John Williams' novel Augustus

From about 90 BC until about 30 BC, the Roman Republic suffered from Civil Wars. They were complicated. In general they were between  aristocrats, who controlled the Senate, and  plebeians, who controlled other political offices, but in practice they were often between generals, caudillos, who maintained private armies only nominally allied with either class and they involved many shifting alliances and betrayals among leaders and clans. Octavius Caesar, the grandnephew and protégé of Julius Caesar, the most famous of these generals, ended these civil wars with his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra in 31 BC. He also ended the Republic and made Rome an Empire, which was free from major civil wars for about 200 years thereafter. Thus did he acquire the title Augustus. This is an epistilatory novel based on the life of Augustus and on his times.

Historiography was just getting started in the West, and, inspired by Greek historians, this period is one of the first in human history to be at least moderately documented. Several histories by eloquent and diligent historians survive, but they are far from perfect. Some of them wrote long after the event, some of the histories are partially lost, and of course the historians have their various biases. Augustus, the person, is notoriously hard to pin down. Shakespeare in his plays Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra, working from the Greek historian Plutarch, portrays him as merely coldl and power-hungry except for his affection for his sister. Other historians portray him as dutifully patriotic, the savior of his country, and the bringer of peace.

Like Napoleon, Augustus was noted for his stare. Several portrait sculptures survived from his lifetime, but it is hard to learn from them. Besides a tendency to show him as stereotypically heroic, Roman sculpture was embellished with colorful painting, gilding, silvering, and inlay that have worn away, so we are left with inscrutable stares.  But are they those of Augustus?

This is the author's fourth and last novel. In his illuminating introduction Daniel Mendelsohn points out that the heroes of each the first three are of no political stature and reflect how the forces of life shape men of very modest accomplishment rather than the hero shaping his life. Two are set in the author's lifetime and one in the 19th-century American frontier. Each has autobiographical overtones. So it is surprising that for his fourth novel he turned to Roman history and a very powerful man.

Williams both exploits and struggles with the historical ambiguity of Augustus' character by choosing to write an epistolary novel. We hear about him from the point of view of several generals, several close friends including the poets Horace, Virgil, and Ovid, from both of his wives, from his most important mistress, from his beloved only child Julia, from spies working both for and against him, from several intellectual hangers on, not to mention from Julius Caesar, and Augustus himself. A wide and varied canvass. Williams does a fine job writing in these various voices. He carefully delineates their biases and somewhat less carefully their styles. Yet for me a sense of foreignness is lacking. I'm an amateur in Roman culture, but I feel that for all their historical standing, the Romans had a very different sense of self than we have, more based on the intersection of face and domination, to put it glibly. This foreignness does not fully emerge through Williams' letter writers. One thing that emerges from these letters is the importance of friendship to William's version of Augustus. In the beginning we see him as a student with a group of close friends. Gradually in the course of his life one of these friends betrays him and others die. It is as if in each betrayal or death he loses part of himself. Augustus' own letters appear only at the very beginning of his career and to the end.

An epistilatory novel demands flexible prose more than anything else, and Williams prose is consistently flexible and effective.

Surprisingly for the man who emerged triumphant from a risky struggle and ruled the Mediterranean world for most of his lifetime (He died in 14 AD.), as Mendelsohn points out, this novel is like Williams' other novels in showing how the struggle with life shapes the hero, rather than the other way around. Augustus in this novel did it not set out to become the ruler of Rome but to avenge the death of his beloved grand uncle Julius Caesar and to survive. But victories lead to obligations until he can only survive by defeating Anthony and Cleopatra.

The novel falls into two halves. The first, though it is far from a military history, portrays Augustus and his associates in the period of his rise to power. Marriages arranged for the purpose of family alliances are almost as important as battles, and Augustus' friend. and in effect prime minister, Maecenas, known to history as a patron of the arts, appears here mostly as a match maker. The second half portrays his intimate world and its public reflection during his life as emperor. It largely neglects Augustus' extension of the empire, vast public works, and establishment of a bureaucracy that served the empire well for hundreds of years. It does display his personally modest style of living.

