Personal History

"This happens to be one of my favourites. It is an excellent and important book. Sheean was one of the great independent foreign correspondents of the 20th century. This was written when he was a relatively young man in the 1930s. It is a story of the news as he saw it – and felt it. Sheean reported events from his own perspective. He is the centre of the story even when he is not talking about himself. He portrayed himself as a kind of everyman against which the news reverberated. This book spawned a large number of books of personal history journalism. One of the factors that contributed to the proliferation of these books was the approach of the world war, and communism and fascism emerging as forces in the world. It was a good environment for a book like this. There is a famous Hitchcock film called Foreign Correspondent that is supposed to be based on Personal History, but the script was rewritten so many times that it bears little resemblance to the book, except for the idea that the hero, a correspondent, realises that news is too important to be treated dispassionately, which, of course, is Sheean’s theme in Personal History. Sheean worked for various newspapers in the US before he decided rather casually to head to Paris in the 1920s. Many young American journalists ventured abroad this way at that time. Sheean started out working for the Chicago Tribune. In one of his assignments it sent him to North Africa where he went behind the lines to find the rebel leader Abd el-Krim in Morocco. He later left the paper and travelled to the Middle East and China, where he fell in love – platonically – with a young American communist. He was always funny about women. He was a wild drinker, smoker and reveller but he was prudish about sex – a fallen away but still tormented Catholic. Sheean had an uncanny ability to anticipate the news. For example, at the time of Indian independence, he predicted – this is amazing but true, I’ve seen the correspondence and diaries – that Gandhi was going to be assassinated by Hindus. He said, ‘I’m going to go to India to find him.’ He gets a magazine assignment and goes there, taking his time. He attends the opera in Austria on the way and has a wild drunken time in what would become Pakistan. But he gets to Bombay, talks several times with Gandhi, and decides he’ll join Gandhi’s ashram. He was standing right there when Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu."