Shackleton

Chapter 7 in Hannibal and Me is titled “Dealing with disaster”. So, how does the Hannibalic story tell us to deal with it?

First, a reminder about the premise of my book: I use stories of real people to make universal points. Put differently, I use the people in the stories to personify lessons (but you, the reader, ultimately have to adapt the lessons to your own life.).

The first personification of responding to disaster in life is named Quintus Fabius Maximus. (From the picture above, you may have guessed that by the end of the chapter he will have a “twin” in Ernest Shackleton, as I explain below).

As I introduce Fabius on page 144 ff., he

came from one of the oldest and noblest families of Rome, the Fabii, who claimed they could trace their ancestry back to Hercules. But Hercules was not exactly the first image that came to mind when looking at Fabius himself. When he was a boy, one of his nicknames was Verrucosus — “Warty” — because he had a big wart on his lip. Another nickname in his youth was Ocivula, “Lamb,” because he had an unusually mild temper for an aristocratic Roman boy. He did everything slowly. He spoke slowly, walked slowly, learned slowly. He was bad at sports in a society that was all about athletic, virile, and martial games. Young Fabius was in almost every way the exact opposite of young Hannibal. …

And yet the Romans gradually changed their minds about the warty, lamblike Fabius. As the boy grew into a man, that same slowness began to look like steadiness and prudence…

He was already in his forties when [the Romans] first elected him consul. As senator or elder statesman, five times as consul and twice as elected “dictator,” Fabius remained one of the republic’s leaders for the rest of his life.

By the time the young and dashing Hannibal crossed the Alps into Italy, Fabius was already in his sixties. … Fabius had never encountered such an enemy. What, Fabius reflected in his slow and methodical way, should he, and Rome, make of Hannibal?

And then, of course, the disasters began. Battle after battle in which Hannibal routed Roman armies that outnumbered him. Rout is the wrong word. Hannibal exterminated Roman armies, he depleted the Roman population of men, of senators, of sons, of fathers. From the Roman point of view, Hannibal represented the extinction of Rome.

How Hannibal did that — how he won those battles — I deal with in the preceding two chapters. But in Chapter 7, I’m looking at these events purely from Fabius’s side, so that we can understand how to deal with disaster.

And Fabius offers us a psychologically layered answer. Page 146:

… The younger Roman leaders found this hard to admit, but Fabius simply accepted that Hannibal was superior on the battlefield. That premise led Fabius to a simple but shocking conclusion: if going to battle against Hannibal meant losing, it was clearly not a good policy to go to battle against him at all. …

In these extreme circumstances, Fabius decided, the strategic definition of success was no longer victory but stalemate. In his slow and methodical way, Fabius thus determined that Hannibal’s stunning triumphs on the battlefield might yet lead to nothing. They might be impostors.

So what were the elements of his response, of “the Fabian response” in the language of my archetypes?

Page 153:

There are two aspects to a Fabian character that make it resilient and that you might remember if ever disaster should strike you. The first is the ability to accept reality for what it is. The second is the ability to stop resisting reality and instead to flow with it until circumstances begin to change.

1) Acceptance

From page 154:

Shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance: these are the stages that make up the human “grief cycle” described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a twentieth-century Swiss doctor who spent her time caring for dying people…

Losing your job, losing your house to foreclosure, being diagnosed with cancer, getting divorced — any bereavement, failure, or other disaster triggers the psychological responses of the grief cycle. But people move through the grief cycle in different ways. Some progress swiftly, others get stuck at one stage, and yet others cycle back and forth through them. …

Page 157:

Eventually, however, some grief-stricken individuals will arrive at a state of acceptance. As Kübler-Ross puts it, “Acceptance should not be mistaken for a happy stage. It is almost devoid of feelings.” But it is the stage where the person is ready to move on…

I illustrate this wrenching process in this chapter by looking at Eleanor Roosevelt, who suffered through the grief-cycle after discovering the love letters between her husband and their secretary, Lucy Mercer. Roosevelt literally cried and raged it out, while sitting for hours and days and weeks in a park, gazing at the female face of a statue called … Grief.

2) Flowing (or “non-doing”)

As Fabius himself said (to a consul who would soon be killed because his co-commander refused to heed this advice): “Can you then doubt that inactivity is the way to defeat an enemy?”

Page 158:

One translation of Minucius’s [a Roman rival to Fabius] taunt about Fabius’s do-nothing tactics into Chinese is wu wei, which means “nondoing” or “doing by not doing.” Wu wei happens to be a central concept of “the way,” the Tao, in Chinese philosophy. This Taoist notion of wu wei, nondoing, is often mistaken for passivity, which it is not. Instead, nondoing is really a very active way of letting inevitable things happen without wasting energy resisting them, instead bringing one’s own position into harmony with this flow of nature. The principle of wu wei might say, for instance, that is is better to use a rushing stream to spin a wheel and transfer its energy than to block the stream and try to make it stop flowing. Or it might say that a skipper is better off tacking through the wind than trying to go against it, which would be futile. Indeed the best skippers often look, as Fabius did, as though they were “doing nothing”….

I then illustrate this point by looking at Ernest Shackleton, who (page 161),

decided to cross the entire Antarctic continent on foot. It was as daring in 1914 as it had been in 218 BCE for Hannibal to Cross the Alps…

But, as you all know, Shackleton failed at his quest, when his ship, the Endurance, got stuck in the ice.

Page 162:

Shackleton’s first reaction was to order his crew to do what heroes normally do: fight. The men climbed onto the ice and hacked away at it with picks, trying to open a sea-lane. But it was useless…

They now spent the Antarctic winter on their ship, which was frozen into its ice pack. No light, eternal darkness. All the stages of Kübler-Ross’s Grief Cycle.

