2. Looking for Antinoüs in Memoirs of Hadrian
By kind permission of the publisher, what follows is adapted from the chapter I devoted to Memoirs of Hadrian in Marguerite Yourcenar: Reading the Visual (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), pp.54-90.
I would now like to turn to the text of Memoirs of Hadrian. In her portrait of Antinous, mediated by Hadrian’s memory, Yourcenar worked by a process of synthesis to overcome contradictions or differences between textual sources and between impressions given by statues. The following description is the result of one such crystallisation of contradictory impressions: ‘I marveled at his gentleness, which had aspects of hardness, too, and the somber devotion to which he gave he gave his whole being’ (155). This conflation was if anything encouraged by the multiplicity of versions of Antinous: Yourcenar made a necessary step in view of the difficulty sometimes of distinguishing the busts, as she wrote in May 1952 to the archaeologist Raïssa Calza who had sent her a series of photos of Antinous: ‘The only problem, and it is a serious one, is that the provenance of the statues is not given on the back, just a reference number, which means that I cannot tell for sure whether I’m looking at a bust from Leningrad, Dresden or London.’ Yourcenar found it useful to think of a likeness with Rimbaud the case of a head in the Palazzo Massimo (10.2.54) and Nijinski when looking at several images together in order to retain a sense of the impact the images had had on her. The illustrated edition of 1971 places the head from Olympia alongside the first mention of Antinous after the meeting in Bithynia. Then one of the first descriptions of Antinoüs may well refer to the Palazzo Massimo relief: ‘This graceful hound, avid for both caresses and commands, took his post at my feet’ (155).
The many facets of Hadrian that fascinated Yourcenar are presented from Hadrian’s perspective, through Hadrian’s voice: we listen to him recalling his strategic successes, overbearing thoroughness and also weaknesses as an emperor; his passion of Greek culture and for architecture; his love for Antinous; his eclectic philosophy, his mysticism, hedonism; his poetry; his travels; and his concern for his legacy. Michel Tournier describes Yourcenar’s Hadrian as ‘a harmonious cosmos’, a man wise enough ‘to renounce nothing’. After the opening account of his wisdom, equanimity and his health near the end of his life at his Villa, accompanied in the illustrated edition by the Farnese Antinous, with an orb definitely showing (see Stephen Bann’s talk on Symonds), for a passage about love and sex, Hadrian treats us to five sections in broadly chronological order. The text is nonetheless more evocation than narration, as Michel Tournier noted, producing a striking breadth of vision and solemnity of tone. The sequences are more photographic than cinematic, in Tournier’s view, so it will be interesting to see how John Boorman’s film of the book turns out, if it is ever made: Hadrian recalls mainly fixed images of the people he has known, a predicament that is brought into sharp focus when Hadrian tries to resurrect Antinous. He experiences considerable difficulty trying to find the right perspective. He is challenged by the power of images of the self and others to fix memory’s gaze. Very soon after Antinoüs’s first ‘live’ appearance in the text, in the ‘Golden Age’ section, Hadrian embarks on a process of mythologisation involving seeing Antinoüs as an Ovidian hunter, as a (silent) sculpture and as a version of Hadrian’s own self-image.