Augustus by John Williams

There are so many wonderful things to say about John Williams’ Augustus and the few online reviews I’ve skimmed do a good job of going into detail about many of its strengths. In this post I want to highlight a few aspects of the book I found enjoyable.

The novel is full of tensions and tradeoffs, such as public versus private obligations, mind versus body, city versus country, choice versus foreordained, permanency versus temporary, cost versus benefit. The last point is stressed often and summarized very nicely by Nicolaus of Damascus (page numbers refer to the Vintage International paperback edition—see this post for an index):

Octavius Caesar has brought peace to this land; not since Actium has Roman raised sword against Roman. He has brought prosperity to the city and the countryside; not even the poorest of the people wants for food in the city, and those in the provinces prosper from the beneficences of Rome and Octavius Caesar. Octavius Caesar has brought liberty to the people; no longer need the slave live in fear of the arbitrary cruelty of his master, nor the poor man fear the venality of the rich, nor the responsible speaker fear the consequences of his words.

And yet there is an ugliness in the air which, I fear, bodes ill for the future of the city, the Empire, and the reign of Octavius Caesar himself. Faction is ranged against faction; rumors abound; and no one seems content to live in the comfort and dignity which their Emperor has made possible. These are extraordinary people…. It is as if they cannot endure safety and peace and comfort. (246-7)

The genesis of the book, relayed by John McGahern in the introduction, comes from the conflict between public requirements and private yearnings. The cost in resolving these conflicts proves to be high:

While they were talking casually about the book, [Morton] Hunt told him [Williams] about the story of Augustus, who had a daughter, Julia, whom he loved, but he exiled and imprisoned her in order to save the State because she had broken the laws on adultery that he had enacted. This fascinated Williams and he started to read about it. Discovering that Julia had been effectively written out of the histories, the more he read the more he was engaged by what he describes as ‘the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need’ which is at the novel’s core. (Introduction, x).

While I can’t argue that the “public necessity and the private want or need” lies at the novel’s core, there is another tension I found equally compelling, and possibly more central to the novel—the tension between reality and ideals.

What you seem so unwilling to accept, even now, is this: that the ideals which supported the Republic had no correspondence to the fact of the old Republic; that the glorious word concealed the deed of horror; that the appearance of tradition and order cloaked the reality of corruption and chaos; that the call to liberty and freedom closed the minds, even of those who called, to the facts of privation, suppression, and sanctioned murder. We had learned that we had to do what we did, and we would not be deterred by the forms that deceived the world. (62-3)

Augustus grasped the discrepancy between ideals and reality quickly, learning to master his emotions in order to achieve his ultimate goals. As his closest friends learned, that might mean protecting enemies in order to first consolidate power. He lived long enough to doubt that the compromises he made, personal and political, were the right choices.

”Father,” I asked, “has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?”

My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has.” (237)

The first two books of the novel draw an outline of Augustus through letters, journals, and other documents but we don’t see into his thoughts until the final book. Williams’ portrait of the aged leader is one of a beneficent, enlightened despot, looking back on his achievements and their cost while also looking into Rome’s future after he is gone. It’s a beautiful section, full of guarded optimism tempered by practical insights. He consoles himself on things he has missed out on or only experienced briefly, such as friendship and love, by noting their fleeting limits. Occasionally he turns his attention to more permanent things, such as literature or the idea of Rome:

Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing. (310)

Highly recommended.

An index for Augustus

I started reading John Williams' Augustus this week and promptly ran into a problem—finding a particular section in an epistolary novel told from many sources could take quite a while. Since there was no index I thought I would create my own and share it here. (Any misspellings are due to a chronic lack of sleep.) I have only started the book but can highly recommend it at this point.

While there are many online resources for the life and times of Augustus/Octavius, I wanted to point out the Annotated Guide to Online Resources for him at virgil.org.

Update--A few additional links on Augustus, which provide many more links:

Some links on Augustus and the Roman Revolution by Jim O'Hara, George L. Paddison Professor of Latin at The University of North Carolina

An Augustus primer at the Roman History Reading Group

Stoner discussion

The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton (1900) by Thomas Eakins
Picture source

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
    This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

- (Shakespeare, Sonnet 73)

For anyone wanting to avoid spoilers regarding John Williams' Stoner the short review is “Yes, the book lives up to the hype. Read it.” For those willing to continue reading, my discussion touches on only a few of the many themes within the book and leaves out several areas all together. I realize my comments will make more sense to those who have read the book but there are some topics I would like to explore which I haven’t seen mentioned in other reviews. (Update: see the end of this post for some links to online reviews)

Stoner starts with a spoiler of its own, a summary of William Stoner’s life:

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshmen in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”

An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem, when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

As the book will show, such a summary of facts leaves out what truly constitutes a life. Growing up on a farm in central Missouri, his father “stooped by labor” appears twenty years older than his age. His mother “regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure.” His own life involved hard work before, during and after school. Taking advantage of the recently opened College of Agriculture at the University of Missouri, William works his way through school with the intent to return to the family farm. His plans change during a sophomore English class while listening to Shakespeare’s 73rd sonnet. Although he is unable to articulate the effect the poem has on him, the passion kindled by the poem ignites a glowing fire, a love of literature, within him.

