April 5, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 53

The greatest of Great Contemporaries

Great Contemporaries by Winston S. Churchill. ISI, softbound, illus., 506 pages, $22. Member price $17.60

2024 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 41st International Churchill Conference. London | October 2024

More

By Richard M. Langworth

We are running short of space, but we squeezed a little room for an important advisory: Give away your other copies of Great Contemporaries (excluding of course early editions), and buy this book! It is by far the most important, instructive edition of Churchill’s famous personality sketches ever published—masterfully edited with a new introduction by James W. Muller and authoritative footnotes by Muller, Erica Chenoweth and Paul Courtenay.

Five Churchill essays are added to the original text—H.G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin, Kitchener, Kipling and Edward VIII—which Muller inserted “to show the range of Churchill’s writing.” Though our author initially left them out, they fit well. I do think Churchill had a mind-tic over Edward VIII, and wonder if this encomium was his final view of a man who became more an irritant than an admirable ex-king. I would have preferred a sketch of Lloyd George, who earlier reviewers noted was remarkable for his absence—though WSC had his reasons for that omission.

Churchill’s 1938 words (absent any editing into Newspeak), are accompanied by James Muller’s notes on texts. Here he laboriously reviews prior appearances of the essays (in periodicals or pamphlets), noting the numerous, intriguing, sometimes humorous changes Churchill made before publishing the collection. Students of these personalities will find unique insights into Churchill’s evolving opinions of them, albeit in very small type.

The most intriguing notes concern the Hitler essay which, as James Muller explains, has often been quoted out of context to brand Churchill a Nazi-sympathizer, or at least a hypocrite. Muller believes Hitler is the “one jarring feature” of the collection, but admits that he was nonetheless a “great contemporary.” Though in places Churchill “seems to pull his punches” over the Führer, Muller writes, “no fair-minded reader…could suppose that Churchill harbored illusions about Hitler. If his tone is diplomatic, his purpose is monitory and his message urgent.”

Perhaps only Churchill, at a time when political opinion was as frozen in place as it is now, could address controversial characters with such justice and balance. Only Churchill, as far as I know, could call H.G. Wells a “milk- and-water little Englander” scornful of Britain, and at the same time “the gifted being to whose gay and daring fancy and whose penetrating vision so many of us owe so much.” This is the kind of measured analysis typical of Churchill the writer—an approach that remains a model for today’s scribes.

Thirty years ago in these pages (FH 36:11) the late H. Ashley Redburn reviewed Great Contemporaries under the subtitle, “Churchill Did Care Much about Others,” rejecting the common portrait of WSC as a self-centered egoist concerned only about himself. Now James Muller and his colleagues have shown us why this is so—through a vigorous and scholarly accompanying text and a vast range of footnotes. It is not going too far to recommend this new ISI edition (like their previous Thoughts and Adventures) as the indispensable “desert island” text for any marooned Churchillian, with only a set of WSC’s books to pass the time.