Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Robert Graves's I, Claudius:

In 1929, Robert Graves published Goodbye to All That, a memoir of his life as a British soldier who fought in the trenches in the First World War. In the prologue to the edition published almost thirty years later, he provided the reason why he wrote it and what happened because of it: “I partly wrote, partly dictated, this book twenty-eight years ago during a complicated domestic crisis, and with very little time for revisions. It was my bitter leave-taking of England where I had recently broken a good many conventions; quarreled with, or been disowned by, most of my friends; been grilled by the police on a suspicion of attempted murder; and ceased to care what anyone thought of me.”

The title of the book became “a catch-word,” his “sole contribution to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. More importantly, Goodbye to All That made him enough money that he could move to Majorca and spend all his time writing. Among the dozens of other things he wrote were the two volumes, or the two novels, I, Claudius, published in 1934, and Claudius the God, published two years later in 1936. In an Author’s Note to the second volume, Graves takes up a frequent criticism of the first volume, a criticism which betrayed a complete failure to understand the difference between books of history and historical fiction; a failure, that is to say, between the report of events that had happened at some point in the past, and the attempt to understand what those involved in those events thought they were doing; the difference between seeing things from a distance, the present looking back at the past, and seeing things as they unfold.

Some reviewers, according to Graves, “suggested that in writing it I had merely consulted Tacitus’s Annals, and Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, run them together and expanded the result with my own vigorous fancy.” Insisting that this “was not so,” he proceeds to list, in addition to Tacitus and Suetonius, twenty-four Greek and Roman authors, including Plutarch, Pliny, Dio Cassius, Diodorus Siculus, Juvenal, Josephus, “and Claudius himself in his surviving letters and speeches.” He then explains that, “Few incidents…are wholly unsupported by historical authority of some sort or other. I hope none are historically incredible. No character is invented.” Graves knew what he was doing.

In what might easily have gone unnoticed, Graves thanks, as he did in the preface to the first volume, “Aircraftsman T. E. Shaw for reading the proofs.” Not everyone then, and very few now, would know that T. E. Shaw was his close friend, T. E. Lawrence, who had played a different role in the First World War when he became known, to Lawrence’s own great displeasure, as Lawrence of Arabia.

I, Claudius purports to be the autobiography of the Emperor Claudius, a “confidential history” intended for his “eventual readers of a hundred generations ahead, or more,” which means, of course, readers of the twentieth century. The main point of this history, the principle lesson to be learned, is that Rome has become entirely corrupt, and all because that instead of a small republic, it has become an empire. “The money madness that has choked Rome since she…made herself mistress of all the riches of the Mediterranean. With riches came sloth, greed, cruelty, dishonesty, cowardice, effeminacy and every other unRoman vice.”

Much of what happened to Claudius, much of what happened to Rome, was because of his grandmother, Livia, whom Augustus had taken as his second wife when he became the first Emperor. Though only seventeen, she had been one of the three most beautiful women in Rome. Augustus had been expected by those closest to him to give up power and return to private life after he had defeated his rivals in the civil war that followed the death of Julius Caesar, but the proscriptions which had among the thousands killed ended the lives of three hundred senators, had “carried away the boldest and the best” of the Roman aristocracy and the survivors “tended more and more to behave like family slaves to Augustus and Livia.” The return to the republic had to wait. Livia insisted that there was still work to be done, and, as she constantly reminded Augustus, “Rome was not yet ready to be free.” What she thought in private was even more emphatic. The Roman people, so far as she was concerned, were “Rabble and slaves! The Republic was always a humbug. What Rome really needs is a king again.”

Livia was Claudius’s grandmother, but all that meant was that Claudius was a source of embarrassment. When he wrote a biography of his father, Germanicus, who had been one of the most respected Roman generals, Livia dismissed it as little more than trash. She wrote to Augustus: “Claudius has singled out for praise his dear father’s one intellectual foible - that willful blindness of his to the march of time, the absurd delusion that the political form that suited Rome when Rome was a small town at war with neighboring small towns could be re-established after Rome has become the greatest kingdom since the days of Alexander.” And to make her point as clear as possible, she adds, “Thank God for Tiberius and Germanicus,” referring to her two sons. “There is no republican nonsense about them, so far as I know.”

When Augustus dies - dies, as Livia will later confess to Claudius, of a poison she gave him - Livia’s son, Tiberius, whom Augustus had adopted, became Emperor. Livia insisted in public that this was only because she decided he should. “She made a boast of it not only to strengthen her position as Augustus’s widow but to warn Tiberius that if her crimes ever came to light he would be regarded as her accomplice, being the person who principally benefitted from them.” What else, one might ask, should a mother do?

Claudius, thought to be a stammering fool by his grandmother and nearly everyone else in Rome, had acquired an unusual insight into the characters with whom he is forced to find ways to survive, including especially his uncle, the new Emperor, Tiberius. He was, “at times, easily tempted to virtue, and in a noble age might well have passed for a noble character: for he was a man of no mean capacity. But the age was not a noble one and his heart had been hardened, and for that hardening Livia must, you will agree, bear the chief blame.” And yet, despite that, Claudius does not disparage what Livia was able to achieve. However criminal the means by which she won the direction of affairs, first through Augustus, then Tiberius, “she was an exceptionally able and just ruler.”

