MEMOIRS OF HADRIAN - Marguerite Yourcenar
Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, the work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. In it, Yourcenar reimagines Hadrian's arduous boyhood, his triumphs and reversals, and finally, as emperor, his reordering of a worn-torn world, writing with the imaginative insight of a great writer of the twentieth century while crafting a prose style as elegant as those of the Latin stylists of Hadrian's own time.
"A classic . . . The entire is exquisitely poised."—George Steiner, The New Yorker
"A singular, and singularly beautiful, novel whose theme is the interaction of great power, great mind, and great love: of mastery and vulnerability."—Shirley Hazzard
"Yourcenar's prose [is] beautiful. What made[thisauthor]remarkable, however, was not so much her style as the quality of her mind . . . If you want to know what 'ancient Roman' really means, in terms of war and religion and love and parties, read Memoirs of Hadrian . . . No other document takes us so deeply into the pre-Christian mind . . . Yourcenar gathers not just the round-cheeked boys and the fire festivals but also the less glamorous materials—the tax abatements, the judicial reforms—into sentences that throb and glow like rising suns."—Joan Acocella, The New Yorker
Wall Street Journal article, October 9, 2010
Portrait of Power Embodied in a Roman Emperor
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN
In 1982, when I first read Marguerite Yourcenar's "The Memoirs of Hadrian," I asked Arnaldo Momigliano, the great scholar of the ancient world, what he thought of the novel. Italian to the highest power, he put all five fingers of his right hand to his mouth, kissed them, and announced, "Pure masterpiece." Now, nearly 30 years later, I have reread the work and find it even better than before. A book that improves on rereading, that seems even grander the older one gets—surely, this is yet another sign of a masterpiece.
ts author was born in Belgium, wrote in French, and lived much of her adult life in Maine with her excellent translator and companion, Grace Frick. As such, Mme. Yourcenar (1903-1987) was, in effect, a writer without a country, though she was the first woman elected to the Académie Française (in 1980). She was the last aristocratic novelist of the 20th century, and not only in the sense that her father was of aristocratic descent. She did not ask in her fiction the contemporary middle-class questions of what is happiness and why have I (or my characters) not found it, concerning herself instead with something larger—the meaning of human destiny as it plays out on a historical stage.
Mme. Yourcenar wrote a good deal of fiction, but her imperishable work is "Memoirs of Hadrian," first published in French in 1951. The novel is in the form of a lengthy letter written by the aged and ill Emperor Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, to the 17-year-old but already thoughtful Marcus Aurelius.
Roman emperors seem to be divided between monsters and mediocrities, with an occasional near-genius, like Hadrian, thrown in to break the monotony. Highly intelligent and cultivated, he was a Grecophile, always a good sign in the ancient world. As emperor, he attempted to pull back from the imperialist expansion of his predecessor Trajan and wanted, as the chronicler Aelius Spartianus put it, to "administer the republic [so that] it would know that the state belonged to the people and was not his property."
And yet Hadrian was also a Roman emperor, which meant living amid dangerous intrigue, wielding enormous power and being able to fulfill his erotic impulses at whim. He was, Spartianus writes, "both stern and cheerful, affable and harsh, impetuous and hesitant, mean and generous, hypocritical and straightforward, cruel and merciful, and always in all things changeable"—in short, not a god but a man.
Mme. Yourcenar has taken what we know of the life of Hadrian and from this sketchy knowledge produced an utterly convincing full-blown portrait. One feels that one is reading a remarkable historical document, an account of the intricate meanings of power by a man who has held vast power. Imagine Machiavelli's "The Prince" written not by an Italian theorist but by a true prince. Imagine, further, that he also let you in on his desires, his fears, his aesthetic, his sensuality, his feelings about death—in a manner at once haute and intimate, and in a prose any emperor would be pleased to possess.
"I see an objection to every effort toward ameliorating man's condition, on earth," Hadrian writes, setting out the political philosophy that will inform his reign, "namely that mankind is perhaps not worthy of such exertion. But I meet the objection easily enough: so long as Caligula's dream remains impossible of fulfillment, and the entire human race is not reduced to a single head destined for the axe, we shall have to bear with humanity, keeping it within bounds but utilizing it to the utmost; our interest, in the best sense of the term, will be to serve it."
Part of the mastery of "Memoirs of Hadrian" is in its reminder that the emperor, like the rest of us, remains imprisoned in a perishable human body. Hadrian's letter to young Marcus is being written at the end of his life, and so with a sure grasp of the inexorability of "Time, the Devourer." Hadrian has come into his wisdom only after manifold errors and tragic mistakes; not least among the latter, contriving, through thoughtlessness, in the death of his great love, the Bithynian youth Antinous. He is writing "when my harvests are in." The letter lets Hadrian take his own measure.
