Titans of History (55 page)

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was of the little piece of madeleine …

Marcel Proust,
Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way
,
vol. 1, 1913), translated by C.K. Scott-Moncrieff and
S. Hudson, revised by T. Kilmartin

It is said that Marcel Proust spent the first half of his life living it, and the second half writing about it. The result was
À la recherche du temps perdu
, a semi-autobiographical novel sequence that is perhaps the most complete evocation of a living world ever written, and also a meditation on the nature of time, the self, memory, love, sexuality, society and experience. Proust's work was originally translated under the title
Remembrance of Things Past
(a quotation from Shakespeare), but a more recent translation, published in 1992, is more accurately entitled
In Search of Lost Time
.

In 1909 Marcel Proust, the dilettante son of a wealthy Jewish bourgeois family, ate a madeleine (a type of small sponge cake) dipped in tea and was instantly transported back to his grandfather's house in the country, where he had spent much of his childhood. Overwhelmed by the completeness of the memory, by its sights and smells, Proust found a purpose to the writing that he had dabbled in since he was a youth. At the age of 38, Proust began the work that was to become
À la recherche du temps perdu
.

As Proust embarked upon his re-creation of a world long gone, he withdrew completely from the world of the present. In his
youth he had used his childhood asthma as an excuse to avoid any kind of career other than that of avid socialite. But when he began
À la recherche
, he shut himself off from society, sealing himself up in a cork-lined room. He became an obsessive invalid, his deteriorating health exacerbated by hypochondria. He insisted that his morning post be steamed in disinfectant, and he ingested nothing but handfuls of opiates and barbiturates.

Proust's approach baffled some: one publisher rejected his first volume, believing that an author did not need thirty pages to describe turning over in bed before going to sleep again. Discarding the notion of a plot-driven work, Proust takes his reader on an almost stream-of-consciousness journey back through his life. He digresses, for pages at a time, on some aspect of philosophy, or history, or art, in a manner that is yet incandescently beautiful, poetical and tragic but also hilarious, outrageous and frivolous. The mundane—drinking a cup of tea, lying awake at night—is just as important as the dramatic. Proust hypnotizes his readers, immersing them in a world as real as their own.

As his writing gathered pace, the neurasthenic, eccentric Proust adopted an exclusively nighttime existence. His staff had to maintain complete silence as he slept during daylight hours. He would pay calls on friends well after midnight or expect them to accompany him on early-morning visits to the cathedral of Notre Dame, dressed in a fur coat over his nightshirt.

Proust had an almost hysterical need to be the focus of attention. His invalidism was just one way of securing the attention of his mother; later on his self-enforced seclusion ensured the same concern from his friends. The desperation of the child when his mother goes out for the night in
À la recherche
vividly evokes Proust's almost Oedipal love for his mother. He tried to buy affection, employing his male lovers as staff, but he drove them away with his obsessive attentions.

A brilliant conversationalist and mimic, Proust was completely without malice. His extravagance was legendary: he financed a male brothel and once hired out the entire floor of a hotel in his compulsive search for silence. His long-suffering staff were extremely well paid, and handsome waiters handsomely tipped. Even after he had sequestered himself away, he still sent food parcels to the soldiers at the front in the First World War.

Proust was, in his youth, a terrible snob. But the desperate need of this Jewish homosexual to be accepted in Parisian high society did not prevent him from demonstrating real courage in the face of that society's virulent anti-Semitism. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair, Proust stood up as a prominent supporter of the Jewish army officer wrongfully convicted of treason—a move that risked social ostracism. And while he was always afraid in life of being rejected for his sexuality, he was not afraid to approach it in his writing, asserting that he needed to be as precise about Baron Charlus' sexual forays as the Duchesse de Guermantes' red shoes.

He achieved his goal. Proust's delicate, life-like descriptions are astoundingly complete. His fascination with the shifting nature of perception produced some of the most exquisite characterizations ever committed to the page. Over two thousand characters, in all their life-like ambiguity, people
À la recherche
. And they are described in some of the most beautiful prose ever written: every one of the novel sequence's 8 million words seems to have been precisely chosen.

