Winston Churchill’s literary world included novelists, playwrights, poets, and writers of short stories. Three of his best-known friends, who were professional authors, were George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and W. Somerset Maugham. Churchill met and corresponded with each man over a long period of time. His friendships with Shaw and Wells had an edginess to them, since both men were professed socialists, and Churchill enjoyed satirizing their anything-but-socialist lives. With Maugham, however, a much warmer friendship developed.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), like Winston Churchill, received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Irish playwright and British statesman had a long, friendly relationship characterized by political rivalry, which Churchill describes in Great Contemporaries. Here follow extracts.

Mr. Bernard Shaw was one of my earliest antipathies. Indeed, almost my first literary effusion, written when I was serving as a subaltern in India in 1897 (it never saw the light of day), was a ferocious onslaught upon him, and upon an article which he had written disparaging and deriding the British Army in some minor war.

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Four or five years passed before I made his acquaintance. My mother, always in agreeable contact with artistic and dramatic circles, took me to luncheon with him. I was instantly attracted by the sparkle and gaiety of his conversation, and impressed by his eating only fruit and vegetables, and drinking only water. I rallied him on the latter habit, asking: “Do you really never drink any wine at all?” “I am hard enough to keep in order as it is,” he replied. Perhaps he had heard of my youthful prejudice against him.

In later years, and especially after the [First World] war, I can recall several pleasant and, to me, memorable talks on politics, particularly about Ireland and about Socialism….At any rate, I possess a lively image of this bright, nimble, fierce, and comprehending being, Jack Frost dancing bespangled in the sunshine, which I should be very sorry to lose.

Few people practise what they preach, and no one less so than Mr. Bernard Shaw. Few are more capable of having the best of everything both ways. His spiritual home is no doubt in [Soviet] Russia; his native land is the Irish Free State; but he lives in comfortable England. His dissolvent theories of life and society have been sturdily banished from his personal conduct and his home. No one has ever led a more respectable life or been a stronger seceder from his own subversive imagination. He derides the marriage vow and even at times the sentiment of love itself; yet no one is more happily or wisely married. He indulges in all the liberties of an irresponsible Chatterbox, babbling gloriously from dawn to dusk, and at the same time advocates the abolition of Parliamentary institutions and the setting up of an Iron Dictatorship, of which he would probably be the first victim.

He prattles agreeably with the tame English Socialists, and preens himself with evident satisfaction in the smiles alike of Stalin or Mussolini. He promulgates in stern decree that all incomes should be equalized and that anyone who has more than another is guilty—unconsciously perhaps—of personal meanness, if not fraud; he has always preached the ownership of all forms of wealth by the State; yet when the [1909] Lloyd George Budget imposed for the first time the slender beginnings of the Super-tax, no one made a louder squawk than this already wealthy Fabian. He is at once an acquisitive capitalist and a sincere Communist. He makes his characters talk blithely about killing men for the sake of an idea; but would take great trouble not to hurt a fly.¹

H. G. WELLS

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) and Winston Churchill first met in 1902. As with Shaw, Churchill had a long, friendly relationship with Wells characterized by political differences, which Churchill describes in the following extracts from a sketch first published in the Sunday Pictorial in 1931.

Mr. H. G. Wells nurses a grievance against the British Empire, the United Kingdom, and in particular against England. He cannot put this uncomfortable and querulous baby down; he has to carry it with him everywhere; he has had to carry it with him all his life. It must be a great nuisance to have such a brat on your hands and on your mind. Nowhere to put it, nowhere to leave it—no convenient Socialist crèche, no doorstep even! And then at the most unseasonable moments it lifts its voice. A dull, sour cry pierces a carefully-guarded silence, or worse still interrupts the flow of an agreeable and comprehending talker, or worst of all distracts a brilliant and—judged as a whole—unquestionably great English writer.

