Customer Reviews

Six Men

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Charlie Chaplin, Edward VIII, H.L. Mencken, Humphrey Bogart, Adlai Stevenson, Bertrand Russell. The men have something in common: "all made a deep impression on their century, and their tracks are very visible in our time". Each also eventually became a misfit, which is sad.

The book fascinates, for Cooke knew them all - sometimes in ways that greatly surprise (Chaplin was due to be best man at his wedding but failed to turn up; the Duchess of Windsor lent Cooke a record of Ethel Merman singing "You're the tops".)

Each study contains illuminating revelations. Chaplin forever worried about his fame ("I don't trust it, I still feel it'll never last"). After decades of being hounded over alleged immorality and Communist sympathies, he became little better than a semi senile doll.

Edward VIII proved "at his best only when the going was good... one of the least enlightened of British monarchs". Cooke was caught up in the drama of the abdication, at the height of the crisis despatching 400,000 words in ten days. Chillingly there is the renewed claim that Hitler, after victory, planned to restore Edward as a puppet king.

Master of words H.L. Mencken (depression his Waterloo, Roosevelt his Wellington) ironically was rendered by a stroke unable to recognize them. Bogart, "an original quite unlike any other human being I have ever known", hated the superficial gloss of life. Cooke writes with warmth of Adlai Stevenson - "a good man in a bad trade", badly let down by Presidents Truman and Kennedy. Philosopher Bertrand Russell (surprisingly small) was a "towering miscontent", randy for most of his 98 years - a whodunnit addict, able to read four at a sitting, each in fifteen minutes flat.

Cooke pays tribute to Russell's ability with a well constructed sentence. We can only admire Cooke's similar awesome craftsmanship, used here so skilfully to help shed more light.

A thoroughly entertaining, thought provoking read.

As is usual with any of Alistair Cooke's writing, that unmistakable transatlantic voice can be heard behind the words as if the author himself was reading his work to an audience of one - you. The generations who would remember the men of whom he has written are fast coming to an end, but there is enough in each of these insightful vignettes to whet the appetite of a true biography-phile of whatever era. I would say that Cooke enjoyed the company of each of his subjects, but that did not put him beyond objective honesty. The saddest, most poignant and ultimately most honest comment of all was that of his summing up of Edward VIII - "The most damning epitaph you can compose about Edward - as a prince, as a king, as a man - is one that all comfortable people should cower from deserving:he was at his best only when the going was good"