Like almost all first-order imaginative literature produced in the Soviet Union, the book could not be published there. Mikhail Suslov, a powerful member of the Politburo, said that it was unlikely to be published for another 200 or 300 years. History intervened to squash this prediction, yet in sad fact Grossman, who died of stomach cancer, did not live to see his great novel in print.
As Tolstoy did in War and Peace, Grossman in Life and Fate does not hesitate to bring in historical characters: Adolf Eichmann, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and actual German and Russian generals appear in the novel’s pages. An unforgettable two chapters in the middle of the book describe, in an all but unbearable yet utterly persuasive way, the experience of going to the gas chambers.
In this novel, Grossman is able to keep two large balls in the air at all times: the conduct of the war and life under the two fascisms, German and Russian, so that throughout the spiritual confrontation of the fragile soul of the individual and the colossus that is the State plays out. This confrontation at the heart of Life and Fate is what gives the novel its grandeur.
Life and Fate is a novel of 871 pages in its American edition (translated by Robert Chandler, New York Review of Books Classics), over the course of which there are many bitter smiles, but no laughs whatsoever. A chronicle of the past century’s two evil engines of destruction—Soviet communism and German fascism—the novel is dark yet earns its right to depression. But it depresses in the way that all genuinely great art does—through an unflinching view of the truth, which includes all the awfulness of which human beings are capable and also the splendor to which in crises they can attain. A great book, Life and Fate is a book only a Russian could write.
Memoirs of Hadrian
(2010)
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.
Its 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 ce 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.
Charnwood’s Lincoln
(2014)
Books about Abraham Lincoln are legion and usually lengthy. The most famous of these books and the longest is perhaps also the worst: Carl Sandburg’s multivolumed biography, a repository of folklore and myth-making that Edmund Wilson called “the cruelest thing that happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth.” Lincoln books continually—one is tempted to write “continuously”—appear. Such is the appetite for these books that an old joke among publishers had it that a sure-fire American best-seller would have the title “Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog.”
The best book about Lincoln was written not by an American but by an Englishman named Lord Charnwood. His Abraham
Lincoln (1916) is a work in the distinguished tradition of brilliant books by foreign writers on American subjects. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Lord Bryce’s The American Commonwealth and George Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States are books in this line. These foreign observers were able to tell us things about ourselves that we Americans were likely to overlook or perhaps did not wish to know.
Born Godfrey Rathbone Benson (1864–1945), later a member of Parliament and an Oxford don, Lord Charnwood was something of an Americanophile, having also written a book on Theodore Roosevelt. He wrote his Lincoln biography in the middle of World War I, a time when the world seemed to be coming apart, as it had seemed to Americans during the Civil War some 60 years earlier.
Lord Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln has a universal appeal, though it was originally written for an English audience. The English much admired Lincoln. True, at the time of the American Civil War, many aristocratic Englishmen sided with the South owing to the region’s aristocratic pretensions, with Charles Darwin and Lord Tennyson being two notable exceptions. But workers in the English textile industry, feeling a kinship with the slaves of the South, sided with the North in the war, even though it was against their self-interest to do so.
Lord Charnwood’s main emphasis in Abraham Lincoln is on character analysis and political philosophy. His decision to place it there was a wise one, for it enlarges the biography’s scope and lends it a Plutarchian gravity that helps give the book its standing as a masterpiece.
The concise portraits of the subsidiary players in the drama that was the Civil War are not the least of the book’s pleasures. Lord Charnwood writes of Millard Fillmore that he
had an appearance of grave and benign wisdom . . . but he was a pattern of that outwardly dignified, yet nerveless and gutless and heartless respectability, which was more dangerous to America at that period than political recklessness or want of scruple.
Franklin Pierce he finds a figure of “sheer, deleterious insignificance.” Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, “must have been a good man before he fell in love with his goodness.” Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune during the Civil War years, is described as “too opinionated to be quite honest,” a formulation worth contemplating by all who hold unshakably firm opinions.
Lincoln was a moral hero for Lord Charnwood and his cause the only right one. The biographer believed the South’s “enduring heroism in a mistaken cause” to be nothing less than a “pathetic spectacle.” Yet he considered both Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson “men of genius,” and superior to any military leaders on the other side. He recognized the high quality of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, but held a low opinion of Jefferson Davis, whose “fanatical narrowness” condemned him to a “progressive warping of his determined character.”
Great as Lord Charnwood’s admiration for Lincoln was, he never portrays him as an unvarnished hero, refraining from what he calls “frigid perfections.” He examines in careful detail Lincoln’s weaknesses, his small vanities and deficiencies. At the same time, he defends him against what he deems unjust criticisms. Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon refers to Lincoln’s ambition as “a little engine that knew no rest.” Lord Charnwood counters this by arguing that Lincoln was finally ambitious for the public weal. He writes:
If ambition means the eager desire for great opportunities, the depreciation of it, which has long been a commonplace of literature, and which may be traced back to the Epicureans, is a piece of cant which ought to be withdrawn from currency, and ambition, commensurate with the powers which each man can discover in himself, should be frankly recognized as a part of Christian duty.
