Is There a Hero in the House?
IS THERE A HERO IN THE HOUSE?
The New Yorker carried a cartoon once which showed a pickup truck with the words Haarlem Dike Emergency Repair Service lettered on the door. In the back of the truck were six or eight small Dutch boys.
An exceptionally good joke, I thought. And it struck not only my funny bone but something deeper. All that business about the town of Haarlem being saved from destruction by the sacrifice of a boy in wooden shoes had thrilled me as a child. He had done the one thing possible when he put his finger in the leak. He suffered. I suffered with him as he stood through long hours, finger aching, then arm, back, and whole body racked and tortured. But he stood. He was “Hans, the Hero of Haarlem.”
Does anyone do things like that anymore? Does anyone notice if they do? But this cartoon—can heroism be organized, commercialized, multiplied? If so, there isn’t much thrill left in it. It’s just a good joke.
Yet we still need heroes, and we need them desperately. I suppose it is partly because we are conscious of failure and ordinariness in ourselves, and we need to be cheered on by the sight of someone who is successful or extraordinary in one way or another. The classic hero of the past was a person of noble character, of fortitude in suffering, of unusual enterprise in danger. There came a time when the thing to do was to debunk all heroes, to smile tolerantly or even to sneer at what looked like greatness, and to attempt as loudly as possible to advertise the weakness of leaders. (Was it a relief to find that there was no need after all to praise anybody?) More recently the hero often hailed by the crowd is a nonhero, a man devoid of any quality of greatness. He is vapid and faceless and certainly not tragic, but only pathetic. Those who follow such a hero are pathetic, too, for he is unable to take them anywhere.
It is a bad thing to make something out of nothing. If there are no longer any real heroes, if the world has no chance for a glimpse of greatness, we shall in our bankruptcy have to make something out of nothing. Nonheroes, presumably, are better than no heroes at all. We have given up the outdated kind, the shining visions of knights in armor or towering kings who ruled in righteousness. We have new supermen: a Batman or a James Bond, whom we can get away with worshiping openly as long as we tell ourselves he’s “high camp,” or just a put-on. Quite without our realizing it, however, we have come to lump real heroes with Batman and 007. Heroism is nothing more than a put-on. To be honest nowadays is to recognize that one man is as bad and as laughable as the next, and the more thoroughly we can demonstrate his rottenness and his absurdity the more cheered we shall be as we contemplate our own.
We are all of us at times bad and laughable, but there are still also among us now and then truth, greatness, even holiness. The merest hint of true holiness we are quick to suspect as counterfeit, and we condemn what we like to call a “holier than thou” attitude. But years ago a teacher pointed out that the person I was condemning was in fact holier than I—and it certainly didn’t take much.
George Eliot, in her incomparable novel Middlemarch, tells of a certain vicar who “had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.”
Because we ourselves bump along the low road, accommodating ourselves, compromising, making outrageously generous allowances for ourselves alone (such as saying, “That’s the way I am, I have to do my thing,” or calling old-fashioned, banal sins “frustrations” or “hang-ups”), we begin to find it less and less possible to believe that there really are some who travel a higher road and that they have reached it perhaps by genuine courage, sacrifice, or the kind of self-giving love that the Bible tells us about.
It is a bad thing to make something out of nothing, to make a hero out of a discouragingly common sort of person, or worse, out of one who has distinguished himself by degradation alone. Eliot’s vicar did an equally bad thing. He made nothing out of something. Both errors come from the failure to value things as they truly are. We end up magnifying the trivial and minimizing the great.
I have written a book or two which have been taken by some of my readers as attempts to making nothing out of something, to debunk. A mere description of one event in one missionary’s life (a conference on “the field”) was read not as a description at all but as an attack on the whole scheme of modern missions, and even on the validity of Christ’s great commission. “Are you determined,” asked some wrathful readers, “to demolish the work of the Lord?” No, I had tried to recreate a scene. This is how it looked there, this is the way these particular missionaries spoke and acted. I had not tried to make it more or less than it was. “Are there no good missionaries?” questioned others. This question had me utterly baffled. A simple count of the characters in my book would have shown more goodies than baddies, or I don’t know a goodie when I see one.