Williams devotes much of the second part of the novel to Augustus' relations with his daughter and only child, Julia. Her letters take up more pages than any other correspondent. She comes off as something of a protofeminist, seeking self-realization within the constrained role of upper-class Roman women. In her letters Williams fails most, for me, to give a true feeling of Roman self-image. Augustus’ fondness for her is mentioned in the histories and dwelt on by Williams. But, for political reasons he married her off to three men, for two of whom she was dutifully indifferent, the third she hated, and to whom she bore in total seven children.

Around 18 BC Augustus promulgated a series of laws promoting what we might call family values, with only mixed success as is witnessed by Ovid's witty and explicit handbook, The Art of Love. In an atmosphere of erotic scandals and assassination conspiracies in 2 BC Augustus exiled Julia to a small barren island off the coast of southern Italy. Since then there has been endless speculation about his motives; her possible involvement with Ovid lends notoriety. Williams has a theory. He portrays it movingly, and it is as good as any other.

The final letter from Augustus, by this time in ill health and surveying the increasing emptiness of his life, is vivid and eloquent as is the last letter in retrospect from his physician. But something remains missing in the decades when we read only other people's thoughts. I came away feeling I had read a rich and moving novel, but not that I had seen into the fears or longings of Augustus.

Comments on Les Miserables

I listened to this novel in the excellent reading by George Guidall of Julie Rose's translation.  A little over 60 hours, or four and a half days.  For quotations and general double checking I used the translation by Isabel F. Hapgood provided by project Gutenberg.

Hugo, who is nothing if not articulate about what he believes are his goals and meaning in this novel, declares that it is about the moral redemption of the principal character, who, as I'm sure most of you know, begins as a petty thief condemned to prison galleys, and c. 1500 pages later rises to ever higher moral nobility until he dies of it, and after.

That's true, but there are other important subjects in this vast work.  One is an assertion of the Christian moral nature of the world, although he is opposed to the institution of the Catholic Church. Another is a human exploration of Paris.  Another is the process of France's digestion of the French Revolution and of Napoleon.  Another is the exposition of how decision-making takes place. Another is the exploration of youth versus age.  Another is his conviction that the author's views on anything at all are worth passing on to the reader.  Most fundamental is his interest in the engagement of opposites.

A tight plot and characters that are attractive and clearly either good or bad are the mainstays of current popular fiction, as they were then, and limit the range and subtlety of a book.  Hugo makes up for that limitation by his prose, what he writes about, and how he writes about it.

Hugo’s prose is often described as ponderous, and it certainly can be.  But in the long haul it is varied and flexible.  It is like a large-scale organ with it’s ponderous pipes, it melodious pipes, it's shrill, at times racy, at times witty pipes, etc.  Indeed one of the pleasures of this book is appreciating the resources of Hugo's style.  Here's a guy who can describe the whole world, or the tiniest corner of Paris, with equal aptness.

The book is highly digressive, like Tristram Shandy.  An example often cited is the 2 1/2 hour description of the battle of Waterloo.  A very minor incident in the battle is a cornerstone of the plot, but he could have delivered that in five minutes.  He describes the battle in some detail including Napoleon’s debates with himself on strategy, and why, in Hugo’s view, he lost.

But, unlike Tristram Shandy, plot drives this novel.  One thing leads to another in intricate, supple, and tightly contrived ways.  There is a problem.  The stereotype these days is that each author gets to have one unlikely coincidence, the McGuffin.  The plot of Les Miserables depends on one unlikely coincidence following another like a pack train; there are hundreds.  It begins to feel as if Hugo had his own special McGuffin: a free pass to unbounded unlikely coincidence.  That usage reflects his idea that we are in the hands of fate, that is God.

Hugo likes to describe characters in ways that will identify them as attractive or unattractive to the reader .  His attractive characters are usually generous, friendly, and good looking; his unattractive characters are selfish, surely, and plain. The social role of the character is always a cornerstone of his or her depiction. You do not meet characters, as we often meet in contemporary novels, who are a bundle of characteristics who happen to have a social role as a kind day job. Jean Valjean is first of all a criminal; Javert is first of all a detective; Cosette is first of all a marriageable girl etc.. It requires the length of the novel to move Valjean out of the criminal category. His self-acknowledgment that he can no longer fulfill the role of detective drives Javert to suicide.

