To the shrewd historical novelist, the challenge posed by that unknowability is also an advantage. Like the best works of historical fiction about the classical world—Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Wilder’s The Ides of March, Graves’s Claudius novels, Mary Renault’s evocation of fifth-century Athens in The Last of the Wine— Augustus suggests the past without presuming to re-create it.
For to have attempted simply to re-create the past would have left no room for the serious literary concern at the heart of Augustus and the author’s other works. In a 1985 interview, Williams described what he saw as the common theme of both Stoner and Augustus: “I was dealing with governance in both instances, and individual responsibilities, and enmities and friendship . . . Except in scale, the machinations for power are about the same in a university as in the Roman Empire . . .” The effect of power (and of struggles for power) on individuals is, in fact, a theme of the episode in Augustus’s reign that first captured Williams’s imagination and would set the novel in motion. Not long after the publication of Butcher’s Crossing, the author first heard the story of the devastating scandal that had rocked both the empire and the imperial family: In 2 BC the emperor was forced to exile his beloved daughter and only child, Julia, to a tiny island called Pandateria. One of the charges was adultery—a violation of the strict morality laws her father had instituted as part of his campaign to renew old-fashioned Roman virtues in his new state. (By that point the emperor’s daughter, trapped in a hateful marriage to Tiberius, was notorious for her flagrant affairs.) Another was treason: There are strong indications that some of the men whom she took as lovers were part of a faction opposed to Tiberius’s succession.
In this tale of a spirited woman whose passions brought her into disastrous conflict with her obligations, Williams perceived a compelling theme: what he called “the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need.” It is one that his Julia, one of the novel’s subtlest and most arresting characters—intelligent, ironic, rebellious, worldly, philosophical—tartly comments upon in the Pandateria journal Williams invents for her. “It is odd to wait in a powerless world, where nothing matters. In the world from which I came, all was power; and everything mattered. One even loved for power; and the end of love became not its own joy, but the myriad joys of power.” It is no accident that Augustus falls into two main sections: the first recounts the emperor’s unlikely, triumphant rise to power, whereas the second, anchored by Julia’s journal entries, maps the disintegration of his family and personal happiness, largely as the result of his machinations to perpetuate his power through ill-conceived dynastic marriages that eventually encourage factionalism and, most likely, murder. Which is to say, part one is about success in the public, political sphere and part two about failure in the private, emotional sphere—the latter being a potential cost, Williams suggests, of the former.
The conflict between individuals and institutions is a theme we can also see working in Stoner—the book, it’s worth remembering, that Williams wrote immediately after learning of the Julia story, the contours of which Stoner’s narrative to some extent inverts. For its thwarted hero repeatedly, stoically submerges his private wants to the obligations in which, as happens to us all, he has become enmeshed and which end up constituting his life. There is an unhappy marriage alleviated too briefly by an affair with a sympathetic graduate student; there is fatherhood. (Williams is particularly good on the tenderness of father-daughter relationships, both here and in Augustus.) And there is the middling career, delicately supported by a few cautious allies and open to threats from one or two enemies he has inevitably made in the course of things. A remarkable set piece of the novel is a scene that takes place during a Ph.D. oral examination at which Stoner tries to prevent an unprepared and cheating protégé of a rival professor from passing: He succeeds at first, but the rival becomes the head of the English department and thereafter works, on the whole successfully, to thwart Stoner’s career and happiness over many years. (In Augustus, a character called Salvidienus—a bosom friend of the emperor’s youth who ultimately betrayed him—observes that “every success uncovers difficulties that we have not foreseen, and every victory enlarges the magnitude of our possible defeat.”)
And yet Williams’s work cannot be reduced to a series of parables about individuals struggling with, and within, institutions. For one thing, to read Stoner as an academic genre novel, as many do—a “novel of university life,” as the Irish novelist John McGahern admiringly wrote—is too limiting; it provides no room for the work’s subtle psychology and complex ethics. (Its one significant failure is the representation of Stoner’s harridan of a wife: Engineered to make Stoner miserable, she is far nastier than she needs to be.) For another, such an approach can’t account for Butcher’s Crossing, in which the strictures of society and its institutions are almost wholly absent; it is, if anything, their absence that creates some of the dreadful outcomes in that novel, which charts the characters’ descent, during and after the buffalo hunt, into a pre-civilized, asocial stupor (“their food and their sleep were the only things that had much meaning for them”).
