Historical fiction of two very different types
Catherine, Called Birdy: Charming film based on a YA novel I have not read, starring a familiar supporting cast, including Billie Piper as our heroine's mother and Andrew Scott as her mostly-useless-but-redeems-himself-late-in-the-day father, and Lesley Sharpe as her nurse. It''s a "days in the life of a medieval girl" kind of story with cheerfully anachronoistic music but surprisingly well done clothing that lives from its teenage first person narrator's brash charm. Early on, my inner nitpicker quibbled that of Birdy's father is in financial trouble, wouldn't he want to marry his sons to rich brides instead of trying to marry his daughter whom he has to provide a dowry for, but hey, this is not a film pretending at historical realism anyway (which ironically might have allowed it NOT to go for the ultra brown Rembrandt look of medieval tv shows and movies that's so in fashion and instead go for actual colours, yay!), and so I shut that voice up anyway. (As it's not pretending at seriousness, I also was reasonably certain Birdy aka Catherine would not have to put up with the marriage to a gross middle aged man, which is not what you want from this kind of story.) It does the usual growing-up-story tropes ( rebelliousness against and tricking smug or overbearing adults, fallout and reconciliation with best friend(s), getting confronted with actions as seen by others at crucial point, falling of pedestals, reevaluating others, etc.) and does them very enjoyably.
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. This is one of those classics I've tried as a teenager, abandoned, and meant to try again years later but never did, until now. I think what threw me back in the day, and to a degree still throws me, is the comparison to I, Claudius, with both named not just as fictional memoirs of Roman Emperors but fiction that became so popular it still to a large degree influences how people think of the Emperor(s) in question, despite being fiction. On that basis, it's true, but the novels are completely different. I'm not talking about accuracy on either author's part. They both did their homework, to put it flippantly (ironically, Graves' book is mostly based on Suetonius, Hadrian's secretary who got fired), and they both still very much used the material they had to do their own thing with it. But Graves' novel - or novels, if you count "Claudius the God" as a separate one instead of as part II split for publication reasons - while certainly drawing a strong portrait of its narrator is more of a (wildly entertaining) multi generation family soap opera than concerned solely with the fictional memoirist who tells it. (The legendary tv adaption strengthens those traits and chucks out more literary bits like Claudius interviewing historians Asinius Pollio and Livy for their impressions of Julius Caesar, but those traits are there in the book already.) As a result, there are plenty of other memorable characters around: Livia and Caligula as athe main villains, of course, but also, say, Claudius' mother Antonia (with an iron clad integrity but no sympathy for her handicaped son), or Tiberius, or Claudius' friend Herod Agrippa.
The Memoirs of Hadrian, otoh, is strictly about Hadrian and no one else. The only other person whom you get an idea about as a character is his lover Antinous, and even there you have to put a question mark. (More about this later.) Everyone else, no matter whether our narrator likes them - lilke his patroness and Trajan's wife Plotina, whom he largely owes his throne to and basically sees as a twin soul - or dislikes them (his own wife, his brother-in-law) remain paper thin and never come alive. According to Yourcenar's appendix, this is a deliberate choice, as "Hadrian himself does not see them" as deeper than that. (At a different point in the appendix, she also says that writing a woman's memoirs, like, say, Plotina's, would be iimpossible, because a woman would not tell her story, lest she stops being a woman. Presumably she means a Roman woman, but you know, Agrippina the Younger (sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero) actually did write her memoirs, though they are lost now.) Fine, but to this reader, it makes the book a lesser novel, its reputation as the ultimate masterpiece in historical fiction not withstanding. I want memorable characters in my fiction, historical or otherwise, more than one.
Which is not to say that "Memoirs of Hadrian" isn't impressive in what it chooses to do and does. Given Hadrian's passion for philsophy, specifically Greek philosophy, it's perhaps not surprising that our author delivers on philosophical musings, but while that's someting I imagine doable for a well read 20th century French writer, what truly impressed me is that she also gets across a passion that's bound to be less shared by the majority of her readers and likely herself, i.e. the hunt. And she doesn't do the post-Claudius (the novel) thing where every sympathetic Roman character has to be a secret republican and/or not ambitious - her Hadrian freely admits that yes, absolutely, he wanted that throne, he was full of burning ambition.
Now, any take on Hadrian is bound to confront two particular aspects which make him controversial to this day:
1 a) On the one hand, Hadrian instead of continuing with the military expansion of the Roman Empire not only stopped it but without a military defeat necessitating this, in some cases withdrew behind the lines of Trajan's conquests. (This in retrospect was very wise and avoided overextension for some more generations.) He was the most well travelled Emperor of them all, visiting all the provinces, and elevated their legal status while, shock horror for the Senate, downgrading that of Italy to the same type of administration, thus changing the structure from "Italy and her colonies" to "Empire consisting of many different countries". One of the traits of his which sources can agree on his boundless curiosity, and you can see the Villa Adriana when you visit it today incorporating/paying tribute to the many different cultures within the Roman Empire of his day. So far, so multicultural and sympathetic. But.
