Sir Harry Flashman books reveal the power of cultural myth

Sir Harry Flashman was the hero of 12 books by a Scottish journalist named George MacDonald Fraser, published between  1969 and 2005 (Fraser died in 2008). 

The books, presented in the form of a long, previously unknown memoir by Flashman, “discovered in the sale of household furniture in Ashby, Leicestershire in 1965,” detail his life from the 1830s when he was expelled from Rugby School up to roughly the First World War, when he was in his 90s. 

They were written in the first person, they were footnoted by the “editor” of the manuscript (Fraser) and when the first one, titled "Flashman," appeared in 1969, it fooled fully a third of the newspapers, magazines, and TV reporters who reviewed it, including the Today show and the Washington Post, all of whom thought they were authentic memoirs.

I became addicted to these books, waiting impatiently for the next one to appear and was sorely disappointed that Fraser died before he could write the “big” book on Flashman’s adventures in the American Civil War, about which he dropped hints in many of the others. Lately, I’ve been watching the PBS series “Victoria,” and I keep looking for Harry Flashman to show up.

Flashman was not Fraser’s creation. He appeared briefly in Thomas Hughes 1856 novel, "Tom Brown’s Schooldays," as a bully, coward, and drunk who is eventually discovered. Fraser’s genius was in demonstrating how such a lowlife came to be a British military hero, winner of the Victoria Cross, knighted, friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee, all the while unashamedly demonstrating the very characteristics that got him kicked out of school. 

In the process of the 12 novels, Fraser had a lot to say about the contingencies of history, and how little we really know. He said something in the opening of the series’ second book, "Royal Flash," that I absolutely agree with to this day, and which places us both far outside the mainstream of current poststructural historical practice:

"If I had been the hero everyone thought Iwas, or even a half decent soldier, Lee would have won the battle of Gettysburg, and probably captured Washington. That is another story, which I shall set down in its proper place… but I mention it here because it shows how great events are decided by trifles.

Scholars, of course, won’t have it so. Policies, they say, and the subtly laid schemes of statesmen, are what influence the destinies of nations; the opinions of intellectuals, the writings of philosophers, settle the fate of mankind…. But in myexperience the course of history is as often settled by someone’s having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside."

One of the traditional purposes of the historian, at least up to the last 60 years or so, was to try to create accepted narrative patterns out of the well-founded belief that cultures cannot survive without them.

Another term, I suppose, is cultural myth. One of the reasons, I believe, that the teaching of history has become so controversial, is that roughly since World War II, the history profession has dedicated itself to the kind of empirical, evidence-based search, that undermines myth.

For example, Nancy Isenberg’s 2016 book, "White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America," essentially seeks to undo perhaps the most important American myth of all, that of the Protestant Work Ethic, the Horatio Alger myth, the myth of equality of opportunity, or whatever you choose to call it. By and large, examining the facts behind our myths is not a bad thing as long as it does not proceed to assume that there is no place for narrative myth in a culture. 

Unfortunately, we are there.

As FSU history professor Neil Jumonville wrote, we have reached the point where “meaning itself, in both historical analysis and narrative, is unstable, shifting, and perhaps meaningless.”  The question is whether a society can survive under those circumstances.

A shared myth, mostly for good, sometimes for ill, helps a people cohere, and communities are constantly creating comforting myths such as the ones that invariably come out of events like 9/11 or the ones that are even now coming out of Parkland.  Christianity is a myth; it helped Europe cohere for 1500 years. So is Islam. Many cultural myths have a positive impact; others don’t.

The German myth of being “stabbed in the back” by Jewish bankers in World War I led to the Holocaust;  the myth of the “Lost Cause,” created to help white southerners feel better about themselves in the aftermath of the Civil War, led to all sorts of problems and worse.

My favorite movie, John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” is about how we create myth and contains one of the seminal lines in the history of cinema: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

People don’t like to have their myths challenged and generally dislike people who do.  You can say they are backward,  benighted, or provincial if you want to. You can also say that they understand there is often a difference between facts and truth. Historians, for quite a while now, have been dealing in a lot of one, and increasingly little of the other. So a large section of the public, both left and right, don’t trust historians.

The messages of Fraser’s Flashman Papers series are two-fold, contradictory, and both valid: on the one hand, don’t believe the myths of history, and on the other, the myths of history are important. 

As Fraser kept turning out these books in the '70s, '80s and '90s, he kept hammering those themes, disguised behind accounts of British brutality in India, Indian massacres, the folly of invading Afghanistan, and a hero who kept ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The books are often violent, in which Flashman physically abuses women to the point of rape, fights fixed duels, and exhibits all sorts of aberrant behavior in which, in his old age, he glories. But they are also rousing, deliberately patterned after the swashbuckling 1930s movies of Errol Flynn.

On the other hand, Fraser’s account of the illegal transatlantic slave trade, in the third book, "Flash for Freedom" is as disturbing as any non-fiction account I have read, without any elaboration or inflation, exposing, I think, the seriousness beneath the surface.

One of the things I tell my students every year is that history is the only discipline I know that requires both imagination and critical thinking in large doses and that it is largely  an interpretive discipline.

It is, in my book, closer to literature than science. But interpretations change. So does the power of cultural myth, which is why John Ford, the most honored of U.S. filmmakers, was unable to direct a movie during the last decade of his life, and why Confederate statues, for the wrong reasons, I think, are coming down.

The “Flashman Papers” may not be authentic, as the reviewers first thought, but they are real.  And even more importantly, true.

Bob Holladay is the managing editor of Sentry Press. Email Bob Holladay at Sentrypress @gmail.com.

The Flashman Papers

Flashman (969)

Royal Flash ( 1970)

Flash for Freedom (1971)

Flashman at the Charge (1973)

Flashman in the Great Game (1975)

Flashman’s Lady (1978)

Flashman and the Redskins (1982)

Flashman and the Dragon (1986)

Flashman and the Mountain of Light (1990)

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994)

Flashman and the Tiger (2000)

Flashman on the March (2005)