The theme at play in all three of John Williams’s mature novels is in fact rather larger: it is that, as Stoner puts it to the mistress he must abandon for the sake of his family and his job, “we are of the world, after all.” All of Williams’s work is preoccupied by the way in which, whatever our characters may be, the lives we end up with are the often unexpected products of the friction between us and the world itself— whether that world is nature or culture, the deceptively Edenic expanses of the Colorado Territory or the narrow halls of a state university, the carnage of a buffalo hunt or the proscriptions of the Roman Senate, a dirt farm in Missouri or the opulent courts of Antioch and Alexandria. At one point in Augustus a visitor to Rome asks Octavian’s boyhood tutor what the young leader is like, and the elderly Greek sage replies, “He is a man like any other. . . . He will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.”
An inescapable and sober conclusion of all three novels is that the friction between “force of person” and “accident of fate” becomes, more often than not, erosion: a process that can blur the image we had of who we are, revealing in its place a stranger. Just before Andrews leaves for the buffalo hunt, a kindly whore he wants but cannot bring himself to bed—his loss of innocence will take another form, during and after the hunt—warns the soft-skinned and handsome young man that he’ll change and harden. This prophecy comes quite literally true at the height of the slaughter of the buffalo: “in the darkness Andrews ran his hand over his face; it was rough and strange to his touch . . . he wondered how he looked; he wondered if Francine would recognize him if she could see him now.” Similarly, Stoner understands at the end of his life that whatever his ideals may have been, they have yielded to chance and necessity, which made him other to what he had hoped: “He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?”
So too Williams’s Augustus, whose many names, the last one sharing no common element with the first, reflect with particular vividness the processes of unexpected evolution and irreversible erosion so fascinating to this author. In Augustus’s concluding letter to Nicolaus, Stoner’s word “triviality” tellingly reappears, as the dying emperor ruefully becomes aware of “the triviality into which our lives have finally descended.” What occasions this thought is Augustus’s weary realization that the peace and stability for which he has long struggled may not, after all, be what the Roman, or indeed any, nation wants: “The possibility has occurred to me that the proper condition of man, which is to say that condition in which he is most admirable, may not be that prosperity, peace, and harmony which I labored to give to Rome.” He has founded his empire, in other
words, on a misconception.
This painful concluding irony is typical of Williams. It bears a strong resemblance, for instance, to the awful end of Butcher’s Crossing, when the buffalo hunters return at last to civilization after the slaughter only to find that, during the months of their absence, the bottom has dropped out of the market for buffalo hides—which means that all their labor, all the slaughter, the deprivations and sacrifices have been in vain. In Augustus, the irony is painfully underscored in a brief coda that takes the form of the last of the many documents the author so imaginatively invents: a letter written forty years after the emperor’s death by the now elderly Greek physician who had attended him on his deathbed. The letter is addressed to the courtier and philosopher Seneca, and in it the writer, having weathered the reigns of the cruel Tiberius and the mad Caligula, celebrates the advent of a new emperor who “will at last fulfill the dream of Octavius Caesar.” That emperor is Nero.
And yet Williams didn’t see his heroes as failures; nor should we. In the long interview he gave a few years before his death, he remarked that he thought Stoner was “a real hero”:
A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. He was a witness to values that are important . . . You’ve got to keep the faith.
“Keep the faith”: These characters may have grown away from the selves they thought they would be, but what they come to understand is that the lives they have made are “themselves”—the dwellings they must inhabit, and must find the courage to inhabit alone. This knowledge is tragic, but not necessarily sad. At the end of the affair that threatens the modest (and largely frustrated) life he has painstakingly, confusedly created, William Stoner gently tells his lover, Katherine, that at least they haven’t compromised themselves: “we have come out of this, at least, with ourselves. We know that we are—what we are.” William Andrews returns from the buffalo hunt dimly aware that his dream of oneness with Nature was a glib fantasy, and that the lessons he took away from his encounter with the wild were different from the ones he imagined he’d be learning—the latter being the “fancy lies” an older, seasoned partner contemptuously dismisses: “there’s nothing. . . . You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school . . . and then maybe when you’re ready to die, it comes to you—that there’s nothing, nothing but yourself and what you could have done.” As with Greek tragedies, both novels expose the process by which “what you could have done” is gradually stripped away from a character, leaving only what he did do—which is to say, the residue that is “yourself.” It comes as no surprise to learn that Williams had considered using a quotation from the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as an epigraph for Stoner: “A hero is one who wants to be himself.”
In the last pages of Williams’s final novel the Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus becomes that deeper kind of hero. Here, finally, he stoically embraces the truth that Will Andrews’s colleague sourly complained about: that to confront one’s self, stripped of pretense and illusion, is the climax to which every life inevitably leads, however great or humble. “I have come to believe that in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself.” This is the conclusion to which many good biographies and some of the best works of fiction also lead. “The poor thing that is himself” is hardly the way that most of us would think about the first Roman emperor. It is the achievement of Williams’s novel that we are able to do so by its end, and to think of that end as a satisfying one.
