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Articles
Churchill’s Novels in Sterner Days: More than Mere Escape
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | July 17, 2023
- Category: Q & A The Literary Churchill
Law professor and radio show host Hugh Hewitt has written an arresting column in the Washington Post: “Fiction has even more value when the real world is in crisis.” Reading novels while the world hangs in the balance: Quite a few great leaders did. There must be good reasons. Mr. Hewitt offers four:
First, fiction can keep anxious minds from chewing themselves to bits…. Second, reading can give a sense of proportion, which our distracted age needs most urgently…. Third, novels can take us into unfamiliar worlds and better prepare us to live in our own…. Fourth, and finally, time spent with a worthwhile novel is not time sucked away and spat out. It is time, and the lessons of time, brought into focus.1
As leading proof of these assertions, Mr. Hewitt offers Winston Churchill: “When his nation, and the free world, took its own pulse each morning in 1940 and 1941, the greatest statesman of my lifetime escaped into a collection of “Captain Hornblower” novels, Moll Flanders, Phineas Finn and Pride and Prejudice, according to the military correspondent and historian Thomas Ricks.”
During his research Mr. Hewitt asked the Churchill Project: what novels WSC read in those perilous days. Typically we showered him with far more information than he needed. Our report however may interest readers. While you will recognize many novels, you may not have known why they attracted Churchill when civilization hung in the balance. You might even wish to re-read them. At any rate, as he said: “If they cannot be your friends, let them at least be your acquaintances.”2
H.G. Wells
Fred Glueckstein has elsewhere explained how closely Churchill read the novels of H.G. Wells. In 1931, weeks after publishing “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” his own forecast of a dystopian future, Churchill praised Wells’s The Time Machine. He called it “a marvellous philosophical romance, in the train of Gulliver’s Travels.” He extolled
Wells the magician, the seer, [who] saw quite clearly [how science] would lead the 20th century to accept with a helpless shrug barbarities of which Marius and Julius Caesar would have been ashamed, and which even Genghis Khan would have thought unbecoming. Wells described with incredible accuracy exactly how the Great War would come….. He knew that hell was going to break loose and knew exactly what it would look like and feel like when it did.3
Paul Alkon, a great teacher of Churchill’s literary heritage, wrote appreciatively of Churchill’s Wells essay: “This now almost entirely forgotten panegyric deserves a reprise as much for the accuracy of its literary judgement as for the light it sheds on what caught Churchill’s imagination.”4
On into the Second World War, Churchill was motivated by Wells’s views of science in war: “The irresistible Juggernaut, driving through towns and villages as through a field of standing corn—a type which Armageddon itself could not achieve….”5 That was an accurate description of the Blitzkrieg that swept over France in May 1940, though Churchill had his reason to speak of it less alarmingly. He settled for “a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks.” He was, after all, about to admonish Britons: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour.”6
Novels retold
In 1932 Lord Riddell proposed that Churchill retell some famous novels for News of the World. Between 8 January and 26 March 1933, WSC reviewed 12 of “The World’s Great Stories”: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Moonstone, Ben-Hur, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Eyre, Adam Bede, Vice Versa, Ivanhoe, Westward Ho! and Don Quixote. Eddie Marsh wrote the drafts; Churchill re-read each novel and finalized the texts.7
The essays (which will be covered here in future articles) are worth re-reading because they are not simply abridgments. They also offer Churchill’s personal impressions. Take for example Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Reflecting on how inextricably slavery was woven into Southern life, Churchill made points rarely heard:
One fact alone reveals the powerlessness of the community to shake itself free from the frightful disease which had become part of its being. Over 660,000 slaves were held by ministers of the Gospel of the different Protestant Churches. Five thousand Methodist ministers owned 219,000 slaves; 6,500 Baptists owned 125,000; 1,400 Episcopalians held 88,000, and so on. Thus the institution of slavery was not only defended by every argument of self-interest, but every pulpit championed it as a system ordained by the Creator and sanctified by the gospel of Christ.8
C.S. Forester
Along with his biography of Nelson, Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels enthralled Churchill. Desmond Morton, a onetime associate, said the great man devoured each as it came out. “To WSC they were almost as a draught of pure wine to a thirsty man.” Asked why this was so, Morton replied:
There are lots of possible explanations…. Of course he hated any kind of life, action or thought that he would consider “sordid.” Equally, he was the “never-grow-up” type of boy that you have seen him to be. Nevertheless this particular trait was endearing…. Actually there is something fundamentally of importance in this. Of course, he saw himself in all the heroic roles, does not a boy do this? But there is much more to it than only this.9
