Shocking internet searches, hagiographic biographies and inspiring teachers. All linked

Beware the internet search: it can sometimes shock and sadden.

And another fundamental truth: out and out partisanship for the subject can make for the most exciting teaching.

Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed “there is properly no history, only biography.” I’ve always been interested in history, so I’ve very properly turned my attention to biographies in recent years – reading them or listening to them, a great way to enhance such experiences as walking a dog, or even more fulfilling, washing floors.

My interest in American history (it’s good, because there isn’t too much of it) inevitably led me to consume biographies of such extraordinary figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. My sympathies have tended to be with the Jeffersonians, with their passionate commitment to democracy and human rights. My son Michael, on the other hand, has a soft spot for the man who became and remained their nemesis during his lifetime: Alexander Hamilton.

Eventually I felt that I really had to turn my attention a biography of Hamilton too, and chose one by Ron Chernow, who wrote so masterfully about Hamilton’s mentor, George Washington. I’m enjoying the imaginatively titled Alexander Hamilton.

How massively have I had to change my viewpoint. I knew, of course, that Jefferson and Madison (Washington too, as it happens) were slaveowners, but I was unaware that Hamilton, on the other hand, was a passionate abolitionist throughout his life. Who then, as Chernow asks, was truly committed to human rights?

It’s always good to have your presumptions challenged. On the other hand, there were times when I began to despair of Chernow’s tone. Jefferson and Madison, as well as being denounced as hypocrites, also come across as conniving, cowardly and backstabbing. This began to feel over the top, so I dug out my copy of Lynne Cheney’s James Madison, a life reconsidered, if only so I could contrast accounts of the same events from the two points of view. Cheney, of course, is as hagiographic towards her subject as Chernow is to his. In fact, I had to smile when I came across her description of Jefferson and Madison as “the two greatest minds of the eighteenth century.”

So we’re setting aside men such as Hamilton, are we? To say nothing of Newton, Locke, Leibniz or Voltaire among so many others?

It’s interesting how biographers tend to become partisans of their subjects. You don’t have to. My PhD thesis turned into Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis: an intellectual biography and I have to say, the more I found out about Maupertuis, the less I liked the man – prickly, self-aggrandising, paranoid and not above being a bully – so I felt no need to canonise him. Equally, I recently enjoyed A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert Merry, who doesn’t pull his punches concerning the faults of the eleventh US President (he was prickly, paranoid and not above being a bully, though perhaps less inclined to self-aggrandisement.)

Still, one has to admire teachers who become so enthusiastic about their subject that they identify personally with it. A man I greatly admired did just that in lectures about the French Renaissance writers, at what was then called Bedford College, University of London, which he allowed me to attend although I was a student at another college.

He gave a series of classes about Michel de Montaigne during which he gave marks of extreme humility. Most striking was his comment that he only felt qualified to teach the course by his profound sense of inadequacy to the task. Now, Montaigne wrote a series of pieces he called “Essays”, the first time the word was used for such writing – so he’s responsible for that bane of schoolchildren’s lives from his days to ours. But at his time, an “essay” was a trial, in the sense of a trying out – “these are the trials of my natural faculties” he says of his book. So everything he wrote was tentative. Indeed, I know of no author who used expressions equivalent to “on the other hand” more than he did.

Montaigne: the inventor of the essay
Ushering in centuries of pain for schoolkids everywhere

When the lecturer finished the classes on Montaigne, he switched his attention to the poetry of Pierre de Ronsard and introduced the subject by informing us that we should immediately forget everything we had ever read or heard about Ronsard, because everyone else had got him entirely wrong. Ronsard, as it happens, believed that no one had written anything that could be properly called French poetry before him. He saw himself as the greatest poet since Classical Antiquity, and probably superior to the Greeks and Romans too.

It was a privilege to be taught by a man who was so entirely adopted the personalities of his subjects.

It occurred to me that I ought to look him up to see what had become of him. I could only remember his first name, Malcolm. But google is unbeatable. “Malcolm Bedford Ronsard” immediately gave me a series of hits. Sadly, the first of these was a 1994 article from the Independent headlined Obituary: Professor Malcolm Smith.

Another giant of Renaissance studies, Professor Screech, had written the tribute. It ended:

His Oeuvres Complètes de La Boétie for the Editions de la Pléïade was submitted last December when he already knew that his cancer was terminal.

His edition of Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome with Edmund Spenser's Ruines of Rome was printed and bound in America days before he died.

He’d died at only 53. But right to the end he’d maintained his fiery enthusiasm for his subject. The enthusiasm that I’d found so inspirational when he taught me.

