The Death of Virgil

"It’s a novel by a man who was a refugee from the Nazis. He was born Jewish and, although he converted, he was of course persecuted. He ended up in the US and had some sponsorship from famous American writers. This is his most famous work. He sees the death of Virgil very much in terms of modern autocracy and totalitarianism. He depicts Virgil almost as a Christ figure who wants his Aeneid destroyed because this is to be his pledge for a freer world. The book is also heavily weighted toward Christianity; his Virgil imagines an anti-Augustus figure rising: not a figure of violence, but a figure of love. Virgil wants the Aeneid destroyed so that this tool of power will not fall into Augustus’ hands. Virgil is thus depicted as a covert rebel against power, represented in the person of Augustus, who pressures and manipulates Virgil to let him have the poem. Historically it’s total nonsense, but it’s a beautiful book. We have the story from a biographical tradition, but almost none of the stories are very reliable. There was a contemporary of Virgil, a friend of his, who acted as his literary executor and produced a proto-biography of him, but that hasn’t survived. We have only biographies that are quite a bit later, some of them hundreds of years later. Factually, they’re all over the place, sometimes appearing to draw on the text of the literary works to fabricate biographical claims—which is typical of literary biographers in the ancient world. This means I need to be very careful in assigning motives to Virgil—by the way, I’m now a biographer of his myself (having just signed a contract for the project)! I love the poetry and know all about it, so I could fall into the same trap of presumption and quasi-intuitive leaps in the wrong direction. It’s not particularly strong evidence, no. But the claim is basically plausible—or, I would say, it would seem a fair inference from the most plausible evidence, including the text itself. Here’s the best we know and can surmise. Virgil wrote the Aeneid very slowly; he was pushing against the limits of his perfectionism. He left a number of lines unfinished—that’s a fact. And it’s a funny work altogether; it’s verbally gorgeous, but it’s melodramatic and stilted and there are many ‘deus ex machina’ plot turns—real garbage. Again and again, Aeneas is perplexed and troubled and tossing in his bed, and then a god comes down and solves it all. It’s a woeful thing for a translator to deal with, because the plot’s just there. You can’t change that. The great appeal is in the Latin. You just have to try to yank as much of that beauty into English as possible. It’s, of course, pretty much impossible. You can’t show people why this poem is so important. You have so many flittering, prancing deities and a stuffed shirt of a hero. That’s mandatory; but the loveliness of the Latin is out of your reach; you can’t bring it to people who don’t read Latin. Perhaps, then, this gap between the clunkiness and crudeness of the story’s contents and the language that reaches helplessly toward perfection offers the best means of understanding how Virgil felt at the end of his life. If I may compare petty things with great ones: I know a little of what literary patronage is like, because my own writing career was saved by it. I won a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2010, right after the financial crisis. When the foundation’s investments were running low, the directors sent a plea across Manhattan to the financial district, and some of the people blamed for the crisis chipped in, so that I could receive the entire requested amount—more money than I’d ever seen, and enough to let me think, for the first time in my life, only about putting together something as near perfect as I could, in this case a translation of Aescylus’s important but very difficult Oresteia tragedies. Did I think for a moment of turning the money down? Did I feel anything but gratitude that somebody came to my rescue as I ate my heart out, unable on my own to produce something really fine? If you don’t believe me, read Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own . Was she going to turn down the inheritance that had no doubt been amassed through the iniquities of the British Empire, to which we know she objected as a woman, as a citizen, as a sensitive, conscientious person? No, she took the money with relief and set about the full-time work of making things of unprecedented beauty, of course expressing through them all the moral ambivalence she felt about her own luck in escaping into such a privileged place as allowed her to make them, but concentrating just on making them—because she was deeply convinced that if she didn’t make them, her time on earth would be wasted. That’s what Virgil must have done in accepting patronage; and that’s why he wanted to burn his unfinished Aeneid , if the story of his deathbed request is true. He was on earth to do one thing, create beauty, and he hadn’t had time to finish his masterpiece."