can look very fierce when I like,” he said to his doctor.13 But the expression of bulldog defiance which appears in his most popular photographs was not evident upon his face before the war, and, as Moran hints, is likely to have been assumed when declaiming speeches in front of the looking glass, and thenceforth used on appropriate public occasions.

  Before turning from the question of inherited physical and psychological characteristics to consideration of the environmental influences which shaped Churchill’s character, it is worth glancing at one more typology. The Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung was responsible for introducing the terms “extravert” and “introvert” into psychology; most people are familiar with the broad outlines of what is meant by these two terms. The extravert is a person whose chief orientation is toward the events and features of the external world. The recesses of his own soul are not of much concern to the predominantly extraverted person, nor is he much concerned with abstractions, ideas, or the subtleties of philosophy. The main interest of the extraverted person is in action, not in thought, and when troubled, he seeks to do things to distract himself rather than to explore his inner life to determine the cause of his distress. Churchill was undoubtedly highly extraverted. He showed little interest in philosophy and none in religion, and he dismissed psychology as irrelevant.

  Jung’s further subdivision of types into thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition has not been widely accepted; but his delineation of the extraverted intuitive in Psychological Types fits Churchill so accurately that it ought to persuade people to take another look at the book. Jung writes:

  Wherever intuition predominates, a particular and unmistakeable psychology presents itself.… The intuitive is never to be found among the generally recognized reality values, but is always present where possibilities exist. He has a keen nose for things in the bud pregnant with future promise.… Thinking and feeling, the indispensable components of conviction, are, with him, inferior functions, possessing no decisive weight: hence they lack the power to offer any lasting resistance to the force of intuition.14

  Hence, according to Jung, the intuitive’s lack of judgment, and also his “weak consideration for the welfare of his nei
ghbours.” The intuitive is “not infrequently put down as a ruthless and immoral adventurer,” terms often applied to Churchill in his youth, and yet “his capacity to inspire his fellow-men with courage, or to kindle enthusiasm for something new, is unrivalled.”15

  In his extremely interesting essay on Churchill, C. P. Snow refers to his lack of judgment. In fact, he says that it was “seriously defective.” He goes on:

  Judgment is a fine thing: but it is not all that uncommon. Deep insight is much rarer. Churchill had flashes of that kind of insight, dug up from his own nature, independent of influences, owing nothing to anyone outside himself. Sometimes it was a better guide than judgment: in the ultimate crisis when he came to power, there were times when judgment itself could, though it did not need to, become a source of weakness.

  When Hitler came to power Churchill did not use judgment but one of his deep insights. This was absolute danger, there was no easy way round. That was what we needed. It was an unique occasion in our history. It had to be grasped by a nationalist leader. Plenty of people on the left could see the danger: but they did not know how the country had to be seized and unified.16

  I think that the kind of insight to which C. P. Snow is referring might equally well be called intuition. Intuition is in many respects an unreliable guide, and some of Churchill’s intuitions were badly wrong. In the First World War, his major strategic conception, the invasion of Gallipoli, was a failure, but his idea of the development of the tank, although it was not properly used at the time, was certainly a success. It is worth noting that as early as 1917 he described a project for making landing craft for tanks and also for something very like the transportable harbors used in the 1944 invasion of France. His intuition was at least as often right as it was wrong, and in his anticipation of the menace of Hitler, and later of the threat of Russian domination of Europe, he was intuitively right where others, who had better judgment than he, failed to see the. important point. Jung’s description of the extraverted intuitive has much which applies to Churchill. As Jung points out, this type is lacking in judgment. Churchill could never think for long at a time. Although he had brilliant ideas, he was hardly susceptible to reason and could not follow a consecutive argument when presented to him by others. His famous demand that all ideas should be presented to him on a half sheet of paper is an illustration of this point. Alanbrooke, in his wartime diary, wrote of him: “Planned strategy was not his strong card. He preferred to work by intuition and by impulse.… He was never good at looking at all the implications of any course he favoured. In fact, he frequently refused to look at them.”17 It is also true that he was, in many respects, deficient in feeling. He had little appreciation of the feelings of others. On three separate occasions. Churchill had promised Alanbrooke the supreme command of the Allied forces. Yet, when it was finally decided that the invasion of Europe should be entrusted to the command of an American, Churchill showed little appreciation of the bitter disappointment which Alanbrooke experienced: “Not for one moment did he realize what this meant to me. He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance.”18 As Jung writes, “Consideration for the welfare of others is weak.”19

  All those who worked with Churchill paid tribute to the enormous fertility of his new ideas, the inexhaustible stream of invention which poured from him, both when he was Home Secretary, and later when he was Prime Minister and director of the war effort. All those who worked with him also agreed that he needed the most severe restraint put upon him, and that many of his ideas, if they had been put into practice, would have been utterly disastrous.