Lord Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln efficiently recounts Lincoln’s youth and largely self-administered education, improbable rise in politics, complex relations with military commanders and cabinet members, and assassination, without neglecting his serene temperament and the philosophical outlook that governed his conduct through the Civil War. He devotes many pages to scrutiny of Lincoln’s letters, debates and speeches. Rightly so, for Lincoln’s prose style, which he acquired through careful reading of Shakespeare, Euclid, and the Bible, made him one of the great American writers.
Of the power of Lincoln’s speeches, Lord Charnwood writes:
It was the distinction of Lincoln—a man lacking much of the knowledge which statesmen are supposed to possess, and capable of blundering and hesitation about details—first, that . . . he was free from ambiguity of thought or faltering of will, and further, that upon his difficult path, amid bewildering and terrifying circumstances, he was able to take with him the minds of very many very ordinary men.
The grandeur of Abraham Lincoln, in Lord Charnwood’s view, is that he put the need to preserve the union before his party, his family, his own ambitions. He prosecuted a war in which 1/32nd of the nation’s population was killed without ever showing hatred for the other side. It was not men but slavery he hated. Yet his hatred, as Lord Charnwood writes, “left him quite without the passion of moral indignation against the slave owners, in whose guilt the whole country, North and South, seemed to him an accomplice.” Malice wasn’t available to Lincoln; mercy came naturally to him. His magnanimity in forgiveness was another sign of his superiority. He was magnificent in his lofty impersonality.
These words from the concluding paragraph of Lord Charnwood’s masterly biography capture Abraham Lincoln better than any I know:
For he was a citizen of that far country where there is neither aristocrat nor democrat. No political theory stands out from his words or actions; but they show a most unusual sense of the possible dignity of common men and common things. . . . If he had a theory of democracy it was contained in this condensed note which he wrote, perhaps as an autograph, a year or two before his presidency: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”
Great men and women do not always get the biographers they deserve. In Lord Charnwood, Abraham Lincoln found his.
Book of the Courtier
(2013)
The Book of the Courtier was an international bestseller from its publication in 1528 until the end of the eighteenth century. Going through no fewer than 150 editions, it was translated into French, Spanish, Dutch, English, German, Polish, and Latin. Twenty years in gestation, put through many revisions, the book, whose subject is the proper behavior of men and women at the courts of Renaissance princes, was written by Baldesar Castiglione, an aristocrat, soldier, and diplomat who died, at age fifty, less than a year after publication of his magnum opus.
Born into a wealthy family residing near Mantua, Castiglione was a contemporary and friend of Raphael, who painted a famous portrait of him. After serving at the court of Francesco Gonzaga, Castiglione took up residence at the court of Urbino, ruled by Duke Guidobaldo da Montrefeltro. Known for its concerts, plays, poetry readings, and festivals, the richness and refinement of Urbino’s cultural life was overseen by the Duke’s wife Elizebetta.
The Book of the Courtier is set on four different nights at the court of Urbino. Several people, all drawn from life, have gathered for a discussion of the qualities the ideal courtier should possess. The only two people conspicuously missing from the proceedings are the author, Castiglione, and the prince himself, Duke Guidobaldo. The mistress of ceremonies, directing the flow of talk, is the Duchess.
Set out in dialogue form, the book does not always, as we should say today, stay on message. Often it veers into lengthy digressions on the nature of women, on what constitutes perfect love, and on the true meaning of a kiss. Castiglione informs us that his book merely “rehearses some discussions which took place among men singularly qualified in such matters.” Many of those who hold the floor have conflicting perspectives, even op
posing views. Little is definitively settled. Often Castiglione leaves complex questions, issues, problems to be settled only in the mind of his readers.
In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt claims that the true subject of The Book of the Courtier is the perfection of the nobleman at court. He summarizes the skills the courtier must acquire. Apart from mastering the arts of war, which are primary, “the courtier,” in Burckhardt’s summary, “must be at home in all noble sports, among them running, leaping, swimming and wrestling; he must, above all things, be a good dancer and, as a matter of course, an accomplished rider.” For Castiglione, the courtier should be acquainted with great literature, know music to the point of being able to play an instrument, be steeped in the arts of oratory, and in conversation employ exquisite tact and apply the art, in his memorable phrase, of “cheating expectations.”
Not only must the courtier acquire all these skills, but he must also avoid any suggestion of exhibitionism or braggadocio in his demonstration of them. He must display them with a casual air of easy mastery. The ideal courtier, Castiglione writes, “must put every effort and diligence into outstripping others a little, so that he may be always recognized as better than the rest.” But he must do so without showing the least strain or hint of affectation. He is to accomplish this through sprezzatura, the art of artlessness, or the art that hides art.
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