Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

DEDICATION

For Dan

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

I ACHILLES

II ALCIBIADES

III CATO

IV EL CID

V FRANCIS DRAKE

VI WALLENSTEIN

VII GARIBALDI

VIII ODYSSEUS

AUTHOR’S NOTE

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THE DELIGHT OF WRITING

LIFE AT A GLANCE

TEN FAVOURITE BOOKS

A WRITING LIFE

ABOUT THE BOOK

THE FANTASY OF SUPERMAN

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

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COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

‘RAGE!’ THE FIRST WORD of the Iliad, the word that inaugurates Europe’s literary culture and introduces one of its dominant themes. The rage not of Agamemnon, king and commander, but of Achilles, the semi-divine delinquent, the paradigmatic hero whose terrible choice of glory at the price of an early death has haunted the collective imagination of the West for two and a half millennia.

Heroes are dynamic, seductive people – they wouldn’t be heroes otherwise – and heroic rage is thrilling to contemplate. It is the expression of a superb spirit. It is associated with courage and integrity and a disdain for the cramping compromises by means of which the unheroic majority manage their lives – attributes that are widely considered noble. It is also, and therefore, profoundly disruptive of any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the ‘the best of the Achaeans’, the pre-eminent Greek warrior, but his rage was directed, not against his people’s enemies, but against Agamemnon, his people’s leader. The Iliad is a celebration of Achilles’ lethal glamour: it is also the story of how he came close to occasioning the defeat of the community of which he was the most brilliant representative.

This book is about Achilles and some of his real-life successors (whether Homer’s hero really lived we are unlikely ever to know for certain). It takes the form of a series of brief lives of people who have been considered by their contemporaries (and in most cases by posterity as well) to be exceptionally, even perhaps supernaturally, gifted and so to be capable of something momentous – the defeat of an enemy, the salvation of a race, the preservation of a political system, the completion of a voyage – which no one else could have accomplished. In 411 BC the people of Athens resolved to recall Alcibiades, whom they had once condemned to death and who had subsequently fought with devastating success for their opponents, because, as one of their commanders told the Assembly, he was ‘the only person living’ who could save their state. So the eleventh-century King Alfonso VI of Castile turned to Rodrigo Díaz, known as the Cid – a man he had twice banished – when African invaders poured into Spain, because whatever threat the Cid posed to the stability of the kingdom he was known to have been ‘born in a happy hour’ and could therefore never be defeated. And so in 1630 the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, having first nerved himself to dismiss his overweening and intransigent General, Albrecht von Wallenstein, had then to humble himself by imploring Wallenstein to resume his command and save the empire from the onslaught of the invading Swedes, something that, by common consent of all his enemies (he had few friends), Wallenstein alone could hope to do.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. It is in times of emergency that heroes are looked for, and found. Bertolt Brecht wrote, famously, that it is an unhappy land that looks for heroes. The dictum is ambiguous, and works both ways. A land without heroes may be fortunate in their absence, for a hero is a menace to any state’s equilibrium. ‘The Argonauts left Heracles behind’, noted Aristotle, for the same reason that the Athenians took to ostracizing and sending into exile outstanding citizens, ‘so the Argos would not have on board one so vastly bigger than the rest of the crew.’ But only a fortunate land is confident enough to dispense with heroes. At the time of writing it is fashionable to lament the littleness of those accorded celebrity within our culture – so many footballers and rock stars and models, so few great spirits – but such collective frivolity should be cherished as one of the privileges of peace. It is desperation that prompts people to crave a champion, a protector, or a redeemer and, having identified one, to offer him their worship.