1 b) On the other hand, there's his treatment of the Jews, before, during and after the Third Roman-Jewish War. Which was brutal to genocidal, both in terms the people killed and the very clear intention to destroy the Jewish culture in totem. Remaing Isral Syria Paleastina and building a Graeco-Roman city named Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem is the most overtly symbolic here, but by no means all.
2.) The relationship with Antinous. Mind you, what was controversial in Hadrian's own day isn't controversial now, and vice versa, and Marguerita Yourcenar, who grappled with this novel, several versions of it, for decades, also has to be considered as writing within her life time. What the Romans found objectionable: Hadrian's open and unending grief for Antinous ("weeping like a woman"), his instant deification of Antinous when he did not instantly deify his sister Paulina who died around the same time. (Tells you something about the changes since Caligula's day. Caligula making his sister Drusilla a goddess was by his contemporaries seen as objectionable and a main reason why incest was assumed. By the time of Hadrian, not making one's late sister a goddess is the thing objected to.) And, of course: the idea that Hadrian would have continued with the relationship despite Antinous, at age 20, aging out of the erastes/eromenos model. What we think of objectionble now: Antinous' age when they meet, for starters - which was either 13 or 14 - and of course the massive power imbalance. (And that's leaving aside the question of Antinous' death, debated then and now with the already shaky surviving sources who write far later than Hadrian's disagreeing: did he dy by accident? Did he commit suicide? If so, why? Was he killed? We will never know.)
How Marguerite Yourcenar handles this:
Antinous: : on the one hand, she remains solidly within Hadrian's pov. Antinous' age would not have been a problem in Hadrian's world, so it's not one to the Hadrian of the novel. It's not explicitly said whether they become lovers instantly or later, when Antinous is older, mind, but then again, Hadrian repeatedly - usualy when his grief is especially intense - refers to him as a child, even when Antinous is 19 or 20. Antinous is the one character other than Hadrian who comes across, but the problem here is that what he comes across is basically: the love interest. He's beautiful, he's loving, he's instinctive and just interested in Hadrian and hunting; he never manages to learn Latin (or any other language but his native Greek). When he gets older, Hadrian confuses him by once organizing a threesome with a (female) courtesan (preemptively wanting to signal he's okay with Antinous wanting to experiment, a current day reader is prone to assume), which he doesn't want, and in a short paragraph that's not returned to ever again, a guilt ridden Hadrian even says that in these later years, he even slapped Antinous a very few times, but that Antinous only adored him more. In short, today, this really reads like an abusive sitiuation, not just but also because of the age factor. Did Yourcenar intend it? Given this article about her own life, I'm not sure, for:
In 1978, a year before Frick’s death, Petite Plaisance was visited by a French television crew that included a young American photographer, Jerry Wilson, who was the director’s assistant. Yourcenar was seventy-four, Wilson was twenty-nine, and he became the last love of her life. Most of her friends disapproved; Wilson didn’t like them, either. (“He hated me,” Joan Howard said to me, “and I came to hate him, too.”) Yourcenar didn’t care. She travelled with Wilson to Europe, to Asia, to Africa. At times, she thought of herself as Hadrian and Wilson as Antinous. The relationship may even have been consummated, or so say some of Wilson’s friends. Wilson drank heavily, and he sometimes hit her. Still, in her mind, it was worth it. Wilson died of aids in 1986. Yourcenar grieved horribly, and then, two months later, she was back on the road, this time with one of his friends.
Of the various versions of Antinous' death, Yourcenar goes with "kills himself because he thinks he's saving Hadrian this way in a mystical fashion" but gives just enough narrative hints that psychological issues, which Hadrian did not see in time, contributed.
Hadrian and the Jews: That actually is the greater problem for me. Not least because I don't know whether or not it would have been solvable without breaking the first person pov, i.e. the form Yourcenar chose to tell her story in. Obviously Hadrian thinks he's in the right there. As the result, he describes the Jews as a bunch of hateful fanatics who for some unfathomable reason reject the benefits of Philhellenic culture, reject every attempt at being reasoned with, and end up forcing him to go against his conviction of letting everyone do their own thing within the Empire. That he has to conduct a brutal war against them, thus ending his golden age of peace, is seen as his tragedy, not theirs. Was this likely what historical Hadrian thought? Probably. Do I still, as a reader, object to a novelist giving us this pov unfiltered by any other character objecting with good arguments to show the narrative isn't actually on board with this judgment, in a novel written after the Holocaust? You bet. I mean, if you write a first person pov, it's tricky to get across your narrator might be unreliable, but there are enough authors who pull it off, and I dare say the first female member of the Academie francaise would have managed if she'd wanted to. But: in her afterword, she mentions a quote to explain what originally attracted her to Hadrian and his world, describing it at the time when the belief in the Roman gods was dead and before Christianity took over on a massive (and state endorsed) scale, where the human being was central. So I can't help but wonder whether the novel's presentation of the Bar Kochbar Rebellion in particular and the Jews in general is due to an authorial dislike of monotheism. But be that as it may, it did stick in my readerly throat and would not let itself be removed, no matter how many elegantly written philosophical musings were around it.