  In Jungian terminology, Churchill was an extraverted intuitive. In W. H. Sheldon’s classification, he was predominantly endomorphic, with a strong secondary mesomorphic component. In terms of classical, descriptive psychiatry, he was of cyclothymic temperament, with a pronounced tendency to depression. These descriptive classifications, though overloaded with jargon, are still valuable as an approach to character, but they reveal very little about the dynamics of a person’s inner life. What follows will be an attempt, necessarily speculative, to examine something of Churchill’s psychological structure insofar as this is possible.

  Let us begin with a further consideration of Churchill’s “Black Dog.” Lord Moran, who, more than most people, realized the importance of depression in Churchill’s psychology, first mentions this in the following passage from his book:

  August 14th 1944.

  The P.M. was in a speculative mood today.

  “When I was young,” he ruminated, “for two or three years the light faded out of the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me. It helped me to talk to Clemmie about it. I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything. A few drops of desperation. And yet I don’t want to go out of the world at all in such moments. Is much known about worry, Charles? It helps me to write down half a dozen things which are worrying me. Two of them, say, disappear, about two nothing can be done, so it’s no use worrying, and two perhaps can be settled. I read an American book on the nerves, The Philosophy of Fate; it interested me a great deal.”

  I said: “Your trouble—I mean the Black Dog business—you got from your forebears. You have fought against it all your life. That is why you dislike visiting hospitals. You always avoid anything that is depressing.”

  Winston stared at me as if I knew too much.20

  Later in the book, Lord Moran quotes a conversation with the dying Brendan Bracken:

  “You and I think of Winston as self-indulgent; he has never denied himself anything, but when a mere boy he deliberately set out to change his nature, to be tough and full of rude spirits.

  “It has not been easy for him. You see, Charles, Winston has always been a ‘despairer.’ Orpen, who painted him after the Dardanelles, used to speak of the misery in his face. He called him the man of misery. Winston was so sure then that he would take no further part in public life. There seemed nothing left to live for. It made him very sad. Then, in his years in the wilderness, before the Second War, he kept saying: ‘I’m finished.’ He said that about twice a day. He was quite certain that he would never get back to office, for everyone seemed to regard him as a wild man. And he missed the red boxes awfully. Winston has always been wretched unless he was occupied. You know what he has been like since he resigned. Why, he told me that he prays every day for death.”21

  Many depressives deny themselves rest or relaxation because they cannot afford to stop. If they are forced by circumstances to do so, the black cloud comes down upon them. This happened to Churchill when he left the Admiralty in May 1915, when he was out of office during the thirties, when he was defeated in the election of 1945, and after his final resignation. He invented various methods of coping with the depression which descended when he was no longer fully occupied by affairs of state, including painting, writing, and bricklaying; but none of these were wholly successful. In order to understand why, we must venture some way into the cloudy and treacherous waters of psychoanalytic theory.

  It is widely appreciated that psychoanalysis is chiefly concerned with the effect of environment, especially the very early environment, upon adult character. It is less generally realized that the psychoanalytic standpoint is not incompatible with the typological or constitutional approaches which we have hitherto adopted in our psychiatric scrutiny of Churchill. The two viewpoints are complementary, rather than contradictory. A man’s genetic inheritance may predispose him to depression, but whether he actually suffers from it or not is likely to depend upon his early experiences within the family. Psychoanalysis does not assume that all individuals are born alike and would react in precisely the same way to the influ
ences of the environment. There is no blueprint for an ideal upbringing, since no two individuals are the same. What psychoanalysis does assume, however, is that the psychological disturbances from which people suffer are related to the whole emotional climate in which they were reared, and that neurosis and psychosis in adult life are explicable in terms of a failure of the environment to meet the needs of the particular individual under scrutiny, at a time when those needs were paramount.

  One salient characteristic of adults who suffer from depression is their dependence on external sources to maintain self-esteem. Of course, we are all dependent on externals to some extent. If a perfectly normal man is taken suddenly from his family, his job, and his social circle, and put into a situation of uncertainty and fear, he will become profoundly depressed. The Russian secret police know this well: which is why they arrest a suspect in the middle of the night without warning, place him in solitary confinement, and refuse him any communication with the outside world or any information about his future. It takes but a few weeks of solitary imprisonment in these circumstances to reduce most people to a state of profound dejection, an apathetic stupor in which both hope and pride disappear. We all need some support from the external world to maintain our sense of our own value.

  Nevertheless, most of us can tolerate disappointments in one sphere of our existence without getting deeply depressed, provided the other spheres remain undamaged. Normal people may mourn, or experience disappointment, but because they have an inner source of self-esteem, they do not become or remain severely depressed for long in the face of misadventure, and are fairly easily consoled by what remains to them.