Emperor of Novels – John Williams’ Augustus

John Williams’ (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner) final completed novel, Augustus, is quite simply the best book I have read all year. At school, an English teacher whose opinion I value highly once said that we know the best books because as soon as we finish them we want to start again. We have gained so much from them, yet we know that so much more lies within, deeper down. What separates these books from your standard ever-interpretable and unfathomably-deep Literary Classics is that these books seem to speak to us. They leave us a feeling of company – it is as if your soul is touched by another’s. If I didn’t have other books to read and exams to think about, I would read Augustus again right now. And then again, and again. It is simply that good. What follows is simply an explanation as to why that is.

Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus, was the first Roman Emperor and is a man widely considered one of the greatest leaders of all time. In Williams’ novel we follow Octavius, as he is usually called here, from his days as a youth, to his battles against his fellow Roman, Marcus Antonius, to his years of undivided power, when on all sides he faced political enemies who were determined to succeed him. Williams does not focus on the battles or on the violence – though both are here. Instead, Augustus’s struggle is to lead Rome and fulfil his duty. More than once is Rome named his daughter, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he feels he is failing her. Forced into violence, time and again, by the necessities of fate, Augustus retains control over Rome, but he watches his friends die, and becomes increasingly alone.

“It is too dark” – The Kaleidoscopic Form of Augustus

The first time I opened Augustus I closed it again immediately. The first thing I saw was a letter. What could be more boring than a novel of letters? I imagined ridiculous, unrealistic, epistolary novels from the 18^th century and gave a shudder. Yet I had the wrong idea entirely. Augustus is closer to those questions we sometimes find on history exams where we are asked to compare and contrast sources. We see an event through many different angles – that of a historian, an eyewitness memoir, perhaps a newspaper report or even a cartoon – and we must evaluate these sources against each other and try to determine what really happened and why. We must check for biases, for concealed information. In short, we must work for our knowledge.

Augustus works by the same principle. Williams weaves together truth and fiction, letters and diaries and proclamations and histories from all sorts of eminent Romans, to tell the story of Augustus’ life. As with Conrad’s Nostromo, we never seem to see Augustus himself, except through the eyes of others. We as readers are always having to think about what we read, to work from glimpses, as if through coloured glass, to guess at what the real man is like. Often, all we get is an image:

“I understand that he wants the letter. I hand it to him, and he turns away from us. The ring of officers breaks for him, and he walks down the hill. For a long time we watch him, a slight boyish figure walking on the deserted field, moving slowly, this way and that, as if trying to discover a way to go.”

The effect of this is incomparable. Augustus appears so vitally human precisely because we know him through confusion and uncertainty, just as we know every human being. No narrator will tell us who he is, just as no human being will tell us who they are either, except through their words and their actions. To create him as I read was one of the most exciting things about reading Augustus.

The Roman Touch – Philosophy, Morals and Nobility

I studied Latin at school. While I can’t pretend to have read Cicero, I did stumble through some Seneca and Livy. But anyone who has studied Latin will have a feel for the way that the Romans wrote. That poise, that composure and nobility of style runs through the entirety of Augustus. Not once did I have the impression it was not a Roman’s writing before my eyes. The Roman way of writing in some sense reflects their philosophical outlook. The Romans had something of a disdain for philosophy, compared to their illustrious Greek forbears. Roman philosophy is focused on the practical, the here-and-now questions of ethics much more than anything else. The most famous Roman thinkers, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, were both Stoics. Nobody in Augustus claims to be a Stoic, but all of the characters, whatever their actions, are motivated by high ideals – honour, duty, and patriotism.