Proust was still correcting manuscripts a few hours before his death. Otherworldly in life, in death “he was totally absent,” commented one friend. But the notebooks into which Proust had poured his memory, his health and his soul seemed, to the writer Jean Cocteau, “alive, like a wristwatch still ticking on a dead soldier.”

1874–1922 & 1868–1912 & 1872–1928

Difficulties are just things to overcome, after all
.

Shackleton, in the journal of his South Polar journey (December 11, 1908)

Sir Ernest Shackleton, Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen were the three most inspirational Arctic explorers of the early 20th century.

Shackleton was born to Irish parents who settled in England, and at the age of sixteen he joined the merchant navy. His voyages took him all around the world, until in 1901 he was appointed to serve on board the
Discovery
, a steam vessel specially built for work in the ice, which was carrying Commander Robert Falcon Scott to Antarctica. Scott chose Shackleton to accompany him and Edward Wilson on a dog- and man-hauled sled journey toward the South Pole.

On the journey—during which temperatures dipped below –80°C—all three men eventually became ill with scurvy, but Shackleton, coughing up blood, seemed worst affected. Although he was invalided home, where he briefly tinkered with politics, he never gave up the dream of a further attempt on the South Pole. In 1907 he returned to Antarctica, this time as leader. He had bought a ship, raised funds and engaged a crew of seamen and scientists. The expedition broke new ground. One party reached the South Magnetic Pole, another made the first ascent
of Mount Erebus, an active volcano. In late 1908 Shackleton led another, heroic sled journey toward the geographic South Pole. Despite bitter conditions, in January 1909 the party came within 100 miles of their destination—further south than any man had ever been before, although his party did not quite make it to the Pole. On his return to Britain, Shackleton was lauded as a hero and knighted by the king.

Ernest Shackleton's gallant attempt on the South Pole in 1908–9 narrowly preceded the battle between his former comrade Robert Falcon Scott and the Norwegian Roald Amundsen, which would become one of the most famous races of discovery in history.

Scott joined the Royal Navy in 1880, when he was just twelve years old. By 1897 he had become a first lieutenant. He led the 1901–4 mission to Antarctica and was recognized as a dedicated scientific investigator and navigator. When he returned to England he was promoted to captain.

By 1910, having seen Shackleton overtake him in the bid to journey ever deeper south, Scott—still a national figure—raised the funds for a private expedition of scientific and geographical discovery, with the ultimate aim of reaching the South Pole.

At the same time, Amundsen had established his name as commander of the first vessel to sail through the sought-after Northwest Passage—a route joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the top of North America—and was also intent on reaching the North Pole. When he heard in 1909 that others had claimed the North Pole, he decided to turn south.

During his time in the Arctic Amundsen had learned a lot from the indigenous people about survival in the harsh cold, and he had become expert in using dogs to pull sledges. This, combined with careful planning, meant that when his party set out for the South Pole in October 1911, even severe conditions and the choice of a new, untrodden route could not prevent them from reaching their
destination on December 14. Amundsen left behind a tent, with a note for Scott to confirm that he had been there. The Norwegian was a brilliant planner and student of Arctic life but also showed heroic endurance—and he should be celebrated just as much as Scott.

Scott's party was less skilled in polar travel, and they reached the Pole more than a month after the Norwegian. Despite physical fortitude, Scott's return journey was hampered by some of the severest Antarctic weather ever known, injuries to members of the party, and ill-placed food depots.

It became clear in mid-March 1912 that their party was doomed. One man had already died of an infection. Then, on March 17, a second man, Captain Oates, left the tent, saying “I am just going outside and may be some time,” a comment of classic English understatement, and crawled into a blizzard, hoping that his certain death would increase his companions' chances of survival.