This grievance-baby was dumped upon him in very early life. He was but a stripling when he had to carry it. A draper’s apprentice! Ordered about hither and thither, made to get up too early, and sit up too late; dull routine under arrogant, petty taskmasters, meagre rewards, intense effort and self-denial, and all the irritations aroused in a proud and hampered spirit by gazing on the prosperous, substantial, well-established figures of the large world. These, or some of them, have been the ill-conditioned parents who passed this tiresome baby, deftly and almost imperceptibly, into Mr. Wells’s arms, and then vanished for ever.

After all—to leave the baby-metaphor on the shore—his grievance is not so great. Mr. Wells was born in humble circumstances into an island community where great statesmen had broken down the barriers of privilege and caste, and where wise laws enforced by vigorous Parliaments kept open the paths that offered careers to talent. Soon this wicked, purblind, common capitalist society offered to our young men the benefits not only of elementary, but of liberal and scientific education. From the treasured libraries which the past genius of its race had filled, he reached down pregnant and inspiring volumes. The peace of a soberly-guided and secure realm sheltered this youth from foreign tyranny. He found, as soon as he had power to think, that he had the right to express his thoughts to as many as cared to listen. He found without inheritance or favour the freedom to choose or change half-a-dozen occupations. He moved with ease to the true development of his native gifts. The base capitalists did not trouble about his indiscretions. They let him have his fling with mind and body. When his opinions were seen to be challenging and subversive, they did not attempt to silence him or punish him. On the contrary they pricked up their ears and began to listen. They turned their eyes upon Mr. Wells. They did more. They put their hands in their pockets and produced good money, offered him a chair and poured it into his lap.

The young H. G. Wells struck the brazen front of bad old Eng-land as Moses smote the rock with his rod, and there gushed forth an abundant golden stream. But these material benefits were but the beginning of his satisfactions. Hard upon them came appreciation, praise, cheers and fame. In a few years, while still a young man, the bright fruits of his intellect were everywhere accepted, welcomed, purchased and enjoyed. Everyone said “Hurrah! Here is a brilliant new writer. Here is an original mind. What do we care what his politics may be? Let us hasten to treat him with honour and respect.” Still there was this wretched baby or its ghost. Still it mewled and puked. Why could he not have left it on that tide-swept shore where we deposited our metaphor a few paragraphs ago?

But let us leave this painful (but we hope salutary) criticism of Wells the Fabian, Wells the Internationalist, Wells the milk-and-water little-Englander, Wells the melter-down of the hard-built structures of British greatness, and turn to the gifted being to whose gay and daring fancy and to whose penetrating vision so many of us owe so much. I am a great reader of Wells. It must be more than thirty years ago that I first discovered his “Select Conversations with An Uncle” or read in the pages of the “Strand Magazine” his “Queer Side of Things.” I responded at once to his intellectual stimulus and literary dexterity; and when I came upon “The Time Machine,” that marvellous philosophical romance, not unworthy to follow at some distance, but nevertheless in the train of “Gulliver’s Travels,” I shouted with joy. Then I read all his books. I have read them all over since. I could pass an examination in them. One whole long shelf in my small library is filled with a complete edition. I could point out with a blue pencil the passages where the brat has squalled. But never mind them. Here is entertainment and frolic. Here are suggestions of order and design. Here are shrewd ideas of peace and war. Here are prophecies of the future, not a few of which we have lived to verify and endure.²

SOMERSET MAUGHAM

“I once said to Winston Churchill,” Somerset Maugham wrote broadcaster Kenneth Allsop, “‘If I had not stammered I might have gone into politics and with my knack for speaking languages, I might have become our foreign minister.’ He looked at me and grunted. So I became a writer.”³

William Somerset Maugham and Winston Spencer Churchill were born in the same year (1874), and they died in the same year (1965). They first met before the Great War, when Churchill was a dynamic young Cabinet minister and Maugham was best known as a successful young playwright. Maugham found Churchill to be refreshingly unlike other politicians, and Churchill admired Maugham’s urbanity and wit. This led to an arrangement:

“I want to make a compact with you,” Churchill told Maugham. “If you will promise never to be funny at my expense, I will promise never to be funny at yours.”

“You’re joking,” Maugham said.