In conclusion: while I can see why this novel is a classic, it's not a novel for me.
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. This is one of those classics I've tried as a teenager, abandoned, and meant to try again years later but never did, until now. I think what threw me back in the day, and to a degree still throws me, is the comparison to I, Claudius, with both named not just as fictional memoirs of Roman Emperors but fiction that became so popular it still to a large degree influences how people think of the Emperor(s) in question, despite being fiction. On that basis, it's true, but the novels are completely different. I'm not talking about accuracy on either author's part. They both did their homework, to put it flippantly (ironically, Graves' book is mostly based on Suetonius, Hadrian's secretary who got fired), and they both still very much used the material they had to do their own thing with it. But Graves' novel - or novels, if you count "Claudius the God" as a separate one instead of as part II split for publication reasons - while certainly drawing a strong portrait of its narrator is more of a (wildly entertaining) multi generation family soap opera than concerned solely with the fictional memoirist who tells it. (The legendary tv adaption strengthens those traits and chucks out more literary bits like Claudius interviewing historians Asinius Pollio and Livy for their impressions of Julius Caesar, but those traits are there in the book already.) As a result, there are plenty of other memorable characters around: Livia and Caligula as athe main villains, of course, but also, say, Claudius' mother Antonia (with an iron clad integrity but no sympathy for her handicaped son), or Tiberius, or Claudius' friend Herod Agrippa.
The Memoirs of Hadrian, otoh, is strictly about Hadrian and no one else. The only other person whom you get an idea about as a character is his lover Antinous, and even there you have to put a question mark. (More about this later.) Everyone else, no matter whether our narrator likes them - lilke his patroness and Trajan's wife Plotina, whom he largely owes his throne to and basically sees as a twin soul - or dislikes them (his own wife, his brother-in-law) remain paper thin and never come alive. According to Yourcenar's appendix, this is a deliberate choice, as "Hadrian himself does not see them" as deeper than that. (At a different point in the appendix, she also says that writing a woman's memoirs, like, say, Plotina's, would be iimpossible, because a woman would not tell her story, lest she stops being a woman. Presumably she means a Roman woman, but you know, Agrippina the Younger (sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero) actually did write her memoirs, though they are lost now.) Fine, but to this reader, it makes the book a lesser novel, its reputation as the ultimate masterpiece in historical fiction not withstanding. I want memorable characters in my fiction, historical or otherwise, more than one.
Which is not to say that "Memoirs of Hadrian" isn't impressive in what it chooses to do and does. Given Hadrian's passion for philsophy, specifically Greek philosophy, it's perhaps not surprising that our author delivers on philosophical musings, but while that's someting I imagine doable for a well read 20th century French writer, what truly impressed me is that she also gets across a passion that's bound to be less shared by the majority of her readers and likely herself, i.e. the hunt. And she doesn't do the post-Claudius (the novel) thing where every sympathetic Roman character has to be a secret republican and/or not ambitious - her Hadrian freely admits that yes, absolutely, he wanted that throne, he was full of burning ambition.
Now, any take on Hadrian is bound to confront two particular aspects which make him controversial to this day:
1 a) On the one hand, Hadrian instead of continuing with the military expansion of the Roman Empire not only stopped it but without a military defeat necessitating this, in some cases withdrew behind the lines of Trajan's conquests. (This in retrospect was very wise and avoided overextension for some more generations.) He was the most well travelled Emperor of them all, visiting all the provinces, and elevated their legal status while, shock horror for the Senate, downgrading that of Italy to the same type of administration, thus changing the structure from "Italy and her colonies" to "Empire consisting of many different countries". One of the traits of his which sources can agree on his boundless curiosity, and you can see the Villa Adriana when you visit it today incorporating/paying tribute to the many different cultures within the Roman Empire of his day. So far, so multicultural and sympathetic. But.
1 b) On the other hand, there's his treatment of the Jews, before, during and after the Third Roman-Jewish War. Which was brutal to genocidal, both in terms the people killed and the very clear intention to destroy the Jewish culture in totem. Remaing Isral Syria Paleastina and building a Graeco-Roman city named Aelia Capitolina on the ruins of Jerusalem is the most overtly symbolic here, but by no means all.