—DANIEL MENDELSOHN
AUGUSTUS
For Nancy
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is recorded that a famous Latin historian declared he would have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia had the effective turn of a sentence required it. Though I have not allowed myself such a liberty, some of the errors of fact in this book are deliberate. I have changed the order of several events; I have invented where the record is incomplete or uncertain; and I have given identities to a few characters whom history has failed to mention. I have sometimes modernized place names and Roman nomenclature, but I have not done so in all instances, preferring certain resonances to a mechanical consistency. With a few exceptions, the documents that constitute this novel are of my own invention—I have paraphrased several sentences from the letters of Cicero, I have stolen brief passages from The Acts of Augustus, and I have lifted a fragment from a lost book of Livy’s History preserved by Seneca the Elder.
But if there are truths in this work, they are the truths of fiction rather than of history. I shall be grateful to those readers who will take it as it is intended—a work of the imagination.
I should like to thank The Rockefeller Foundation for a grant that enabled me to travel and begin this novel; Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, for affording me a period of leisure in which to continue it; and the University of Denver for a sometimes bemused but kind understanding which allowed me to complete it.
PROLOGUE
Letter: Julius Caesar to Atia (45 B.C.)
Send the boy to Apollonia.
I begin abruptly, my dear niece, so that you will at once be disarmed, and so that whatever resistance you might raise will be too quick and flimsy for the force of my persuasions.
Your son left my camp at Carthage in good health; you will see him in Rome within the week. I have instructed my men to give him a leisurely journey, so that you might have this letter before his arrival.
Even now, you will have started to raise objections that seem to you to have some weight—you are a mother and a Julian, and thus doubly stubborn. I suspect I know what your objections will be; we have spoken of these matters before. You would raise the issue of his uncertain health—though you will know shortly that Gaius Octavius returns from his campaign with me in Spain more healthy than when he began it. You would question the care he might receive abroad—though a little thought should persuade you that the doctors in Apollonia are more capable of attending his ills than are the perfumed quacks in Rome. I have six legions of soldiers in and around Macedonia; and soldiers must be in good health, though senators may die and the world shall have lost little. And the Macedonian coastal weather is at least as mild as the Roman.
You are a good mother, Atia, but you have that affliction of hard morality and strictness which has sometimes disturbed our line. You must loosen your reins a little and let your son become in fact the man that he is in law. He is nearly eighteen, and you remember the portents at his birth—portents which, as you are aware, I have taken pains to augment.
You must understand the importance of the command with which I began this letter. His Greek is atrocious, and his rhetoric is weak; his philosophy is fair, but his knowledge of literature is eccentric, to say the least. Are the tutors of Rome as slothful and careless as the citizens? In Apollonia he will read philosophy and improve his Greek with Athenodorus; he will enlarge his knowledge of literature and perfect his rhetoric with Apollodorus. I have already made the necessary arrangements.
Moreover, at his age he needs to be away from Rome; he is a youth of wealth, high station, and great beauty. If the admiration of the boys and girls does not corrupt him, the ambitions of the flatterers will. (You will notice how skillfully I touch that country morality of yours.) In an atmosphere that is Spartan and disciplined, he will spend his mornings with the most learned scholars of our day, perfecting the humane art of the mind; and he will spend his afternoons with the officers of my legions, perfecting that other art without which no man is complete.
You know something of my feeling for th
e boy and of my plans for him; he would be my son in the fact of the law, as he is in my heart, had not the adoption been blocked by that Marcus Antonius who dreams that he will succeed me and who maneuvers among my enemies as slyly as an elephant might lumber through the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. Your Gaius stands at my right hand; but if he is to remain safely there, and take on my powers, he must have the chance to learn my strengths. He cannot do this in Rome, for I have left the most important of those strengths in Macedonia—my legions, which next summer Gaius and I will lead against the Parthians or the Germans, and which we may also need against the treasons that rise out of Rome. . . . By the way, how is Marcius Philippus, whom you are pleased to call your husband? He is so much a fool that I almost cherish him. Certainly I am grateful to him, for were he not so busily engaged in playing the fop in Rome and so amateurishly plotting against me with his friend Cicero, he might play at being stepfather to your son. At least your late husband, however undistinguished his own family, had the good sense to father a son and to find advancement in the Julian name; now your present husband plots against me, and would destroy that name which is the only advantage over the world that he possesses. Yet I wish all my enemies were so inept. I should admire them less, but I would be safer.