Winston Churchill hoped and expected his autobiography, My Early Life, to be read as much as literature as history, and also as an adventure story. He dedicated it ‘To a New Generation’, and it was especially intended to inspire people in their early twenties. ‘Twenty to 25, those are the years,’ he wrote. ‘Don’t be content with things as they are.’ Aged 56, Churchill was singularly discontented with things as they were. He was out of office and out of favour with his party, and had already entered his ‘wilderness years’.
There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life
Because My Early Life was published in 1930, there are many people, places, literary allusions, historical events and even words – nautch-girls, marplots, Uitlanders – that require explanation for today’s reader. Professor James W. Muller of the University of Alaska has produced no fewer than 1,450 editorial notes to the text, which explain everything. It is a feat of erudition and scholarship in which he was helped by the late Paul Courtenay.
There is no better revelation of Churchill’s character, including his sense of humour, than My Early Life, written at a time when he felt that people were focusing too much on private concerns rather than public ones. It is a hymn to the sense of noblesse oblige that actuated him and many of his contemporaries. Some of the chapter titles brilliantly convey the adventures it recounts, including ‘The Sensations of a Cavalry Charge’, ‘I Escape From the Boers’ and ‘The Relief of Ladysmith’. Yet there is also a good deal of self-deprecation in the book, and little of the vainglorious boasting of which his modern detractors accuse him.
Another powerful insight into Churchill’s psychology, especially as it was affected by his father Lord Randolph Churchill, is afforded in the short story ‘The Dream’, which Muller has also annotated in the volume. This strangely whimsical piece, written in 1947, recounts a meeting between Churchill and the ghost of his father, who visits him while he is painting a portrait of Lord Randolph. The ethereal figure appears to Winston in his studio at Chartwell in Kent and they have a long conversation; but at no stage does Winston tell his father that he has become a success in life, and indeed has been instrumental in winning the second world war. Randolph departs in a puff of cigar smoke, believing that his son has only been a moderately successful newspaper reporter, and does not learn that his own fame, as a short-lived chancellorship of the exchequer, has been entirely overshadowed.
During their conversation in the story, Winston touches on the changes and political developments that have taken place in the half century since Randolph’s early death in 1895, which emphasise how unimaginable the 20th century would be to someone from the late Victorian age. The Boer War does not surprise Randolph, of course, but socialist governments, the female franchise, MI5, the two world wars (‘We have had nothing but wars since democracy took charge’), 18 per cent income tax, the Holocaust, Stalinism and nuclear bombs leave him ‘stupefied’. Churchill also makes his father say ‘I loved you dearly’, whereas the truth was more complex.
Though written 78 years ago, ‘The Dream’ appears to contain a message for our times when Winston tells his father:
It may well be that an even worse war is drawing near. A war of the East against the West. A war of liberal civilisation against the Mongol hordes. Far gone are the days of a settled world order.
But Churchill, being an optimist, did not end the story fatalistically, instead saying: ‘Having gone through so much, we do not despair.’
There are other delightful touches, as when Lord Randolph tells his son, who, at 73, was still leader of the opposition: ‘You are too old now to think about such things, but when I hear you talk I wonder that you didn’t go into politics. You might even have made a name for yourself.’ Of course the story can also be seen as a form of humble-brag, but both it and the autobiography are superb pieces of writing.
Muller is methodically working his way through the Churchill oeuvre, having already edited The River War, Great Contemporaries and Thoughts and Adventures. Once he has finished, he will have done Churchill scholarship an invaluable service by opening up the great man’s works to a whole new audience. My Early Life’s original dedication ‘To a New Generation’ still stands.
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