Then the ice crushed the Endurance, and the men watched as their ship sank. Page 164:

Suddenly, the men were all alone, floating on ice somewhere near the South Pole.

Shackleton announced new plans of daring and heroic resistance: they would march, while dragging their own life boats, across the ice toward an islet, covering roughly the distance from San Francisco to Loas Angeles. Page 164-165:

After three hours of hard toil, they had moved one mile. It began to snow. The next day they tried again, but the snow was like glue. … The next morning they tried again. Shackleton went ahead and scanned the ice. He saw pressure ridges where colliding ice floes had formed mountains that looked as forbidding as the Alps.

Shackleton turned around and walked back to the group. He took deep breaths of the icy air and prepared to announce his decision, which he knew was probably the weightiest of his entire life. At first, he had thought that attacking the enemy was the best thing to do, both for morale and for their chances of survival. But he now thought that he might have been in denial. During the night, he had accepted reality, and seeing the endless ice mountains around them had confirmed it. Instead of attacking and wasting caloric energy to make at most a mile  a day toward who knew where, they would instead … do nothing.

And to understand why this saved him, why this turned his disaster into one of the greatest triumphs in human history, you have to know something about the ice. For that, you’ll have to read the book.

The ice … the Tao.

Fabius, Roosevelt, Shackleton … you. 

To be continued.

Here is my table of contents, which gives you a sense of the structure of the book: For the most part we “age with” Hannibal, and also with Scipio, in the main storyline, so that we face the issues that arise at each stage of life.

In bullet points, I’ve put some of the people that come up in each chapter. You can try to figure out the context in which they appear, and why.

One. HANNIBAL AND ME

• Hannibal
• Me
• (A bit of Carl Jung, tiny bit of Scipio and Fabius)

Two. THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTS

• Hamilcar, Hannibal, Hasdrubal, Mago
• Theseus
• Barack Obama
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Amy Tan
• (Gerhard Kluth)

Three. DO YOU NEED A GOAL?

• Hannibal
• Meriwether Lewis (and Thomas Jefferson, William Clark)
• Harry Truman
• Ludwig Erhard

Four. TOWERING PEAKS

• Hannibal
• Pablo Picasso
• Paul Cézanne
• Meriwether Lewis

Five. THE ART OF WINNING

• Hannibal
• Morihei Ueshiba
• Cleopatra (and Julius Caesar

)

Six. TACTICS AND STRATEGY IN LIFE

• Hannibal (and Sosylus)
• Carl von Clausewitz
• Steve Miller and Tiger Woods
• Cleopatra
• Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman
• Pyrrhus and Cineas

Seven. DEALING WITH DISASTER

• Quintus Fabius Maximus
• Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
• Lance Armstrong
• Lao Tzu and Sun Tzu
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Ernest Shackleton

Eight. THE PRISON OF SUCCESS

• Hannibal
• Tennessee Williams
• Amy Tan
• Eliot Spitzer
• Albert Einstein

Nine. THE LIBERATION OF FAILURE

• Publius Cornelius Scipio
• Steve Jobs
• Eleanor Roosevelt

Ten. THE THRESHOLD OF MIDDLE AGE

• Hannibal and Scipio
• Carl Jung (and Sigmund Freud)
• Ernest Shackleton

Eleven. POLITICAL DEATH

• Scipio and Marcus Porcius Cato
• Ludwig Erhard (and Konrad Adenauer)
• Liu Shaoqi (and Mao Zedong)

Twelve. AGING AND TRANSCENDING

• Hannibal and Scipio
• Abraham Maslow
• Ludwig Erhard
• Eleanor Roosevelt
• Albert Einstein

Thirteen. THE LESSONS OF HANNIBAL

• All of the above
• (plus Arjuna)

The other day, my publisher and I had a conversation about some of the ideas. I’ve put a transcript of that chat up on this page.

We were just scratching the surface in that conversation. And that is becoming my chief difficulty in this process: Whenever anybody asks me anything about the book (such as: “What is it about?”), I want to answer with the whole book. Can’t do that.

So, if you feel so inclined, you might do me a favor: Tell me which bits of the conversation hit, move, stimulate, enrage or otherwise interest you.

That would be enormously helpful: From your reactions, I will try to figure out what the various “elevator pitches” might be. You know: my 10-second answer when some radio host interviews me about the book. As in:

Host: So, Andrew, you wrote a book about success and Caesar, is that right?

Andreas: Both success and failure, actually, and the main character is Hannibal.

Host: Lecter?

Andreas: No, the other one….

I just devoured Robert Harris’s Imperium, the first book in what will be a trilogy of historical fiction, or fictional biography, about Cicero. I read it in a couple of sittings, hardly able to put it down. It may be the best way to learn about that great man and that fascinating time, a turning point in world history. I’ve just ordered the second book in the trilogy, and I can’t wait for the third to come out.

In terms of themes that show up a lot here on this blog:

1. Storytelling: Wow. Harris has Cicero’s slave and confidante Tiro tell the story from his point of view, which works well. All the details of Roman life and of the characters (Crassus, Pompey, Caesar etc etc) come to life.
2. The “impostors triumph and disaster”: Cicero embodies them (though not quite as perfectly as Hannibal and Scipio do, which is why I myself chose them to tell my own story. )
3. The tension between mobs and elites, republican and democratic power sharing, what ought to be and what is.

Among other things.

In any case, if you like The Hannibal Blog, you’re likely to like not only Hannibal and Me in January but also Imperium right now.

Recall that I placed Andrew Jackson near the “populist” (as opposed to “elitist”) pole in the spectrum. Here, from Jon Meacham’s excellent biography of Jackson, is a little anecdote that shows how easily such populism veers into mob rule.