Characterisation is in certain respects full, and in certain respects shallow.  It is full with respect to establishing the characters’ position on the ladder of good and evil.  The ladder has many rungs but goes only up or down.  Of the moral standing of men he sees as related to the French revolution, he writes:

"Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre, there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf.  And so it goes on.  Lower down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who perhaps do not exist as yet. ……"

It is also full in the sense of describing the process of decision-making in dramatic detail.  This decision-making portrays minds engaged in internal rhetorical debate.  For those of us who live after a hundred years of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, it seems a little stiff and awfully rational, but it is rich in vigorous and detail. 

Hugo goes to considerable trouble to portray youth an age.  He delights in the garrulousness of quirky old men; old women get scant attention. He delights in the naïve enthusiasm of youth; pretty young women get lots of attention. But you do not come out of this book with the gut feeling that you know them personally.  What will the marriage of the ingénue couple (Cossette and Marius) be like in 20 years?  We don’t even wonder.  We know their societal niche and we know their moral standing instead.

Hugo expects a reader well read in French and classical history. He casually refers us to our familiarity with the Greek biographer Plutarch and the Roman historians Livy and Tacitus, among others. Interestingly he never cites Montagne; perhaps the mayor of Bordeaux was too skeptical for him.

The anecdote that Chou En-Lie once remarked to Nixon (or was it to Kissinger) that it was too soon to know if the French revolution has been successful is probably a legend, but it’s endurance reveals an unmythical concern.  The French, and with them the world, continue to try to come to terms with events and issues arising from the overthrow of the Ancien Régime and to discover proper means of dealing with them. Besides Chou En-Lie, Pol Pot, & Deng Xiaoping, among many others, studied in Paris in forming their concept of revolution and governance. Hugo, who several times says Paris represents the world, was only concerned with France, which went though a process of digesting the revolution that is comparable in intricacy and painfulness to a polity digesting itself.

The period of the action is 1815 - 1832, but by frequent flashbacks, explanations, and references the book engages with history from the beginning of the French revolution (1789). In those decades France was governed or ungoverned successively by absolute monarchy, a period of chaos, a couple of different imperious committees, an emperor, absolute monarchy again, and constitutional monarchy and at all times by passionate and deadly factionalism. In those years for anyone with anything to loose which side you were on was a constant source of identity and anxiety.

The family of Marius, the ingénue hero, whose experiences in the unrest of 1832 resemble those of Hugo, embodies the identifications and tensions. His grandfather is a passionate monarchist, his father an equally passionate Bonapartist. He has been raised by his grandfather to hate his father, but gradually comes to respect him and absorb his political position. This is the process of debate over governance embodied in the lives and feelings of characters.

One of the most moving actual verbal debates comes between the bishop of Digne and a former member of the convention that overthrew Louis XVI (un conventionnel). The bishop was appointed by Napoleon, almost by chance, that is fate, that is God. He is sort of an anti-clerical clergyman, living simply and piously in the mountain village of his bishopric, giving his salary mostly to the poor, etc. Acts of empathy and generosity by the bishop save Jean Valjean from rearrest and set him on the path of virtue. In the course of his pastoral care he seeks out a conventioneer, as they were called, who is an atheist and a republican living as a hermit in a period of merciless reaction. The conventioneer is a man of great wisdom and dignity who accepts his immanent death. They debate their respective faiths. Hugo is evenhanded; he is interested in portraying the debate, not in settling it, and it remains unresolved with each man thoughtfully moved.

First, as is typical of serious characters, the bishop debates with himself:

"Nevertheless, the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time he gazed at the horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the valley of the former member of the Convention, and he said, "There is a soul yonder which is lonely."

And he added, deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."

But, let us avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush, appeared to him after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and almost repulsive. For, at bottom, he shared the general impression, and the old member of the Convention inspired him, without his being clearly conscious of the fact himself, with that sentiment which borders on hate, and which is so well expressed by the word 'estrangement'.

Still, should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No. But what a sheep!

The good Bishop was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction; then he returned."

The bishop journeys to the hut of the conventioneer, and they debate the revolution. For a long time they trade citation of atrocities, the bishop citing the atrocities of the revolution and the conventioneer those of the Ancien Régime. The conventioneer sums up:

"In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ.... The French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. ... Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this fact is recognized,--that the human race has been treated harshly, but that it has progressed."

