photograph of the Antinous of the Archaeological Museum in Florence, purchased there in 1926, the young face gravely sweet.
From 1939 to 1948 the project was wholly abandoned. I thought of it at times, but with discouragement, and almost with indifference, as one thinks of the impossible. And with something like shame for ever having ventured upon such an undertaking.
The lapse into despair of a writer who does not write.
In the worst hours of apathy and dejection I would go for solace to Hartford’s fine museum, seeking out a Canaletto painting of Rome, the Pantheon standing brown and gold against the blue sky of a late afternoon in summer; and each time I would come away from it comforted, and once again at peace.
About the year 1941 I had discovered by chance, in an artists’ supply shop in New York, four Piranesi engravings which G … and I bought. One of them, a View of Hadrian’s Villa which I had not known before, is an interior of the chapel of Canopus, from which were taken in the Seventeenth Century the Antinous in Egyptian style and the accompanying basalt statues of priestesses, all to be seen today in the Vatican. The foreground shows a round structure, burst open like a skull, from which fallen trees and brush hang vaguely down, like strands of hair. The genius of Piranesi, almost mediumistic, has truly caught the element of hallucination here: he has sensed the long-continued rituals of mourning, the tragic architecture of an inner world. For several years I looked at this drawing almost daily, without a thought for my former enterprise, which I supposed that I had given up. Such are the curious detours of what is called oblivion.
In the spring of 1947, while sorting over some papers I burned the notes taken at Yale; they seemed to have become by that time completely useless.
Still, Hadrian’s name appears in an essay on Greek myth which I wrote in 1943 and which Roger Caillois published during those war years in Les Lettres Franfaises, in Buenos Aires. Then in 1945 the figure of the drowned Antinous, borne along somehow on that Lethean current, came again to the surface in an unfinished essay, Canticle of the Soul and its True Freedom, written just before the advent of a serious illness.
Keep in mind that everything recounted here is thrown out of perspective by what is left unsaid: these notes serve
[Hadrian 324a.jpg] Interior of the Pantheon, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
[Hadrian 324bc.jpg] Temple of Canope Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
[Hadrian 324d.jpg] Foundation Wall of Hadrian?s Tomb, Rome Engraving by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
only to mark the lacunae. There is nothing, for example, of what I was doing during those difficult years, nor of the thinking, the work, the worries and anxieties, or the joys; nor of the tremendous repercussion of external events and the perpetual testing of oneself upon the touchstone of fact. And I pass also in silence over the experiences of illness, and over other, more profound experiences which they bring in their train; and over the perpetual search for, or presence of, love.
Never mind. That disjunction, that break in continuity, that “night of the soul” which so many of us experienced at the time, each in his own way (and so often in far more tragic and final form than did I), was essential, perhaps, in order to force me into trying to bridge not only the distance which separated me from Hadrian, but, above all, the distance which separated me from my true self.
Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one’s self without thought of profit. During those years in an unfamiliar land I had kept on with the reading of authors from classical antiquity: the red or green cloth-bound volumes of Loeb-Heinemann editions had become a country of my own. Thus, since one of the best ways to reconstruct a man’s thinking is to rebuild his library, I had actually been working for years, without knowing it, to refurnish the bookshelves at Tibur in advance. Now I had only to imagine the swollen hands of a sick man holding the half-rolled manuscripts.
Do, from within, the same work of reconstruction which the nineteenth-century archaeologists have done from without.
In December of 1948 I received from Switzerland a trunk which I had stored there during the war, with its contents of family papers and letters some ten years old. I sat down by the fire to work my way through the debris, as if to take some gloomy inventory after a death. I passed several evenings alone at the task, undoing the separate packets and running through them before destroying that accumulation of correspondence with people whom I had forgotten, and who had forgotten me, some of them still alive, others dead. A few of the pages bore dates of a generation ago, and even the names had quite gone from my mind. As I unfolded and threw mechanically into the fire that exchange of dead thoughts between a Marie and a Francois or a Paul, long since disappeared, I came upon four or five typewritten sheets, the paper of which had turned yellow. The salutation told me nothing: “My dear Mark …” Mark… . What friend or love, what distant relative was this? I could not recall the name at all. It was several minutes before I remembered that Mark stood here for Marcus A urelius, and that I had in hand a fragment of the lost manuscript. From that moment there was no question but that this book must be taken up again, whatever the cost.
That same night I reopened two of the volumes which had also just been returned to me, remnants of a library in large part lost. One was Dio Cassius in Henri Estienne’s beautiful printing, and the other a volume of an ordinary edition of Historia Augusta, the two principal sources for Hadrian’s life, purchased at the time that I was intending to write this book. Everything that the world, and I, had gone through in the interval now served to enrich these chronicles of an earlier age, and threw upon that imperial existence certain other lights and other shades. Once I had thought chiefly of the man of letters, the traveller, the poet, the lover; none of that had faded, to be sure, but now for the first time I could see among all those figures, standing out with great clarity of line, the most official and yet the most hidden form of all, that of the emperor. The fact of having lived in a world which is toppling around us had taught me the importance of the Prince.
I fell to making, and then re-making, this portrait of a man who was almost wise.
Only one other figure in history has tempted me with nearly the same insistence: Omar Khayyam, the poet- astronomer. But the life of Khayyam is that of the pure contemplator, and of the somber skeptic, too; the world of action meant little to him. Furthermore, I do not know Persia, nor do I know its language.
Another thing virtually impossible, to take a feminine character as a central figure, to make Plotina, for example, rather than Hadrian, the axis of my narrative. Women’s lives are much too limited, or else too secret. If a woman does recount her own life she is promptly reproached for being no longer truly feminine. It is already hard enough to give some element of truth to the utterances of a man.
I left for Taos, in New Mexico, taking with me the blank sheets for a fresh start on the book (the swimmer who plunges into the water with no assurance that he will reach the other shore). Closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the night between New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station where I awaited a train blocked by storms and snow; then again until dawn, alone in the observation car of a Santa Fe limited, surrounded by black spurs of the Colorado mountains, and by the eternal pattern of the stars. Thus were written at a single impulsion the passages on food, love, sleep, and the knowledge of men. I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardor, or more lucid nights.
I pass as rapidly as possible over three years of research, of interest to specialists alone, and over the development of a method akin to controlled delirium, of interest, probably, to none but madmen. And yet this term delirium smacks too much of romanticism; let us say, rather, a constant participation, as intensely aware as possible, in that which has been.
One foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts, or, more accurately and without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul.
Portrait of a voice. If I have chosen to write these Memoirs of Hadrian in the first person it is in order to dispense with any intermediary, in so far as possible, even were that intermediary myself. Surely Hadrian could speak more forcibly and more subtly of his life than could I.
Those who put the historical novel in a category apart are forgetting that what every novelist does is only to interpret, by means of the techniques which his period affords, a certain number of past events; his memories, whether consciously or unconsciously recalled, whether personal or impersonal, are all woven of the same stuff as History itself. The work of Proust is a reconstruction of a lost past quite as much as is War and Peace. The historical
