The Cheever Misadventure Revisited

Abstract

volume. Manchester often allows himself long, loose sentences that roll along on metaphor and feeling. Though we are occasionally treated to such cadences in this volume, it isn’t often. Instead what we get is bright sharp prose, brilliant images, fresh metaphors, perfectly chiseled paragraphs, and an incredible wealth of telling detail, facts, and statistics. I happen to be one of those lovers of Manchester’s voice—and I did not for one moment feel cheated by the prose in this book. I was treated, instead, to scores of sentences, paragraphs, and whole pages of precise, lyrical, and evocative prose in such scenes as the Old Man touring the Blitz-bombed neighborhoods; the Yanks’ arrival in Britain; troop life in the warrens of Anzio; Mussolini’s arrest; the D-Day landing. These and dozens more scenes pulse and bloom on the page. My favorite was England’s victory celebration the night of May 8, 1945, which echoes the lyrical last paragraph of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Such passages allow me to think Defender of the Realm might even be the best of the three volumes. Manchester and Reid’s book is living testament to a man who “never, never, never, never” lost his will, his courage, his honor, his tears, his wit, his eloquence, his optimism, or his ability to be utterly his unique and outrageous self. The authors devoted years of their lives to making these qualities and virtues live on the page, thus following the injunction of three words inscribed on a green marble slab in the floor of Westminster Abbey: remember winston churchill. The last three words of this book, they are the command we readers will carry with us the rest of our days, for Reid and Manchester have allowed us to witness the whole of Western civilization for a short time held in the hands of a single man.