Essays in Biography

From George Washington: An Amateur’s View

In The American Commonwealth, his book of 1888, Lord Bryce, considering American political institutions, provides an early chapter titled “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents.” Most Americans, without needing to hear the argument, are likely to agree with the chapter’s premises. The planetarkhis, the modern Greek word for ruler of the planet, the President of the United States may well be, but we can all be assured that, whoever he is, nowadays he is almost certainly likely to be a mediocrity. “Besides,” Bryce wrote, “the ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He has a lower conception of the qualities requisite to make a statesman than those who direct public opinion in Europe have. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls ‘magnetic,’ and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge.” Mr. Ford, Mr. Carter, Mr. Reagan, Messrs. Bush, Mr. Clinton, and Mr. Obama—take a bow, please.

Bryce goes on to discuss the other factors inhibiting, if not absolutely excluding, the possibility of a great man becoming President of the United States: the preference for a safe over a brilliant man, the nature of American party politics, the distinct difference between a successful candidate and a successful leader, the humdrum and ceremonial nature of much of the job. “We may now answer the question from which we started,” Bryce writes. “Great men have not often been chosen presidents, first because great men are rare in politics; secondly, because the method of choice does not bring them to the top; thirdly, because they are not, in quiet times, absolutely needed.”

Happy with our mediocrity though we Americans may be, it is also more than a mite interesting to note that Lord Bryce felt that the presidency of the United States was nearly designed with George Washington in mind. “The creation of the office,” Bryce averred, “would seem [to the members of the Second Continental Convention meeting in Philadelphia in 1783] justified by the existence of a person exactly fitted to fill it, one whose established influence and ripe judgment would repair the faults then supposed to be characteristic of democracy, its impulsiveness, its want of respect for authority, its incapacity for pursuing a consistent line of action.” Washington, in this description, was not only the perfect man for the job, but the man after whom the job itself ought to be tailored.

Remarkable though George Washington was in so many ways, the ways of remarking upon both him and his extraordinary qualities are not easy. People have tried, for more than two centuries now, and with vastly uneven results. Was he an authentically great man, or instead merely the right man for his time? Was he a great military leader, or instead, General Kutuzov-like, a man whose genius lay in his sensing when not to fight? Had he a vision for his country, or for that matter anything resembling a coherent political philosophy? Was he, in the judgment rendered him by history, a fluke, a very lucky man, or was the newly fledged United States lucky beyond its wildest reckoning in having a man of George Washington’s caliber to call upon in the crucial years of its revolution and the forming of its unique republican democracy?

I hope no one thinks that I pose these questions with confident answers already in mind, for seeing Washington plain is a project at which even the best minds, of his time and ours, have strained themselves to do. Consider one of the subtlest of those minds, that of Thomas Jefferson, who served as his Secretary of State. In a letter of 1814—written nearly fifteen years after Washington’s death—to a Dr. Walter Jones, who was then preparing a history of the young republic, Jefferson claimed to know Washington “intimately and thoroughly,” and provided the following delineation of his character.

From Max Beerbohm: The World’s Greatest Minor Writer

Lovers—no lesser word will do—of the prose, caricatures, and mind of Max Beerbohm constitute a cult. Membership in the cult requires a strong penchant for irony, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sharp taste for comic incongruity. Like all impressive cults, the Beerbohm cult is small, very small, and always in danger of guttering out—but never, I’m happy to report, quite doing so.

When Max Beerbohm died, in his eighty-fourth year, he was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, along with a very select company of roughly three hundred other English heroes of war, politics, and culture. His family’s house in Kensington, at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace, has long borne one of those periwinkle blue plaques noting that an important figure had resided there. In his lifetime, he was knighted, praised by everyone whose praise mattered (T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, Edmund Wilson, and W. H. Auden, among others, weighed in), and was widely respected if not revered by people of literary sensibility.

Still, he was always what Arnold Bennett called a “small-public” writer. Beerbohm, even when alive, thought he had a readership of no more than fifteen hundred in England and another thousand in America. He had no delusions about the breadth of his appeal. His “gifts were small,” he felt, and he told his first biographer, a man named Bohun Lynch, that he “used them very well and discreetly, never straining them; and the result is that I’ve made a charming little reputation.”

