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Not a Review of AUGUSTUS by John Williams

John Williams—no, the other one—was a little-known instructor of creative writing at the University of Denver who published only a pawful of books in his life. When he died in 1994 he was barely a footnote in the annals of American letters, but thanks to New York Review Books, the publishing industry’s Criterion Collection, Williams’ stature has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. His three major novels, all reissued by NYRB, have garnered him a posthumous reputation as a storyteller of uncanny insight, a writer of stoical craftsmanship, underneath which simmers a rare literary potency. Butcher’s Crossing is a Western that draws a knife across Ralph Waldo Emerson’s throat and leaves the American frontier and the national psyche doused by a pitch-black arterial spray. Stoner is a campus novel that by some mysterious alchemical sleight-of-hand manages to be both transcendentally idealistic and heartbreakingly realistic. Then there’s Williams’ final novel, Augustus, an historical fiction that is more believable than most histories, a tale of absolute power and its ultimate impotency. And it’s in Augustus that John Williams evinces the full power of fiction.

If you know me at all, you know how nerdily I obsess over Roman history, so you may suspect that my opinion of this book will be biased in its favor. But actually my standards for historical fiction are probably too high because I’m a history buff. I despise it when fiction ignores or rewrites history to accommodate a plot that could be just as easily applied to a contemporary or imaginary setting. As many people wiser than I have said, fiction is a lie told to reveal a greater truth. Why not take the historical truth and meld it to lies of characterization, to supposed motivations that the historical record never touches upon? Why write historical fiction if not to cast a little light onto history’s shadows? If not to outline those slender threads that will always tether the way-back-when to the here-and-now? That’s exactly what Williams does in Augustus, putting the distant and elusive under a lens that makes it immediate and knowable.

Given his subject, it’s only fitting that Augustus is John Williams’ most ambitious work. Augustus is a remote and larger-than-life figure, and the motivations of Rome’s first emperor have long puzzled historians. It’s hard to fathom how the definitive enlightened despot could so completely embody those words that to a contemporary mind reside squarely in mutual exclusivity. He’s a lot like Charles Foster Kane, an inscrutable character of intimidating stature and authority, simultaneously driven by an unquenchable thirst for power and a high-minded opposition to injustice, and as Orson Welles revealed his mercurial protagonist through the perspectives of others, so does Williams reveal his. The multiple points of view, with their unique personalities and prejudices, underline the oft-contradictory facets of a great and terrible man whose gravity holds those voices in his orbit.

Williams employs an epistolary framework to erect his panoramic and microcosmic view of Rome’s first emperor, and it enriches the reading experience in multiple ways. Firstly, it enhances the verisimilitude of the entire work. Some of our best primary sources on Roman history are the extant letters of those who lived it: Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and such. The epistolary structure creates the illusion that we’re reading a genuine first-hand account of Augustus’ life. The approach also enables a breezy economy of storytelling. Strabo of Amasia’s letter fears how Brutus will react to Augustus’ proscriptions, then Brutus’ letter to Augustus is the reaction, then Agrippa’s account of Philippi closes the matter and sets up the inevitable breakdown between Augustus and Antony. But each letter is flavored with a unique energy. Each individual is animated with the pure music of the written word. Agrippa’s starched military man, Maecenus’ cynical dandy, Salvidienus’ betrayed idealist, Piso’s sinister toady, Flaccus’ pretentious gossip. The entire novel is a sumptuous potpourri of character study.

Unlike Charles Foster Kane, Augustus is granted his own voice. After 260 pages of impressions from others who, no matter how close they are to him, can never truly know the most powerful man in the world, the Revered One speaks to us directly. Through a letter to his old friend, the only friend still alive, Nicolaus of Damascus, we meet a man who has only days left to live. He is dying of a life of regret. What begins as a simple thank-you note for some dates quickly becomes an epigraph in Augustus’ own hand. He confides the story of an idealistic youth who was handed the keys to the kingdom, who recognized the weight of the burden, and committed himself to the inexorable sacrifices he would have to make.

“When I was young, I would have said that loneliness and secrecy were forced upon me. I would have been in error… I chose to enclose myself in the half-formed dream of a destiny no one could share, and thus abandoned the possibility of that kind of human friendship which is so ordinary that it is never spoken of, and thus is seldom cherished.”

Now, in his twilight, with the wisdom that comes too late to us, he could not have foreseen the emotional toll taken by his loneliness and secrecy. With no companionship but from the ghosts of loved ones he had carved into pawns, he knows that the order he imposed upon a chaotic world has become his Frankenstein’s monster, and the monster has enslaved its creator. The most powerful man in the world is powerless against his responsibility.

Williams gives believable and fully fleshed voice to unknowable authority, but even more memorably he gives voice to the ultimate victim of that authority. Augustus imposed an involuntary responsibility on his daughter, Julia. She was married off repeatedly to the men who would succeed Augustus and ensure the survival of his orderly vision for Rome. When she rebelled against the princeps’ strict morality laws by cuckolding Tiberius and bedding half the men in Rome, he banished her and never set eyes on her again. Like her father, the historical Julia has become trapped in a popular image, one of wanton harlotry and irresponsibility. 

But through a novelist’s prose Julia becomes a full human being and the book’s most vivid and sympathetic character. Her story is entirely about her quest for agency, for the desire to lead her own life, to find value in herself, for herself, beyond her father’s political machinations.

“It was after the death of that good man, Marcus Agrippa, that Julia, daughter of Octavius Caesar, the August, discovered the power that had been hidden within her, and discovered the pleasure that she could take. And the pleasure she could take became her power, and it seemed to her that it was a power beyond that of her name and of her father. She became herself.”