The bishop respectfully does not assent.

The title is notoriously hard to translate. It means something like the poor or the unfortunate or the outsiders. It implies that the subject of the book is the suffering of people whom society does not nurture, who dwell outside the empathy of the comfortable and well off. Hugo is criticising people's lack of compassion and charity rather than society's very structure. Hugo stresses that the lot of the poor could be improved by education, but beyond that what he mainly does is admonished the rich to be nicer to the poor, rather than imagining a way to eliminate the richness and poorness. Note that in his hierarchical list of the intellectual fathers of the revolution, he puts Baboef at the bottom. Baboef was the only one of the prominent revolutionaries who proposed concrete plans for removing hierarchy from society in general.

The Way We Live Now

Trollope's novel of that name is a masterpiece of plotting based on the interaction of characters and character discrimination. There are about 12 major characters in this long book, around 450,000 words, and you are never confused, for one reason because Trollope introduces each person one by one in short chapters.

The central plot is applicable to our time when foolish knaves sell impossible mortgages to knavish fools; when “financiers” package the shaky mortgages as “securities”; and the London bankers collude at teatime on Facebook to fix the LIBOR rate. It is based on a murky stock promotion of which we never understand the details. What we understand is how interaction of characters, usually in pairs, sometimes in triplets, moves the action and in some cases alters the movers.

What you think about when you think about this book is the characters. The most interesting are: First, Augustus Melmotte, a "financier" of murky background who dazzles London by flashing wealth, perhaps more than he really has, founds a Ponzi scheme worthy of Bernie Nadoff, and even gets himself elected to Parliament, before his ultimate fall. He is charismatic and a bad guy. He has no notion of honesty and beats his daughter. Yet he is a sort of tragic hero, and his downfall is moving and telling. Trollope even grants him a helping of tragic insight:

“He had not far to go round through Berkeley Square into Burton Street but he stood for a few moments looking up at the bright stars. If he could be there, in one of those unknown distant worlds, with all his present intellect and none of his present burdens, he would, he thought, do better than he had done here on earth. If he could even now put himself down nameless, fameless, and without possessions in some distant corner of the world, he could, he thought, do better. But he was Augustus Melmotte, and he must bear his burdens, whatever they were, to the end.”

Second, Mrs. Hurdle, an American widow, except her husband is not actually dead, although she has shot and killrd another man. She is beautiful, sensitive, passionate, wealthy on her own initiative, and, in the crises we witness in the book, highly moral. Trollope makes clear that she and another major character, Paul Montague, a priggish vacillating Englishmen, have been physically lovers in the past when he was traveling in America. This is not the shy, 2-dimensional flower of so many 19^th century English novels.  In a way she is Henry James’ free-spirited American girl carried far beyond what James would care to undertake.

Third is Marie Melmotte, the daughter of Augustus Melmotte, who begins the novel by falling in love with a handsome ne'er-do-well because she is enchanted by stereotypes from novels. She progresses through several fiancés or near-fiancés including an English Lord, and evolves to choosing a husband from a position of cynicism but not malice.

Most of the action of the book does involve the marriage plot, but the outcomes are complex and ambiguous.   Unlike in, say Jane Austen, it is thinkable for women to choose other careers than marriage.   Nor does Trollope hand out good and bad marriages simply as a reward for being moral or immoral characters.  The relentlessly bad mother, Lady Carbury, probably gets what is for her the best marriage.  Paul Montague's chooses a bland and timid ingénue over the complex and passionate Mrs. Hurdle. They will settle in the country with her obsessive one-time admirer living a cottage in the back.  Not a happy prospect. 

This novel explores ant-Semitism. It was published in 1875, a time of change in the standing of Jews in English society. For one thing Disraeli was Prime Minister. A fully developed secondary character has reached the age of 30 and is losing in the marriage game. She chooses to marry a banker who is 20 years older than she is, fat, ugly, a Jew, and the most decent human being in the book. Her immediate family reacts like Nazi’s. Her fiancé is also a of foil for Marie Melmotte first admirer, Sir Felix, who is wellborn, handsome, youthful, but an utterly worthless drunk and compulsive gambler. So Trollope is telling us something about his attitude towards prejudice against Jews. But he also accepts without comment the general knee-jerk prejudice that was of course commonplace in his time. I have seen it stated by critics that Melmotte himself is Jewish, and characters sometimes assume that.  His pitiful wife (not Marie’s mother) certainly is.  But I found no clear-cut statement to that effect in the text; the most unambiguous description of his origin is that he was Irish-American and grew up in New York.

