Novels in crises

Law professor and radio show host Hugh Hewitt wrote an arresting column in the Washington Post: “Fiction has even more value when the real world is in crisis.”  Reading novels while the world is in turmoil? Some great leaders did. There must be reasons why. 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.

As leading proof of these assertions, Hugh Hewitt offers 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 piled on far more information than he needed. Our report however may interest readers.

H.G. Wells

Fred Glueckstein has elsewhere explained how closely Churchill read H.G. Wells. In 1931, weeks after publishing “Mass Effects in Modern Life,” his 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.” Wells, Churchill wrote, “knew that hell was going to break loose and knew exactly what it would look like and feel like when it did.”

On into the Second World War, Churchill was motivated by Wells’s views of military 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….” That was an accurate description of the Blitzkrieg in France in 1940. More circumspectly, Churchill called it “a remarkable combination of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks.” He then admonished Britons: “Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour.”

Novels retold

In 1932 Lord Riddell proposed that Churchill retell some famous novels for News of the World. Between January and March 1933, WSC reviewed twelve 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.

The essays are worth reading because they are not just reviews or abridgments. They 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.

C.S. Forester

Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels enthralled Churchill. Desmond Morton, a onetime associate, said WSC devoured each as it came out. 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.

En route to meet Roosevelt in August 1941, Churchill devoured a Hornblower novel, saying: “I find Hornblower admirable.” This caused perturbation in the Middle East Headquarters. “It was imagined that ‘Hornblower’ was the code-word for some special operation of which they had not been told.”

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.”

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.”

Later that year found Churchill reading Jane Austen’s classic novels on the landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Again pneumonia struck. He repaired to Marrakesh for recuperation, joined by his daughter Sarah:

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.

Trollope and more Forester

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.” Next he read The Prime Minister.

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.”

Later in 1953, the PM was 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.

Churchill to Wells, 1901-1931

“Change, even for the better, [man] accepts doubtfully & thanklessly; he knows science & civilisation will not give him Happiness… and he has no intention of putting himself in the hands of amiable but pitiless philosophers, to be regulated and informed as if he were a breed of short horns.”  —Winston S. Churchill to H.G. Wells, 17 November 1901

“Projects undreamed-of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants; forces terrific and devastating will be in their hands; comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache, their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.” —Winston S. Churchill, “Fifty Years Hence,” Strand Magazine, December 1931

Clubbable adversaries

Churchill admired the great futurist H.G. Wells (1866-1946) as fervently as he disagreed with him. In youth they argued over the roles of experts in government. Their debate mirrors modern arguments over Anthony Fauci and the Regulatory State. But there is no attempt here to draw comparisons. The reader may decide what lessons the Wells-Churchill dialogue offers.

The two made contact in November 1901. Both were by then established authors. Their relationship lapsed during the First World War, for Wells held Churchill responsible for the Dardanelles debacle. Still, Wells was welcomed into The Other Club, whose “the pious founder” loved gifted literati.

Wells died in 1946, agreeing with Churchill about nuclear proliferation and Western unity. Our focus here, however, is their early debate over government by experts—when Churchill was only 23 and Wells 35. For Churchill’s and Wells’s later relationship, see Fred Glueckstein, “Great Contemporaries: Churchill and H.G. Wells, the Two Futurists” (2018).

Tory grandee and Fabian socialist

Jonathan Rose offers a comparison of Churchill and Wells at the time they met:

[Winwood Reade’s] The Martyrdom of Man, which looked forward to space travel and other technological marvels… was profoundly inspirational for both… even if they drew different lessons from it. They were both progressives but they had divergent conceptions of progress. For H.G. Wells, who would join the Fabian Socialists, it meant rigorous scientific planning by technocrats. For Churchill it meant muddling through by aristocrats, and he was far less willing to sacrifice human freedom for the sake of a better future.

Their chief correspondence concerns Wells’s books. In 1899, Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes and Churchill’s Savrola both concerned democratic revolutions, although the former was set 200 years in the future, while Churchill focused on the present. But there is no indication in their letters that Wells had even read Savrola, much less critiqued it. Churchill, by contrast, gobbled everything of Wells that he could find.

“Good Lord deliver us” 

In late 1901, the publisher sent Churchill a pre-publication copy of Anticipations, another Wells vision of the future. It anticipated a republic—later a “world state”—governed by “capable, rational men.” Their differences are interesting given the world we live in today, which in many ways seems to be governed by experts.  

The precocious young Winston declared there was much in Anticipations “which I cannot accept”: 

Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of States to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers etc., are drones or worse? 

To manage men, to explain difficult things to simple people, to reconcile opposite interests, to weigh the evidence of disputing experts, to deal with the clamorous emergency of the hour; are not these things in themselves worth the consideration and labour of a lifetime? If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible. Wherefore I say from the dominion of all specialists (particularly military specialists) good Lord deliver us.

“Easy to lead and hard to drive”

Churchill pressed Wells: “Human nature is a much more intractable and masterful thing than your speculations admit…. We shall not change so quickly as you think.” (His views hadn’t changed 30 years later when he wrote: “It is at once the safeguard and the glory of mankind that they are easy to lead and hard to drive.”)

 “I too will most heartily join in the ‘God shall deliver us,’” replied the not-yet-quite-atheistic Wells. But the leaders he envisioned would be “educated not trained.” He thought Churchill prejudiced by his class:

If you could be transported by some magic into the Household of your ancestors of 1800, a week would make you at home with them…. But of the four grandparents who represented me in 1800 it’s highly probable two could not read and that any of them would find me and that I should find them as alien as contemporary Chinese. I really do not think that your people who gather in great country houses realize the pace of things.

While valid, this greatly underestimated Churchill. Even then he had a grasp of the problems of ordinary people that would soon drive him to the reforming Liberal Party. Nor could Wells quell the younger man’s passion for liberty. “You must not be too impatient with the politician,” Churchill told him. It was a politician’s duty “to protect millions of imperfect people who merely wish to remain comfortable against those who on the one hand would make them perfect…”

Bingo. But 12 decades later, do we still resist those who would make us perfect?

“Big sliders and new fissures”

Wells was not put off by Churchill’s challenges. “To me,” he wrote, “you are a particularly interesting and rather amiable figure….

Believing as I do that big sliders and new fissures are bound to come in the next few years…. I speculate whether you anticipate that when you are 60 you will be in or​ ​upon a Conservative Party with a Liberal opposition and an Irish Corner in a British or Imperial Parliament and if not—where you expect to be.

Churchill was a Conservative at 60, but the opposition was by then socialist, and the “Irish Corner” had vanished. Nor, at 60, was he where he expected to be.  

Churchill shared Wells’s faith in science, but he never lost his reservations about experts. Four months after they met, he declared in Parliament: “It was a principle of our Constitution not to employ experts, whether business men or military men, in the highest affairs of State.”

Five months before Wells’s death he reiterated: “Expert knowledge, however indispensable, is no substitute for a generous and comprehending outlook upon the human story with all its sadness and with all its unquenchable hope.”

Parallel reading

“The Social Dilemma and Churchill’s ‘Mass Effects in Modern Life,'” 2021.

“How Churchill Saw the Future: Prescient Essays, 1924-1931,” 2018.