Virtue is not a necessary qualification for heroic status: a hero is not a role model. On the contrary, it is of the essence of a hero to be unique, and therefore inimitable. Some of the people whose stories are told in this book were irreproachable, others were scoundrels. Cato had the highest moral standards and adhered to them as nearly as could possibly be expected. Garibaldi was a man of signal sincerity, although he was not quite so transparently simple as his admirers imagined. (Alfred Lord Tennyson, meeting him in 1864, was delighted to recognize in him the ‘divine stupidity of a hero’. In fact Garibaldi was far from dumb: he just didn’t speak English.) Others among my subjects were more morally questionable. Alcibiades was an arrogant libertine and a turncoat several times over. The Cid was a predatory warlord, Drake was a pirate and a terrorist, and Wallenstein was a profiteer prone to apparently psychotic rages whose contemporaries believed him to be in league with the devil. But heroes are not required to be altruistic, or honest, or even competent. They are required only to inspire confidence and to appear, not good necessarily, but great.

This book is rooted in ambivalence. Thomas Carlyle, who wrote one on the same subject a century and a half ago, declared that there was ‘no nobler feeling’ than hero-worship. ‘Heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man … it is to this hour and at all hours the vivifying influence in a man’s life.’ I disagree. An exaggerated veneration for an exceptional individual poses an insidious temptation. It allows worshippers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfilment that they should more properly be working to accomplish for themselves. Carlyle approvingly called it ‘the germ … of all religion hitherto known’, but to make a fellow human the object of religious devotion is unwise. Hero-worshippers, as the stories in this book repeatedly demonstrate, are frequently disappointed in, and lay themselves open to abuse by, the heroes of their choice.

The notion of the hero – that some men are born special – is radically inegalitarian. It can open the way for tyranny. ‘Beware the pursuit of the Superhuman,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw. ‘It leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.’ True. Carlyle’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote ‘Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in great men’, saw the prime function of the great man as that of rendering ‘indemnification for populations of pigmies’, while humanity en masse seemed to him ‘disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or fleas.’ Such a revulsion from the majority of one’s fellow beings, combined with an exaggerated admiration for the exceptional few, makes a politically poisonous mix.

But a wariness of the potentially pernicious effects of hero-worship hasn’t made me immune to the intoxicating allure of the hero. The people I have written about here are all compelling personalities whose life stories – tragic, inspirational, or shocking – have been told and retold over centuries, in some cases millennia, because they are so dramatic, so full of complex resonance, and so profoundly moving. The idea of the hero would not be so emotionally disturbing or so politically dangerous were it not so potent.

I am not a debunker, more a collector and analyst of bunk. I shall repeatedly be pointing to discrepancies between the ascertainable facts about heroes and the legends that grew up around them. I do so not as an iconoclast but because the process whereby heroes’ characters and curricula vitae are adjusted to suit the moral values and emotional needs of those who adore them is a fascinating one. That most idols have feet of clay is a banality: what is interesting is the question why, knowing it, we are still enthralled by them. Cato was an inept politician who repeatedly handed advantages to his opponents, but his contemporaries thought him a man in ten thousand, and his admirers in the next generation revered him as a god. Francis Drake turned aside from the pursuit of the Spanish Armada to grab a disabled ship as his own prize, imperilling the entire English fleet by doing so, but his popularity was undiminished by the action: on the contrary, when the news reached London bonfires were lit in celebration. Byron and Keats had both read their Plutarch: they knew all about Alcibiades’ treachery. Yet Byron wrote ‘no name comes down from antiquity with a more general charm than that of Alcibiades’, while to Keats ‘Alcibiades, leaning on his crimson couch in his galley, his broad shoulders imperceptibly heaving with the sea’ was the embodiment of the abstract idea of the heroic, ‘large, prominent, round and coloured with magnificence’.

Heroes are insubordinate: that is part of their glamour. Several of the people I have written about followed Achilles in defying their political masters: in doing so they were acting within a well-established heroic tradition. There are men, wrote Aristotle, so godlike, so exceptional, that they naturally, by right of their extraordinary gifts, transcend all moral judgement or constitutional control: ‘There is no law which embraces men of that calibre: they are themselves law.’ Such men inevitably clash with the established powers that their inordinate personal prestige subverts. The legendary Persian hero Rustum quarrelled with his king and refused his services. Horatio Nelson is at his most heroic with his telescope clamped to his blind eye. George Custer was court-martialled barely a week after he graduated from West Point and afterwards he so frequently annoyed his superiors that he would have been excluded from the Little Big Horn campaign had not a storm of public protest obliged President Grant to restore him to his command.

