Thoughts and Adventures

Winston S. Churchill, James W. Muller, James W. Muller

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780795349652
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Teoría y crítica históricas

The fourth volume in this collection of the Nobel Prize–winning prime minister's essays and journalism showcases his wide-ranging interests and talents. Legendary politician and military strategist Winston S.Churchill was a master not only of the battlefield, but of the page and the podium. Over the course of forty books and countless speeches, broadcasts, news items and more, he addressed a country at war and at peace, thrilling with victory but uneasy with its shifting role in global politics. In 1953, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for "his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values." During his lifetime, he enthralled readers and brought crowds roaring to their feet; in the years since his death, his skilled writing has inspired generations of eager history buffs. This collection of 1920s–30s magazine and newspaper articles convey the extraordinary variety and depth of Churchill's thoughts on the questions, both lofty and quotidian, facing humankind. From oil painting to learning to fly an airplane, from cartoons to commanding a frontline infantry battalion in World War One, these essays bring the great man's wit and intellect to life. With a new introduction and notes by James W.Muller, academic chairman of the International Churchill Society, this edition recovers Churchill's unforgettable table talk for a new generation of readers.

Notes

An initial note for each essay provides references to periodicals or pamphlets in which the essay was published before it appeared in Thoughts and Adventures, and in some instances to later reprints. In preparing these notes I have relied on Ronald I. Cohen, Bibliography of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill, 3 vols. (London: Thoemmes, 2006). References to “Cohen” in these notes refer to this bibliography—for example, Cohen A95. Several of these notes also describe how essays included in the book were composed.

Some essays were revised for publication in Thoughts and Adventures. Although the book has been reprinted many times, few alterations in the text were made in subsequent editions. I have not attempted to provide a variorum edition of these essays, but significant variations are indicated below.

Preface

Although signed by Churchill and dated September 1932, the preface to Thoughts and Adventures was neither written by Churchill nor written that month. Our author was in a nursing home recuperating from a relapse of paratyphoid in early October 1932 when he received a visit from his former secretary Edward Marsh, who often served as his “devil,” checking the proofs of his books before they went to press. It was resolved that Marsh would write the preface, which the publisher, Thornton Butterworth, urgently needed. So well did Marsh counterfeit our author’s style that Churchill wrote, “Rather a good pastiche!” on his copy of the typescript. The story is told in Cohen, I 382, and in Christopher Hassall, Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts: A Biography (London: Longmans, 1959), 575 (Cohen F146.1). Among the Churchill papers is a typed note from Marsh to Churchill’s publisher, undated but presumably written that same month, which begins, “Mr. Churchill has read the preface and thinks it is delightful. All that is needed is his name the date and Chartwell to add to it.” (CHAR 8/312/138.) Only occasionally did Churchill use ghostwriters, and rarely with such success. Marsh’s knowledge of literature is reflected in the frequency and aptness of literary references.

A Second Choice

“A Second Choice” was first published as “If I Lived My Life Again,” in the Strand Magazine, 81:483 (March 1931), 243–51 (Cohen C347a), and reprinted as “If I Lived My Life Over,” in Collier’s, 87:14 (April 4, 1931), 12, 47, 50 (Cohen C347b), as “If I Could Live My Life Again,” in Answers, 92:12 [2383] (February 3, 1934), 3–4 (Cohen C347c), and as “A Second Choice,” in Men Only, 10:37 (December 1938), 23–26 (Cohen C347d).

5, In the Strand Magazine, the essay begins with the following passage:

How am I to live my life over again? Under what conditions is this prodigy to be accomplished, or this trial to be endured? Am I just to set out on life from infancy to boyhood on the chance of my taking different decisions from time to time? If so, why should I take different decisions or act otherwise than I did?

I am a being composed in a certain manner, equipped with certain impulses and inhibitions, moving amidst circumstances which create themselves around me at every moment, and evoke from me certain action or neglect of action.

5, If I had to live my life over again in the same surroundings … : In the Strand Magazine, this sentence concludes: “and meet the same events, why should I do anything different from that which I have done?”

5, … why should I not run in fact along … : the 1933 Keystone edition has “as the result” rather than “in fact.”

5, … and the whirling ivory ball … : The Strand Magazine has “spinning” rather than “whirling.”

6, … I should certainly act as I did then: In the Strand Magazine, this paragraph continues as follows: “Unless, indeed, I were the sort of person who, having obtained a decision from the spin of the coin, would decide that it was unworthy to be swayed by such trifles and, therefore, did the opposite. For the purpose of this argument, either alternative is the same, everything flowing out just as we know now it has flowed out.”

7, … only in some trifling matter, that will … : The Strand Magazine has “very likely” here.

7, But it will nevertheless make immediately a different world around me: In place of this sentence, the Strand Magazine ends the paragraph as follows: “A very small tadpole waggling its tail this way or that, swimming up towards the sunlight or down into the green mysterious depths, does not make much commotion in a good-sized pond. Foreknowledge of where he would find food, and how he would avoid danger, might give him a good deal better chance of survival, without the people who owned the estate in which the pond lay ever noticing that he possessed the sublime gift of prescience. Everything that we do, even the most casual action, may conceivably be of profound consequence. Happily, in practice, a very good deal of what we do passes away without becoming noticeably a part of the chain of causation.”

7, In despair he jumped into a pond: The Strand Magazine elaborates as follows: “—perhaps it was the same pond in which our tadpole had been swimming (squashing the tadpole). But this is by the way.”

7, Under our silly rules … : The Strand Magazine has “the existing” rather than “our silly.”

7, … in the new world which my supernatural intuition had made: The Strand Magazine has this passage here: “Indeed, my knowledge would not give me certainty about even the first Derby. The mere fact of the heavy bets I made might cause unscrupulous people to dope or sabotage the horse so that it did not win the race once I had altered the conditions.”

7, … which would increasingly affect my immediate environment: The Strand Magazine concludes this paragraph and adds another, as follows:

Indeed, I should be puzzled and put wrong by trying to apply my foreknowledge of what I remembered had happened to the new unknowable series of events which were now actually unfolding. It is hard enough to decide when we do not know what the future will contain. Fancy having to decide, hampered at every moment by the memories of a future which could now never come to pass!

Foreknowledge, in fact, could never be exercised more than once; and that only in a negative sense. It could only say “Don’t.” It could never say “Do.” The very fact of its exercise would create different conditions, and perhaps prevent my ever doing for the first time, and once only, the act I had planned.

The argument in this additional passage in the Strand Magazine was suggested to Churchill by his scientific adviser, Professor Frederick Lindemann, who pointed out in a letter of December 1, 1930, that foreknowledge “can only be used with any certainty, negatively. It can only say ‘don’t’ never ‘do.’ Thus for instance, the knowledge of the horse which won the Derby cannot enable you with certainty to make large sums of money.” (CHAR 8/282A/47–48, at 47.)

7, … and how final would be … : The Strand Magazine has “the disturbance arising from” after this phrase.

9, … should probably have died of enteric fever: In the Strand Magazine, the paragraph ends with this sentence: “A double loss, which, so far from being av...