"I liked to feel that I was above all a continuator," Hadrian writes. He notes that he looked "to those twelve Caesars so mistreated by Suetonius," in the hope of emulating the best of each: "the clear-sightedness of Tiberius, without his harshness; the learning of Claudius without his weakness; Nero's taste for the arts, but stripped of all foolish vanity; the kindness of Titus, stopping short of his sentimentality; Vespasian's thrift, but not his absurd miserliness."
Mme. Yourcenar has Hadrian compare himself, favorably, with Alcibiades, who "had seduced everyone and everything, even History herself." Unlike Alcibiades, who had brought destruction everywhere, he, Hadrian, "had governed a world infinitely larger...and had kept pace therein; I had rigged it like a fair ship made ready for a voyage which might last for centuries; I had striven my utmost to encourage in man the sense of the divine but without at the same time sacrificing to it what is essentially human. My bliss was my reward."
Like most of our lives, Hadrian's—and so Mme. Yourcenar's novel—is plotless. What keeps the reader thoroughly engaged is not drama but the high quality of Hadrian's thought and powers of observation. Hadrian, through the sheer force of his mind, comes alive. That this most virile of characters has been written by a woman might be worth remarking were it not the case that the greatest novelists have always been androgynous in their powers of creation. With the dab hand of literary genius, Mme. Yourcenar has taken one of the great figures of history and turned him into one of the most memorable characters in literature in a masterpiece too little known.
The Passage from Now to Then: Examining Historical Literature Through Marguerite Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian"
By Deva Jasheway
When considering historical literature that is based upon people who once lived, readers often ask where the details are taken directly from historical accounts, and where they differ. This is a perfectly valid lens through which to view the work, but one should not attach too much importance to faithful adherence to historical accuracy. A novel like Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian undeniably transports the reader back to the time of Hadrian, but it does not relate the progress of his life exactly the way it was. It cannot, because Yourcenar was not a Roman scribe; in this case she was a novelist and historian. As such, her account was affected by the changes that, over centuries, take place in historical accounts. If a moment in history were an object frozen in time, then it would remain the same, but it is the record of the moment, and not the moment itself, that is generally the source for the historical writer – and the record is subject to the same changes as any other object. Moreover, any record of an event, whether historical or recent, is strongly influenced by perspective, and very rarely truly objective. With this in mind, we might recognize that in some cases it may never be possible to achieve historical accuracy.
Many people regard history as a static, unchanging set of information. They think of events of the past as though they were long ago set in stone, failing to recognize that such works of stone are further worked upon by the passage of time. In speaking of the statues and sculptures that remain from centuries ago, Marguerite Yourcenar’s essay “That Mighty Sculptor, Time” insightfully notes just how different the original work was from what we see. No one would claim that a statue “lives” the way a human does, but like a human body the supposedly inert creation changes with each moment that goes by. “Everything, including the atmospheric conditions of the museums in which they are today imprisoned, leaves its mark on their bodies of metal or stone” (Mighty Sculptor, 58). Even the change over generations in how people view the object alters what future generations will see; “Of all the changes caused by time, none affects statues more than the shifts of taste in their admirers” (Mighty Sculptor, 61).
It is much the same with history as with these statues. The metaphor is quite clever, because statues have a connotation of indestructibility. The stone and metal Yourcenar talks of are hard substances, not easily decomposed, which would be able to last for centuries; if one can view the statues she discusses as standing in for history, then history must also be indestructible and able to survive through the ages. Yet if the reader considers more carefully, they will see that Yourcenar acknowledges this survival, but claims that what survives today is far removed from the time that produced it. While the historical accounts we now read resemble the first accounts, which only resembled the actual events, they are not the same. Years that have crept by, revisions for clarity or illumination, or in other instances multiple translations, have served to separate newer versions of historical resources from their generators. This applies most when discussing historical subjects like the Roman Empire, the records of which are necessarily translated and interpreted.
In “That Mighty Sculptor, Time,” Marguerite Yourcenar writes of “statues so thoroughly shattered that out of the debris a new work of art is born” (Mighty Sculptor, 58). Although not the same situation, Yourcenar’s writing of Memoirs of Hadrian shares features with that process. She gathered the pieces left over from Hadrian’s life, “thoroughly shattered” in the sense that she had to draw upon multiple historical books and records to pull out the full picture that Memoirs presents. She recreated Hadrian’s life with several pieces in a different place than they had previously occupied, and added a few new pieces where she deemed necessary. This type of reconstruction is unavoidable in a work like Memoirs of Hadrian, which, despite the historical records left to the world, takes place in a time far removed from the age in which Yourcenar lived. Such reconstruction is not limited to literary works; even the author of a supposedly objective textbook on Hadrian would be required to go through the same process of gathering and fitting pieces of his life together.