2.) The relationship with Antinous. Mind you, what was controversial in Hadrian's own day isn't controversial now, and vice versa, and Marguerita Yourcenar, who grappled with this novel, several versions of it, for decades, also has to be considered as writing within her life time. What the Romans found objectionable: Hadrian's open and unending grief for Antinous ("weeping like a woman"), his instant deification of Antinous when he did not instantly deify his sister Paulina who died around the same time. (Tells you something about the changes since Caligula's day. Caligula making his sister Drusilla a goddess was by his contemporaries seen as objectionable and a main reason why incest was assumed. By the time of Hadrian, not making one's late sister a goddess is the thing objected to.) And, of course: the idea that Hadrian would have continued with the relationship despite Antinous, at age 20, aging out of the erastes/eromenos model. What we think of objectionble now: Antinous' age when they meet, for starters - which was either 13 or 14 - and of course the massive power imbalance. (And that's leaving aside the question of Antinous' death, debated then and now with the already shaky surviving sources who write far later than Hadrian's disagreeing: did he dy by accident? Did he commit suicide? If so, why? Was he killed? We will never know.)
How Marguerite Yourcenar handles this:
Antinous: : on the one hand, she remains solidly within Hadrian's pov. Antinous' age would not have been a problem in Hadrian's world, so it's not one to the Hadrian of the novel. It's not explicitly said whether they become lovers instantly or later, when Antinous is older, mind, but then again, Hadrian repeatedly - usualy when his grief is especially intense - refers to him as a child, even when Antinous is 19 or 20. Antinous is the one character other than Hadrian who comes across, but the problem here is that what he comes across is basically: the love interest. He's beautiful, he's loving, he's instinctive and just interested in Hadrian and hunting; he never manages to learn Latin (or any other language but his native Greek). When he gets older, Hadrian confuses him by once organizing a threesome with a (female) courtesan (preemptively wanting to signal he's okay with Antinous wanting to experiment, a current day reader is prone to assume), which he doesn't want, and in a short paragraph that's not returned to ever again, a guilt ridden Hadrian even says that in these later years, he even slapped Antinous a very few times, but that Antinous only adored him more. In short, today, this really reads like an abusive sitiuation, not just but also because of the age factor. Did Yourcenar intend it? Given this article about her own life, I'm not sure, for:
In 1978, a year before Frick’s death, Petite Plaisance was visited by a French television crew that included a young American photographer, Jerry Wilson, who was the director’s assistant. Yourcenar was seventy-four, Wilson was twenty-nine, and he became the last love of her life. Most of her friends disapproved; Wilson didn’t like them, either. (“He hated me,” Joan Howard said to me, “and I came to hate him, too.”) Yourcenar didn’t care. She travelled with Wilson to Europe, to Asia, to Africa. At times, she thought of herself as Hadrian and Wilson as Antinous. The relationship may even have been consummated, or so say some of Wilson’s friends. Wilson drank heavily, and he sometimes hit her. Still, in her mind, it was worth it. Wilson died of aids in 1986. Yourcenar grieved horribly, and then, two months later, she was back on the road, this time with one of his friends.
Of the various versions of Antinous' death, Yourcenar goes with "kills himself because he thinks he's saving Hadrian this way in a mystical fashion" but gives just enough narrative hints that psychological issues, which Hadrian did not see in time, contributed.
Hadrian and the Jews: That actually is the greater problem for me. Not least because I don't know whether or not it would have been solvable without breaking the first person pov, i.e. the form Yourcenar chose to tell her story in. Obviously Hadrian thinks he's in the right there. As the result, he describes the Jews as a bunch of hateful fanatics who for some unfathomable reason reject the benefits of Philhellenic culture, reject every attempt at being reasoned with, and end up forcing him to go against his conviction of letting everyone do their own thing within the Empire. That he has to conduct a brutal war against them, thus ending his golden age of peace, is seen as his tragedy, not theirs. Was this likely what historical Hadrian thought? Probably. Do I still, as a reader, object to a novelist giving us this pov unfiltered by any other character objecting with good arguments to show the narrative isn't actually on board with this judgment, in a novel written after the Holocaust? You bet. I mean, if you write a first person pov, it's tricky to get across your narrator might be unreliable, but there are enough authors who pull it off, and I dare say the first female member of the Academie francaise would have managed if she'd wanted to. But: in her afterword, she mentions a quote to explain what originally attracted her to Hadrian and his world, describing it at the time when the belief in the Roman gods was dead and before Christianity took over on a massive (and state endorsed) scale, where the human being was central. So I can't help but wonder whether the novel's presentation of the Bar Kochbar Rebellion in particular and the Jews in general is due to an authorial dislike of monotheism. But be that as it may, it did stick in my readerly throat and would not let itself be removed, no matter how many elegantly written philosophical musings were around it.
In conclusion: while I can see why this novel is a classic, it's not a novel for me.