'Level with Life'

I suspect it’s no longer fashionable to have heroes, except perhaps for those chosen from among athletes. Too many kids are inoculated early with hip cynicism, a lazy nihilism ingested with mother’s milk. Every reputed hero has something wrong with him, at least when judged by the day’s ever-shifting standards. That’s obvious to anyone with the most glancing familiarity with human nature. Given our species’ record, it’s remarkable anyone might be reasonably judged a hero.

As a kid I claimed the predictable American heroes — Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain – all reinforced by biopics recycled on television: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, Henry Fonda), Young Tom Edison (1940, Mickey Rooney), The Adventures of Mark Twain (Fredric March, 1944). A little later, Louis Armstrong. What do they have in common? Overcoming adversity, applied talent, a quality that used to be called “grit.” I was never interested in sports and never had much use for politics, so my pool of potential heroes has always been narrower than it is for many Americans. 

As an adult, my heroes have always been writers. Lincoln, Twain and Armstrong, of course, all were writers. I’ve been thinking about how one claims a hero. At least in my case, it’s not a conscious search. I’ve always been skeptical of the “great man” theory of history. One doesn’t necessarily look among the popular or famous. It’s a combination of who they are and what they create that in some way resonates with me. I admire many writers but that doesn’t automatically make them hero material. My near-hero category includes an odd assortment – Rebecca West, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Conquest, J.V. Cunningham, Antonin Scalia. All, indisputably, had grit. I think of another old-fashioned quality – orneriness.

 

As of today, my small, personal pantheon includes Dr. Johnson, Yvor Winters and Whittaker Chambers. By today’s standards, they are unlikely heroes. None was photogenic or by second nature “charming.” You wouldn’t invite them to a cocktail party. All were serious men, tempered by a ready sense of humor. They all would have made solid friends and good company.

 

In his “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson writes: “Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life.” That may be the secret to having a hero. They embody qualities we have in modest quantities. To admit you have heroes is to suggest they possess something you don’t, that you perhaps envy them – an admission intolerable to our swollen sense of self-importance. With age ought to come some measure of “down-sizing,” accepting one’s self more realistically and acknowledging that we’re pretty much stuck with who we are. Now I have heroes, all gifted, all flawed, all admired more deeply for their flaws because the essence of heroism is overcoming them.