But reputations for charm do not usually long survive the lives of those who exhibit them, however well and discreetly. Something more than charm has kept the small if scarcely gem-like Beerbohmian flame alive. I am myself, as you will perhaps by now have gathered, a member of the Beerbohm cult. Ten or so feet behind my back, three of his caricatures (of Byron, Matthew Arnold, and Dante) hang above a bookcase. A picture of Max Beerbohm is on a wall roughly six feet from where I am now writing about him. The photograph shows an elderly man—born in 1872, he lived until 1956—sitting on a cane chair on the terrace of his small villa in Rapallo. Ever the dandy, he is wearing a boater at a jaunty angle, a light-colored and slightly rumpled suit, a white waistcoat, and dark tie with a collar pin. His left leg is crossed over his right. His head and hands seem rather large for his body. His hooded eyes peer out of deep sockets, his thick white mustache does not droop. His countenance, slightly dour like that of so many great comedians, is that of a man on whom, right up to the end of life, not much has been lost.

I first began reading Max Beerbohm the year before his death. Of all the comic reputations of that day—S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Frank Sullivan—his is the only one, nearly fifty years later, whose comedy holds up for me. The combination of common sense and whimsy that were his special literary blend continues to work its magic. All is presented in a calm and unfaltering style of what I think of as formal intimacy; if he ever wrote a flawed sentence, I have not come across it. “To be outmoded is to be a classic,” he once said of himself, “if one has written well.” His economy of formulation touched on genius. Asked by the playwright S. N. Behrman what he thought of Freudianism, he replied: “A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?” Ten perfectly aimed words and—poof!—a large and highly fallacious school of thought crumples to dust.

From Michael Jordan: He Flew through the Air

“Forget it. It’ll be close at the end, and then with about twenty seconds left, Michael will have the ball and he’ll keep his eye on the clock, and then with a few seconds left he’ll go for a jumper and hit it. The Bulls will win, and the legend will live. It’s who he is and it’s what he does.”

—Chuck Daly, NBA coach

When I was thirteen, my father allowed me to put up a wooden backboard and basket in our backyard in Chicago. The yard was small, mostly grass, the only concrete being a narrow sidewalk leading to the alleyway. I used that basket in all seasons, including insultingly cold Chicago winters when I would daily shoot a hundred free throws with my gloves on. At other times, I would play fantasy games. Since I have always been of the realist school, in personal life as in literature, I would limit my scoring to somewhere between 24 and 33 points a game, usually winning for my team by popping in two free throws after the clock had run out. Not in my sweetest fantasies could I ever imagine myself doing what Michael Jordan, the retired star of the Chicago Bulls, would do in actuality some 40 years later. If I was a realist even when grounded in fantasy, he, Michael Jordan, was a magic realist, soaring in life.

In Playing for Keeps, his book about Michael Jordan, David Halberstam uses the phrase “Jordanologist” to describe close students of the great player, marketing phenomenon, and international celebrity. Only now do I realize that, since 1984, when he left the University of North Carolina after his junior year to play with the Bulls, Jordanology has been, as the professors say, my subspecialty. Over this period of time I must have seen Michael—as we in Chicago refer to him—play perhaps a thousand games; even though I watched most of them on television, I feel that I know his facial expressions, his moods, his verbal responses at least as well as I do those of most members of my own family. When I acquired cable TV, I did so not chiefly but exclusively in order to see more of Michael before he closed out his career. The prospect of seeing him at night could lift my spirits during the day; actually watching him play—even through the cool medium of the screen—brought me the kind of ephemeral but never-to-be-gainsaid pleasure of a fine meal or a lightish aesthetic experience.

Maybe not so lightish as all that. Having had the chance to observe so much of Michael Jordan in performance may be the equivalent, in sports, of having had tickets to the early years of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. If this reference to Balanchine seems too elevated, the law of carefully measured accolades has long ago run out on Michael Jordan. By now he has been compared with nearly every genius the world has produced, with the possible exceptions of Goethe and Proust. In many quarters, he has become the standard by which genius in other fields is measured. “Frank Galati,” I heard a former president of Northwestern University say about a theatrical director who happens to teach there, “is the Michael Jordan of the contemporary theater.”

When Michael retired, Jerry Sloan, coach of the Utah Jazz, whom the Bulls twice defeated in the NBA finals on their way to winning six championships in eight years, said that he should be remembered “as the greatest player who ever played the game.” Sidney Green, a journeyman player and briefly a teammate, asserted that Jordan “was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God.” Jayson Williams, the power forward for the New Jersey Nets, called him “Jesus in Nikes.” Bobby Knight, the coach of Indiana University, once remarked that we would not see his equal in our lifetimes and neither would our children or our grandchildren in theirs. Later he pushed things up a notch by stating that Michael Jordan was the greatest player of all time, not just of basketball but of any sport. My own view is that in Michael we had the reincarnation of Achilles, but without the sulking and without the heel.