Several major decisions mark dramatic turning points in William Stoner’s life. The first choice happens when he changes majors to English. This choice sets in motion many outcomes that Stoner seems to passively allow, such as returning to school for a postgraduate degree in order to teach. The next choice occurs when Stoner opts not to enlist for World War I and accept a deferment. While allowing him to finish his degree, it also gives him the opportunity to begin his teaching career due to the shortage of instructors. The third choice to marry Edith appears to be one he stumbles into although his pursuit demonstrated his characteristic persistence. While he had many reasons to regret this decision, he never seemed to do so. The fourth choice, as a member on Charles Walker’s review committee for oral comps, becomes a defining moment. Stoner’s choice not to go along with the fraud, to exert integrity instead of scoring political points, may win him the admiration of the reader but dooms him to unrelenting retaliation from his department head. His integrity about his profession and what it represents will not allow him to take the easy way out.

And yet…Stoner upholds the integrity of his profession but engages in an affair. Furthermore, because of his wife’s emotional instability (I’m being nice), I think most readers are happy to see that he finds love, even if it falls outside his marriage. Is that because Stoner upholds what is required of him in work and marriage? He reveals Walker’s fraud and refuses to compromise the integrity of his profession. The sacrifices he makes in his marriage could be described as above and beyond the call of duty, also. So why do we forgive one failing while holding Stoner up for his virtue and integrity for his professional decision? There is an overlap between what is required to be successful in professional and personal lives (both as spouse and as parent in the latter) and while Stoner demonstrates these qualities as a professor and as a family man, do the events outside his control mitigate his decision? I realize these are mostly rhetorical questions, but since I had not seen anyone else raise this point (although I haven’t read every review) I wanted to note it.

There are many parts in the book that provide enjoyment. Some sections trumpet their importance, providing insight at the moment as well as providing a foundation to be built on or referred back to in later parts in the book. The discussion, over beer and boiled and eggs, about differing views of what constitutes a university, is such a section. Other parts appear as throw-away lines but reveal much about the characters and the atmosphere Williams painstakingly develops. Here is part of one paragraph that is almost lost during Stoner’s reflection on the loss of a friend and other students in World War I. These lovely lines help set the tone for the remainder of the book:

His dissertation topic had been “The Influence of the Classical Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric.” He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.

There are a few over-the-top portrayals in the book, especially with Stoner’s wife Edith and his nemesis Hollis Lomax. These characters, impenetrable most of the time, become part of the “wars and defeats and victories of the human race that nor military and that are not recorded in the annals of history” of which Stoner’s mentor, Archer Sloane, counsels him. Many details within the book cannot be accidental, such as Lomax and his protégé’s area of expertise involving Romantic poets in opposition to Stoner’s grounding in classical and medieval literature. The differences between their areas of study mirror the differences between the individuals. Another touch which didn’t seem accidental includes physical changes or conditions reflecting the inner state of characters: Lomax’s and Walker’s crippled nature, daughter Grace’s adolescent weight gain, and Stoner’s hearing loss to name a few. The willingness of most characters to use other characters for retaliation or pleasure, sad to say, did not feel over the top, such as Edith using Grace to hurt Stoner or Stoner using his students to have Lomax reinstate his seminars.

The novel has been categorized as an academic novel and early in the book I thought it didn’t matter what the professional setting was since there are similar politics in any profession. Later, though, I realized that William Stoner not only had to be cast as a teacher but his subject had to be English—Williams uses the book to make a statement on literature’s potential. While studying literature in college, Stoner

would feel that he was out of time, as he had felt that day in class when Archer Sloane had spoken to him [about the 73rd sonnet]. The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was compacted and from which he could not escape, and had no wish to escape.

Those moments of otherness, standing outside of time, happen a few times in the book and, in addition to communing with those no longer living, provide a balm to Stoner. Those moments of otherness occur in additional ways:

Once, late, after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything—the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars—seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness.

Those moments of otherness, of standing outside himself, provide Stoner a Woolf-like moment when delight can race over the floor of the mind and announce “It is enough!” In addition to literature and nature, Stoner’s experience of love causes another “gentle flux of sensation” similar to the previous moments of otherness.

Just as Stoner explains to his students that there is poetry in grammar and other places we don’t expect, Williams shows there is poetry within moments of our life we don’t anticipate. These moments keep Stoner’s life from being tragic, even when the moment is something as simple as his daughter’s face absorbing the light in his study while he worked. With Stoner, John Williams makes good on equating the study of literature and language with investigating the mystery of the mind and heart.

