200 years ago this year, Harry Flashman, the scourge of the School House fags, was born as a bluff Victorian super-hero whose epic battle honours included Balaclava, the Indian Mutiny, and the Little Big Horn.
So plausible was the tale Flashy had to tell about the disastrous retreat from Kabul - from which he alone emerges with credit - that several American reviewers believed his resurrector, George MacDonald Fraser, when, poker-faced, he proclaimed himself the editor, rather than the author, of “The Flashman Papers”. ‘This ranks with Pepys and Boswell’, gushed one.’The rarest of all manuscript in the old trunk discoveries’, enthused another.
Thomas Hughes would have been appalled. Flashman reborn is the antithesis of the dutiful English Christian gentleman patented by Dr Arnold and hymned by Hughes. He is a lecher, a liar, a cheat, a braggart and a coward, who ‘doesn’t give a damn about honour’ and lays down his friends for his life. But as Fraser told me when I interviewed him, Hughes had only himself to blame. When reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a boy, Fraser was struck by how ‘tame’ it became once Flashy was expelled. ‘I thought he was easily the most vivid character in the book, and I remember wondering what became of him.’ Many years later, he concluded that, far from coming to the bad end that Hughes probably envisaged, Flashman had many of the qualities needed to ‘get on’ - if not in the strait-laced Mother Country, then certainly in our freebooting colonies and rapacious Darwinian societies like the nascent United States.
But Fraser knew that if Flashy were to win the VC and earn four inches in Who’s Who he would need to do more than show a clean pair of heels every time the going got tough. That’s why he had to make him a brilliant horseman and a natural linguist. The first was feasible, given that his family were Leicestershire gentry. The second was ‘a bit of a liberty’, but vital if he was to surmount the kind of plot hurdles Fraser envisaged for him. Occasionally Flashy also displays what Fraser called ‘the courage of a cornered rat.’
Fraser was deputy night editor of the Glasgow Herald when Flashman was written. Disillusioned with journalism he told his wife that he was ‘going to write us out of this’, typing at the kitchen table after finishing his shift. On completion he amassed a pile of rejection slips, probably because a taste for imperial gore was not widespread in the late Sixties. Then Barrie and Jenkins made an offer and the rest, it seems permissible to say, is history.
A meticulous researcher, Fraser said he found Punch ‘invaluable’ for background material like jokes, women’s fashions and popular songs. But research has its limits. If Fraser is so good at mayhem, and the gut-wrenching fear that results, it’s probably because he experienced them at first hand in the Burmese jungle, as an infantry scout in the Fourteenth Army. His account of this, Quartered Safe Out Here, was described by John Keegan in these pages as ‘one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War.’ An exemplary sentence reads: ‘There are few sounds as menacing as a bayonet being fixed.’
The son of a GP from the Borders who practised in Carlisle, Fraser acquired a taste for imperial history as a boy. ‘My generation were brought up on the prizes our fathers had won at school. And these tended to be imperial yarns by writers like G.A. Henry and R.M. Ballantyne, very moral, very exciting as a rule, and most of them very well written.’
But, said Fraser, fiction couldn’t really compete with the extraordinary people who existed in the 19th century. A case in point is Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, whom Flashy encounters during the Indian Mutiny. A cross between Jezebel and Joan of Arc, she was, said Fraser, ‘straight out of Hollywood. Not only was she young and beautiful, she was also a warrior queen who died leading her troops against us in a cavalry charge. I simply had to fit her in.’ (As indeed does Flashy).
Having done his homework, Fraser would slip effortlessly into gear as Flashman. The result is a cad’s eye view of imperial history, vividly depicted through the medium of robust masculine prose. ‘In my experience,’ says Flashy, ‘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 wiggling her backside.’ Brutally frank about his own shortcomings, he extends the same discourtesy to others, describing Oscar Wilde as looking like ‘an overfed trout in a toupé’.
Fraser modestly attributed Flashman’s success to the fact that people loved reading about a rascal, especially if his conduct was unacceptable by ‘modern fashionable standards’, the depth of which he doubted. But as one of his unlikelier fans, Christopher Hitchens, noted, Fraser’s reverence for the British Empire was qualified: ’he does not romanticise or airbrush the gruesome and exploitative aspects of imperialism.’ And his attention to detail was such ‘that you can, between guffaws, learn from him’ - how astonished Dr Arnold would have been to hear that!
