There’s been a lot of talk among my writer friends about an article that appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Fallen Idols.” The author writes about her disappointment in discovering that many of her literary heroes were rather awful people in their personal lives. Rilke, a favorite poet of hers, turned out to be “a selfish, sycophantic, womanizing rat.”
I’m actually not that bothered by the whole issue of artists who create great art but are personally big jerks. Beethoven was a jerk. Wagner was a jerk. Picasso was a jerk. Caravaggio was a murderer. Doesn’t bother me. I can still love their art.
But historical figures are quite another issue, and it’s been bothering me for a long time. For those of us who read and write a lot about social history, it’s difficult to reconcile one’s admiration for a great historical figure with one’s discovery that he (usually he) was a big fat jerk.
Here are my two issues: First, to what extent were these personally repugnant individuals the products of their time? And two, how certain can we be that the historical accounts that have prevailed are accurate? Two very different but important issues.
Even most school kids now know that Christopher Columbus was a big fat jerk, whose primary motivation was personal enrichment, and who was immensely cruel to the natives he encountered and to his own men. And if you research Thomas Edison, you’re bound to read about the bitter rivalry between him and Nikola Tesla, and intimations that Edison may have taken undue credit for some of Tesla’s inventions. Or maybe Edison was simply the better marketer. In any case, Tesla wasn’t all that bothered, because, as one blogger put it, “he was too busy inventing the twentieth century.”
I lose a lot of sleep over the Founding Fathers, the ones who proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” because a lot of them were slave owners and womanizers who actually meant “all white male property owners are created equal.” Churchill helped take down Hitler, but he was himself extremely racist. But at what point do we declare that at least some of these men were products of their time? That the good they did for humankind vastly outweighed their personal jerkiness? I think about this a lot.
Then there are those figures that historians don’t all agree about. Was Gandhi truly such a jerk to his three sons? Whenever they did something wrong (like the time Gandhi caught one of them kissing a girl), he punished himself by fasting for a week. He refused his sons a formal education. He was pretty mean to his wife, too. Was he a bad family man or simply trying to encourage his family to embrace his fervently held ideals?
And what about Galileo? Did he steal the theory of the path of projectiles from Cavalieri? Should he really be credited with inventing the telescope, when telescopes had already been built by others before him? Some accounts say he was persecuted by the Inquisition and forced to recant his heliocentric theories. Others say the church was rather reasonable with him (considering the era), and just asked him to say they were theories rather than facts.
Did Florence Nightingale really refuse Mary Seacole’s request to join her nurses in the Crimea because of Mary’s race? Or was Mary just an opportunistic innkeeper looking to earn a living by setting up a hotel in the war zone?
What’s the takeaway? History is complex. It’s written by the victors. Textbooks are too superficial. Take your pick.