Pleasure Reading: Memoirs of Hadrian

Antinous, from the statue at Eleusis

Yourcenar, Marguerite. Memoirs of Hadrian. Translated by Grace Frick and Marguerite Yourcenar. New York: Farrar Straus and Young, 1954. The Emperor Hadrian is near his death, about 138 AD, and decides to write the story of his life, how he became emperor, and the great (queer, pederastic) love affair of his middle age (which in the ancient world counted old age; Hadrian died at 60).

I just finished this book and was mightily impressed. I can't help but compare it to a couple of volumes of American fantasy genre lit (Sir Apropos of Nothing comes to mind) and this comparison makes the French historicist Yourcenar seem even more powerful -- almost god like in her ability to weave fantasy. To readers and writers like Peter David: here is what I mean when I say I want to read fantasy.



First, Yourcenar's imagination channels the voice and persona of man unlike any a modern reader has ever met, but which must be familiar to any who study the classics: a ruler and egoist of the ancient world. This ruler persona sketches in adventures in a world of battles, political intrigue and affairs of the heart and we gladly travel along so that we can imagine ourselves taking on great power, or accepting the pains and pleasures of great passion. More importantly, we learn something of the layers and masks of any powerful ruler, of the many kinds connections he forms with other people, and we sense that a certain richness immanent in his identity is after all not that different in any modern identity:

Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods; the lover ready to risk all for a moment's rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor's table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some external hum of a bee. But little by little a newcomer was taking hold, a stage director and manager. I was beginning to know the names of my actors, and could arrange plausible entrances for them, or exits; I cut short superfluous lines, and came gradually to avoid the most obvious effects. Last, I learned not to indulge too much in monologue. An gradually, in turn, my actions were forming me.

Here the trappings of fantasy literature -- "the privations of war," for example -- are forged in tandem with a more universal experience of maturing. The vision of a "young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark" brings a wince and a smile to this reader, who sees in the line someone very much like himself, observant and interrogating by mind but nevertheless and after all limited by self-absorption in the end. This is meta-fantasy: the emperor figure in the fantasy is also admittedly a fantast, and points the way for the reader to realize that we are all always already pretenders.

Of course, lurking behind all this is Yourcenar the researcher and reader, a personality one of my teachers described as "creepy." I think the novel is at its weakest when this persona shines through with its eccentric and vaguely elitist tastes, and for me at least this seemed to happen more often in later passages of the novel:

...among the ancient poets Antimachus especially won me: I liked his rich but abstruse style, his ample though highly concentrated phrases, like great bronze cups filled with a heavy wine. I preferred his account of Jasno's expedition to the more romantic Argonautica by Apollonius: Antimachus understood better the mystery of voyages and horizons, and how ephemeral a shadow man throws on this abiding earth.

As the last sentence indicates, this is part of a longer passage describing the progress of Hadrian's mourning, but too often Yourcenar is not able to achieve the pathos either of grief or of true love -- both fold back into artfully fluffed-up reading notes that reveal nothing to me so much as the writing subject ensconced for emotional and social reasons behind the covers of old books. This is also revealed in scene after scene that should be charged with overt eroticism, but ends up a sketch completed with only to broad a brush. The best passage describing Hadrian's lover Antinuous seemed a great start:

If I have said nothing yet of a beauty so apparent it is not merely because of the reticence of a man too completely conquered. But the faces which we try so desperately to recall escape us: it is only for a moment ... I see a head bending under its dark mass of hair, eyes which seemed slanting, so long were the lids, a young face broadly formed, as if for repose. This tender body varied all the time, like a plant, and some of its alterations were those of growth. The boy changed; he grew tall. A week of indolence sufficed to soften him completely; a single afternoon at the hunt made the young athlete firm again, and fleet; an hour's sun would turn him from jasmine to the color of honey. The boyish limbs lengthened out; the face lost its delicate childish round and hollowed slightly under the high cheekbones; the full chest of the young runner took on the smooth, gleaming curves of a Bacchante's breast; the brooding lips bespoke a bitter ardor, a sad satiety. In truth this visage changed as if I had molded it night and day.

Still, we can tell from the opening of the passage that our author does not really want to dabble to much in erotica (that job of examining the scenario with a stronger magnifying glass perhaps falls to another writer!), and this impressionist sketch really is just as much of boy beauty as we ever get to see. More often it comes in tiny fragments weighted with bland words like "beauty."