Update: I mentioned other online reviews but failed to link to any of them. I'll correct that now, picking up a few additional reviews I just found. Feel free to let me know of other links to comments on Stoner and I'll be happy to include them in the list:

Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus
Donald Brown at blogocentrism
David Auerbach at waggish
zhiv
John Self's Asylum
Stephen Elliott's comments at Maud Newton
Ryan Williams reviews Stoner and Butcher's Crossing
Review at The Mookse and the Gripes

Butcher's Crossing discussion

The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
by Albert Bierstadt (1863)
Picture source

Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes recently reviewed John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing, prodding me to look for the book in our library system. Fortunately they had one copy available and it is everything he claims. Trevor covers many of the parts I wanted to address while avoiding what drives the last half of the book (which I’ll try to do too). Fortunately The New York Review of Books released a recent version of Butcher’s Crossing, although if this is the version you read skip the introduction by Michelle Latiolais—it is painfully embarrassing.

William Andrews, a third year Harvard student and son of a Unitarian Church lay minister, for reasons unclear to himself, seeks to experience a freedom and a vigor he found lacking at home in Boston. Under the spell of Emerson and others he heads west and ends up financing and riding along on a buffalo hunt to the Colorado Territory. While Williams highlights the destruction involved as the country moved west, he avoids a simple “innocence lost” tale. There was a high price paid for the westward movement, not just on the land and resources but on those settling the area. The Forward quotations, one by Emerson and one by Melville, remind today’s reader, insulated as we are, that nature can heal and destroy. Nature may judge “like a god all men that come to her”, but it can be an arbitrary, indifferent, and harsh adjudicator. Will, in searching for “the source and preserver of his world, a world which seemed to turn ever in fear away from its source, rather than search it out,” finds more than he was looking for as well as reason to fear. Questions, unasked but implied in those Forward quotes, circle around this power of nature—what does it take to tame or transcend it? What is the cost of taming it?

Andrews, warned that he will come back different from this outing declares “I will only become myself!” For precisely that reason he should have been more concerned at what he would ultimately find. His previous experiences with nature had been restricted to short walks from the college campus and engravings in books and magazines, both of which only hint at what he will see and experience out west. In addition to the power of nature, one of Williams’ themes revolves around not just what we know and learn but, just as importantly, when we learn it. Andrews is constantly looking for something, although he is hard-pressed to express exactly what it is he’s looking for. Although not a strict Transcendentalist, his actions demonstrate a belief in nature and intuition to elevate (or at least placate) his spiritual state. Wanting to encounter nature in its full force in order to become one with it will be a rude awakening. He is able to survive on inner courage and experienced help, proving he has what it takes to belong in the West. The “what it takes” is key and, as he finds out, has little to do with his idealization of nature.

Here are a few quotes from the book, this one as the hunting group approaches the Rockies:

Andrews felt that the mountains drew them onward, and drew them with increasing intensity as they came nearer, as if they were a giant lodestone whose influence increased to the degree that it was more nearly approached. As they came nearer he had again that feeling that he was being absorbed, included in something with which he had had no relation before; but unlike the feeling of absorption he had experienced on the anonymous prairie, this feeling was one which promised, however vaguely, a richness and a fulfillment for which he had no name.

That name will elude him, as indicated during his participation in the hunt:

During the last hour of the stand he came to see Miller as a mechanism, an automaton, moved by the moving herd; and he came to see Miller’s destruction of the buffalo, not as a lust for blood or a lust for the hides or a lust for what the hides would bring, or even at last the blind lust of fury that toiled darkly within him—he came to see the destruction as a cold, mindless response to the life in which Miller had immersed himself. And he looked upon himself, crawling dumbly after Miller upon the flat bed of the valley, picking up the empty cartridges that he spent, tugging the water keg, husbanding the rifle, cleaning it, offering it to Miller when he needed it—he looked upon himself, and did not know who he was, or where he went.

When leaving the valley in the Spring, Will finds that “he would be leaving something behind, something that might have been precious to him, had he been able to know what it was.” Understanding and comprehension elude many of the characters. Even worse, several characters are driven to actual or near madness or to a desolate nihilism (the latter including the hide trader McDonald):

“Young people,” McDonald said contemptuously. “You always think there’s something to find out.”

“Yes sir,” Andrews said.

“Well, there’s nothing,” McDonald said. “You get born, and you nurse on lies, and you get weaned on lies, and you learn fancier lies in school. You live all your life on lies, 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. Only you ain’t done it, because the lies told you there was something else. Then you know you could have had the world, because you’re the only one that knows the secret; only then it’s too late. You’re too old.”

Williams avoids judgment in the book, preferring to present the struggle to tame the West as a mirror to the human soul. Just as man is capable of heroic and horrific deeds, often at the same time, so reads our history.

A highly recommended read, and I look forward to reading Williams’ other two books, Stoner and Augustus soon.