 Another prejudice is against Americans.

 Trollope's prose is always sound, clear, readable, and supple but is never thrilling in sustained passages. Trollope is a master of summarizing complex human situations, both in decisive paragraphs and in telling bon mots. There are paragraph-long summaries of characters’ previous lives that could serve as scenarios for whole novels by Henry James, and on which David Foster Wallace or Karl Ove Nausgaard could build a career. For example this summary of the situation in the Carbury family at the beginning of the book. Note that the situation has developed through the interaction of three characters:

“Sir Felix was then 25, had been in a fashionable regiment for four years, had already sold out, and, to own the truth at once, had altogether wasted the property which his father had left him. So much the mother knew, – and knew therefore that with her limited income she must maintain not only herself and daughter, but also the Baronet. She did not know, however the amount of the Baronet’s obligations; – nor, indeed, did he, or anyone else. A baronet, holding a commission in the guards, and known to have had a fortune left by him left him by his father, may go very far in getting into debt; and Sir Felix had made full use of his privileges. His life had been in every way bad. He had become a burden on his mother so heavy, – and on his sister also, – that their lives had become one of unavoidable embarrassments. But not for a moment had either of them ever quarreled with it. Henrietta had been taught by the conduct of both father and mother that every vice might be forgiven in a man and in a son, though every virtue was expected from a woman, and especially from a daughter. The lesson had come to her so early in life that she had learned it without the feeling of any grievance. She lamented her brother’s evil conduct as it affected him, but she pardoned it all together as it affected herself. That all her interests in life should be made subservient to him was natural to her; and when she found that her little comforts were discontinued, and her moderate expenses curtailed, because he, having eaten up all that was his own, was now eating up also all that was his mother's, she never complained. Henrietta had been taught to think that men of that rank of life in which she had been born always did eat up everything.”

One of Lady Carbury’s vices is bad writing. She is the author of a dreadful piece of popular history called Criminal Queens.  Her efforts to publish and promote it show that the vices of her publishing world, like her financial world, are much like those of our own.

Where Trollope's prose really shines is in bon mots. The little word or phrase that cunningly sounds the depths of what's before us. Here is a little summary of Lady Carbury’s thoughts rejecting someone's proposal of marriage:

"But mixed with her other feelings there was a tenderness which brought back some memory of her distant youth, and almost made her weak. That a man, -–such a man, – should offer to take half her burdens, and to confer upon her half his blessing! What an idiot! What a God! She had looked upon the man as all intellect, alloyed perhaps by some passionless remnants of the vices of his youth; and now she found that he not only had a human heart in his bosom, but a heart that she could touch. How wonderfully sweet! How infinitely small!”

It is that last, small word "small" that nails so much about both Lady Carbury and her admirer and stimulates and shapes our feelings about them.

There is a subplot that involves a country lass and her bumpkin admirer. It's loosely related to the main action and is amusing, but it constantly reminded me of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals, which is both a kind of complement, and a kind of distraction.

Trollope's energetic but orderly ability to generate plotting for his characters sometimes gets a bit tedious. There is a whole sub subplot of the relations between an Anglican bishop and a Catholic priest that is really unnecessary and never goes anywhere. After Melmotte’s, fall, Trollope spends probably another 50,000 words tying up loose ends. Tying up loose sends is satisfying, but maybe not every i in every marriage contract needs to be dotted.

A note on punctuation: I read the free version that comes from the Apple Store which I assume, partly from some of the errors that electronic scansion is prone to, is an unedited presentation of the original text. Punctuation is interesting. It is filled with dashes, almost a sort of prose version of Emily Dickinson, the dashes frequently proceeded or follow by semicolons, commas, or colons. On the other hand, there are many occasions where we would expect a carefully punctuated text to have commas, such as examples or introductory adverbial phrases of time, where they are lacking.