A Touch of the Apostasies
THE sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the death (or assassination) of the Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus was mutely celebrated last year. Julian the Apostate has always been an embarrassment to Christians. A moral man, even a man of pro- foundly devotional temperament, he was shown the Nazarene light only to reject it for a luminosity more palpable—that of Apollo, Mithras, eventually- the whole Hellenic pantheon. Worse men than he were better Christians. His main fault was, perhaps, a religious earnestness that suffered early disillusionment; brought up in the Arian camp, he couldn't see why there was so much bitterness towards the Athanasians. Christianity wasn't fulfilling the Christian ideal of peace and unity; there was something rotten somewhere. And so the sun, that raised its host daily, provided him with a more satisfactory mass and a cleaner theology.
Julian was a writer as well as a ruler, soldier and religious reformer. He satirised Antioch (inimical to his neo-Hellenism) in `Misopogon'; we know from Saint Cyril that he wrote a treatise against the Christians. It was proper, then, for Mr. Gore Vidal to make his Julian an autobiography with letters and footnotes from Libanirs and Priscus, Julian's friends. Sir Steven Runcirran assures us that Mr. Vidal's scholar- ship is exact enough. Although Julian is repre- sented as being killed by a Christian (all we know from history is that he died in his expe- dition against the Persians, in the third year of his reign), he resists the melodrama of the cry, `Vicisti, Galiime,' which Christian propagan- dists (as well as Swinburne's 'Hymn to Proser- pine') imposed on Julian's end. Whether Mr. Vidal the film-maker could resist it is another matter.
The book is very long, but the fascinating world of the fourth-century empire asks for ex- pansiveness,what with its eunuchs and bishops and arguments about homoiousios and homoousios. Mr. Vidal handles his huge cast well, achieves a triumph in his portrait of Julian's cousin Con- stantius and makes his hero perhaps more sym- pathetic than the tradition of bitter aggressive- ness would approve. the style is Graves-plain; all the colour is in the subject. It is a worthy subject for an historical novel, and Mr. Vidal has dealt with it so comprehensively that no his- torical novel need ever deal with it again. Like Dr. Skinner and his Meditations on the Life and Character of St. Jude, if you catch my meaning.
We have been told so often that 1964 is sacred to the First World War that a meed of admira- tion is due to any novelist who dares, this year, to publish a book about the Second. But George Steiner's Anno Domini is no mere grim cele- bration; at any time it would be timely, since, like all real war-books, it concerns itself with those aspects of war that are timeless—war as sex, war as love-hate, war as self-revelation. Mr. Steiner has already earned a considerable reputation as a literary critic, but only once in this trilogy of novelle does power derive from a literary reference—in 'Cake,' where a neutral American is studying Garnier—a French drama- tist who distilled Senecan horrors—in a France full of the real-life ghastliness of the Nazi occupation. The other stories have no bookish- ness in them. In 'Return No More' a Wehrmacht officer is drawn back, after the war, to his French billet. He seeks love, the hate of the French family to be cancelled out by his own wretched- ness, and he marries the younger daughter. But he has come back too soon : at the height of the wedding feast (a real piece of Flaubertian composition) the hooves of the dancers crush him to death. 'Sweet Mars' is more labyrinthine: an English veteran is led back through reminiscences, club reunions, the psychoanalyst's couch to a revelation of homosexual love which explains the title. There are flaws (the dialogue of English- men is, curiously, less convincing than that of foreigners), but the skill is considerable and the insight devastating.
'Ah, you English,' says Mr. Steiner's Pole. 'You voluptuaries of remorse.' Not you Americans, though. At the centre of The 480 is the Ken- nedy assassination. The tears are brisk, the accession of national guilt apocalyptic but brief : the business of President-making (reduced or elevated to a science) has to go on. The virtue of Fail-Safe, in which Mr. Burdick collaborated with Haivey Wheeler, lay mainly in its brute logic and its technological authority; the same qualities are here, too. The title refers to the number of groups into which the American elec- torate has been divided by the Simulmatics Cor- poration (this really exists) and an appendiX conscientiously lists them. John Thatch, an American engineer, prevents a war between India and Pakistan (he orates about the time when both were united against the wicked English). .crushes the Communists in the Philippines, and thus becomes, not surprisingly, a national hero. Can he be processed scientifically into the next President? This is what the book is about. Mr. Burdick, being a novelist, is on the side of the charisma that, unsubmissive to IBM analysis, makes the born leader, but, before all his machinators see the light, he gives us a tough course in the New Politics. Its topicality makes The 480 a good read, though the characters them- selves seem to be creations of the Simulmatics Corporation (Fiction Branch). Get it hot now; It will be stone-cold by Christmas.
Ned Kelly, since Nolan painted his adven- tures, is an OK hero for intellectuals. Eric Lambert's Kelly is not of the same literary order as the novels of C. P. Snow and hence has tio Nolan dust-jacket. But this very Australian talc of Australia's patron saint- --a rogue but also man not to be put upon--needs no stylistic graces. While the hangman tightened the noose- Kelly said, 'Such is life.' A few more centuties of sainthood and something better than that something more Julian-the-Apostate-like maY well be attributed to him.
ANTHONY BURG! SS
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