Come Back a Man

"BENHUR" WALLACE -- Irving McKee --University of California ($4).

Lewis Wallace failed in four schools in four years, started his first novel at the age of 16, and then (in 1843) ran away to join the Texas navy, only to be brought home again. His father a West Point graduate and onetime governor of Indiana, said to him: "I am sorry, disappointed, mortified; so, without shutting the door upon you, I am resolved that from today you must go out and earn your own livelihood. I shall watch your course hopefully."

Wallace was almost six feet tall, weighed only 130 Ibs., had hawklike features and a glance so concentrated as to seem ferocious. He got a job copying in a lawyer's office. Electrified by reading Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, he studied Spanish, began writing a novel about Montezuma in a blank book one wintry night. He became a political reporter, for substantial fees helped lazy legislators draft their bills, became second sergeant in his home-town rifle company, and failed his bar examination. "Goodbye," said his father, when he marched away to the Mexican War, "come back a man."

Lawyer, Fighter, Poet. He came back a wild man. Students of his career may be reminded of Kenneth Fearing's poem:

And wow he died as wow he lived,

going whop to the office and blooie

home to sleep

for there seems never to have been a breathing space in his career. He was a lawyer, editor, poet, author, lecturer, a major general in the Union army, a major general in the Mexican army, a minister to Turkey, the organizer of an insurance company, a fortune-hunter, a hero. He was ruined by the Battle of Shiloh and again by postwar politics; ruined again by an attempt to organize a Mexican army. But after all his misfortunes, he wrote Ben-Hur which, both as a novel and as a play, and later as a movie, exercised a genuinely magnetic hold over the American imagination.

Wallace was wounded by the Battle of Shiloh as truly as its physical victims. He had acted with great speed and intelligence at the beginning of the Civil War, won promotion handily, justified it in the first battles. Then on April 6, 1862, he was camped at Crump's Landing on the Tennessee River, in command of the 3rd Division, while Grant assembled his divisions at Pittsburg Landing, six miles away. Grant did not know that Albert Sidney Johnston, with 40,000 men, was near. At dawn lightning struck, and Grant's Army of the Tennessee was nearly driven into the river. Grant, off in Savannah, Tenn. at the time, was plainly at fault, but four times during the battle he sent messengers to Wallace, to hurry up replacements. Wallace's men did not reach the battlefield until after dark.

The following day Wallace did well: the defeat became a victory, though a costly one. But he could never live down the fact that it had taken his men six hours to reach a battlefield six miles distant. Some time after the battle, he got a leave of absence to visit Indiana, see the dentist, buy some summer clothes. The governor asked him to make recruiting speeches. He said he would rather be in the field. The governor said, "There is nothing doing there." Thus Lew Wallace learned that he had been relieved of his command.

Billy the Kid. The other great event of Wallace's life was his term as governor of New Mexico. He reached Santa Fe in September 1878, to find his constituency deep in a bloody feud. The wealthy cattle firm of Lawrence G. Murphy & Co. had been threatened by a likable young Englishman named John Tunstall. So far, 23 men, including Tunstall himself, had been murdered.

Wallace tried to get grand jury indictments against the known killers. He called a meeting at the courthouse, attended by 75 or 100 citizens, all of whom were afraid to testify. Unexpectedly, a letter came from William H. ("Billy the Kid") Bonney, offering to talk: he had seen Murphy partisans kill Tunstall's successor. Wallace promised Billy immunity, agreed to meet him at 9 p.m. at the home of a Tunstall man. "The door swung slowly open, and there stood the Kid, a Winchester in his right hand and a revolver in his left. He was a mere boy in years and appearance--nineteen, five feet seven, thin, light-haired, blue-eyed. This was the terrible Kid, companion of thieves and murderers since he had quit school at the age of eleven, ruthless killer of at least six men (some said nineteen).

" 'I was sent for,' said the Kid pleasantly, 'to meet the Governor at nine o'clock. Is he here?'

" 'I am Governor Wallace.' " To keep the Kid from being tagged as an informer, he was (by his own planning) captured, arrested on a charge of cattle-stealing, imprisoned comfortably in the Patron Store. He testified, then grew doubtful of Wallace's promise to safeguard him, and escaped before his own trial.

Lamplit Target. The excitement, color, and fighting of Ben-Hur, though set in the Rome of the early Christian martyrs, came out of Wallace's own vivid experience, says Biographer McKee. He had been stimulated to think out his own religious convictions to answer the century's famed atheist, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll. It took him seven years to write the novel. When three-quarters of the book was finished, he was recalled to New Mexico. Wallace worked on Ben-Hur in the governor's mansion at Santa Fe, an old building with grime-covered walls, rain-stained cedar rafters, a dark, low ceiling. His wife feared that the lamp burning in the window made him a target for Billy the Kid's bullets--the Kid had now turned against him.

Ben-Hur earned Wallace only $300 in the first seven months. But nine years later, in 1889, 400,000 copies had been sold. In 1913, Sears Roebuck ordered a million copies. Just before the play was produced, Charles Frohman said to Producers Klaw & Erlanger: "Boys, I'm afraid you're up against it--the American public will never stand for Christ and a horse race in the same show." The play ran for 21 years.

The great scenes of the play--the dim, enormous interior of the Roman trireme, the wreck, and the struggles on machine-tossed waves, pale moonlight, the cataclysmic race, with two real chariots, each drawn by four Arabian horses, wheels rumbling and swaying, the incredible collision and Ben-Hur's triumph--all this excited and continued to excite the public.

Few people had ever needed a success so badly. Nothing could ever compensate Wallace for what he groaningly called "the awful mystery known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing." He marched in the parades, he attended the reunions, he ran for office, he applied for foreign missions, he looked more than ever like a hero. But he could never quite be what he wanted to be: an Old Soldier.

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