June 1, 2015

Finest Hour 108, Autumn 2000

Page 39

By Charles W. Snyder

Mr. Churchill: A Portrait, by Philip Guedalla. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1941, rep. 1945; New York: Reynal& Hitchcock, 1941; London: Pan Books (shortened to end in May 1940, source list deleted), 1951; Paris: La Jeune Parke, n.d. (paperback); Stockholm: P. A. Norsted & Soners Forlag, 1942; Toronto: Musson, 1942; Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1942; New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1943. 346 pages, illustrated. Current availability: common and low priced.

Philip Guedalla’s Mr. Churchill (1941) portrays its subject at the pinnacle of his prestige, the man of the hour, the bulwark of a Britain whose survival still hung in the balance. If we cast our minds back to the sterner days of 1941, it is easy to imagine the appeal this book had, not only in Britain but in America, where many wondered how Churchill, the British bulldog who rallied his embattled nation, had become the great man who by then dominated the world stage.

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Is Mr. Churchill worth reading today? Certainly it can be read with enjoyment, for its style is pleasing and its pace is fast. This is a very readable book. But the sources available to the author were scant, necessitating a superficial treatment of many topics. Compared with the meatier volumes now available, especially the Official Biography and such one-volume “lives” as Pelling’s, Gilbert’s, Rose’s and Morgan’s, Guedalla’s is a very light souffle indeed.

It is a flavorful dish nonetheless. Philip Guedalla wrote with flowing style and subtle humor. Because of the book’s readability, one might be tempted to recommend it to younger readers, who would like to learn the basic facts of the Churchill saga before tackling more detailed and scholarly treatments. But Mr. Churchill does not fully fit that bill because it ends with the German invasion of Russia, and so much must be learned that came afterward. One would certainly want a student of Churchill to know about his role in the many strategic decisions of the war, the conferences with other Allied leaders, the Fulton speech, the Nobel Prize, and the return to Downing Street in the 1950s.

Still, Mr. Churchill retains some interest. For one thing, just as the biographies Churchill himself wrote tell as much about their author as their subjects, Mr. Churchill us much about its author, himself a notable figure. Philip Guedalla (1889-1944) was a popular historian and a failed politician, who would die from disease contracted while on a wartime mission in the Middle East. He attained early celebrity as President of the Oxford Union in 1911, and was described by David Walter, one of his successors, as one of the all-time greats in that office: “He was so well-known and admired as an undergraduate that people stared at him as he walked down the High Street. His epigrams are said to have rivalled Oscar Wilde’s. He was the ultimate champion of style over content.”

Guedalla found later that the polished style he had honed at the Oxford Union did not always go down well at the hustings. He failed in four attempts to win election to the House of Commons from 1922 to 1931. As Lord Elton observed, “Working-class audiences…were sometimes mystified by speeches which retained all the epigrammatic glitter of his Oxford Union days.”

The glitter still shines. Consider Guedalla’s comment on the events of 1915: “The cause of national unity demanded the elimination of Lord Haldane, who had made the Army, and of Winston Churchill, who had mobilized the Navy.” Or consider this very Oxonian picture of Churchill in political isolation in the early 1920s: “Life as an anti-Socialist Stylite on a lonely pillar in the political Thebaid would lead nowhere.” (There is nothing wrong with dispatching the reader to consult the dictionary now and again.)

It is striking to contrast Mr. Churchill With the very different picture the author drew back in 1924, in a collection of portraits entitled A Gallery. There, one is startled to read that “High up on the short waiting-list of English Mussolinis one finds the name of Winston Spencer Churchill.” Seventeen years later Churchill had not changed—but Guedalla had. Instead of comparing him to Mussolini, Guedalla in 1941 likened Churchill to British leaders who had faced and defeated continental autocrats who had tried to dominate the whole of Europe, placing him alongside Cecil, Marlborough and Pitt, and concluding, “Mr. Churchill is not far from Chatham.”

Mr. Churchill was written at a time that was terrible and yet stirring. It has within it the glow of that momentous hour, and this is the best reason for reading it. Here is Churchill in his prime, taking his place with the other great leaders of British history, from the days of the Spanish Armada onward, defying the tyrants, standing guard to protect the heritage of freedom that is the birthright of the English-Speaking Peoples. This is the Churchill the world remembers best. Guedalla offers a snapshot of the man taken at the pinnacle of fame, a fact that gives his book a certain drama absent from more detached and detailed studies drawn long after the storm was over. Philip Guedalla tried to write a portrait of a man; he succeeded better in preserving the special flavor of a remarkable epoch.

Mr. Snyder is a longtime Churchill Center member in Savannah, Georgia.