Pilgrim's Way: An Autobiography

Rating:
Summary: "Great Contemporaries"...disguised as autobiography
Review: Buchan's elegiac prose notwithstanding, the book on the whole is uneven. Although the prose is seductive, "Pilgrim's Way" lacks narrative form, juxtaposing descriptions of Scotland, South Africa, and London with descriptions of Buchan's friends who fell in the war -acceptable until one realizes this was supposed to be Lord Tweedsmuir's autobiography.

There is actually very little of Mr. Buchan himself in the book. Since it is a eulogy to other men, there is a considerable loss of narrative momentum once they are gone. World War I, suprisingly, is a great anti-climax. This is due to the harried nature of Buchan's descriptions, which not only tell how gifted a man was at college, but that he perished in the war - even if the war is a decade down the road. He should have kept his beautiful descriptions but revealed the men's deaths in chronological order. This would have kept the reader rivited and all the more anguished at their passing. Instead Buchan's chapter on the Great War becomes a taut laundry list of the dead.

Still, the book is a tribute to high Edwardian precepts at their fulcrum, to an honorable age of adventurers and scholars, and a worthy gift to the young. If the book were re-released for mass publication, I would give it to many friends and younger relatives.

Rating:
Summary: "Addressing a Gathering of Shades" Lord Tweedsmuir
Review: Lord Tweedsmuir must not have liked public speaking. In Parliament, he felt he was "addressing a gathering of shades, who might at any moment disappear into limbo unless they were clutched by the hair." Elsewhere, he wrote that "I believed profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world peace".

Pilgrim's Way is Lord Tweedsmuir's last book, published in1940, the same year he died at the age of 64. This book was also read in 1943 by a young, sweet naval officer...John F. Kennedy. In Robert Donovan's PT109:JFK in WWII, Donovan writes that JFK had read the Forty Days of Musa Dagh but found Tweedsmuir's book even better. Well, I just had to read it!!!

John Buchan, later titled Lord Tweedsmuir, wrote several books while attending Oxford University and continued writing two or three books a year until his death. His life was extraordinary; he studied law, served as secretary to the High Commissioner of South Africa, in WWI, a correspondent for the London times, was elected to Parliament, when he died, he was Governor General of Canada. He had ambitions to climb Everest!!! But all that is not in the book! His most famous work was the Thirty Nine Steps, which was made into an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

I had trouble reading this book at times, because he often writes of the personalities of people he remembered and knew, of people he admired. Many of those personages are of a bygone era, around the turn of the 19th century, and most of them are British. He wrote of so many people, that I would often forget which he, he was writing about, and had to flip a few pages back to figure it out. He wrote of Arthur Balfour, prime minister of Britain and legislator of the Balfour Declaration which promised Israel a homeland in 1917, and William Gladstone, another prime minister critical of prime minister Disraeli's pro-turkish policies during the Bulgarian massacres of the 1870's. Gladstone resigned as prime minister in 1894 over the issue of Irish home rule, and just before the Armenian massacres of 1894-1896. But those details I procured from web surfing. Lord Tweedsmuir is more interested in the most noble attributes of their characters. Of King George V, Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather, Lord Tweedsmuir writes: "He had one key of access to all hearts, his sincere love of his fellows. He could be explosive and denunciatory, but always with a twinkle in his eye...His simplicity, honesty, and warm human sympathy made themselves felt not only in the Empire but throughout the globe, so that millions who owed him no allegiance seemed to know and love him. He was a pillar of all that was stable and honourable and of good report in a distracted world."

I loved Lord Tweedsmuir's descriptions of the English and Scottish countrysides. He describes the forests of his boyhood home as: "the woods were, on the whole, a solemn place, canopied by Calvinistic heavens" and "as a child, autumn meant the thick, close odour of rotting leaves, varied by scents from the harvested stubble; glimpses of uncanny scarlet toadstools, which I believed to be the work of Lapland witches...Winter meant vistas of frozen branches with cold blue lights between..." I imagine that JFK found solace in such writing, hardly a war-rallying work, although Lord Tweedsmuir also writes about the friends and family he lost in WWI, and Britain's South African campaigns before that.

Rating:
Summary: "Addressing a Gathering of Shades" Lord Tweedsmuir
Review: Lord Tweedsmuir must not have liked public speaking. In Parliament, he felt he was "addressing a gathering of shades, who might at any moment disappear into limbo unless they were clutched by the hair." Elsewhere, he wrote that "I believed profoundly in the possibilities of the Empire as a guardian of world peace".

Pilgrim's Way is Lord Tweedsmuir's last book, published in1940, the same year he died at the age of 64. This book was also read in 1943 by a young, sweet naval officer...John F. Kennedy. In Robert Donovan's PT109:JFK in WWII, Donovan writes that JFK had read the Forty Days of Musa Dagh but found Tweedsmuir's book even better. Well, I just had to read it!!!

John Buchan, later titled Lord Tweedsmuir, wrote several books while attending Oxford University and continued writing two or three books a year until his death. His life was extraordinary; he studied law, served as secretary to the High Commissioner of South Africa, in WWI, a correspondent for the London times, was elected to Parliament, when he died, he was Governor General of Canada. He had ambitions to climb Everest!!! But all that is not in the book! His most famous work was the Thirty Nine Steps, which was made into an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

I had trouble reading this book at times, because he often writes of the personalities of people he remembered and knew, of people he admired. Many of those personages are of a bygone era, around the turn of the 19th century, and most of them are British. He wrote of so many people, that I would often forget which he, he was writing about, and had to flip a few pages back to figure it out. He wrote of Arthur Balfour, prime minister of Britain and legislator of the Balfour Declaration which promised Israel a homeland in 1917, and William Gladstone, another prime minister critical of prime minister Disraeli's pro-turkish policies during the Bulgarian massacres of the 1870's. Gladstone resigned as prime minister in 1894 over the issue of Irish home rule, and just before the Armenian massacres of 1894-1896. But those details I procured from web surfing. Lord Tweedsmuir is more interested in the most noble attributes of their characters. Of King George V, Queen Elizabeth II's grandfather, Lord Tweedsmuir writes: "He had one key of access to all hearts, his sincere love of his fellows. He could be explosive and denunciatory, but always with a twinkle in his eye...His simplicity, honesty, and warm human sympathy made themselves felt not only in the Empire but throughout the globe, so that millions who owed him no allegiance seemed to know and love him. He was a pillar of all that was stable and honourable and of good report in a distracted world."

I loved Lord Tweedsmuir's descriptions of the English and Scottish countrysides. He describes the forests of his boyhood home as: "the woods were, on the whole, a solemn place, canopied by Calvinistic heavens" and "as a child, autumn meant the thick, close odour of rotting leaves, varied by scents from the harvested stubble; glimpses of uncanny scarlet toadstools, which I believed to be the work of Lapland witches...Winter meant vistas of frozen branches with cold blue lights between..." I imagine that JFK found solace in such writing, hardly a war-rallying work, although Lord Tweedsmuir also writes about the friends and family he lost in WWI, and Britain's South African campaigns before that.

Rating:
Summary: No wonder JFK liked this book
Review: Pilgrim's Way was one of John Kennedy's favorites, so it is said. It's easy to see why. The people in this book provide examples of lives lived with respect, character and grace -- and ample humor.