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Winston Churchill Retells the World’s Great Stories, Part 2
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | August 11, 2023
- Category: Explore The Literary Churchill
Churchill’s Great Stories: The Top Four
In 1933 Winston Churchill retold twelve of “The World’s Great Stories” for Lord Riddell’s News of the World. Six were reprinted by Robert McCormick’s Chicago Sunday Tribune. There is no doubt about the stories’ qualifications, but Churchill’s perspective as soldier, statesman and historian added a unique flavor. The first part of this article concerned the origins of the project and the title selection. Herein we consider the first four Great Stories, and the reflections that stand out as distinctly Churchill’s. Part 3 will cover the last eight. Continued from Part 1…
How much did Churchill write?
As explained in Part 1, Churchill hired his longtime associate Eddie Marsh to help prepare his drafts. With Marsh’s enthusiastic help, WSC was able to produce four retold novels by the end of November, 1932. Riddell loved them, but Churchill warned him to delay publication, lest they steal a march on McCormick’s Tribune. The first, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was published by both newspapers simultaneously on 8 January 1933.
The question for Churchill literary scholars has always been: how much of the Great Stories were Churchill’s? He frequently engaged “stringers” to rough out his drafts—especially for what he and his staff called “potboilers.” These were eagerly lapped up by a popular press anxious for his byline. Eddie Marsh worked with him nearly thirty years. Sensitive to WSC’s style, he was eminently capable of producing Churchillian lines. In “The World’s Great Stories,” Marsh played an increasing role in the later productions.
Marsh’s role19
Churchill’s assignment was 5000 words per article. He originally asked Marsh to supply “2500 words of your ideas.”20 The bibliographer Frederick Woods insisted that Marsh produced far more of the Great Stories than that:
The first hint that Marsh was, in fact, going well beyond his initial brief comes in his letter to Churchill of 12 November, 1932 [on Ben-Hur]…. “The seafight is really fun, so I’m making that a ‘high-light,’ and there will be another in the chariot race.” It seems apparent from this, I believe, that Marsh was not producing either ideas or préces, but was actually using creative language and techniques…. Churchill’s reply two days later implicitly confirms this suspicion: “I think it is only necessary to select the main episodes, and not to tell the story evenly and conscientiously throughout.” The original request merely for ideas seems to have been jettisoned, and the use of the phrase “tell the story” is extremely revealing. Churchill is wanting structure, interpretation and presentation delivered pre-packaged to his desk.21
Woods notes Churchill’s complaint that he had to prune Marsh’s Ben-Hur by 1500 words: “To prune is to cut; by no means to rewrite.” And why, Woods asks, had the original request for “2500 words of ideas” become 5000-7000? Later on, he notes, Marsh proudly says Adam Bede is “within 5000 words” and Westward Ho! “exactly 5000 words for once.”22
Churchill’s role
Woods is partly correct. In 1933, Churchill was hugely busy writing Marlborough, pondering the India Act and the rise of Hitler. A lot was on his mind. But in all his articles, Churchill signed off on every word and edited freely. He selected the titles and directed the approach. Rejecting Marsh’s first efforts on The Count of Monte Cristo, he asked not for “great stories summarised, but great stories retold. It is essential to select the salient features of the tale and make them live in all their fullness…. In Monte Cristo I shall give 1000 words to the plot against Dantès and 2500 to the terrific prison drama and 1500 to the revenge.”23 That is very specific direction.
Nor was Marsh always working from a blank sheet of paper. Ivanhoe came late in the Great Stories, yet Churchill’s secretary sent Marsh a draft before he began work: “I am asked by Mr. Churchill to enclose herewith the proof of Ivanhoe and to ask you to be good enough to go through it with your careful revision as usual.24 Thanking Marsh for Westward Ho! Churchill said it was “very good and helpful.”25 Helpful does not mean finished.
In fact both writers deserve credit. Eddie Marsh certainly had much to do with the Great Stories. But Churchill told Marsh what mattered and what didn’t: “Both Dickens and Dumas mixed up a lot of rot and padding,” he wrote, “all of which goes overboard through my lee scuppers.”26
Readers of the Great Stories will find certain distinctly Churchillian passages, offering insight into Churchill’s thought and experience. Here is a brief look at the first four.27
1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 8 January 1933
It was likely that the first Great Story would contain much by Churchill, but this title was a natural. He was researching the American Civil War for a future History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He had toured and wrote of Civil War battlefields,28 imbued with the ethos of the War between the States. It is impossible nowadays, he begins, to understand how profoundly slavery “was interwoven into the whole life, economy and culture of the Southern States.” Nor does Churchill confine its evils to the South:
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. [Preachers] championed it as a system ordained by the Creator and sanctified by the gospel of Christ. The tentacles of slavery spread widely through the northern “free” States, along every channel of business dealing, and many paths of political influence.29
Uncle Tom’s author Harriet Beecher Stowe was fearless, Churchill writes: “Her work was frankly propagandist [and] behind the winged progress of her words around the world arose the long roll of the drums. The American Union bristled and gleamed with innumerable bayonets, and there broke out that cannonade which was not to be silenced till more than a million men had paid a fatal debt.”30
The Civil War death toll was actually 620,000, but Churchill had made his point. He closed with a favorite passage by John Bright which he’d used before, and would again: “At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished and was gone for ever.”31 There is no doubt about who wrote these words.