In all likelihood, you wouldn’t remember me, Professor Smith, if you were still around. But I remember you, with admiration undimmed. Thanks for all you did. And thanks for the passion you communicated in doing it.

Down the ages, the phrase ‘we’re all in this together’ is just the prelude to your being ripped off. Again.

I hate it when we turn human beings into secular saints. 

In these sad days, which I fear are going to be the last of Nelson Mandela’s life, I’m particularly dreading the overblown tributes we’re going to be given by people who once declared him a terrorist. Almost as bad as the hypocrisy, however, one of the worst effects of that kind of adulation is that it spreads legends that submerge the truth, making it difficult to discover the reality of the man beneath the myth. And yet the man is always more interesting than the saint.

This thinking was one of the main reasons I’ve tended to keep away from studies of George Washington, despite my fascination with US history. All that stuff about ‘I cannot tell a lie’ and throwing a silver dollar (none of which existed in Washington’s youth) across the Potomac (not his local river and a mile across at its nearest point to him) is just that: so much stuff.

So I’m delighted to be reading Ron Chernow’s masterly study of Washington’s life, racily entitled Washington: a life. An excellent gift from my mother. Chernow only mentions the cherry tree myth to debunk it, and doesn’t even dignify the dollar-across-the-Potomac story by mentioning it at all.

A fine biography of a remarkable man

What emerges is a rounded picture of a noteworthy man.

Let’s say at once that he wasn’t an exceptional general, whatever the legends say. He was unusually courageous, forever exposing himself to fire on the battlefield. In fact, if we did want to canonise him, we might point to the fact that he was never injured (though he did have two horses shot from under him) as evidence of something miraculous. However, a military leader needs more than personal courage, and the verdict of history is that Washington was excellent at planning an action, and successful when everything went to plan; he was however far too slow to adapt when circumstances abruptly changed.

What he did have was another quality which to me seems far more admirable. He understood that as their leader, he had to share his men’s pain. It was the custom in his time for armies to fight only in good weather (in passing, let me say I think that would be an excellent defence policy for Britain: warfare could only take place here on about ten days of the year).

In winter, armies stopped and concentrated on keeping warm. For the Continental Army led by Washington, that was no easy task. Winter after winter, they found themselves trying to shelter from bitter winds and snow, with inadequate clothing and far too little food. Why? Because Congress was practically bankrupt and the States weren’t prepared to finance it properly. So Washington was forced to sit and watch his men wasting in cold and dying of hunger, while all he could do was keep begging for funds.

It made it particularly difficult to hold any kind of force together, because many of his men were on short-term enlistments. Given the terrible conditions, which included long periods without even their pay, it was hard to persuade them to stay and fight again when the next season came round. And yet keeping the army going was all that won the war: the British could, and did, occupy American cities; they could, and did, win battles; but while they couldn’t finally destroy the Continental Army, while it survived to go on harassing them, they couldn’t win the war.

Washington lived in marginally better conditions than his men – usually in a stone house rather than in rickety, overcrowded shacks – but he was there, among them and knew their sufferings. It was that capacity for sacrifice as well as his courage that held his army together and ensured ultimately that the war would be won and the US successfully born.

For that, all Americans owe him a great debt of gratitude, which no doubt inspires the veneration felt for him to this day. However, in among the admiration, it would be well to remember a little more about the behaviour of the Americans of his time.

His armies starved in areas of rich agriculture. There was food around. It just wasn’t getting to his men. Principally, this was because too few people were prepared to dip into their pockets to finance the war. In addition, though, many of the farmers around his encampments preferred to sell their produce to the British, who paid in good, solid, hard currency than to the Congress with its rapidly devaluing credit.

And the farmers were far from alone in putting their pocket books ahead of their country. Far from it. As Washington himself saw on a visit to the capital, many were profiteering from the war, lining their pockets very nicely. And a great many others, without directly turning the war to their advantage, continued to live very comfortably off their civilian incomes, while paying lip service to a common cause to which they expected others to give their all.

The story of Washington and the Continental Army is a glorious illustration of how many of those who talk of national causes and general dedication, prefer in practice to see others make the sacrifice while they keep making the bucks.

I’ve learned to think more highly of Washington than I did before, if only because he rose above the petty self-serving attitudes of those around him, and sacrificed his own comfort to ensure his nation gained its freedom.

However, I’ve also learned again a lesson I learned a long time ago: never trust those who tell you ‘we’re all in this together.’ Like David Cameron’s  government, what they really mean is that there are bad times ahead for those least able to defend themselves: the vulnerable, the poor, the unskilled, the disabled. But they and their friends will go on doing just fine, thank you.

It’s true that there’s often no gain with no pain. Trouble is, they aren’t both felt by the same people.