The Literary Churchill

Author, Reader, Actor

Jonathan Rose

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780300206234
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

"An interesting and at times surprising account of Churchill's tastes as a reader…many of [these] nuggets will be new even to Churchill junkies."— The Wall Street Journal This strikingly original book introduces a Winston Churchill we haven't known before. Award-winning author Jonathan Rose explores Churchill's careers as statesman and author, revealing the profound influence of literature and theater on Churchill's personal, carefully composed grand story and the decisions he made throughout his political life. In this expansive literary biography, Rose provides an analysis of Churchill's writings and their reception (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 and was a best-selling author), and a chronicle of his dealings with publishers, editors, literary agents, and censors. The book also identifies an array of authors who shaped Churchill's own writings and politics: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Margaret Mitchell, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, and many more. Rose investigates the effect of Churchill's passion for theater on his approach to reportage, memoirs, and historical works. Perhaps most remarkably, Rose reveals the unmistakable influence of Churchill's reading on every important episode of his public life, including his championship of social reform, plans for the Gallipoli invasion, command during the Blitz, crusade for Zionism, and efforts to prevent a nuclear arms race. Finally, Rose traces the significance of Churchill's writings to later generations of politicians—among them President John F. Kennedy as he struggled to extricate the U.S. from the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Immensely enjoyable…This gracefully written book is an original and textured study of Churchill's imagination."— The Washington Post

CHAPTER 1

The Theatre Rage

Everyone knows that as a boy he loved playing with toy soldiers, but biographers do not often mention an equally significant fact: he was no less fond of his miniature theatre. Churchill was thirteen when his aunts Leonie and Clara presented him with a toy stage, which at the time he called “a source of unparalleled amusement.” He had the evident approval of his tutor, James Theodore Best, who “told me that the Theatre Rage is very great.” His letters to his mother are filled with breathless demands for accessories, as well as a promise “to give a grand performance when I come home.”¹ As Churchill recalled many years later, “I certainly remember visiting Mr [W. J.] Webb of Old Street” – the great Victorian impresario of toy theatres – “and also purchasing from him from time to time some of his plays. The one I remember best is ‘The Miller and His Men.’ For three or four years of my life a model theatre was a great amusement to me.” This suggests that he continued playing with it to the advanced age of sixteen or seventeen. Webb's son remembered his frequent patronage and his enthusiasm: “He was a jolly and impulsive lad, and I shall never forget the way he would vault over my counter.”²

Churchill was throughout his life a passionate theatregoer. Several files in his archives are stuffed with ticket receipts from booking agencies, but unfortunately the receipts do not reveal what plays he attended.³ However, from other sources we can reconstruct much of that record, which is essential to understanding his political career. More than most politicians, he was a public performer, always on stage and in character. His prose was distinguished by a lifelong addiction to dramatic metaphors. Many of his most crucial political decisions were essentially acts of theatre, and some of them only make sense when placed in the context of theatre history.

In the late Victorian upper-class milieu of his childhood, the theatre had become respectable, fashionable, and ubiquitous. Churchill once alluded to his youthful “infatuation” with private dramatic performances, and he was enthusiastic about school theatricals, performing Robin Hood in an operetta and Martine in Molière's Le Médecin Malgré Lui. He enjoyed Gilbert and Sullivan and Christmas pantomimes. He made a point of memorizing Shakespeare at Harrow for a prize competition, in which he placed fourth out of about twenty-five boys.⁴ He may have even tried his hand as a playwright: in October 1887 his brother Jack reported to their father that Winston “is going to write a Greek play for Christmas.”⁵

His mother Jennie had grown up in a Manhattan mansion equipped with a 600-seat private theatre.⁶ Throughout their marriage, she and Lord Randolph exchanged notes about the latest plays.⁷ In 1909 she would write and produce her own play, His Borrowed Plumes. It had a short run but a fair share of clever epigrams, including: “Is there so much difference between politicians and actors? Both are equally eager for popular applause and both equally doubtful whether they will get it.”⁸ She probably had in mind both Winston and Lord Randolph. The son learned political theatre at first hand from the father, whom Beatrice Webb considered a dazzling public performer:

Surely we shall look back on the last fifty years of the nineteenth century as the peculiar period of political artists: we have no statesmen – all our successful politicians, the men who lead the parties, are artists and nothing else: Gladstone, Disraeli, Randolph Churchill, Chamberlain, and the unsuccessful Rosebery, all these men have the characteristics of actors – personal charm, extraordinary pliability and quick-wittedness.⁹

