Winston Churchill and the Literary History of Politics

Jonathan Rose

What if political history were written as literary history? After all, every politician is also an author, who must create texts which appeal to an audience. Given that, the methods used by book historians might cast a new light on the tactics and passions of statesmen.

And what better subject for this methodology than Winston Churchill? He was a successful author before he achieved elective office, earned a fine living by the pen, and ultimately won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has hundreds of entries in Historical Abstracts - but, in striking contrast, only a handful in the MLA Bibliography. That aspect of his life is generally treated as peripheral to his political career. I argue that it was central, and that if it is treated as such, a better understanding of Churchill emerges. His apparently irrational political actions become more explicable if we understand them as the work of a creative literary artist. His political agenda was not unlike a novel, a deliberate effort to craft a narrative – and once that agenda was carried out, Churchill wrote it up as history, with himself as the central character. During the Second World War, senior civil servants liked to joke that the PM was collecting material for his next book: I argue that they were more right than they imagined.

Writing this kind of history involves studying not only government memoranda, speeches, and politicians' diaries, but also the archives of publishers and literary agents, which I draw on. And any literary history of politics should pose three basic questions:

First, what literary sources do politicians draw on when they compose speeches and frame policies? I will explore some of Churchill's key literary models, including Benjamin Disraeli, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Anthony Hope, possibly even Oscar Wilde, and (a particularly crucial and overlooked source of inspiration) the war memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Second, how do politicians use print media to publicize themselves and their agendas? The "New Journalism" of the late nineteenth century gave rise to the celebrity reporter, who created a public persona and made himself a leading character in the stories he covered. (Or she: think of Nellie Bly.) Churchill recognized this trend and exploited it as a young war correspondent, with stunning success. Later, however, he would fail to grasp that the United States was no longer a literary dependency of Great Britain, and his concerted literary efforts to promote a reunion of the English-speaking peoples would fail to find an American audience.

Third, to what extent are politicians literary artists engaged in constructing a narrative? Do they form and carry out their agendas with a view toward how it will all read in their biographies? The stories they construct can dazzle audiences, but these same stories can hem in the politicians who compose them: Churchill sometimes locked himself into a self-destructive course of action (e.g., Gallipoli) because he could not deviate from the script he had written. On the other hand, consider his 1899 novel Savrola, which is deliciously inept as literature, but which also reveals a great deal about Churchill: the plot concerns an electrifying orator who battles an evil Middle European dictator. It is significant that, in May 1940, the Second World War became a war between two artists: my work dovetails with another study using a similar methodology, Frederic Spotts's Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.