Morton fell out with Churchill after the war and never forgot; he followed this remark with a lengthy rant on WSC’s “few moral scruples.” Churchill probably saw Forester novels as just good entertainment. En route to meet Roosevelt in August 1941, he devoured a Hornblower novel Oliver Lyttelton had given him: “When a chance came I sent him the message, ‘I find Hornblower admirable.’ This caused perturbation in the Middle East Headquarters, where it was imagined that ‘Hornblower’ was the code-word for some special operation of which they had not been told.”10
Nor was Forester a wartime fixation, according to Edmund Murray, Churchill’s bodyguard from 1950 to WSC’s death. Sir Winston’s affection for Hornblower, Murray thought, was its “accurate historical allusions…. He was such a devotee of the celebrated Captain, in fact, that Forester would send him, from his home in America, an autographed copy of each new work. When the author came to visit England he was invited to Chartwell for lunch.”11
Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen
Churchill’s pace in wartime was heavy for a man pushing 70, and in 1943 he twice fell ill with pneumonia. Confined to bed in February, he picked up Defoe’s Moll Flanders, “about which I had heard excellent accounts, but had not found time to test them.” Finishing it, he gave it to his doctor, “to cheer him up.”12
Later that year found Churchill reading Jane Austen’s classic novels on the landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Again pneumonia had struck, in December in Tunis. He repaired to Marrakesh for recuperation, joined by his daughter Sarah:
The days passed in much discomfort. Fever flickered in and out. I lived on my theme of the war, and it was like being transported out of oneself. The doctors tried to keep the work away from my bedside, but I defied them. They all kept on saying, “Don’t work, don’t worry,” to such an extent that I decided to read a novel. I had long ago read Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and now I thought I would have Pride and Prejudice. Sarah read it to me beautifully from the foot of the bed. I had always thought it would be better than its rival. What calm lives they had, those people! No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.13
Trollope and more Forester
Churchill’s postwar novel reading was not part of Mr. Hewitt’s request, but might as well be added here. Despite his liking for Austen, Churchill came late to Trollope, in 1953. According to his doctor, Lord Moran, he had not read Trollope’s novels before. Now he read three. “At parts of Phineas Finn I became very tearful,” WSC said, “though it is not at all a moving story.”14 Next he read The Prime Minister.
I find the difference between those days and the present time interesting…they mixed up society and politics. What happened at the Carlton and Reform Clubs mattered to the Prime Minister then, and the House of Lords had a lot of power. Though the franchise had already been extended, public opinion had less power then. The wife of the Prime Minister filled her house with a weekend party of forty-five people, and the talk influenced the course of events.15
Churchill’s favorite Trollope novel was The Duke’s Children. It offered, he said, “a good picture of an extraordinary world that has gone. The Duke is, of course, a poop; a Liberal he calls himself, yet he is so narrow-minded.”16
Later in 1953 found the PM flying to the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower and French Prime Minister Joseph Laniel. For reading en route, Churchill acquired another Forester. Moran found WSC with “his nose in it throughout the meal.” Landing at Bermuda, he was still engrossed in it. “I must get Christopher to put it away before they come,” he quipped. The title was Death to the French.17
Endnotes
1 Hugh Hewitt, “Fiction has Even More Value When the Real World is in Crisis,” Washington Post, 26 April 2023, accessed 13 May 2023. Mr. Hewitt conducts the Hillsdale Dialogues every Friday with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn or other faculty or staff. Click here for archived broadcasts.
2 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC), “Painting as a Pastime,” Strand Magazine, December 1921, quoted in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016), 50.
3 WSC, “H.G. Wells,” in the Sunday Pictorial, 23 August 1931 (Cohen C356.5), reprinted in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), III 50-54. The essay is also in WSC, Great Contemporaries, (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2012), 376-77.
4 Paul Alkon, Winston Churchill’s Imagination (Lewisburg, Penna: Bucknell University Press), 173-74.
5 WSC, “H.G. Wells,” ibid.
6 WSC, House of Commons, 19 May 1940, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), VI: 6221, 6223.
7 “The World’s Greatest Stories” retold by Churchill are in Michael Wolff, ed., The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), IV: 123-256.
8 WSC, Collected Essays, IV: 123.
9 R.W. Thompson, Churchill and Morton: The Quest for Insight in the Correspondence of Major Sir Desmond Morton and the Author (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976), 194-95.
10 WSC, The Grand Alliance (London: Cassell, 1950), 382.
11 Edmund Murray, I Was Churchill’s Bodyguard (London: W. Allen, 1987), 93-94.
12 WSC, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951) 651.
13 WSC, Closing the Ring (London: Cassell, 1952), 376-77.
14 Lord Moran, Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (London: Constable, 1966), 446.
15 Ibid., 460.
16 Ibid., 474.
17 Ibid., 533, 537. Christopher Soames, later Lord Soames, who had married his daughter Mary, was then WSC’s Parliamentary Private Secretary.