Ben-Hur

Life & Times

Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur, published in 1880, is one of the bestselling novels of all time. Ambitious in scale and seven years in the making, it was the result of an extraordinary personal transformation. It has even been credited with saving a nation from reckless self-destruction. But its author, Lew Wallace, was almost the last person from whom this achievement could have been expected. Restless and lacking in direction, he spent most of his life struggling against failure, searching in vain for a sense of significance.

Early Years

Born in Indiana in 1827, Wallace was an unremarkable middle child of a prominent politician who went on to become State Governor. Already a half-hearted student, young Lew slid further into idleness following the death of his mother in 1834. A series of schools failed to inspire him and he was packed off to seek his own fortune aged just sixteen. ‘My rating at school was the worst,’ he later wrote in his memoir; but ‘looking back to the thrashings I took … I console myself thinking of the successful lives there have been with not a jot of algebra in them.’

Wallace yearned to be elsewhere doing more exciting things. He was good at drawing and writing and he loved to have adventures outdoors. Growing up in the era of American expansion and Davy Crockett, he dreamt of life on the wild frontier; what he got was a menial job in a clerk’s office. But with the outbreak of the Mexican–American War in 1846, by which point Wallace was reluctantly studying law under his father’s guidance, he finally got his first taste of the battlefield. It was a short-lived adventure but it proved decisive: even though he had little choice but to pursue life as a respectable lawyer, setting up his own practice in 1849 and marrying in 1852, he continued to dabble in military affairs, organising and commanding the local independent militia, eagerly waiting for the next war to begin.

In the Firing Line

When the Civil War between the Unionist and Confederate states broke out in April 1861, Wallace abandoned everything and rushed to the Union’s front line. He didn’t just fight; he wanted to lead. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming a colonel by the end of April and a brigadier general by September. In March 1862, aged just thirty-four, he became the Union Army’s youngest major general. He was good at his job in these early years of the war and he knew it, frequently indulging his fantasy of running the whole show in lengthy letters home to his wife, Susan, in which he complained of ‘mismanagement’ from above. But in April 1862, just one year into the war, a strategic error caused either by Wallace’s overconfidence or his superior’s mismanagement – the debate was never conclusively resolved – was blamed for preventable loss of life at the Battle of Shiloh. Wallace’s military career never really recovered from what he felt was his scapegoating, while the superior in question, Ulysses S. Grant, went on to become Commanding General of the Union Army and then President of the United States. Wallace spent the next few decades trying to clear his name.

Bored by law, let down by the military, Wallace turned to politics when he returned from the war. In 1878 he was made Governor of New Mexico, a dangerous territory in the grip of violent outlaws – among them Billy the Kid – as well as corrupt officials. His subsequent four-year stint as US ambassador to the troubled Ottoman Empire was tame by comparison. But by far the most remarkable aspect of this chaotic period in Wallace’s life was that he found the time to put pen to paper; he researched and wrote for seven years, and the result was Ben-Hur.

Spiritual Awakening

Wallace wrote Ben-Hur mainly by candlelight, in the dead of night, after a full day’s work trying to restore order to New Mexico. It was a labour of love: he hand-delivered his hand-written manuscript to a publisher in New York and it was accepted for publication in 1880.

For all its scholarship and epic backdrop, Ben-Hur is essentially a rags-to-riches tale of redemption, a story of self-made fortune and honour, which chimed perfectly in a country that was riding the wave of the Gilded Age at the same time as experiencing a significant religious revival. Any nerves Wallace’s publisher had about the sacrilege of depicting Jesus Christ in fiction proved to be unfounded: Wallace had been meticulously sensitive with his source material, scouring the King James Bible for approved dialogue (‘every word He uttered should be a literal quotation from one of His sainted biographers’) and reading almost nothing but books and maps about the Holy Land, including ‘a German publication showing the towns and villages, all sacred places, the heights, the depressions, the passes, trails, and distances’.

Ben-Hur was the project that finally turned an idle student and apathetic Christian into a scholar of religious texts, and Wallace had an extraordinary encounter with an atheist to thank for it. In 1876, aboard a train to Indianapolis, he recognised the prominent orator and fellow Shiloh veteran Robert Ingersoll, and the two men got into a long and friendly debate about religion. ‘He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano,’ Wallace later wrote, ‘the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell.’ The result of all this must have shocked Ingersoll: Wallace, feeling utterly ‘ashamed’ of his own ignorance, determined ‘to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another’. He studied so thoroughly that when he finally visited Jerusalem in the early 1880s he was able to ‘find no reason for making a single change in the text of the book’.

Redemption

Initial sales of Ben-Hur were as slow as might be expected for a relatively unknown fifty-three-year-old novelist. (Wallace’s first historical novel, The Fair God, had appeared in 1873.) But Wallace had friends and fans in high places: President James A. Garfield loved it and even Ulysses S. Grant is said to have read it from cover to cover without pause. Pope Leo XIII gave it his official blessing.

Ben-Hur sold almost half a million copies in its first ten years and then kept going, overtaking even Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to become the highest-selling American novel of the nineteenth century. Where that novel had anecdotally helped spark the Civil War, Ben-Hur helped pull the country back together, finding almost as many fans in the southern states (among them Confederate leader Jefferson Davis) as it did in the North. The nationwide hit novel became a touring hit play in 1899.

Wallace died at home in Indiana in 1905, never to know that the play would ultimately reach an international audience of 20 million in its twenty-two-year run, or become one of the most iconic (and most garlanded) films ever made; but without a doubt he died knowing he had put ‘Shiloh and its slanders’ behind him. He had found his elusive purpose in life.

