Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship Read online

  Acclaim for Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s

  HEROES

  “A book packed with information and insights. … [A] formidable accomplishment.”

  —Washington City Paper

  “Magnificent…. Cleverly argued…. A fascinating portrait gallery.”

  —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

  “I greatly enjoyed and admired Heroes. I intended when I opened it to take a few soundings here and there rather than read it seriously. But the plan failed; I had to read every word. What terrific and terrible stories they all are. Lucy Hughes-Hallett knows so much, and writes so elegantly. A wonderful book.”

  —Michael Frayn

  “Fascinating.… Compellingly portraying her heroes, Hughes-Hallett is equally brilliant in evoking both the allure and the danger of hero worship.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Brilliantly explored…. Both rich in material, and riveting to read.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “Compendious and stupendous.… Will leave you flushed and breathless.”

  —The Independent on Sunday

  “A magnificent book…. Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s prose, never flawed, is worthy of the grand scope of her subject. It would be possible to read Heroes for the style alone, which has about it the effortlessly seductive quality of those men she is writing about.”

  —Literary Review

  “Vivid and highly readable, here are biographies that thrill, enthrall, and dazzle.”

  —The Observer (London)

  LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

  HEROES

  Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a critic for The Sunday Times (London) and the author of Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions. She lives in London with her husband and daughters and is at work on a book about Gabriele d’Annunzio and the origins of Italian fascism.

  ALSO BY LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT

  Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions

  For Dan

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  I: ACHILLES

  II: ALCIBIADES

  III: CATO

  IV: EL CID

  V: FRANCIS DRAKE

  VI: WALLENSTEIN

  VII: GARIBALDI

  VIII: ODYSSEUS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  REFERENCES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  ILLUSTRATION

  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 semidivine 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 which are widely considered noble. It is also profoundly disruptive of any civil state. Homer’s Achilles was the “the best of the Achaeans,” the preeminent Greek warrior, but his rage was directed against Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks. 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 to be so exceptionally gifted as 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 de Vivar, 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 lucky hour” and could therefore never be defeated. And so in 1630 the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, 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. Now it is fashionable to lament the littleness of those accorded celebrity within our culture—so many football players 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 always 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.) But 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 and with the same structure a century and 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 worshipers to abnegate responsibility, looking to the great man for salvation or for fulfillment which 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 devo
tion is unwise. Hero worshipers, 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 of 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 of 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 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, imperiling 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 that “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 judgment or constitutional control: “There is no law which embraces men of that calibre: they are themselves law.” Such a man inevitably clashes with the established powers which his inordinate personal prestige subverts. The legendary Persian hero Rustum quarreled 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-martialed 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 quarreled with Agamemnon, prayed that his fellow Greeks might be defeated. Lancelot was the most complete knight at Arthur’s Round Table but 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 which didn’t prevent their passing into legend as nationalist 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 hero 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 which 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 don’t combine well with the individualism expected of the hero. Achilles, wrote Aristotle, was that rare, not-quite-human creature, a nonpolitical man, “a non-co-operator like an isolated piece in a game of draughts.” None of my subjects were heads 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 persnickety 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 which 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 suicid
e 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. Those stories, as they have come down to us, are therefore 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 a precursor of Christ. 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 offenses against his birthplace rendered him anathema in 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 have been to imply that one-sixth of historical heroes were women. That kind of emollient falsification, in my opinion, does women no service.