I) Background

The seventh president, six foot one but only 140 pounds — “gaunt but striking, with a formidable head of white hair, a nearly constant cough, a bullet lodged in his chest,” according to Meacham — was orphaned at 14 and never knew his father (rather, if not quite, like Hamilton,  Obama/McCain, Clinton/Newsom, Villaraigosa and other presidents).

He also never had biological children of his own. In this respect, he was similar to George Washington. Both Jackson and Washington, in the popular mind, made good “fathers of the nation” because, childless, they regarded the people as their children.

But above all, Jackson was the first president to come from “the common people,” from what we would call the lower classes. The six presidents before him had all been members of an educated, classically trained elite. This contrast became Jackson’s salient feature. He would spend his two terms fighting against what he perceived as elites.

As Meacham puts it (emphasis mine):

Before Jackson, power tended toward the elites, whether political or financial. After Jackson, power was more diffuse, and government, for better and worse, was more attuned to the popular will….

The [debates among the Founders had] largely concerned how the new nation might most effectively check the popular will. Hence the Electoral College, the election of senators by state legislatures, and limited suffrage. The prevailing term for America’s governing philosophy was republicanism–an elegant Enlightenment-era system of balances and counterweights that tended to put decisive power in the hands of elites elected, at least in theory, by a country of landowning yeomen. The people, broadly defined, were not to be trusted with too much power. This creed, best articulated by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, lay at the heart of presidential politics in the first decades of the nineteenth century, years in which a small establishment in the capital essentially decided on its own who would have the chance to live in the White House.

Jackson had reason to regard this elitism as his personal enemy. In the election of 1824 he won the popular vote but was tied in the electoral college and lost in the House of Representatives. In his mind, the people had chosen him, but the elites had robbed him of the office. So in the next two rounds, which he won, he took his fight directly to the people, even going on the first presidential campaign tour.

Meacham:

The force driving Jackson after 1824: a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the whim of the powerful, with himself as the chief interpreter and enactor of that will…. “the republic is safe, and its main pillars — virtue, religion and morality — will be fostered by a majority of the people”… Democracy was in; elitism was out.

(Notice his explicit mention of virtue as residing in the common people — that, ie the putative location of virtue, was what I attempted to trace across time in that diagram post.)

II) Inauguration Day

On the day in 1829 he was sworn in, Jackson (apparently without prior planning) opened the White House to “the people”. They gladly obliged by piling in. As one contemporary lady of letters described it:

no police officers placed on duty and the whole house [was] inundated by the rabble mob…. The Majesty of the People had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping [replaced it] …. the carpets and furniture are ruined …. The armies of democracy were pitching their tents in Andrew Jackson’s White House. …

Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who was at the White House that day, declared the “the reign of King Mob.”

Prostitutes could confidently ply their trade by slipping on customised little hobnail boots and casually strolling up and down the alleyways. In the dust their shoe-nails would spell out akolouthei – ‘this way’, or ‘follow me’.

Isn’t that a great little detail? When strung together densely in one single narrative, these details transport you to a place and a time, to Athens during the life of Socrates. Kudos to Bettany Hughes for achieving such intensity in The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life.

And oh, what an Athens it was. This is the Athens of aromas and stink; of sweat, blood and sperm; of tanners pissing on their hides and Adonises oiling themselves for war games; of parades, assemblies and battles; of sex, slavery and domesticity; of democratic group-think, individual liberty and massacre; of humanity at its highest and simultaneously its lowest; of strutting health and vile disease.

Regarding disease, for example, is it not obvious that a plague such as the one that fell on war-torn Athens during Socrates’ prime must have influenced the subsequent events and the worldview of Socrates and his compatriots?

[W]ithin a year the disease danced its way through the caged population of Athens and across the hot streets; 80,000 died. At a cautious estimate, at least one-third of the city was wiped out. It had started in 431 BC.

Imagine one third of Americans, 100 million, dying in one year from a plague.

But we also need the lighter moments. For example, that time (beloved by artists, as above and below) when Socrates’s wife doused him with piss:

Xanthippe, raging after one argument with her maddening philosopher spouse, pours the contents of a bedpan over Socrates’ head; ‘I always knew that rain would follow thunder,’ sighs the philosopher, resignedly mopping his brow.

So Hughes accomplished something big: She brought that world-historical character, Socrates, to life. It’s a scandal how dull ‘philosophers’ (as opposed to historians) usually make Socrates. We needed this ‘biography’. She makes reading about Socrates easy and fun and personal. That is what I tried to do with Hannibal and the other characters in my own book.

(And, by the way, a reminder: Don’t ever assume that a thread on The Hannibal Blog has ended just because it slumbers for a few months. Both the series on Socrates and that on the Great Thinkers will continue. I have big plans for them.)

Another recent book on Socrates and the great philosophers is Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche by James Miller. It tackles a selection of thinkers, one per chapter:

• Socrates
• Plato
• Diogenes
• Aristotle
• Seneca
• Augustine
• Montaigne
• Descartes
• Rousseau
• Kant
• Emerson
• Nietzsche

Since three of my own favorites were on the list, I bought the book. (The three, each with his own tag here on The Hannibal Blog, are Socrates, Diogenes and Nietzsche.)

Miller, too, sets out to write a biography (as opposed to a philosophical essay). His conceit, if I may paraphrase it, is to examine the lives of those who examined their lives.

Put differently, he wants to see how various philosophers lived and whether they just ‘talked the talk or also walked the walk’. Did their lives reflect their love of wisdom (= philo-sophy), or where they hypocrites?

