Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Robert Graves's "I, Claudius"

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.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is I, Claudius by Robert Graves. It begins:

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...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius.

--Marshal Zeringue