One who has become the object of hero-worship is hard to accommodate in a well-ordered state. Established authority has often been highly (and justifiably) suspicious of the heroes that served it. The Cid and Wallenstein were both dismissed by the royal masters who feared and envied them. Garibaldi was and is revered as the valiant creator of a united Italy, but he was repeatedly imprisoned or blockaded on his tiny island home by the state he had brought into being.

Most heroes are rebels. A startling number are actually traitors. Achilles, having quarrelled with Agamemnon, prayed that his fellow Greeks might be defeated. Lancelot was the most complete knight at Arthur’s Round Table, but he brought about the collapse of the civilization of which he was paragon. Of my six historical heroes, five fought at some point against their compatriots (a fact that did not prevent their passing into legend as national heroes). Drake is the exception: but though he never had political power enough to precipitate a confrontation with his queen, he frequently disobeyed her.

Hero-worship is the cult of the individual, and the hero is always imagined standing alone. The heroes of classical mythology were homeless wanderers, and so are those of modern legend, be they cowboys or police officers, vigilantes or secret agents. They are brilliant mavericks, outsiders coming in from elsewhere to handle an emergency before riding off into the sunset. The wanderer seems to the settled majority to be free and invulnerable. As Herodotus wrote of the nomadic Scythians: ‘This people has no cities or settled forts: they carry their houses with them and shoot with bows from horseback: they live off herds of cattle, not from tillage, and their dwellings are on their wagons. How then can they fail to be invincible?’ Much more can be expected of a stranger, whose unfamiliarity makes him a blank screen for the projection of fantasies, than could ever be asked of someone familiar. Historical heroes, whose status depends at least in part on the public’s identification of them with legendary counterparts, have frequently been people with no fixed position in the society that expected such great things of them. Wallenstein, the protector of the Austro-Hungarian-German empire, was a Czech. Garibaldi, the maker of Italy, was born in France, wore the costume of a South American gaucho, and until the end of his life still needed a dictionary by him when writing in Italian.

The responsibilities of government do not combine well with the individualism expected of the hero. Achilles, wrote Aristotle, was that rare, not quite human creature, a non-political man, ‘a non-cooperator like an isolated piece in a game of draughts’. None of my subjects was a head of state (although the Cid, at the end of his life, created a new state for himself). They are the successors, not of Agamemnon but of Achilles, not of Arthur but of Lancelot, not of Jehovah but of Jesus Christ. In the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche defined the state – any state – as ‘a fearful tyranny, a remorseless machine of oppression’ against which he opposed the heroic figure of the ‘superman’. Nietzsche’s superman is ‘like a star thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude’. He has no community within which to hide, no religion, legal system, or moral code as guide, no group or institution to share the responsibility for his choices. He is terrifyingly exposed. ‘Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law?’ asks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. ‘Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law?’ Achilles took it upon himself to do so, repudiating his allegiance to Agamemnon, denying any obligation to his fellow Greeks, choosing to answer to no human authority save his own, and insisting on his right to determine when and on whose behalf he would exercise his devastating skills. And although some of my subjects – Cato, with his embarrassing clothes and pernickety accountancy; tubby, venal Drake – are scarcely the kind of resplendent figures Nietzsche had in mind, the same proud rejection of a communal identity has been the mark of the hero throughout the millennia covered by this book.