As a drama critic Max Beerbohm proclaimed that in or around 1880 human nature changed. He identified at that point in time a “great change in the constitution of English society,” which cast off Victorian reserve and became flamboyantly theatrical: “The sphere of fashion converged with the sphere of art, and a revolution was the result.” The Aesthetic movement permeated everything, including parliamentary politics, now enlivened by the “incomparable” performances of Liberal tribune W. E. Gladstone, Irish firebrand Charles Stewart Parnell, and militant atheist Charles Bradlaugh. In that company Randolph Churchill, “despite his halting speech, foppish mien and rather coarse fibre of mind, was yet the greatest Parliamentarian of his day.”¹⁰

He led a small circle of upstart Tory MPs, the “Fourth Party,” which succeeded in winning plenty of sympathetic publicity in the Morning Post and Vanity Fair. In July 1880 the latter identified Lord Randolph as the group's most brilliant actor, even if he did not attach great importance to being earnest:

He does not care much for facts, it is true, and his blows are not always perfectly legitimate; while he scarcely pretends to be too much in earnest; but surely after all he is therein right. … The House of Commons should really be taken to be what it is – that is to say, a club of gentlemen who for the most part have a fair amount of money and no particular occupation in life but that of finding an escape from being bored. If men in that frame of mind come down to the House after their dinners, they want to be made to laugh, and have a profound dislike of heroics, unless when really well acted, and recalling memories of Modjeska or Bernhardt. Lord Randolph Churchill has grasped this fact, and il ira loin.¹¹

Lord Randolph's favorite theatrical device was the political coup, a stroke so unexpected that it shocked even his cronies in the Fourth Party. During the First Boer War he suggested that, “like a thunderbolt in a clear sky,” they should call for an end to British military operations and peace talks with the Boers. He proposed to set off “political dynamite” with an amendment to limit the 1881 Irish Coercion Bill to one year.¹² These stands were hardly consistent with mainstream Conservatism, but he conceded that his Tory Democracy was “chiefly opportunism,” which succeeded brilliantly in garnering public attention.¹³ His public speeches were marked by melodramatic hand gestures and walking “about the platform as though it were really a stage,” the Pall Mall Gazette observed.¹⁴ He dispatched his opponents with facile catchphrases that journalists liked to pick up and repeat: Gladstone was “the Moloch of Midlothian,” Joseph Chamberlain “this pinchbeck Robespierre.”¹⁵ One of his most famous (and self-revealing) assaults on Gladstone came in Blackpool, on 24 January 1884:

Gentlemen, we live in an age of advertisement, the age of Holloway's pills, of Colman's mustard, and of Horniman's pure tea; and the policy of lavish advertisement has been so successful in commerce that the Liberal party, with its usual enterprise, had adapted it to politics. The Prime Minister is the greatest living master of the art of personal political advertisement. Holloway, Colman, and Horniman are nothing compared with him. Every act of his, whether it be for the purposes of health, or of recreation, or of religious devotion, is spread before the eyes of every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom on large and glaring placards.

At Hawarden Castle, his Flintshire estate, Gladstone conspicuously chopped down trees as staged media events. Once he hosted a delegation of workmen:

One would have thought that the deputation would have been received in the house, in the study, in the drawing-room, or even in the dining room. Not at all. That would have been out of harmony with the advertisement “boom.” Another scene had been arranged. The working men were guided through the ornamental grounds, into the wide-spreading park … [where] the Prime Minister … in scanty attire and profuse perspiration, engaged in the destruction of a gigantic oak, just giving its last dying groan. They are permitted to gaze and to worship and adore and, having conducted themselves with exemplary propriety, are each of them presented with a few chips as a memorial of that memorable scene.…

Likewise Gladstone's celebrated Midlothian campaigns, first staged in 1880 and reprised over the next few years, were ridiculed by Lord Randolph as play-acting: “The old stage properties have been brought out at every station: all the old scenery, all the old decorations, the old troupe, they have all been brought forward in a sadly tarnished and bedraggled condition. …”¹⁶ This was perfect hypocrisy: no politician was more ruthless at self-publicity than Lord Randolph Churchill. He fully grasped that the enfranchisement of a broad electorate, the creation of a mass-circulation press, and the rise of the advertising industry, had transformed the ground rules of politics. Delivering Olympian speeches in Parliament was no longer enough: one had to exploit the new culture of celebrity, which placed a premium on flamboyant public performance. Lord Randolph had an advertising agent's talent for inventing catchy slogans, either rhyming jingles (“Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right”) or clichés with an unexpected twist (Gladstone was an “old man in a hurry”).¹⁷ He strategically positioned himself as President of the Conservative News Agency. The Central News Agency (a competitor of Reuters) reported his speeches in their entirety: only Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain, and Lord Salisbury (the Conservative Party leader) enjoyed the same level of coverage.¹⁸

