A newly discovered letter written by a young Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson hit the headlines last week. What tickled the auctioneer who found the document at a house clearance in Derby was the way it showed a youngish Nelson in a less than flattering light. Written on Aug 16, 1795, when the recently promoted Commodore was 36 and not yet a “Great Briton”, the letter reveals Nelson having a bit of a whinge.

He complains to a British diplomat in Genoa that he is being kept “completely in the dark” about what the army is up to. Consequently, he does not quite know what manoeuvre he should be making next. Still, he boasts, his squadron is enormous.

It is not what you would call a commanding letter. In fact it is full of the telltale signs of under-confidence: petulant, boastful and chippy about other people (he can’t resist a dig at his boss, Admiral Hotham). And that is what makes the document so compelling. Great lives like Nelson’s are always seen in hindsight and, in the process, acquire the qualities of marble: monumental, unnaturally smooth and slightly cold to the touch. We know how Nelson’s story ends — as a national hero sprawled out on the Victory’s quarterdeck — and we naturally read that grandeur, that certainty, back into the early years.

So it is comforting to discover that most of the time Nelson did not have a clue what he was doing. Just like the rest of us he lived from day to day, never knowing whether he would amount to anything much. In his complaints about the army and Hotham you recognise the pain of anyone who has ever spent a bad day at the office and wondered “does any of this really matter?” Or, more existentially, “if I die tonight, is this how I want to have spent my last days on earth?”

A NEWLY discovered letter written on Aug 16, 1795, by a young Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson to Francis Drake, a British diplomat in the Italian city of Genoa.

That is why the letters of “great” men and women retain such an extraordinary talismanic power, not to mention market value. Another Nelson letter sold last year fetched 54,000 pounds. What’s more, it did not mention Lady Hamilton once. For it is not a letter’s revelation about moments of high drama — adulterous love affairs, state secrets, murderous desires — that makes it so thrilling. It is, rather, its quiet unfolding of the chaos and contingency of everyday life.

George Eliot fretting that her publisher has not written, Charles Dickens worrying about a failed train connection, Mrs Gaskell convinced she is going to be sued for libel. Underlying all these banal worries you imagine these “Great Britons’” real terror is the fact that their lives so far have not achieved their true and shining purpose. Just like the rest of us, they are a distracted mess.

You would think that biographers would be able to incorporate this quotidian uncertainty into their accounts. That they would be able to show Sylvia Plath not so much in despair as mildly bored with having to cook dinner, or Henry James having a quiet night in. But we are all, readers as well as writers, compulsive pattern-makers. We need Plath to be limbering up for her suicide, or James to be gathering material for his novels of high society. To see them doing things that do not point towards the finale of their lives is to risk charges of poor storytelling.

Thank heavens, then, for the letters that remind us that national heroes have no idea about what is coming next. The Nelson letter up for sale next month is written with his right hand, firm, bold and full of a still-young man’s impatience. It was not until the following year, 1796, that Nelson would lose his arm at a sea battle in Tenerife.

His letters until the end of his life would continue to be full of the dead ends and false trails of everyday existence. The only difference was that, from now on, they would be expressed in altogether shakier handwriting.

—By arrangement with the Guardian

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2014