Winston Churchill’s Literary Mindset

IN SAM LIPSYTE’S gimlet-eyed short story “The Natural,” a professional wrestler says: “You have to be able to tell [a] story to get people on board for anything.… Nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached.” Today’s psychologists would add that this is true as well for the life stories we tell to and about ourselves. Personal memory, it turns out, is actually an entertaining creative writer of sorts. It fashions a malleable narrative collage comprised of unconsciously winnowed recollections, selectively highlighted episodes or details, strategic or accidental erasures, stealthy revisions and sometimes even invented (quite fictional) enhancements.

It is not surprising that in telling the story of our life—whether to ourselves or to others—that we unwittingly appropriate plotlines, themes and motifs from the various print and cinematic/theatrical encounters that influenced us in some way during our lifetime. That was the case with Winston Churchill (1874–1965), Jonathan Rose argues: “His political goals and methods were shaped by what he read in books and saw on the stage. In turn, he recast his political experiences as literature, inevitably with some artistic license” in telling “the grand story that he spent his life composing.” Sometimes this practice was apparently deliberate; more often it was not.

The journalistic practices of the last two decades of the nineteenth century had a literary influence on Churchill. During that period, when Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw were exploiting the culture of celebrity, Churchill was an imperial-adventure reporter. At that time journalism allowed for elements of fiction, and Churchill also learned that popular reporting required a “gripping plot, unforgettable characters, gorgeous settings, cleverly constructed dialogue, memorable turns of phrase, a strong and opinionated authorial voice, impressionistic commentary, and a fine sense of dramatic timing.”

Another influence, among many, was H. G. Wells. Churchill read most of Wells’s books pretty much as soon as they appeared. In 1931, he claimed to have read all of Wells’s books at least twice; somewhat later in his life he also said that The Time Machine was such a wonderful book, he wished he could take it with him after his death. Churchill appreciated Wells’s audience-appealing narrative skills and shared some of his ideas, but (as Wells bluntly told him at one point) the two authors parted company along steep social-class lines. Still, as much as Churchill enjoyed John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, he loved Wells’s fiction more.

Wells thought he had pegged Churchill, but in fact the latter’s mercurial self-positioning remained hard to pin down: “Often Churchill was a prisoner of his own rhetoric, willing to adopt almost any ideological stance as long as it offered an opportunity for a great solo performance.” Like Lipsyte’s wrestler, Churchill deliberately aimed to give a good show; but unlike the wrestler, Churchill often seemed unable to adjust his performances to align with changed circumstances. Rose observes that, for example, “as reality diverged from the narrative he had planned” during the disastrous Gallipoli siege, Churchill “insisted ever more shrilly that the climax was approaching and there could be no deviation from the plot line.”

Rose makes a cogent case for reading Churchill, the winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, as a metahistorian who understood that historical narratives are not objective accounts. They are, instead, crafty constructions of calculated subtractions and additions stealthily designed to advance a particular point of view. Churchill understood, as well, that historical accounts starring an author-commander figure, such as T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, receive the most publicity; and that such public acclaim, in turn, fosters the instatement of a historical work as unquestionable fact. Because it played well as documentary truth for working class audiences, melodrama (“the theatre of crisis”) remained Churchill’s favored (if increasingly outdated) rhetorical mode.

Not every one of Rose’s suggested influences is perfectly convincing. For example, although Churchill read H. Rider Haggard’s King...