Later I wrote the true story of what happened in the life of a missionary who was nearly a hero by reputation during the latter part of his life, and whose death has, as often happens, made him a full hero to many. But some readers were convinced I had tried to make him a nothing; that I had searched meticulously for the negative aspects of his experience and personality in order to expose gleefully the feet of clay.
My model for this and an earlier biography had been the Bible. Men are shown there for what they are: far less than perfect, but far more than nothing. And a few readers, to my immense encouragement, wrote that they had been able to identify with Kenneth Strachan in my biography, principally because they had found him a man of “like passions” with themselves, a flawed human being, but one who had, in spite of his sins, sought the will of God. David, clearly shown to be both an adulterer and a murderer in the Bible, was yet a man whose heart was “perfect toward God.”
An evangelical magazine carried a discussion not long ago on the missionary as hero. To say with a shrug, “Oh, this missionary hero bit . . implies that it’s all nonsense. But to ask, “Are missionaries really heroes?” is beside the point. Some missionaries (and some knights, some sailors, some plumbers and housewives) are heroes, whether we like it or not. One of the writers in the magazine said, “The truth comes not through sentimental biographies peppered with anecdotes, but through facts.” He was mixed up. The truth may indeed come through a sentimental biography peppered with anecdotes, for anecdotes, after all, may be facts, and very interesting ones, too. I for one would like it a lot better without the sentimentality. This cuts off some of the light. But an anecdote may well carry the truth of a man’s life, as Jesus’ parables showed heavenly truth, and may stun us into the awareness that we are looking at a great person: the man who did this, the woman who endured that. The abolition of heroes is easier said than done, for the world still contains them. Far be it from me to wish to debunk them. Just as far be it to wish to make a man look larger than life (which is what we mean when we speak artistically of “heroic” proportion). My job as a biographer was to try as hard as I could to show the man in life size, not smaller, not greater. This is impossible, for my own judgment is imperfect. Yet I try for it.
Let me remember his frailties, not to show him up as a mere put-on, but only so that I may not excuse myself from achieving what he achieved. If I regard him as invulnerable and blameless I shall take refuge in my own weakness and never aim at strength. Let me study his glory (whatever in him was really admirable) as a continual proof that men who were weak became strong, men who suffered passions and temptations that I suffer nevertheless rose above them. Even if they rose only for a moment, let me grasp the truth of that moment.
* * *
Recently I read in the paper that a woman was planning to sail the Atlantic alone. Good idea, I thought. If you like to sail, it would certainly be fun to sail across a whole ocean, and it might be interesting to sail it alone. I can easily sympathize with people’s wanting to tackle a tough job, even if it’s unnecessary, if it strikes them as a good adventure. (Men and women used to have real adventures in the ordinary and necessary course of their lives, but it doesn’t seem to happen that way much anymore. We’ve inoculated and insulated and insured and protected ourselves against most kinds of adventure, so that we now have to go out looking for them.) The part in the news story that made me say, “Oh dear,” was the announcement that the lone sailor was going to tape record her emotions throughout the voyage. No, I thought, I don’t want to hear about it. If the lady was going because she liked to sail, she might give us a good story when she got back, but if she was in search of an “experience” which would elicit certain emotions she was hoping to have, I doubt that the complete transcription would be something very many of us would like to hear.
Why is it, I wonder, that the question, “How do you feel about this?” has taken on such huge significance today? It is not a question concerning the thing done, or the purpose in doing it. People seem to have lost their objectives, to have forgotten what they are trying to do.
In the movie Patton the general encounters a soldier lying on the floor.
“What the —are you doing?” he roars.
Leaping to his feet and saluting, the soldier stammers, “I’m just trying to get some sleep, sir.”
“Well, get the——back down on the floor, then,” says Patton. “You’re the only——around here that knows what he’s trying to do.”
