The Wall Street Journal-20080117-Hail the Cowardly Hero And His Bravely Un-P-C- Creator
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Hail the Cowardly Hero And His Bravely Un-P.C. Creator
The "Flashman" novels of George MacDonald Fraser, who died earlier this month at the age of 82, pass one of the great reading tests. I thought them rollicking comic delights when I discovered them in my early teens -- and had hardly any sense that there really were Sikhs, much less an Anglo-Sikh war or two in the 1840s. And I liked them even better as an adult when I could revel not just in the comedy, but also in Fraser's command of history. For while the epic bounder Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional creation, his adventures occur amid the very real events of British imperial history -- from the Afghan disaster of 1842 to the desperate stand at Rorke's Drift in 1879. Fraser was fond of dipping into the pages of Punch and books like Kaye and Malleson's six-volume "History of the Sepoy War in India" to get even his slang and haberdashery right.
His inspiration was Rafael Sabatini, whose "Captain Blood" -- now best known from the Errol Flynn movie -- "made me realise that history was one helluva story." Sabatini had a tremendous gift for opening lines: "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony," begins "Scaramouche," his French Revolution adventure. Fraser picked up the trick. It is unthinkable to put down a novel that opens "If I had been the hero everyone thought I was, or even a half-decent soldier, Lee would have won the battle of Gettysburg and probably captured Washington" ("Royal Flash") or "They don't often invite me to Balmoral nowadays, which is a blessing; those damned tartan carpets always put me off my food, to say nothing of the endless pictures of German royalty and that unspeakable statue of the Prince Consort standing knock-kneed in a kilt" ("Flashman in the Great Game").
Unlike Sabatini, though, Fraser didn't go in for the standard brave, honorable hero. Flashman is the most impossibly toadying, lying, cheating and cowardly hero in fiction. It is one of his prime delights. That his attitudes toward women and the races ruled by the Empire can be characterized as somewhere to the right of "un-p.c." is another. As Fraser noted, "If he wasn't an elitist, racist swine, I'd be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer."
Fraser was fascinated by the way reviewers' attitudes toward Flashman changed over the decades, until they were essentially apologizing for liking the novels. He certainly had no liking for modern Britain. His 2002 autobiography condemns the whole of our modern social regime, which "demands that 'stress,' which used to be coped with by less-sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments lavished on griping incompetents who can't do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen 'traumatised' by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted."
No matter the topic, Fraser was one of the masterly comic writers of the 20th century -- and praised as such by his true peers, P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis. And it isn't just that the Flashman books are all laugh-aloud funny. His account of his service in the British infantry in Burma during World War II, "Quartered Safe Out Here" (1992), a thoughtful examination of how war is experienced and remembered, is riotously brilliant. I need only commend you to the section where Pvt. Fraser has to demonstrate the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank -- "Like many British inventions, it looked improbable, unwieldy, and unsafe -- and it worked.") to one Capt. Grief to establish my point.
His gift for dialogue and situation is equally evident in his more than 30 movie scripts: none better than his two-picture adaptation of Dumas's "The Three Musketeers." The adventures of D'Artagnan and company are one of our greatest adventure stories, but, in the original, there are oppressively long stretches of melodrama and overwriting. Fraser turned the tale into the comic masterpiece it always longed to be.
"The Three Musketeers" (1973) and "The Four Musketeers" (1974), both directed by Richard Lester, are over-the-top romps characterized by a big cast of stars -- Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, and Charlton Heston as Richelieu -- delivering Fraser's lines with relish. Pretty much everybody gets a chance to chew the scenery. Porthos (Frank Finlay), at the siege of La Rochelle, complains about having to shoot "these poor devils of Protestants. I mean, what are we killing them for? Because they sing psalms in French and we sing them in Latin?" Aramis (Richard Chamberlain) replies: "Porthos, have you no education? What do you think religious wars are all about?"
Fraser's least-celebrated book, "The Hollywood History of the World" (1988), is a defense of such movies' portrayal of the past. He argues that they "have given a picture of the ages more vivid and memorable than anything in Tacitus or Gibbon or Macaulay, and to an infinitely wider audience." This is a paean to the power of entertainment and full of praise for long-forgotten films. Browsing through my copy as I prepared this article, I found myself yearning to watch "Sanders of the River" and "Victoria the Great."
For Fraser, movies and novels were not opposed to good history. In noting the dominance of Kipling in our cultural remembrance of the British Raj, he wrote that the "reliance on fiction [for the plots of films set during the Raj] must influence one's consideration of Indian films as 'historicals'; it becomes not a question of comparing them with written records, but of seeing how well they reflect the country, its people, Indian and British, and that mysterious institution, the Raj, which is now fast fading beyond recall." The Flashman books reflect rather well another mysterious British institution, the Empire -- certainly better than much of the scholarship of the past 50 years. A reading of all 12 this year wouldn't be the least pleasant way to develop a better sense of the history of the British Empire during Victoria's reign.
For instance, you'd be hard pressed to find a pithier description of what went wrong in Kabul in 1841 than Flashy's appraisal of Gen. William Elphinstone: "Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such a ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganised enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with a touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again."
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Mr. Messenger is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.