Socrates, in this exercise, comes off splendidly. He embodied the love of wisdom and lived accordingly, searching for the good and treasuring simplicity. From Miller:

Socrates prided himself on living plainly and “used to say that he most enjoyed the food which was least in need of condiment, and the drink which made him feel the least hankering for some other drink; and that he was nearest to the gods when he had the fewest wants.” … Abjuring the material trappings of his class, he became notorious for his disdain of worldly goods. “Often when he looked at the multitude of wares exposed for sale, he would say to himself, ‘How many things I can do without!’ ” He took care to exercise regularly, but his appearance was shabby. He expressed no interest in seeing the world at large, leaving the city only to fulfill his military obligations.

And, of course, he died for his principles.

Diogenes, whom I admire so much for his extreme simplicity/freedom, arguably became the caricature of this Socratic lifestyle:

While Diogenes regarded Plato as a hypocrite, Plato saw Diogenes as “a Socrates gone mad”—and by Plato’s standards, he certainly was.

Masturbating in public and living in a barrel can give you that kind of reputation.

Plato and Aristotle arguably started that other trend, that of the hypocrite philosopher, talking/writing sophisticated words while, one way or another, selling out in private life. By the time you get to Rousseau, the hypocrisy becomes hard to stomach (I’ll leave that for another post some day.)

Storytelling lesson: unity vs fragmentation

But that’s not what I was mainly pondering after reading these two books, one after the other. Instead, I was reflecting why one author succeeded in a big way, and the other possibly failed in a small way.

Hughes, in The Hemlock Cup, succeeded big. She tackled an intimidating subject (intimidating because Socrates is not exactly an under-covered subject) in an innovative way and rose to the challenge by presenting one single, unified tale, no part of which a committed reader would dare to omit or skip.

By contrast, Miller, in Examined Lives, put forth a list, then broke his narrative into discrete chapters for each person on the list.

There is a problem with such lists: Why this list, and not some other list? Why Augustine and not Aquinas? Why Descartes and not Spinoza? Why Montaigne and not Montesquieu? Et cetera.

The result is that the reader, as he progresses, is increasingly tempted to skip the chapters that don’t interest him to speed ahead to those chapters that do interest him. I confess that I did that. Life is short, and I was a bit bored on some pages.

A good author reins in his readers as a charioteer steers his horses. He has readers asking the questions he, the author, is asking, not some other question (such as: where is Hegel?).

What could Miller have done differently? He could have woven the various lives together so that each chapter was about a theme, not an philosopher, and the various philosophers that interest him reappear at the right places.

My choice

You should take this with a grain of salt, because I have a reason to be thinking such thoughts.

A few years ago, when I first contemplated the book I wanted to write, I also envisioned it as a collection of chapters about various individuals that interested me (around the theme of triumph and disaster being impostors). (Hannibal was to have one chapter, Scipio one, Einstein one, Roosevelt one, et cetera.)

When I pitched that to an agent, he suggested that a better (but also more challenging) book would thread the lives together into one unfolding story, so that readers would not be tempted to disassemble the book and cherry-pick among the chapters. That structure would also force me to do the hard work of actually teasing out the themes concealed in these lives.

I took that advice. You can soon (on January 5th) decide whether I succeeded at it or not. For now, I simply observe with fascination how other authors approach this choice.

I’m finding myself intrigued in the extreme by a figure from antiquity as colorful as Hannibal: Alcibiades. He is such a good character, he might be worth another book.

Why? Mostly because he was a (bad) student of Socrates‘, and indeed the perfect foil for the great old man:

• Socrates: ugly. Alcibiades: gorgeous.
• Socrates: wise, deep, profound, intellectual, curious. Alcibiades: confused, cynical, shallow, but clever!
• Socrates: interested in justice. Alcibiades: interested in himself.
• Socrates: tried to teach Alcibiades inner values. Alcibiades: tried (and failed) to sleep with Socrates

Let me give you an abbreviated and simplified biography of this man. (One reason why many people never learn to appreciate history is that many teachers get bogged down in boring detail. So let’s not make that mistake today.)

Alcibiades, his father having died young, was raised in the home of his uncle, Pericles, the greatest statesman of Athens, which was in turn the greatest power of Greece. Alcibiades was thus a rough equivalent of, say, a Kennedy heir in the 60s and 70s–a party boy in a powerful family.

On the eve of Alcibiades’ own entry into Athenian politics, Socrates took an interest and, using his customary Socratic irony (in which Socrates pretends to be less than he is), got Alcibiades to talk about what he wants Athens to do, in the process exposing him to be the confused young man that he was.

Alcibiades, being good-looking (and very much the ladies’ man, of which more in a minute) and charming, rose politically. He became a general in the Peloponnesian War, one of two to take a huge invasion army to Sicily in what was to be one of the dumbest pre-emptive strikes in history.

Just after they sailed, however, the Athenians discover that somebody had, apparently as a prank, broken off all the erect phalluses on the statues of Hermes, which was sacrilege. This was exactly the sort of thing that Alcibiades got up to when he was drunk, so he was presumed guilty. (Then again, he was such an obvious culprit that he may have been framed.) So the Athenians sent another ship after the invasion fleet to arrest their general and bring him home for trial.

Alcibiades did not like that idea and defected to … Sparta! The enemy. Because he was so charming, the Spartans accepted him, and Alcibiades helped them defeat the Athenians. But then it was found out that Alcibiades was sleeping with the wife of one of the Spartan kings, so he made a hasty exit.

Next he went to Persia, Athens’ other enemy. He charmed them, advised them …. (you get the pattern).

Such was his charm and charisma that, after having been a traitor to his native country so long, he then persuaded the Athenians to take him back! For a while, he became their general again. But then he fell out again and crossed back over the Hellespont to another kingdom.

He was sleeping with a girl there one day when his political enemies (he had amassed a few by then) surrounded the house. Alcibiades grabbed a dagger and, possibly naked, attacked. He died in a hail of arrows.