The question, “How do you feel?” strikes me as aimless. Suppose a clear answer can be given; then where are we? What do we know, in most cases, that is worth knowing?
The city of Boston had a Cleanup Day a few years ago, when thousands turned out on the Common with brooms, rakes, and plastic trash bags. A TV interviewer nabbed a teenage girl to ask the big question.
“I think it’s beautiful,” the girl answered. “I mean, you know it’s like fun, a lot of people getting together and all.”
“How does your mother feel about it?”
She shifted her gum to work the other side of her mouth.
“My mother?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh well,” she said, “you know, she wished I’d, like, clean up my own room before I started on Boston Common. But, I mean, that’s a typical mother reaction.”
The girl laughed and went on sweeping and chewing.
Our sudden self-conscious effort in this technological age to treat people as people has made us act as though the be-all and end-all of life lies inside us, in our psyche, and as though the highest reason—often the only reason—for doing or not doing a thing is a feeling. I saw a poster put up by the youth group in a church which said, “If it feels good, do it.”
For a few years I worked on some Indian languages in South America. I found in each of them a tremendous wealth of vigorous verbs and onomatopoeic words, but very few terms which describe emotion. How they felt about things was best discerned by what they did, not by what they said. I shared the emotions of the hunt not by the hunter’s describing for me how he really felt during the chase, but by his telling me in detail where he was, where the animal was, what he saw, what he heard—the specific noises of the spear slicing through the air, the thunk when it sank into the flesh of the prey, the grunt or bleat or scream of agony as the animal was impaled, and the sound of the fall to the ground. The hunter was after food, not an emotional experience, but in this necessary work he found a huge pleasure which he managed also to give me just by the telling of the story. He experienced emotions which a man who hunted for the sake of the thrill would probably miss altogether.
It wasn’t all thrills, of course. The Indian endured some terrific hardships, but he hadn’t many words for those either. Weather was what I would call bad for hiking in the rain forest most of the time. But it was not talked about. The heavy burdens the Indians carried on their backs, the deep mud they plowed through, the steep hills climbed and ravines descended, the heat and gnats and thorns, were matters of course. They endured these without comment most of the time, doing what they had to do regardless of the difficulties, regardless of their feelings. They were far from unfeeling—I am convinced of this—though a superficial acquaintance with them might give the impression that they felt nothing. It wasn’t that nothing mattered. They knew exactly what they were doing. Their aims were perfectly clear and those were what mattered. Feelings were simply not given much attention.
This is one of the things that made these people interesting. The trouble with hearing how everybody feels about everything is that after a while hardly any of it is interesting. No wonder talk shows are almost all the same. No wonder kids’ faces are so expressionless. Everybody is looking inside. There aren’t any horizons.
We hear a lot about the need for sharing. I am all for sharing what I have that others want, but too often the word means loading what we can’t stand—our disappointments, hostilities, frustrations, burdens of all kinds—onto other people’s shoulders. We ought to be willing, the Bible tells us, to bear one another’s burdens, but each man is told also to bear his own. It is a big thing we ask when we lay them on somebody else, a thing not to be asked lightly.
A word no Indian language that I know has (and I wonder if it is nearly obsolete in our language) is endurance. Each time I read through the New Testament I am surprised at how often it occurs. “Sheer dogged endurance” is a phrase in Phillips’ translation of 1 Thessalonians 1:3. Paul endured an astounding variety of trials. Jesus endured the cross—and the accounts of what happened that awful day are simple and stark: “There they crucified him.”
But the idea of endurance in the Bible is associated with some wonderful words, too, I found. Words like faith, patience, crown of life, hope, love, courage. This is what it’s about. The emphasis is on the ultimate object, not on how the sufferer actually felt in the middle of the night.
“Who for the joy that was set before him endured the Cross. . .
Perhaps we can learn, as we grow, to pay less attention to ourselves and how a thing affects us.
“He hath borne our griefs.”
That ought to be enough.