No man may know himself, nor how he must appear even to his friends; but I imagine they must have thought me a but of a fool, that day, and even for some time afterward. I was a bit luxuriant then, and fancied that a poet must play the part. There is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.-- Maecenas to Livy (John Williams Augustus: A Novel, 15-16 [emphasis in original--ES])*
I have been hesitant to post about John Williams's (1971) Augustus: A Novel because I have been eager to re-read Yourcenar's (1951) Mémoires d'Hadrien, which, I suspect, inspired Williams, first. But impressions are fleeting and by their very nature can never complete what they aim for. So, I cut a corner here.
The novel tells an exciting story, but is a serious (sometimes too serious) exploration of the most fundamental political philosophy by way of a mixture of letters and notes/diary fragments by a number of characters. This is a clever device in a novel set in history because it allows the author to introduce relevant material that frames the action rather than engage in lengthy, explanatory asides. Chapter One (of Book 1), the thematic introduction of the book, which contains two letters and two such fragments does not let Augustus speak in his own voice. In fact the four entries give us schematic types. The four 'entries' jump around in time and exhibit indirect form, a theme explicitly stated at the start of the book:
I am a poet, and incapable of approaching anything very directly.--Maecenas to Livy (12)
And indeed, the book is an extended meditation -- an unfolding -- on art (both in the literary sense and in the art of ruling). The novel reaches its climax with a long set-piece (a letter from a dying, nearly delirious Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus which occupies the whole of Book Three) in which the poetic art and the art of being emperor are said to spring from the same kind of love and involve analogous ordering patterns and self-deceptions. So, the novel calls attention to the oblique status of its presentations. The reader is expected to do some work.
As an aside, we are also warned** that this work of figuring out the oblique point is tricky because of human nature. For, the first chapter closes on: "death and greatness...the two words go around in my head, around and around, until they seem the same." (26) Williams never gives us the latin (Mortem et Magnitudo (allow a gymnasiast his play)), but while there are a great many deaths -- the historical, temporal start of the novel is the final part of the great age of Roman civil war -- the novel is, in fact, also an investigation of the nature of greatness, especially greatness of soul. But in these lines we are also reminded that the mind has a capacity of conflation, of effacing difference, such that homogeneity results (we might say, there is nothing greater than God, or the universe, and it coincides with death--not a strange thought amidst war). These words ("death and greatness..." etc.) are spoken, as we learn in the novel, by a traitor. (Perhaps some readers will dimly recall this from their school days.)
One of the schematic types (or part-players), a hybrid, poet-politician/patron, (Maecenas) presents himself in the lines quoted at the top of this post, as an anti-philosophical philosopher: "No man may know himself." If true, this would imply that the philosophical life ('know thyself' etc.) is doomed to failure for everybody. If it didn't violate guild-rules on acceptable philosophical speech, it would have the form of a philosophical claim! After all, it's one thing to stake one's claim on the familiar trope that the path or search is more important than the destination; it's another thing to claim that the destination is a kind of two-level mirage (not just no possible self-knowledge, but even no access to the image of you by your intimates).
The poet qua poet isn't just an anti-philosophical philosopher (rejoining Plato's old quarrel from the side of poetry), he is also anxious about the historian's privileged claim to control memory. (It's possible, too, that he isn't anxious qua poet but qua statesman.) That is to say, Williams let's us know that while his novel ("A Novel") is not factual, it concerns itself with a species of what is; but primarily that subset of existence which cannot be recorded or re-presented, that is -- to echo Seneca (who is mentioned finally in the novel's Epilogue) -- necessary loss. It would, perhaps, go too far to suggest that the opening salvo of William's novel is the claim that the historian, not even the political historian (celebrated by Machiavelli no less), cannot capture (good) living (while art may, indirectly succeed at this); but he certainly promises that what may seem foolish at first (the imagination's creativity), is, in fact, sturdier organizing material than thought either by the philosopher (who devalues it in name of reason) or the historian (who devalues it in name of the facts); despite its capacity to betray its better instincts, the imagination can, in fact, try to evade the conflation of greatness and death (one presumes by generating a form of greatness that is eternal, or at least more capable of catching that which escapes the historian's fishing expeditions).
I have not made the case yet that Williams's treatment deserves to be taken seriously, but I think we would be foolish to underestimates his ambitions for Augustus: A Novel.
*My references are to the 2003 Vintage reproduction (London)
** One might find this warning didactic. But when one deals with tough material it can't hurt to alert one's audience that the ride is not going to be easy (and it is a familiar, sales-technique).
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