In other words: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John McCain, J.K. Rowling, Hercules, Bertrand Russell and the Dalai Lama.

Answer: They are people whose “lives” or stories I have cut from the second draft of my book manuscript.

Now, I am entirely aware that seeing these people on the same list is bizarre to begin with. What could they possibly have done in the same book–my book-in the first place? Why would I cut them out now? And who might be left?

I’m not at liberty to answer these questions right now, but I will say this:

Good writing and editing is in part about “crucifying your darlings,” as Ed Carr, one of my editors at The Economist, once said to me. And I have decided–boldly and without regret–that my book will be better with fewer lives.

Less is more, in other words. The total word count has stayed the same, but I have gone much deeper into the characters I have chosen, and have done a much better job weaving them together into precisely the narrative about success and failure that I am trying to produce.

I am very happy with the story that’s emerging. This, to me, is the fun part. How absurd that must sound to everybody else.

Tactician

• Knowing means from ends
• Knowing tactics from strategy
• Understanding why the first must always be subordinate to the second

These, as I argued in the previous post, are the greatest and most enduring lessons of Carl von Clausewitz, and the reason why I include him in my pantheon of great minds.

Where I have most fun in my forthcoming book is in fleshing out his ideas in contexts other than war, to show that strategy applies to all areas of life. But today I want to make his ideas a bit more concrete in the obvious context: war.

So allow me to introduce the two archetypes:

1. Douglas MacArthur and
2. Harry Truman

Strategist

Here is their story (from one of the best biographies ever written):

Nuke to win, nuke to lose

In June of 1950, Communist forces from North Korea poured south across the 38th parallel in an all-out attack on South Korea. Harry Truman, having come to power late in life, was the American commander-in-chief and had already made history by dropping the first and only two atomic bombs on Asian cities just five years earlier. He knew immediately and instinctively that this Communist attack had to be reversed or contained. And there to execute this purpose, in theory, was Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the United Nations forces in the region, as well as a certified American Hero from World War II and a notorious prima donna.

MacArthur began true to form, with a swashbuckling landing at Inchon in South Korea. He took the enemy by surprise, liberated Seoul in eleven days and, by October 1st of 1950, brought UN forces—primarily composed of Americans—back to the 38th parallel that the North Koreans had crossed. MacArthur now wanted a “hot pursuit” , and Truman authorized him to cross the 38th parallel.

Truman, however, added a crucial strategic condition: Do not to provoke the Chinese to enter the war, lest that should spark World War III and possible nuclear Armageddon!

Right around then, things began going wrong, not only in the war effort but also in the relationship between MacArthur and Truman.

When the two men met–for the only physical meeting of their lives–on  a tiny coral islet in the Pacific, MacArthur tellingly greeted his commander-in-chief but failed to salute. The two men then met alone, before inviting others to join them. Truman made clear his overarching concern, one that Clausewitz would have approved of: to keep this a “limited” war,  meaning a war to meet one single objective—rebuffing Communist aggression in Korea—without risking an escalation into what Clausewitz would have called an “absolute” war.

But the following month, Truman’s fears came true and the Communist Chinese attacked with huge force. Suddenly, MacArthur, who had been dreaming of another glorious military victory, was trying to avoid a humiliating defeat. He demanded:

• huge reinforcements,
• a wholesale naval blockade of all of China and
• immediate bombing of the Chinese mainland.

MacArthur wanted to broaden the war and to burst any remaining “limits” on it. For MacArthur, there was only one objective: victory. At all costs!

Truman thought the exact opposite. His first fear had already come true, and he now worried that the Chinese were the advance guard of a Soviet Russian intervention, what he called “a gigantic booby trap”  that could lead to the explosion of World War III.

Truman and MacArthur started issuing competing press releases. MacArthur began publicly blaming Washington for everything that was going wrong. He disobeyed specific orders. He called on Truman

• to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs on the cities of China (!) and
• to “sever” Korea from China by laying down a field of radioactive waste all along the Yalu River.

MacArthur appeared to have lost his mind. He even issued his own ultimatum to the Chinese government, as if he were president.

Big Man vs Little Man

At last, Truman took the inevitable measure and fired MacArthur. This was an obvious step, but not an easy one. MacArthur, to ordinary Americans, was still a war hero, whereas Truman’s approval was at an all-time low of 26%. (Hard to remember today, but true.) Time Magazine wrote that “Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man” whereas “Harry Truman was almost a professional little man.”  In a poll, 69% of the country backed MacArthur. There were calls to impeach Truman. (Never underestimate the capacity of a democracy, whether Athenian or American, to run amok!)

In time, minds cleared. Truman settled for a stalemate in Korea that continues to this day and is as tense and unsatisfactory this week as ever. He chose a “defeat” of sorts that has brought lasting peace. Communism would be contained for another four decades and then crumble, leaving American as the only superpower. Parts of East Asia, like Western Europe, would prosper in relative safety.

Had MacArthur prevailed, America might well have achieved “victory”, at the cost of another world war, nuclear annihilation of millions, and perhaps nuclear counterstrikes on America from the Soviets, who were fast catching up to the Americans in the technology. It would have been the ultimate impostor of a triumph, with nobody left to march in the victory parade through the radioactive planet.

Amazing, isn't it?

Cheri’s comment about my use of the word wonderment made me … wonder. And so, a brief paean.

Einstein (on page 387 of this biography), once said:

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.

I’ve talked before about Einstein’s love of simplicity and his non-conformity as keys to his astonishing creativity. But I should have started with his famously child-like ability to wonder.

Wonderment is the origin of every creative act. The natural flow of Hmms leads to questions and inquiries that are usually never quite answered but become signposts on a great journey, a great story.