The relationship between father and daughter is not the calculated arrangement undone by rebellion as history has cast it. It is a tragic love story between two people who want to make each other happy but can only sacrifice so much for one another.

In John Williams’ novel, Julia, alone among Roman women, gets to speak for and define herself. Augustus, a man who literally changed the course of human history, is free of his responsibility and can speak his mind. Augustus is not only a powerful story about power. It is a testament to the power of fiction. Fiction can correct the corrupted perspective of history, giving voice to the previously voiceless, revealing the humanity that impels history’s monsters, the heart and soul that is the foundation of the ignominy. And we are all stronger for it. 

NEWS FROM ROME #1

    As you may know from my Twitter feed (and if you’re not following, start before I send an angry old Russian woman to box your ears - @tonypetracci) I’ve been writing my first novel, The Trial of Marcus Aurelius, for over a year now. The first draft is finished, clocking in at roughly 143,000 words. I’ve got the story and the characters down, and now it’s time to tackle the yeoman’s work and make the book actually, you know, good. So, I thought I’d start updating you all on the book’s progress and my thoughts on my own evolution as a writer, what I’ve learned, what I still have to learn, and whatnot. But first thing’s first...

  SPOILER ALERT!!!

“Tony, you’re spoiling your novel before it’s even finished? What’s your problem?”

I’ll explain. The Trial of Marcus Aurelius is historical fiction, which means it’s a bunch of made-up stuff incorporating other stuff that really happened. But historical fiction is not a sub-genre I patronize frequently. The majority of what I’ve been exposed to has incorporated only the giant, textbook-sized events and made up the rest, usually contradicting the very nature of the characters its portraying. This, to put it mildly, frustrates me. In my opinion this signifies a disrespect for history and an inability to recognize a good story. History is brimming with fantastically rich stories that do not require a rewrite. The life of Marcus Aurelius is one of them, and I don’t intend to alter any more of it than I absolutely have to. I’ll change minor details and some of the chronology, nothing that will impact the story, but I will not rewrite history. I’ll extrapolate from it and expand upon it, not ignore or contradict it. All you have to do is read Marcus’ Wikipedia entry, and you’ll know everything that happens in the book. But that’s the plot, not the story, and if the novel works, it will work because of the story.

So... why am I writing a fictional biography of Marcus Aurelius?

A couple of years ago I was thinking about what I wanted my first novel to be. I had a few ideas and started to explore them, crafting characters, concocting plots, writing scenes, just trying to get a handle on one of those ideas and see which one took root. Eventually one of them did, a sort-of fantasy with some interesting, if not entirely original, ideas. I ended up writing a third of a draft before realizing that the story’s narrative and thematic foundation wasn’t as strong as I’d originally thought, and the ending I’d written myself into didn’t resolve anything. Maybe one day I’ll revisit it or recycle some of its elements into something else, but right now those pages are sitting in a drawer (I write longhand). 

While all this was going on, and I was writing short stories (which I will continue to do), I was listening to Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome podcast. I was already enthralled, being an enthusiast for ancient Rome, by the time Mike got to Marcus Aurelius’ reign. Mike is excellent at putting a beating human heart into the stone effigies we think of when we hear the names of the famous ancients. Inside Marcus, he put the heart of a long-suffering man forced by circumstance into a life he never wanted, but who rose to meet every challenge and fulfill his responsibility. But when we got to the end of Marcus’ reign, and he had to face the reality of his son Commodus succeeding him, Marcus’ story took a decidedly sad turn. Mike noted how, in his biography of Marcus, Frank McLynn illustrated how Marcus was faced with a stark decision regarding the issue of succession. He knew Commodus was going to be a train wreck of an emperor, but on the other hand, he couldn’t name anyone else. Commodus was his only son. If he named anyone else emperor, the parasites would come out of the woodwork once Marcus was dead and swallow Commodus with their talk of, “Who’s this usurper denying you your birthright? You’re the son of the great Marcus Aurelius! YOU should be draped in the purple!” And Commodus would go, “Yeah!” Before long... civil war. It had happened before, and it would happen again. Therefore Marcus had to name Commodus as his heir... unless he had to name someone else because Commodus wasn’t around to be his heir. So, Marcus either had to name Commodus his successor, or kill his own son. 

What must that have felt like, I thought. You dedicate your entire life to fulfilling the gravest responsibility your world can offer someone, against your own wishes, your own desires. In the end you have to make a decision that will ensure all your work was not in vain, and you can’t do it. What would’ve been running through Marcus’ mind as he lay on his deathbed, the Antonine Plague eating away his body? I started reading more about Marcus, and everything I found further convinced me that Marcus' life was a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions. I started writing, figuring out the characters and the story and the tone, everything. But I knew that, as a writer, I needed to find my own personal avenue into the story, that deep connection that makes me, as the creator, emotionally and psychologically invested in this story. Eventually I found it. What was it? None of your business. But as soon as I had it, I knew that The Trial of Marcus Aurelius was going to be my first novel.

My goal is to provide new updates every couple of weeks. I’ll probably focus on some different aspect of the work with each new update. I also have a lot of ideas about how I’m going to try to drum up interest in potential readers -- marketing ideas, that sort of thing -- and I’ll let you know about those when it comes time. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. If nothing else, I hope these updates get you a little excited about the prospect of what the novel could be and make you more inclined to check it out once it’s done. But keep coming back here. I’ve got short stories I’ll keep posting too, and for godsake, TWITTER: @tonypetracci.

Thanks for reading, and don’t be the internet.