It was perhaps a better time. Even Livia, Augustus’ wife, who is determined to secure the succession of her son Tiberius, is far more an antagonist than a villain. Like Cicero, another of Augustus’ opponents, she is a character whose values and hopes go against his. Both of them find value in the older Roman Republic and its ideas of family honour. In part, the tragedy of Augustus is that good people are politically divided because of incompatible values. It is noble – and reasonable – of Livia to write Tiberius such things as “You have a duty to yourself, to your country, to your name”. And there is a more than a hint of heroism in phrases like “Our futures are more important than our selves.” But what she wants necessitates the limiting of Augustus’ power, just as what he wants demands the limiting of her own.

Williams depicts all of his characters with force. They are real people, with their own motivations. Williams, I believe, is speaking when Maecenas writes to Livy against being a moralist. I shall quote it because it gives an idea of the moral tone of the novel:

“it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.”

Just as we need to piece together Augustus’ character from scraps and choice remarks, so too must we piece together judgements for ourselves, instead of relying on the author to tell us what to think. And as a result, it forces us to be active participants in the novel, making our own meaning out of what’s there.

Power and Necessity

No character here is good or evil, least of all Augustus himself. When you rule an empire you are forced, constantly, to act to secure your power against those who would wrest it from you. When those who went against Julius Caesar are finally punished by Marcus Antonius and Augustus, Cicero’s head is brought and placed at the rostrum in the Forum where once he had spoken so eloquently. The son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra is executed also, though he is only seventeen. Even Augustus’ own daughter, Julia, is forced repeatedly into unhappy marriages by her father to secure his political dominance, as are his own friends. All the time, we are faced with the question that Julia asks Augustus as she enters her final marriage:

“”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”.”

One of the novel’s perceptive observers writes that “Octavius Caesar is Rome; and that, perhaps, is the tragedy of his life”. His destiny is Rome, is power, and he does not grow corrupted by that power as so many others do. But in his fulfilment of his destiny, he loses the only things that ever gave him joy – his daughter, and his friends. Forced to choose between his private and his public duties, Augustus always chooses the latter, and eventually he is left all alone. When his old friends have died, he is surrounded by only those who lust after power. That is to say, people he cannot trust. And yet his body will not fail him, and he continues to grow old, all alone.

Julia

The story that, according to my copy’s introduction, was the seed out of which Augustus grew, was not Augustus’ own but that of his daughter, Julia. Augustus had no son, but his daughter was given an education in art and philosophy that at the time was reserved for sons alone. Julia is an extraordinary character, a woman whose existence was scrubbed away by history as best it could. Augustus loved her – and this love is truly touching – but perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel is how Julia, in spite of her knowledge and intelligence, ends up herself becoming a piece on the chessboard of her father’s Empire. And unlike him, who managed to survive to the end, Augustus was forced to let her be captured.

In the end, Augustus leaves us with a sense of limitations. Julia at one point says to her father the wonderful line “The power you have… cannot legislate against the passions of the human heart”. And it is true. Augustus cannot control the hearts of his people, whether friend or foe. In the same way, try as he might to bring peace to the Romans instead he is forced, time and time again, to spill their blood. “There is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness”. People fail repeatedly here. After all, we cannot know another’s heart, and perhaps we cannot even know our own. Augustus is a man determined to do good, and he does, but at great cost – to his health, to his friends and family. It is up to us as readers can say whether it was worth it.

Conclusion

I could write more but I will not. Augustus is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect novel I have ever read. I love it with a passion I struggle to put into words. Its nobility, its formal ingenuity, its gripping plot with tragedy and farce and all the rest together, its characters with their forceful existence, all this I love. John Williams’ absolutely stunning prose I love too. Augustus is a novel for now and forevermore. In its questions of power and necessity, in its praise of the value of friendship and love, in its exploration of the obscurity of knowledge and the unfathomability of the human heart, it is incomparable. If ever a post on this blog has proved for you a reason to go out and buy a book, let it be this one. It will blow you away.

For more on these themes, see my review of William’s earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing, and my comments on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Have you read Augustus, and what did you think of it if you have? What do you make of the final section of the work, where Augustus himself speaks? Does it undermine what comes before, or strengthen it?