People sometimes ask journalists how we get our ideas for stories and I’ve never had a good answer. There is no shortcut, no ten-steps process, no secret vault. Instead, it always starts with simple–and yes, child-like–curiosity and wonderment.

An ability to wonder is of course also what the reader/listener/viewer of a story needs. If you don’t find your own life and its ups and downs somewhat mysterious, you probably won’t enjoy my book when it comes out.

So here’s to wonderment, and its official inclusion in our thread on story-telling. Every good story begins and ends with it.

At one point, Orville says: “Oh, so it’s like Plutarch.”

Now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know why this made me happy. First, to be compared to Plutarch is tall praise for any writer. But in my particular case, it means a lot more.

Plutarch, you recall, was the first biographer. More to the point, what he did was to pair one Greek and one Roman at a time in order to draw lessons and comparisons from their lives. Alexander and Caesar, for instance. He assumed that we would be able to apply these lessons to our own lives.

One way to express the idea for my book is to call it a “modern Plutarch”–although I would never say so unless prompted, since “Plutarch” doesn’t mean much to most Americans. But the idea is quite similar:

I don’t have pairs in the sense of twos, but I do follow my main characters–Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio–through their whole lives and, in each chapter, pair them with other figures. (Amy Tan, JK Rowling, Tiger Woods, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ludwig Erhard, Cleopatra, the Dalai Lama, and so forth.)

In each case, or so I hope, it will be so obvious what the theme of the chapter is that the segues are fluid and natural. Hannibal went through X; and so did Einstein. Scipio responded with Y, and so did Steve Jobs. You get the point.

So, for Orville to listen to some of these individual comparisons and instantaneously blurt out “Plutarch” is a great vote of confidence that I executed my idea well. But I’m still waiting for my editor’s reaction; he has the manuscript right now.

Olivia Judson

Still apropos of Charles Darwin, whom The Hannibal Blog named runner-up for the title of greatest thinker ever: Olivia Judson commemorates his 200th birthday today with this fantastic biographical sketch of the man as well as the scientist. And a great man he was.

Olivia, incidentally, used to be a colleague of mine at The Economist. As a prank, she once dressed up as Dr Tatiana, a sultry sex expert, and apparently duped a senior editor just long enough for it to be embarrassing (to him) and memorable (to us). This led to a widely read Christmas Special in The Economist in which she plays agony aunt to critters from bees to spiders and counsels them on their sexual problems. This then led to an entire book.

So, when somebody asks why I chose Hannibal, Fabius, Scipio (and Cleopatra, Ludwig Erhard, Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Jung and the rest of them)–as the characters for a book about success and failure today, I could just play this clip:

I’ve told you about Plutarch, the father of biography, who has an important place in my bibliography. A lot of people of course love Plutarch. J.K. Rowling does, Truman did. And so does Sam Donaldson, who recommends the Parallel Lives here:

Plutarch’s Lives is simply the biographies of people back in an ancient era, Caesar and the Antonines. You study how they lived and what they did, and how they thought. I can’t tell you I came away from it saying, “Now I’ll pattern myself after this guy, and this guy.” But I came away with the sense that some of the people who were very ordinary when they started out could make something of themselves. … But lives, what is it about various people’s lives who are successful, who make something of themselves, who make a mark on history and on the world? That book influenced me.

A major character in one chapter of my book, as hinted in the synopsis, will be Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew a thing or two about Triumph and Disaster being Impostors. So a few biographies about her are in my bibliography. The best is this one.

She is such a fascinating and engaging personality, that I’ve got loads overmatter of stuff that has nothing to do with the part of her story that I’m telling in my book. Take, for instance, this quote (from page 20) about the word Liberalism, which rhymes verbatim with my post on the matter:

But for the future to be “more rewarding,” she concluded, the United States needed to resurrect with conviction and daring the good American word “liberal,” “which derives from the word free… “We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.”

Or this comment on intellectual rigor, honesty and diligence (on page 5):

“Argue the other side with a friend until you have found the answer to every point which might be brought up against you.”

Always better to do so with a friend first, because your enemies will oblige very quickly. This also dovetails with Amy Tan’s advice to writers about seeking criticism, but from friends or sources they trust to be honest.

Highly recommended book.

Impudently yours

What made Einstein so creative?

It was not his brain, which they literally embalmed after his death, says Walter Isaacson in his biography of the great man, which will be in the bibliography of my book. It was his utter disregard of authority, his refusal to conform.

What Einstein recognized in people like Galileo was “the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority.” Another time, he wrote a friend  that “A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

“Long live impudence!” he liked to say, and practiced what he preached.

But he did so with a wry humility. He ignored conventional wisdom more than he rebelled against it. It bored him.

But the world astonished him as it usually astonishes only children but not adults. He himself attributed this child-like ability to be amazed to his late development. Because he learned about space and time later than other toddlers, he thought about these things more deeply.

Several things spring to mind randomly:

One is that Einstein (and Newton and Galileo …) represents the best and most complete refutation–and indeed indictment–of all rote learning, all Confucian/Asian education, and indeed much of traditional education full stop.

Another thought, more in tune with the theme of my book, is that even Einstein’s mental freshness could not last. Something happened to ensure that he would spend the first thirty years of his career as a rebel and the next thirty as a resister. “To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself,” he joked.

What was this treacherous something? It’ll be in Chapter 8 of my book.

Ernest Shackleton

Earlier this month, I told you how frustrating it is when, in the course of the research for my book, I follow a trail into a dead end. Back then I had been reading about Casanova until I had to admit to myself that he didn’t fit into the chapter that I was re-writing. I swallowed and moved on.