My subjects are all Europeans. There are many correspondences between the Western heroic tradition and those of some Asian and African cultures, but I have not attempted to trace them, partly for practical reasons – this book is plenty long enough as it is – and partly because the tradition I describe is a continuous and self-referential one. Achilles in his tent sang of the exploits of heroes dead and gone, tales that shaped his concept of himself and his role just as his own story was to condition posterity’s idea of what a hero might be. Cato prepared himself for his own suicide by reading Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. Even when heroes were not themselves aware of the parallels between their careers and those of their celebrated antecedents, the people who told and modified their stories frequently were, so that those stories, as they have come down to us, are full of echoes and presentiments: Drake is a latter-day Jason, Wallenstein a Mars; Cato (despite having died half a century before the Christian era began) is an avatar of Christ, and to Alexander Herzen Garibaldi seemed ‘a hero of antiquity, a figure out of the Aeneid’. As heroes are shaped by the past, so in turn they shape the future. In the 1930s, when Europe was once more in crisis, my heroes (except for Alcibiades, whose offences against his birthplace were anathema to the age of nationalism) were resurrected and put to political use.

They are all white Westerners and, for different reasons, they are all male. Heroes’ stories resemble women’s stories in that the hero is simultaneously adored and marginalized, being more often an object of veneration than a holder of power; but the vast majority of the people accorded hero status in Western history have been men. Of course there are women I might have included, but to have done so would have been to obscure the lamentable fact that people of my sex have, throughout most of recorded time, been considered incapable of running a country, let alone saving one. To have chosen a female subject would be to imply that one sixth of historical heroes were women. That kind of emollient falsification, in my opinion, does women no service. When Agamemnon sent out a call for all the men of Greece to join him in attacking Troy, Achilles’ father, anxious to save his wonderful boy from conscription, dressed him as a girl and hid him in the women’s quarters. Odysseus heard of it and came visiting, bringing with him magnificent gifts. The women of the court crowded round, exclaiming over the embroidered cloths and golden cups, the robes and the jewels; but Achilles, unable to suppress his true nature, seized upon a sword. At once Odysseus knew him. Achilles abandoned his pretence, acknowledged his manhood, and accepted his heroic destiny. So Odysseus himself, in Homer’s account of his journey home, has to extricate himself from Calypso’s island, the tempting domain of the feminine where he enjoys every comfort and every pleasure, before the tale of his adventures can begin. Alcibiades dreamed shortly before he was murdered that he was wearing his mistress’s clothes and that she was making up his face with pigments and white lead like a woman’s. Plutarch recounts the dream as though it should be read as a premonition of the hero’s death: to lose one’s masculinity is tantamount, for a traditional hero, to losing life itself.

The definition of that masculinity has fluctuated. Homer’s heroes fume and weep, indulging their emotions in ways commentators from Plato onwards have found disgracefully unmanly, and they are immensely proud and careful of their magnificent bodies, shamelessly displaying a physical vanity later ages would consider contemptibly effeminate. Charles Baudelaire identified Alcibiades as being among the first of the dandies: the tradition of heroic self-adornment is ancient. Achilles’ shield was the most marvellous piece of armoury the world had yet seen. The warriors of ancient Sparta decorated their clothes and weapons with ornaments: they wore their hair long and plaited it intricately before going into battle wreathed with flowers. Beauty breeds valour. The troops who travelled on the Armada’s ships in 1588 were not required to wear uniform, explained a Spanish military expert in 1610, because their morale was much enhanced by the gorgeousness of their own clothes: ‘It is the finery, the plumes and bright colours which give spirit and strength to a soldier so that he can with furious resolution overcome any difficulty or accomplish any valorous exploit.’ Napoleon’s Marshal Murat was as noted for his red boots and extravagant epaulettes as he was for his fearlessness. But although the heroic tradition encompasses areas of human experience identified for most of the recent past as feminine, it is nonetheless sexually exclusive. Even Joan of Arc, the most obvious female candidate for inclusion in this book, renounced her sex and its perceived limitations by cross-dressing, tacitly acknowledging that the pantheon of heroes admits men only.