More conventional politicians might distrust and resent Lord Randolph, but for the time being they had to do business with him. By 1885 Punch was portraying him as a prima donna dictating terms to impresario Lord Salisbury.¹⁹ J. B. Crozier, an early and unfriendly biographer, found Lord Randolph a dull public speaker whose reputation for verbal fireworks had been puffed up by the press. His clever catchphrases, which would now be called “sound bites,” oversimplified issues and caricatured opponents, but were endlessly repeated by the newspapers. They might denounce him in editorials, but they gave him the coverage he craved in their news columns.²⁰ “The best thing that can happen to a politician is to be abused by the press,” Lord Randolph cheerfully observed. “It does him some good to be praised. But when he's ignored altogether, it's the devil!”²¹

Young Winston was paying attention and learning his lessons. As he put it in the 1906 biography of his father, “Instead of that paragraph of mutilated misrepresentation with which so many eminent Ministers and ex-Ministers have to remain dissatisfied, column after column of the Times was filled with the oratory of an unproved stripling of thirty-two.” His speeches upheld no consistent principles and advocated no coherent policies, but they attracted attention because

they were entirely fresh and original. Wit, abuse, epigrams, imagery, argument – all were “Randolphian.” No one could guess beforehand what he was going to say nor how he would say it. No one else said the same kind of things, or said them in the same kind of way. He possessed the strange quality, unconsciously exerted and not by any means to be simulated, of compelling attention, and of getting himself talked about. Every word he spoke was studied with interest and apprehension. Each step he took was greeted with a gathering chorus of astonished cries.

Winston had revolted against his classical education and rarely resorted to Latin tags, but now he deployed a quotation from Tacitus: Omnium quae dixerat, feceratque quadam ostentator (“He had the showman's knack of drawing attention to everything he said or did”).²² And if that aroused the suspicions of stodgy Tories, Winston quoted first Pope, and then Machiavelli:

Sworn to no master, of no sect am I,

As drives the storm, at any door I knock.²³

Of this, however, I am well persuaded, that it is better to be impetuous than cautious. For Fortune is a woman who to be kept under must be beaten and roughly handled; and we see that she suffers herself to be more readily mastered by those who treat her so, than by those who are more timid in their approaches. And always, like a woman, she favours the young, because they are less scrupulous and fiercer, and command her with greater audacity.²⁴

In this culture of celebrity, the distinction between fiction and reality dissolved. One could never know whether Lord Randolph had any real core convictions or was simply playing to the gallery. Was he an actual person, or a theatrical persona created by himself? In fact he appeared as a character in several literary and stage works, at least some of which were familiar to Winston. Lord Randolph was thinly disguised in Justin McCarthy's novel The Rebel Rose (1887) and W. F. Rae's An American Duchess (1890), and not disguised at all in Rae's Miss Bayle's Romance (1887) and J. M. Barrie's first novel, Better Dead (1888). In the last of these, Lord Randolph invents an ingenious quantitative method for “calculating fame,” an early form of media research. He haunts tobacconists' shops and counts the celebrities' faces appearing on matchboxes, anxiously comparing his totals to those of Gladstone, Chamberlain, and Lily Langtry.²⁵ In 1883 Jennie took Winston to a pantomime that starred a poodle named Lord Randolph Churchill.²⁶ Early in 1885 Jennie saw another play, The Candidate, which mentioned her husband.²⁷ In February 1890 Winston's Aunt Frances wrote to him about a burlesque of Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas (1838), that including satiric topical songs “with allusions to your Father!” In the same letter she reported that Lord Randolph also starred in that week's full-page cartoon in Punch, which twitted him for introducing temperance legislation.²⁸ In 1891 Randolph was spoofed on stage once again, in the political extravaganza Joan of Arc, until the Lord Chamberlain ordered the satire to be toned down. In his turn, Winston too would be incarnated as a character in a number of novels.

In August 1886 Lord Randolph became Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Salisbury, but then his hunger fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: A Literary History of Politics
• 1 The Theatre Rage
• 2 An Uneducated Man
• 3 A Pushing Age
• 4 War of the Worlds
• 5 A Portrait of the Artist
• 6 Publicity Capital
• 7 Things to Come
• 8 Comédie Anglaise
• 9 On the Stage of History
• 10 What Actually Happened
• 11 Revolutionaries
• 12 The Chancellor's Star Turn
• 13 That Special Relationship
• 14 The Apple Cart
• 15 The Producer
• 16 Blackout
• 17 The Loaded Pause
• 18 The Hour of Fate and the Crack of Doom
• 19 This Different England
• 20 The War Poet
• 21 Victory?
• 22 The Summit
• 23 The Last Whig
• 24 The Terrible Ifs
• Notes
• Index