HEROES: Washington

When a man has been dead 127 years, when his soul begins to yawn at the pleasures of immortality, lie must certainly count it a full day when he looks down (or up) from the foggy Hereafter and sees two Earthly biographies hopping off presses by the thousands. Such was the case last week with George Washington, hero.

On the same day two books* appeared which lifted the “Father of His Country” put of the cherry tree and put him into the size 13 shoes of a Virginia landowner who rode to the hounds.

The Rupert Hughes† book takes G. Washington to his 30th year; tells much of his loves and early mishaps. Excerpts:

Washington’s Mother. “Few women have ever had such rhetoric of adulation heaped upon them, and Washington is quoted as saying that he owed all he was to his mother. But it is a cruel truth that she was chiefly remarkable as a very human, cantankerous old lady, who, from being a fond taskmaster in her early motherhood, evolved into a trial to everybody. She seems to have smoked a pipe incessantly. George never smoked at all. . . .”

At 16. “The Father of His Country was a swell from his 16th year on. He consorted with English lords, rode to hounds, learned to love foppery and all the elegancies, became a past master of dancing, of gambling, polite drinking and exquisite flirtation. He shone in everything but the successful making of love. . . .”

In Virginia. “They formed a strange community, those old Virginians with their stately mansions rising here and there in a wilderness yet unconquered; with their arms and their titles and their carriages, their slaves and their aristocracy set in a jungle of pioneering crudities; with their dances, intrigues, love-affairs, and their bad spelling.

“In the dancing, the love-making and the bad spelling, none of them exceeded George Washington. . . .”

Sally Fairfax. “If ever a man had need of woman’s kindness, Washington needed it now. He was disgusted with the world of men. He had finished with ‘the Art Military.’ Being only 22, it was perhaps natural that he should turn for comfort to an older woman. He had had enough of proposing to 14-year-old chits.

“It is no longer questionable that at this time Washington began to yield his heart to the love of his life, who was the wife of his best friend—unless she herself had been his best friend. . . .

“It was inevitable that an old friend like Sally Fairfax should try to cheer him and persuade him that he was not the hopeless failure that he must have begun to think himself. . . .

“His letters reveal the torment, and in the last years of his existence he wrote to her that the happiest moments of his life had been spent with her. . . .”

Martha Washington. “In any case, the meeting with Martha was a blessing to him [Washington]. He was none of your intellectuals himself, no bookworm. He had gone through years of loneliness in rain and snow, in horror, bloodshed and defeat. He needed above all things a plump little widow to take him to her soft breast and give him repose and the luxury of a home. If he could not give her the passionate ardor of his first love, neither could she give him hers. . . .

“Then he rode away to the wars in triumph, for after his long and futile campaigns as a lover, he had at last found a woman who would marry him. . . .”

“Never Drunk.” “Liquor of all kinds he loved and manufactured, imported, gave away and consumed in vast quantities. Where Charles Lamb won a bad name as a little sot because anything over a thimbleful went to his head, Washington was always drinking but never drunk ”

Realism. “His diaries are full of Rabelaisian details, the manure and realism of the stock-breeder’s life, the amours of mares, the matings and misalliances of hounds whose pups he kills or saves. . . .”

W. E. Woodward, also a novelist,* spent six years producing his biography of Washington. His pen has not the iconoclasm of Rupert Hughes, but it is equally scholarly. Mr. Hughes uses 494 pages to bring his hero to the age of 30; Mr. Woodward in 460 makes a brilliant sketch of Washington, flanked by the colonies in peace and in revolt, and many another bigwig of the Revolutionary era.

Excerpts:

Family. “George Washington came of a family that must be called undistinguished, unless a persistent mediocrity, enduring many generations, is in itself a distinction. . . .

“They were sane and dull people, these Washingtons, and excessively normal. Men of this type, in all ages of history, have presented an opaque surface to the fresh thought of their time. They are conservative by instinct. But their vitality .is tough and deeply rooted, and their stolidity is antiseptic. They are immune to the fructifying quality of genius. . . .”

Cherry Tree. “The Cannot-Tell-a-Lie incident of the cherry tree and the hatchet is a brazen piece of fiction made up by a minister named the Rev. Mason L. Weems, who wrote a life of our country’s father which is stuffed with this and similar fables. . . .”

“Thing-Man.” “He was not an idea-man but a thing-man. . . . He was a man of hands; not without brains, but with hand and brain moving together. He did not amuse himself with thought. He used thought only as a mode of action. He moved through this world like a thinking hand. . . .”