Greg Balco

Well, the opposite can happen too. Almost a year ago, my friend Greg Balco (who has since proposed that I rename this blog An Inconvenient Kluth) suggested that I look into the life of Ernest Shackleton as one of my subsidiary stories. Shackleton took a ship named Endurance to explore the Antarctic, but got stuck in the ice, lost the ship and found himself and his crew, truly, facing a Disaster. What happened next was all about character!

Anyway, I read the book that Greg recommended and loved it–in part because there is a lot of Greg in it. He is a geochronologist and his idea of fun is to camp in the Antarctic ice and drill for snow, or perhaps rocks; or perhaps they just go sledding. He would know exactly what Shackleton and his men endured when they subsisted on blubber on floes of ice for a year, with no light in the winter and no darkness in the summer.

But as my own storyline was evolving Shackleton didn’t seem to fit. Now, a year later, I am reopening the middle chapters to make them perfect. Suddenly one of them has a gaping hole that cries out for a life, a character to fill it.

This is the chapter about the least known of my three main characters: Fabius, the old Roman Senator who fought Hannibal by not fighting him, until the young and dashing Scipio came onto the scene. That doesn’t tell you about the context of the chapter, or about the hole in it that needs filling. Suffice it to say that Shackleton, suddenly, seems to be a perfect fit. Endurance hereby re-enters my bibliography.

Syd Barret

Thanks to Abhishek for pointing out a life story that fits the theme of my book, which is that success and failure can be impostors, as Kipling would say. Abhishek emailed that

The other day, I downloaded a documentary on Syd Barret [the co-founder of the band Pink Floyd] from You tube. This is a classic story of Hannibal of the 1970′s. A 22 year old Barret was at his peak as the lead singer of Pink Floyd and then he lost it all to LSD. During concerts, he stood on the stage stoned and out of sorts strumming his guitar playing all the wrong notes. His colleagues would somehow cover it up, but one fine day they had to pick up their bags and leave him behind…

Now, this actually not a “story of Hannibal,” because Hannibal’s life trajectory had more twists and turns and was more perplexing. But I do have a chapter where I explore this–ie, Barret’s–sort of life trajectory, which we might call “premature success.”

Contemplating his success

Contemplating Barret, I think of people like Diego Maradona, who soar to fame, success or some other kind of triumph in their field, but apparently too early in life to be able to cope with it. Then they fall apart. Drugs, alcohol, or less obvious but equally insidious lapses of personal discipline. They become wrecks.

The book in my bibliography in this regard, which I recommend, is Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.

Meriwether Lewis, you recall, is the first half of the Lewis & Clark expedition that explored the North American continent west of the Mississippi and to the Pacific after Thomas Jefferson bought those lands from Napoleon. Lewis is, in many ways, an American Hannibal: a young, dashing hero who did what many thought was impossible.

Meriwether Lewis

But what came next? Whereas his friend William Clark, upon their return, married and lived happily, Lewis fell apart. He couldn’t handle the fame. No luck with women. Booze, later even morphine. He did not publish his famous Journals. Jefferson made him governor of the territory he had explored, but he failed in every respect, defaulting on his debts and drinking himself into oblivion. In his mere thirties, only a few years after his breathtaking success, he killed himself in a dingy Tennessee tavern (although the event remains a bit of a mystery).

Impostor triumph indeed. To me, this sort of tale is not the end of a story but the beginning of one. What happens to these people?

Plutarch

Let’s get back to the bibliography for my book.

Right now–while we’re still dealing with the ancient sources–I’m going through the texts in chronological order. And after Polybius and Livy, that brings me to Plutarch.

You recall that Herodotus was the father of history. Well, Plutarch must be the father of biography. Like Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius, he was Greek. But Plutarch lived much later, in the first and second century AD–three centuries after Hannibal and Scipio. So I don’t use Plutarch because I think he has any scoops over Polybius, or more accurate information. Why, then, do I use (and love) Plutarch?

Because he was the first to take an interest in character. That’s what he wanted to capture: the characters of the great Greeks and Romans. For that he used the big events and deeds in their lives and, just as much, the tiniest but telling details. Occasionally, he may have stretched the facts a bit, but, hey, let’s relax about that and just enjoy.

In that respect, of course, Plutarch does exactly what I aspire to do in my book. I too want to capture how characters respond to success and failure, ups and downs.

Plutarch’s main work was his Parallel Lives (which we usually read in the John Dryden translation), in which he paired one great Greek with one great Roman. Alexander the Great, for instance, is paired with Julius Caesar, and so on.

Hannibal was neither Greek nor Roman, so we don’t have a Life with his name as title. But Hannibal, who is my main character, features prominently in several of Plutarch’s Lives: Fabius (who also plays a big role in my book), Marcellus (a Roman consul killed by Hannibal), Cato the Elder, Flamininus (conqueror/liberator of the Greeks and the man who finally hounded Hannibal into suicide).

Plutarch’s life of Pyrrhus, which I’ve quoted from, is one of my favorites, by the way.

The tragedy is that many of his lives are lost. And the loss that hurts most is, of course, the Life of Scipio, my other main character.

My reaction progressed in two steps:

Step 1) This is great! I will get on the flight, log on, snap a photo or two of the airplane aisle and then blog it right from my seat so that you all can see what a connected urban nomad I am. En passant, I would be corroborating my own thesis in my special report in The Economist on that topic (ie, “nomadism”).

Step 2) What utter nonsense! Have you lost it, Andreas? This is the last redoubt you have for reading. For the next few hours it is you and your biography of Meriwether Lewis, which is 500 pages and must be read and absorbed for you to make progress in one particular chapter of your own book. For once, no kids tugging on you, no phone ringing, no email alerts. Instead, deep, linear immersion. And you are thinking of giving that up just because… you can?