Livia’s career of treachery and violence, begun when, only seventeen, she married Augustus, continued until she was eighty-three and to protect herself against her son, gave a public reading of some of the letters written to her, years earlier, by her husband. The reading lasted an hour and a half, and though her voice was weak, she “held her audience spellbound.” It is not difficult to understand why. Augustus had written her tens of thousands of letters, but she chose the fifteen most damaging to Tiberius she could find. In one letter, Augustus called Tiberius, “a man whose character I confess I continue to feel the greatest repugnance, and I pray to Heaven that by giving way to you now I do not inflict lasting damage on the commonwealth.” The last letter she read, written a year before Augustus died, was devastating: “If I did not believe that when I am dead he will be guided by you in all matters of State and shamed by Germanicus’s example into at least a semblance of decent living, I would even now, I swear, disinherit him and ask the Senate to revoke all his titles of honor. The man’s a beast and needs keepers.” Tiberius did not enter the Senate for two whole months; he could not look senators in the face with the knowledge that “their wives had heard Augustus’s letters about him.”

Claudius is more than surprised, astonished, when shortly after this his grandmother invites him to dine with her on her birthday. “I had never in my life been allowed to visit her on her birthday. I had never even dined with her. I had not spoken to her, except ceremoniously at the Augustan festival, for ten years.” At dinner, Livia asks, “Do you dislike me, Claudius? Be frank.” He replies with candor: “Probably as much as you dislike me.” Livia laughed. “Frank enough! By the way, have you noticed that monster there?” she asked, nodding toward another grandson, Caligula. “He’s going to be the next emperor.” Claudius thinks she is making a joke. She was not.

“Tiberius will make him his successor,” she explains. “He can’t bear the idea of a successor who is more popular than himself.” Then, with clinical detachment, she describes what Caligula is, and what will happen to Claudius when Caligula takes power. Caligula is treacherous, cowardly, lustful, vain and deceitful, but he will never kill you, she tells him, because he is going to be murdered and you are going to avenge him. It is all a question of fate. “And now that Rome has been ungrateful and mad enough to let my blackguardly son put me on the shelf, and insult me - me, can you imagine it, perhaps the greatest ruler the world has ever known, and his mother, too….”

But there are compensations. She has been told by a soothsayer she trusts that she will, after her death, be acknowledged as a Goddess, and not just that, but “the greatest Deity the world has ever known.” This, she tells Claudius, is only reasonable. “If Augustus is a God, it’s absurd for me to be merely his priestess. I did all the work, didn’t I? He no more had it in him to be a great ruler than Tiberius has.”

After Livia dies, Tiberius names Caligula his successor just as she said he would. More than the question of their respective popularity, Caligula was “one of the few people wicked enough to make Tiberius feel, by comparison, a virtuous man.” The proof was soon to come. When Tiberius becomes seriously ill, but does not die, Caligula watches while someone smothers him to death with a pillow. He does not worry that anything like this will ever happen to him, because unlike Tiberius, unlike anyone who has ever lived, he is not mortal. He is, as he explains to Claudius, undergoing a metamorphosis, a very painful one, “as if I were my own mother.” If Claudius has not noticed this it is because Caligula is “still in mortal disguise, so it is not remarkable that you did not notice my Divinity at once.” It is the reason, he admits, that he killed his own father. “He stood in my way. He tried to discipline me - me, a young God, imagine it!” Caligula does not just admit, he brags, that he slept with all three of his sisters; Jupiter had slept with only one of his. He knows he is the son of a God - Augustus. “I am his son by his incest with Julia,” his daughter. “I must be. That’s the only possible solution. I’m certainly not the son of Agrippina, her father was a nobody. It’s ridiculous.”

There seems to be no limit to what people will believe, or pretend to believe, about those who have power, no matter how insane it might be. Caligula’s “Divinity was accepted by everyone without question.” No one objected, no one questioned - no one was willing to risk the danger - when he ordered that all the most famous statues of the Gods be removed from the temples of Greece and sent to Rome so he could have their heads removed and replaced with his own. No one was willing to say anything that might incur his wrath, and there was hardly a citizen in Rome who did not want him dead. The inevitable conspiracy was formed, a conspiracy to kill Caligula and all his family, including Claudius, and restore the Republic. “If only the idiots had taken me into their confidence this story would have had a very different ending. For I was a better Republican than any of them.”

The citizens of Rome may have wanted a Republic, or thought they did, but the Roman army wanted an Emperor, and when two soldiers found Claudius hiding in the palace, the army ignored his protests and declared him Rome’s fourth Emperor. What thoughts or memories passed through his mind? Not what you would expect. Nothing about his three Imperial predecessors - Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula - their lives and their deaths; nothing about the promise he had made to his grandmother, Livia, to deify her when he became Emperor. He thought instead in the way of an author that now at least “I’ll be able to make people read my books.” He also thought, more seriously, that as Emperor he would have the opportunity, not given to other people, “for consulting the secret archives and finding out just what happened on this occasion or that.” And, as the readers of I, Claudius have now discovered, “I took full advantage of my opportunities."