Lucy Hughes-Hallett - Heroes - Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

For Dan

COVER

TITLE PAGE HEROES Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

DEDICATION DEDICATION 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 READ ON IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE … HAVE YOU READ? FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR PRAISE ALSO BY THE AUTHOR COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER For Dan

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

READ ON

IF YOU LOVED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE …

HAVE YOU READ?

FIND OUT MORE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

‘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 landthat 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 leftHeracles 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 stupidityof 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.