So you had no posts from me while I was in the air. And I’m guessing that you’re no worse off for it.

Incidentally, I noticed that the other lop-sided laptop-bag-toting types also passed on this opportunity for uninterrupted mid-air connectivity, after the same moment of initial temptation. Have we reached the point of backlash? A civilizing counter-trend?

Heard about my victory?

You’ve heard of Pyrrhic Victories, which are defeats disguised as triumphs–in other words, Kipling-esque impostors of the sort that I will be describing in my book. But do you know why they are called that?

It’s thanks to Pyrrhus, who is well worth five minutes of your time.

Pyrrhus was the ancient world’s equivalent of a dumb jock whom all the girls loved, who bashed the equivalent of Budweiser cans on his forehead and beat up the enemy football team but never quite figured it all out.

Put differently, he was the King of Epirus in northern Greece, and wanted to be like Alexander the Great, who died a couple of generations before him. (Pyrrhus in turn died a generation before Hannibal was born.) He wanted to be a hero and to conquer. Basically, that’s all there was to it. And he was great at it–brave, courageous, strong. Plutarch says that once, when he was thought dead on the battlefield, he just got up and cleft an enemy soldier in two pieces with one blow of his sword.

One day, an opportunity came up: Tarentum, a Greek city in southern Italy that was fighting the Romans, invited Pyrrhus to come over and fight Rome on their behalf. Pyrrhus was thrilled. As he was preparing to leave for Italy with his army and his war elephants (sounds a lot like Hannibal, doesn’t it?), he had a conversation with the wise Cineas. This is one of my favorite exchanges in antiquity. Here is Plutarch’s version:

Cineas: If we beat the Romans, what should we do next?

Pyrrhus: Why, then we’ll be masters of all Italy.

Cineas: “And having subdued Italy, what shall we do next?”

Pyrrhus: “Sicily.”

Cineas: “But will the possession of Sicily put an end to the war?”

Pyrrhus: “We will use that as the forerunners of greater things” such as Libya and Carthage. Would anybody resist us after that?

Cineas: “None,” for then we can take Macedon and even all of Greece. “And when all these are in our power what shall we do then?”

Pyrrhus: “We will live at our ease, my dear friend, and drink all day, and divert ourselves with pleasant conversation.”

Cineas: “And what hinders us now, sir,” from doing exactly that?

At this Pyrrhus was nonplussed. But left for Italy anyway!

Next, he had his Pyrrhic victories. He beat the Romans, but each time he lost so many men and gained so little that once, when congratulated on yet another victory, he sighed: “Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone.”

Eventually, as he was wont, he got distracted. There was another opportunity for glory in Sicily, so he sailed around a bit there and bashed a few heads. You can see on that map what that trip (dare I say his life?) looked like.

Courtesy PIOM, via Wikimedia Commons

In any event, Sicily also failed to make him happy, so eventually he made his way back to Greece.

Once home, he kept fighting wars here and there. I mean, it’s a hard habit to kick! His end came as it had to come (irony alert): He was in the middle of some vicious street fighting in a Greek city, when an old woman on a rooftop dropped a tile, which landed on his heroic pate and knocked him dead. So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

Have you ever been a Pyrrhus in your life? Do you know any Pyrrhuses?

Kahlo and Rivera. Photo by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons

I popped into the Frida Kahlo exhibition currently at the San Francisco MOMA. Mainly, to see her piercing paintings–and boy, do they pierce–but also, at least in part, as research for my book.

A friend of ours, Erika Lessey Chen, had suggested Kahlo to me a year ago as a possible life-story to look into. I had told Erika that I’m interested in people whose success (triumph) somehow turned into failure (disaster), or whose failure somehow turned into success, à la Kipling’s impostors.

Does Kahlo fit my story-line? Mostly, I’m looking at characters such as Hannibal’s enemy and nemesis Scipio to illustrate how disaster at the right moment in a life can liberate a person–set free his or her imagination and creativity, and thus initiate a much bigger triumph in the future. People such as J.K. Rowling and Steve Jobs.

But disaster can have other effects, of course. There is the strength that comes from overcoming it. I’ve mentioned Joe Biden and Demosthenes in that context. Among the main characters in my book, the person who would personify that is Fabius, the old Roman senator who was the only one not to despair after Hannibal’s crushing victories.

And Kahlo? As I walked through the exhibition and looked at her absolutely harrowing self-portraits, I realized that she had done something else again with her own disasters: She had made the disasters themselves the success.

Here she was on a hospital bed in Detroit, her body writhing and bleeding, with a uterus and a fetus torn out of her. She painted it after yet another miscarriage. The people in the exhibition became very quiet in front of that one.

There she was bound in a steel corset with a broken spinal column, her entire body pierced with nails. In this painting, she is all pain and frustrated sexual desire.

Over there she is sitting in a double-self-portrait, after her marriage to Diego Rivera had failed. She is holding hands with herself, and simultaneously tries and fails to stop the bleeding of her heart. (All these paintings seem to be copyrighted, so I don’t want to show them here.)

What were her disasters? The first was polio, which she caught at age six, and which left her right leg atrophied. The second was a bus accident when she was eighteen. She broke her spine, her pelvis, and lots of other bones, and an iron handrail pierced her uterus, leaving her infertile. The third, arguably, was falling in love with Diego Rivera, whom she adored but who was never faithful to her.

In short: pain, infertility, loneliness. And to deal with it, she painted. And the painting made her into the most “successful” Mexican artist ever.

Interesting moment of interpretation: why Hannibal, in this version, chose not to take Rome itself, which was the single biggest decision of his life. “We are not animals,” he says here.

(Also: did I detect stirrups on the cavalry? Maybe not. There weren’t any in those days.)