Dedication

To the wife of my youth who still abides with me

Chapter I

Into the Desert

The Jebel es Zubleh is a mountain fifty miles and more in length, and so narrow that its tracery on the map gives it a likeness to a caterpillar crawling from the south to the north. Standing on its red-and-white cliffs, and looking off under the path of the rising sun, one sees only the Desert of Arabia, where the east winds, so hateful to vine-growers of Jericho, have kept their playgrounds since the beginning. Its feet are well covered by sands tossed from the Euphrates, there to lie, for the mountain is a wall to the pasturelands of Moab and Ammon on the west—lands which else had been of the desert a part.

The Arab has impressed his language upon everything south and east of Judea, so, in his tongue, the old Jebel is the parent of numberless wadies which, intersecting the Roman road—now a dim suggestion of what once it was, a dusty path for Syrian pilgrims to and from Mecca—run their furrows, deepening as they go, to pass the torrents of the rainy season into the Jordan, or their last receptacle, the Dead Sea. Out of one of these wadies—or, more particularly, out of that one which rises at the extreme end of the Jebel, and, extending east of north, becomes at length the bed of the Jabbok River—a traveler passed, going to the tablelands of the desert. To this person the attention of the reader is first besought.

Judged by his appearance, he was quite forty-five years old. His beard, once of the deepest black, flowing broadly over his breast, was streaked with white. His face was brown as a parched coffee berry, and so hidden by a red keffiyeh (as the kerchief of the head is at this day called by the children of the desert) as to be but in part visible. Now and then he raised his eyes, and they were large and dark. He was clad in the flowing garments so universal in the East; but their style may not be described more particularly, for he sat under a miniature tent, and rode a great white dromedary.

It may be doubted if the people of the West ever overcome the impression made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedouin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute. The charm is not in the figure, which not even love can make beautiful; nor in the movement, the noiseless stepping, or the broad careen. As is the kindness of the sea to a ship, so that of the desert to its creature. It clothes him with all its mysteries; in such manner, too, that while we are looking at him we are thinking of them: therein is the wonder. The animal which now came out of the wady might well have claimed the customary homage. Its color and height; its breadth of foot; its bulk of body, not fat, but overlaid with muscle; its long, slender neck, of swanlike curvature; the head, wide between the eyes, and tapering to a muzzle which a lady’s bracelet might have almost clasped; its motion, step long and elastic, tread sure and soundless—all certified its Syrian blood, old as the days of Cyrus, and absolutely priceless. There was the usual bridle, covering the forehead with scarlet fringe, and garnishing the throat with pendent brazen chains, each ending with a tinkling silver bell; but to the bridle there was neither rein for the rider nor strap for a driver. The furniture perched on the back was an invention which with any other people than of the East would have made the inventor renowned. It consisted of two wooden boxes, scarce four feet in length, balanced so that one hung at each side; the inner space, softly lined and carpeted, was arranged to allow the master to sit or lie half reclined; over it all was stretched a green awning. Broad back and breast straps, and girths, secured with countless knots and ties, held the device in place. In such manner the ingenious sons of Cush had contrived to make comfortable the sunburnt ways of the wilderness, along which lay their duty as often as their pleasure.

When the dromedary lifted itself out of the last break of the wady, the traveler had passed the boundary of El Belka, the ancient Ammon. It was morning-time. Before him was the sun, half curtained in fleecy mist; before him also spread the desert; not the realm of drifting sands, which was farther on, but the region where the herbage began to dwarf; where the surface is strewn with boulders of granite, and gray and brown stones, interspersed with languishing acacias and tufts of camel grass. The oak, bramble, and arbutus lay behind, as if they had come to a line, looked over into the well-less waste and crouched with fear.

And now there was an end of path or road. More than ever the camel seemed insensibly driven; it lengthened and quickened its pace, its head pointed straight towards the horizon; through the wide nostrils it drank the wind in great draughts. The litter swayed, and rose and fell like a boat in the waves. Dried leaves in occasional beds rustled underfoot. Sometimes a perfume like absinthe sweetened all the air. Lark and chat and rock swallow leaped to wing, and white partridges ran whistling and clucking out of the way. More rarely a fox or a hyena quickened his gallop, to study the intruders at a safe distance. Off to the right rose the hills of the Jebel, the pearl-gray veil resting upon them changing momentarily into a purple which the sun would make matchless a little later. Over their highest peaks a vulture sailed on broad wings into widening circles. But of all these things the tenant under the green tent saw nothing, or, at least, made no sign of recognition. His eyes were fixed and dreamy. The going of the man, like that of the animal, was as one being led.

For two hours the dromedary swung forward, keeping the trot steadily and the line due east. In that time the traveler never changed his position, nor looked to the right or left. On the desert, distance is not measured by miles or leagues, but by the saat, or hour, and the manzil, or halt: three and a half leagues fill the former, fifteen or twenty-five the latter; but they are the rates for the common camel. A carrier of the genuine Syrian stock can make three leagues easily. At full speed he overtakes the ordinary winds. As one of the results of the rapid advance, the face of the landscape underwent a change. The Jebel stretched along the western horizon, like a pale-blue ribbon. A tell, or hummock of clay and cemented sand, arose here and there. Now and then basaltic stones lifted their round crowns, outposts of the mountain against the forces of the plain; all else, however, was sand, sometimes smooth as the beaten beach, then heaped in rolling ridges; here chopped waves, there long swells. So, too, the condition of the atmosphere changed. The sun, high risen, had drunk his fill of dew and mist, and warmed the breeze that kissed the wanderer under the awning; far and near he was tinting the earth with faint milk-whiteness, and shimmering all the sky.