But Oates's sacrifice was not enough. The group was pinned to their tent by blizzards and they froze to death just eleven miles from the next food depot. All the while, Scott kept recording his moving journal of events. “Had I lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman,” he wrote in his final entry. “These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

In 1914 Shackleton set out in charge of the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition. His aim was to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to McMurdo Sound, via the South Pole. However, the voyage of the
Endurance
was overtaken by misfortune. The enormous rafts of floating ice in the Weddell Sea closed in on the ship, and after ten months of drifting with the pack ice the
Endurance
was crushed, without even having reached the expedition's jumping-off point on the coast. All of the men aboard were forced onto the surrounding ice floes, where they camped
for another five months as they drifted north with the ice. In April 1916 they made their way to the northern edge of the ice floe and embarked in three small boats; after six days they reached Elephant Island in the South Shetlands.

From there, Shackleton and a handful of colleagues decided to head to the island of South Georgia, 800 miles away. They completed the hazardous journey across the stormy Southern Ocean in a tiny boat, reaching the island's south coast in seventeen days. Even then, they had to climb an uncharted mountain range in the middle of the island to reach a Norwegian whaling station on its northern coast. In a single push over two days, Shackleton and two companions made it. From there, Shackleton organized the rescue of the rest of his men on Elephant Island, reaching them at the fourth attempt. Incredibly, not a single life had been lost.

When Shackleton returned to England, he was too old to be conscripted to fight in the First World War, but he volunteered anyway. A diplomatic mission to try to woo Chile and Argentina to the Allied war effort was a failure, as was a covert mission to establish a British presence in Norwegian territory. Shackleton returned to England in 1919 to lecture and write. In 1921 he set out on a voyage to circumnavigate Antarctica but died of a heart attack on board his ship, the
Quest
, in 1922, at South Georgia.

The polar historian Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote, “for a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott … for a dash to the pole and nothing else, Amundsen; and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”

1874–1965

He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle
.

President John F. Kennedy, conferring honorary US
citizenship on Winston Churchill (April 9, 1963)

Sir Winston Churchill was one of the most remarkable men ever to lead the British people. This extraordinary leader rallied Britain in her dark hour, when Europe was dominated by Hitlerite Germany, and he inspired and organized the British conduct of the war, against all odds, until victory was achieved. After a meteoric career spanning the first half of the 20th century as self-promoting adventurer, bumptious young politician, mature minister and then lone prophet of Nazi danger, serving in almost every major government position, he emerged from isolation and proved as superb a warlord as he was a writer, historian and orator. Perhaps even more so than Nelson, he is regarded as Britain's national hero.

Churchill's father scolded him when he was a schoolboy for idling away his time at Harrow and Sandhurst, and warned him of an impending career as a “mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public-school failures.” He need not have worried. As a young soldier in the Sudan and as a war correspondent in southern Africa during the Anglo-Boer War, Churchill devoted himself to swashbuckling charges and escapes, journalism and self-promotion, but he also devoured the great British historians of the past, such as Macaulay and Gibbon, and adopted their elegant—sometimes portentous—style as his own.

As a young man, Churchill rode in the cavalry charge—the last of its kind by the British military—at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, a heroic action by the 21st Lancers that earned three men the Victoria Cross and the regiment a royal cipher.

The Battle of Omdurman ended a long conflict in Sudan. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmed, who styled himself al-Mahdi, the prophesied savior of Islam, led a rebellion against British rule. The Mahdi and his successor, the Khalifa, and their army of fanatical dervishes repeatedly defeated the British forces. London sent out the ultimate Victorian Christian-military ascetic, General Charles Gordon, who became an imperial hero-martyr, killed when the Mahdi took Khartoum in 1885. This almost brought down Gladstone's government. In 1898 Lord Salisbury dispatched an army led by the gifted but strange General Herbert Kitchener to avenge Gordon, who was Kitchener's own hero. Kitchener, who spoke Arabic and had made his name on espionage missions into the desert dressed as a Bedouin, was an inscrutably severe soldier and a superb planner, nicknamed the Sudan Machine; he was also a connoisseur of interior decoration and an avid porcelain collector.