So what makes a hero? And what are heroes for? In narrating the lives of a handful of heroes, in attempting to recreate their contemporaries’ expectations of them and tracing the way posterity responded to and reshaped their stories, I hope to give a kaleidoscopic answer to each question. Simple, single ones would be impossible. The hero’s nature and function have repeatedly shifted along with the mentality of the culture that produced them, and so have the attributes ascribed to the hero, the exploits expected of him, and his place within political structures and society at large.

Each era has a different theory as to how some men come to be, or seem to be, extraordinary. Often ideas about the hero are religious: the hero is the son of a god, or a saint, or a hubristic challenger of divine authority, or a god himself. Or his superhuman talents may be less legitimately supernatural: he may be a witch. Class is important, though not always in predictable ways. Many heroes’ social status is indeterminate and wavering, like that of the English folk hero Robin Hood, who is now the dispossessed lord of Locksley Hall, now the comrade of common criminals. The majority of heroes throughout history have been, or pretended to be, or aspired to become, aristocrats. But heroes, especially dead ones, are usefully malleable: their images have been pressed into service as often by revolutionaries as by defenders of authoritarianism. There is a vigorous counter-tradition celebrating the popular hero, the man of the people who challenges elitist power and privilege, the plucky little fellow who slays the giant with nothing but a pebble in a sling, the common sailor or the carpenter’s son who lays low principalities and powers.

There is an erotic dimension to hero-worship. Beauty, charm, and sex appeal are useful assets for a hero: in their absence, a dashing style or a commanding presence will do. People were dazzled by Alcibiades, besotted with Garibaldi, terrified by Wallenstein. A hero must be able either to seduce or intimidate: either way he needs an outsize personality and a talent for projecting it. Heroism is theatrical. Heroes must look, and act, the part. They must swagger and preen, or, if their public’s taste inclines the other way, they must make a show of their humility, as Cato did, going indecently under-dressed to the Forum. Heroic gestures are frequently histrionic, which is not to say they are frivolous: a symbolic gesture can have substantial consequences. When it was suggested to General Gordon that his brightly illuminated headquarters in Khartoum provided too easy a target for the Mahdi’s guns he called for an immense candelabrum, lit its twenty-four candles with his own hands, and stationed himself beside it at a great arched window saying, ‘Go tell the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing.’ He died anyway, but he had made a stirring spectacle of his own defeat. The capacity to stage a splendid tableau is a more important qualification for admission to the gallery of heroes than either survival or success.

Appearances matter, and not only because ‘defeat in battle’, as Tacitus wrote, ‘always begins with the eye’. ‘What is he [Achilles] more than another?’ asks Ajax in Shakespeare’s bitterly anti-heroic version of the Troy story, Troilus and Cressida. ‘No more than what he thinks he is,’ replies Agamemnon. Heroic status depends on the hero’s self-confidence and often also on the confidence trick he (or his sponsors and advocates) pulls on others in persuading them of his superhuman potency. Some heroes’ reputations are manufactured or enlarged by others: Drake’s power and ferocity were magnified by Spaniards motivated by anger at the humiliations to which he had subjected them. Garibaldi was surprised, on returning to Europe in 1848, to find that Mazzini had made him an international celebrity. Others are self-created: Alcibiades’ most audacious and ingenious publicist was himself. But whether by his own or others’ will, a hero inevitably acquires an artificial public persona. Shakespeare’s Achilles is addressed as ‘thou picture of what thou seemest’, a doubled image of inauthenticity. But an image is what a hero inevitably becomes. In 1961, Anthony Mann, with General Franco’s enthusiastic support (the Spanish army was placed at his disposal for the battle scenes), made a stirring film of El Cid. At the end of it the Cid is killed fighting but his grieving wife and followers, knowing that without the inspiration his presence provides their armies will never succeed in beating off the hordes of the enemy, keep his death secret. His corpse is dressed and armed and strapped upright in the saddle of his great white charger. The trusty horse gallops out at the head of the Cid’s army. Believing that their great leader is still with them, his men win a marvellous victory before the horse, with its lifeless but still invincible burden, disappears over the horizon.