At 16. “At that time Washington was only 16, but he looked much older. He wore a number 13 shoe and Lafayette said that his hands were the largest ‘I have ever seen on a human being.’ He was about six feet tall, with grey-blue eyes and reddish brown hair. . . .”

Among Women. “Early in life Washington began to fumble with love. It was really fumbling, for he was never at ease in the technique of love and lovemaking. . . .

“In the presence of women he would often lose his simple forthright manner and turn himself into a pompous and mouthy sentimentalist—or else remain spellbound and silent. . . .

“My impression is that he idealized women; and most women, in their hearts, detest idealization. With good reason, too, for it puts them in a very uncomfortable position.”

No Clothes. “One day he was taking a swim in the Rappahannock and two girls of low degree ran off with his clothes.

“Only fancy! The Father of our Country standing by the river’s brink in the golden sunset clad only in humorless dignity—for, although he had plenty of dignity he never had any humor—clothed in dignity, and wondering how to get home. . . .”

Love, Land. “If he was precocious in love, he was also precocious in land, and of the two passions, the desire for land was the stronger. . . .”

Sally Fairfax. “Mrs. Fairfax was probably a woman of virtue, though the extremely slippery nature of this quality always gives it an air of uncertainty. I think that Washington had been in love with her from the time he first met her, but had never told her so. . . .”

Martha Washington. “Now they are married, happy, and settled down at Mount Vernon. Martha calls George her ‘Old Man’—a term still used in the South by wives in

speaking of their husbands and

he calls her ‘Patsy.’ When she wants to persuade him to do anything, she holds on to a button of his coat and looks up at his face with a smile. A tall, large-jointed ‘man with a pockmarked face and icy cold blue eyes; and a plump little woman twisting his coat-buttons and pouting. . . .”

One-Bottle Man. “Washington was a one-bottle man. This means that at dinner he customarily drank a pint of Madeira, besides rum, punch and beer. He preferred Madeira to all other beverages, but he was catholic in his drinking habits, and often drank cider, champagne and brandy.”

Spirit of ’76. “In the American Revolution hardly anybody wanted to die, either to make men free, or for any other purpose. . . .”

“The War was a combat between awkward fighters; a prize-ring contest in which both gladiators were slow and dull. It was long drawn out and sleepy with delays. The combatants sulked in their corners, rising now and then to scuffle awhile with a sort of sad ferocity. . . .”

First President. “He seems to have been principally a figurehead, a symbol. He was almost as impersonal at the top of the government as a statue on top of a monument would have been. . . .”

Retirement. “America has always felt a little awkward in the presence of its retired heroes. To keep on living after all is over is as embarrassing as to be an actor who has to remain on the stage after his part has been played. Most of our surviving heroes know this well, and keep as quiet as possible.

“Washington kept quiet indeed after going home to Mount Vernon. He was then very grey inside, his interest in life had melted away, he was no longer a hero in his own mind; he was merely a sad, disillusioned old man who felt himself nearing the horizon of life. . . .”

Death. “At about four o’clock in the afternoon he said to Lear, ‘I find I am going, my breath cannot continue long; I believed from the first attack it would be fatal—do you arrange and record all my late military letters and papers—arrange my accounts and settle my books. . . .’

“As night was falling, and the candles were being brought in the room, he pressed Dr. Craik’s hand and said, ‘Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go. . . .’

“Just before his death he placed the fingers of his left hand on his right wrist, and Lear, watching him closely, saw his lips move in counting his own pulse. . . .”

*GEORGE WASHINGTON, THE HUMAN BEING & THE HERO, 1732-1762—Rupert Hughes —William Morrow & Co. ($4).

GEORGE WASHINGTON : THE IMAGE AND THE MAN—W. E. Woodward—Boni & Liveright ($4).

†Mr. Hughes is both a novelist and a scholar with a thirst for the sensational. (His sister-in-law, Mrs. Adella Prentiss Hughes is Tsarina of the Cleveland Orchestra.) Musicians know him for his able works: American Composers, Music Lovers’ Cyclopedia. Rabid novel readers recall such things as: The Thirteenth Commandment, Souls for Sale. Then suddenly, last January (TIME, Jan. 25), Mr. Hughes bounded into the public eye as the interpreter of a new George Washington. Citizens wereshocked by his speech before the Sons of the American Revolution in Washington, D. C. Senators flayed him. So Mr. Hughes set about to write a scholarly biography to prove he knew his George Washington. Last week’s publication is the first half of the effort. The future volume will be entitled: George Washington, the Rebel and the Conservative.

*His best known novels are Bunk and Lottery.