2. The Count of Monte Cristo, 15 January 1933
We have seen how precisely Churchill laid out his retelling of this novel: 1000 words to the unfortunate Edmond Dantès, 2500 to his escape from prison (WSC himself had that experience), 1500 to his revenge. The text wound up at 5900 words—more Marsh than Churchill, probably, but elegantly summarized. Nevertheless, Churchill made clear his critique of Alexandre Dumas’ “rot and padding,” as well as his admiration of the author:
The basic idea of Monte Cristo can be stated in two sentences. An innocent man is condemned through the machinations of three of his fellow-men to perpetual, or, at least, indefinite, imprisonment and the loss of all that is dear to him. On his escape, chance makes him master of unlimited wealth and power. He has vowed revenge on the three malefactors, and wreaks it without haste or mercy. But the working out of this main idea is unimaginably rich and complicated, and here only the dry bones can be given. Whole scenes of vivid action and glowing colour must be passed over, and there is no room for a thousand delicate and skillful touches by which Dumas persuades us of the unlikely or the impossible.32
“I shall tell enough,” Churchill promises, “to give some notion of the enthralling quality which had made this story famous.”33 And he does.
3. The Moonstone, 22 January 1933
News of the World subtitled this piece, “Ill-starred History of a Stolen Jewel [and the] Pseudo Saint Unmasked in Death.” Like Monte Cristo. it ran over by 1000 words. Churchill had experience in India, knew of its religious mysteries, and appreciated a good yarn. Wilkie Collins’ tale of the theft and recovery of a sacred diamond, he wrote, is “one of the pillars of the detective novel.” It contains “no figure so memorable as Count Fosco” in Collins’ The Woman in White. Yet it is “a gallery of curiously-conceived and vividly-presented personages; and the tale which they combine to build up is a miracle of complexity and of the perfect adjustment of detail.”34
Perhaps Eddie Marsh had not done the draft justice, for Churchill’s introduction offers qualifications. If the reader finds this summary unconvincing, he says, read the novel itself. Readers “will find sufficient ground for what Coleridge calls ‘the willing suspension of unbelief.’”35
Churchill rather fancied Coleridge, thought of him sometimes as a model. In 1924 he drew a round of laughs at a printers’ convention:
Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb and others were all none the less journalists for being men of letters, none the less men of letters because they wrote for the press. Even in the 20th century, there have been some well-known writers, but I think that modesty must prevent me from pursuing that line of thought to its legitimate and inevitable conclusion.36
4. Ben-Hur, 29 January 1933
Marsh and Churchill retold Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur in 4500 words, subtitled “Galley Slave to National Hero / Chariot Race for Destiny of an Empire.” Churchill had earlier considered Ben-Hur “mere popular sentiment,” but apparently grew to like it. The climactic chariot race surely appealed, for he’d loved horses since his youth. Ben-Hur also offered him the opportunity for a characteristic flourish to a Biblical event:
At the evening meal Balthasar told them of the wonderful night 27 years ago when he met the Greek Caspar and the Hindoo Melchior in the desert, and led by the Star to the manger at Bethlehem they did homage to Him Who was born King of the Jews. Since then his faith had never altered. In God’s good time the King would declare Himself. But he had pondered much, and come to the belief that His Kingdom would not be of this earth, nor of the Jews only, but a heavenly Kingdom in the hearts of all mankind.
“Man as a subject,” he said, “is the ambition of a King; the soul of a man, for its salvation, is the desire of a God.”
Ben-Hur, like all the Jews of that time, was possessed with the expectation of a splendid and powerful Messiah, who would conquer Rome and rule the world, and it was hard for him to accept Balthasar’s vision; yet it stirred and moved him, and he went out to meditate on it under the stars.37
Scholars dispute the origins of the Magi, but WSC used their generally accepted names, and the passage reflects his ecumenical impressions.
Endnotes
19 Sir Edward Howard Marsh (1872-1953), known as “Eddie,” educated at Cambridge, joined the Colonial Office as a clerk, 1896. Private secretary to Churchill, 1905-15, 1917-22, 1924-29; private secretary to successive Colonial Secretaries, 1929-36; elected to The Other Club 1932, knighted 1937. Churchill said when he died: “All his long life was serene, and he left that world I trust without a pang and I am sure without a fear.” Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta Books, 2016), 360.
20 Winston S. Churchill (hereinafter WSC) to Eddie Marsh, 3 August 1932, in Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 12, The Wilderness Years 1929-1935 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2009), 463.
21 Frederick Woods, Artillery of Words: The Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (London: Pen and Sword, 1992), 166-67.
22 Ibid.
23 WSC to Lord Riddell, 3 August 1932, in Wilderness Years, 461-62.
24 Violet Pearman to Eddie Marsh, 25 February 1933, ibid., 531.
25 WSC to Marsh, 26 February 1933, ibid., 533.
26 WSC to Marsh, 17 September 1932, ibid., 473.
27 For American titles and other details, see Ronald I. Cohen, Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, 3 vols. (London: Continuum, 2006), II: 1383-88.
28 WSC, “Old Battlefields of Virginia,” Daily Telegraph, 16 December 1929.
29 WSC, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Michael Wolff, ed., Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, 4 vols. (London: Library of Imperial History, 1975), II: 123.
30 Ibid., 123, 133.
31 Ibid., 133. Churchill also quoted John Bright in his fantasy, “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” (1930); about Nazism in a speech, “The First Month of War,” 1 October 1939; and in his account of the American Civil War in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1958).
32 WSC. The Count of Monte Cristo, in Collected Essays IV: 133.
33 Ibid.
34 WSC. The Moonstone, in Collected Essays IV: 145.
35 Ibid.
36 WSC, “Literature and the Press,” Printers Pension Corporation Dinner, Connaught Rooms, London, 12 November 1924, in Robert Rhodes James, ed., Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897-1963, 8 vols. (New York: Bowker, 1974), IV: 3504.
37 WSC, Ben-Hur, in Collected Essays IV: 162.