The distance between the older periods of history and modern times can create perspective problems for the author, such as Marguerite Yourcenar recounts in regard to finding the right voice for Hadrian. In her notes on Memoirs of Hadrian she states that she envisioned the work in a dialogic mode, but claims that she could not find the voice of Hadrian in the midst of all the other characters (Hadrian, 320). It seems that there is another reason that dialogue did not work: there is no dialogue in the writings of the time, and therefore nothing to on which to base “an exchange about serious or urgent, subtle or complex matters, a conversation between Hadrian and [others … ] Nothing, or virtually nothing, is left us of those inflections, those quarter tones, those articulated half smiles which yet can change everything” (Mighty Sculptor, 31). Without the remnants of interacting voices from the time, she would have most likely created a markedly contemporary set of dialogues.
It is from Hadrian’s voice in the texts of his time that Yourcenar built her novel’s voice; “In an attempt to rediscover that voice […] I used the little – but the diverse little – that is left from Hadrian himself” (Mighty Sculptor, 33). “Hadrian himself” is an important distinction – she went directly to the source, of which she could find only a few wisps, to find the voice that she felt would fit the man. Following this, in the same essay, she notes the same link between historical records and statues that this essay draws when she describes this pool of information as “bits of voice out of which to reconstitute an entire tone or timbre of voice, the way others reconstitute a broken statue out of fragments of marble” (Mighty Sculptor, 35).
Yourcenar also demonstrates in “Tone and Language in the Historical Novel” the extent of the difficulty of “rediscovering” a voice from so long ago. Between the beginning and completion of Memoirs of Hadrian, approximately two decades passed. In this case, the passage of time worked to Yourcenar’s benefit, for she tells us, “it took me years to learn how to calculate exactly the distances between the emperor and myself” (Hadrian, 322). This could easily refer to the voice of the emperor that she worked so hard to reconstruct. If these imagined memoirs were to be plausible, they must appear to be written by a long-dead Roman emperor, and not a European woman of the twentieth century. She managed to find the line between his voice and hers perhaps better than others would have, but in looking back over her writing she admits, “I don’t flatter myself that I always succeeded” (Mighty Sculptor, 35). While one unsuccessful passage may only be insufficient in evoking Hadrian (“I no longer believe that he would have recounted himself in that fashion“ (35)), another’s trouble lies in the use of modern language. In this vein, Yourcenar says of the passage following the death of Antinous, “I caused him to speak the French of my day” (36). While her treatment of this is more of an observation than a criticism, it shows how the stretch of centuries can affect the accurate or, to use Yourcenar’s word, “authentic” portrayal of history.
History refers not to events themselves, but to the relating of those events – to the records and documents, and thus it changes like the statues in Yourcenar’s “That Mighty Sculptor, Time,” gaining “the accumulation of dirt and the true or false patina” (58). As one looks at Yourcenar’s beautiful expression of how simply existing in the world ages the statues, so to speak, it is possible to see how the same process applies to history. As Yourcenar puts it, “We do not possess a single Greek statue in the state in which its contemporaries knew it” (Mighty Sculptor, 57). In the same way, we cannot see the events of the past the way someone living at the time did; however, just as we can infer what the statue looked like in its original finished state, we can speculate on what history looked like to those for whom it was the present. Trying to recount history in a perfect, unchanged state is impossible; thus an unbending loyalty to exactness of detail is energy wasted. Yourcenar followed the details in “authentic” historical records concerning Hadrian rather closely, but it was a path she chose, and not an end goal. Of greater concern was finding the correct essence of Hadrian’s life and the events in it; as the author herself says, “With [historical] truth […] one errs more or less“ (Hadrian, 330), and it is of greater importance that “the impression, if not the expression, seems authentic” (Mighty Sculptor, 36).
That is not to say that the details supported by historical texts are not important, because they certainly are. This should be clear in the discussion of Memoirs of Hadrian, a book that is well-grounded in research and documents of the time. The importance of historical records, however, is shaded by the fact that history does not remain as an intact entity. Instead, it creates more of a hunt-and-peck situation, and in compiling a complete picture of any historical event, a certain amount of guesswork is involved. As mentioned before, this is most applicable in relation to events of centuries before the present day. The more time that passes between the moment of occurrence and the moment of retrospect, the more chances appear for pieces of the records to be changed or lost.