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A Riveting Biography: “Marcus Aurelius Stoic Philosopher”

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“Accept humbly: let go easily.” – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.33 (Penguin)

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121- 180 CE), son of Domitia Lucilla and adoptive son of Emperor Antoninus Pius, was a Stoic philosopher best-remembered as the author of Meditations. This popular book is often called “the best self-help book.” Marcus Aurelius’ stoic sayings can be short and pithy; sagacious and complex; or even lessons in etiquette and diplomacy. 

Though I’m not a great fan of Meditations, I was fascinated by Donald J. Robertson’s lively biography, Marcus Aurelius Stoic Philosopher. This short, riveting book is crammed with action, political maneuvering, warfare, thoughts on the advantages of mediation with the enemy, decadent co-emperors, the solace of philosophy, and the spread of the plague that decimated Rome.

The truth is, Marcus Aurelius was a reluctant emperor. He preferred philosophy to politics. Nonetheless, he was well-prepared for the job: he was fast-tracked through several high-level political offices after the emperor Antoninus, his adoptive father, named Marcus his heir. (Antoninus’ predecessor, Hadrian, had also taken an interest in Marcus.)

Marcus’ stoicism directed his political decisions. Philosophy had intrigued him since he was a boy. His mother, Lucilla, was his role model:  she was gentle, calm, well-spoken, and in letters he called her his “little mother.” She directed his education: the curriculum was divided into two parts, Greek rhetoric and philosophy, the former for the sake of public speaking and the law, the latter for critical thinking and pursuing wisdom. Sometimes Marcus managed to turn a negative into a a positive. No wonder Meditations is so popular.

Marcus Aurelius was popular with the Roman people. But he had to work with, and cover for, his decadent co-emperor, Lucius Verus, a slacker who, even in wartime, loitered and partied at luxurious resorts before arriving late to the scene of war. Later, after Lucius Verus’ death, Marcus Aurelius was full of grief when he had to name his son, Commodus, co-emperor. Commodus was another party boy, very like Lucius Verus, but the people did not know that. One can only hope poor Marcus’ meditations helped him. In 190 CE, Marcus died of what was probably the plague.

Meditations is now on my bedside table. Some of his maxims are inspiring; other times I raise my eyebrows.

But he is often curiously modern.  There used to be a sweatshirt slogan: “Living well is the best revenge.”  Marcus Aurelius put better:  “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

Muriel Spark & Her Alter-Ego

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“But that day in the twentieth century I felt more than ever how good it is to be a woman and an artist there and then.” – The narrator of Muriel Spark’s “Loitering with Intent”

In the preface of her brilliant new biography, Electric Spark:  The Enigma of Dame Muriel, Frances Wilson portrays Muriel Spark as a dominating writer who tries to control Martin Stannard’s authorized biography.  Spark chose Stannard because she admired his biography of Evelyn Waugh.

“So much misinformation has been put out about me,” she told him before he began.   When the biography was published, she was furious.  “A hatchet job,” she told people.

Spark had many friends, but also frenemies and enemies: Wilson devotes a long chapter to her best friend-lover-turned-enemy, Derek Stanford, who wrote poems with her. They “literally finished each other’s sentences,” writes Wilson. I am most interested in Stanford because he is the model for Sir Quentin in her novel Loitering with Intent.

Muriel Spark

 Certainly Spark was more difficult, and less mischievous than her alleged alter-ego, Fleur Talbot, the narrator of Loitering with Intent, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1981. Fleur, a novelist, takes a job as a secretary for Sir Quentin, director of the Autobiographical Association. Quinn assures the small group of aristocrats in the Autobiographical Association that their memoirs will be locked away for 70 years.

Fleur finds the job easy, but she suspects Sir Quentin of a blackmail scam. As she types up the aristocrats’ first chapters, she enlivens them with melodramatic details.  Some of the memoirists are dubious of the results, but others like it.   

Sir Eric Findlay is dubious.  “I say, Quentin, my memoir has been tampered with.”  Apparently it is true that the butler locked him in the pantry and made him polish the silver (“How did you know that?”), but Sir Eric Findlay did not catch Nanny and the butler riding on his rocking horse.  

Loitering with Intent is Muriel Spark at her best.  Her writing is exquisite, spare, hilarious and ironic: her images jump off the page. Halfway through, the story turns into a parodic heist-and-counter-heist farce. The manuscript of Fleur’s first novel, Warrender Chase, is stolen, and the hilarious hunt is absurd and enthralling.

Still, we wonder: is Fleur really Spark’s alter-ego? Fleur/Spark is also the doppelganger of evil Sir Quentin/Derek Stanford. The fictional pair are closer than we think, if we examine the real-life relationship of Spark and Stanford. They are both in the writing game, but Spark is a talented writer of unusual novels, whereas Stanford was a wordy writer, not highly esteemed by the critics. Sir Quentin is equally verbose, creator of a dubious cult of autobiography and memoirs. In the biography of Spark, Wilson suggests that Stanford woud have been happier as an academic. He did go to Cambridge, but no one seems to know whether he graduated or not. But Wilson feels that writing was not his true calling.

Do read Spark if you haven’t. Her books are delightful. And Loitering with Intent is one of my favorites.

Waiting for the Biography: The World without Doris Lessing

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When Doris Lessing died in 2013, I had a hard time imagining a world without her. She was versatile and original and I always wanted to see what she had to say. Now there would be no new books.

She had a great influence on my generation, probably even more so on the Second Wave feminists, as if she were writing primers for women’s survival. I first read her in my teens: the characters Anna Wulf and her friend Molly in The Golden Notebook reminded me of the sisters Ursula and Gudrun in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. All four defy prescribed sex roles and are ambivalent about marriage. Lawrence’s influence on Lessing is clear, if fleeting.

It is not that we were at all like her characters: that’s not how we read. And yet we identified with them. These heroines transcend the conventions of women’s lives, finding love and sex outside of marriage, and working at jobs without clear demarcations, though happiness is not necessarily the result. These women are politically aware and empathetic, yet must guard themselves from the demands of others, which sometimes overwhelm them, as they do tend to overwhelm women.

And now that we live in a world without Lessing, I am happy to come across a Lessing sighting. The other day I read an Afterword she’d written for science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. She considered it a classic: she is not put off by genre categories. And her own science fiction series, the Shikasta books, were adapted by Philip Glass as an opera.

Sometimes I read Lessing for comfort, though that is not her forte. During a power outage after a storm destroyed our garage, I managed to read her autobiography by the light of a lantern. That I could read in such uncomfortable, dimly-lit circumstances says much for her style. Detractors call her style “flat-footed.” I find her writing compelling and urgent.

And I liked her personal insouciance. In a video on YouTube: she is filmed getting out of a taxi in front of her house and accosted by polite reporters with the news that she has won the Nobel Prize. “Oh f–,” she said. She added that “it” had been going on for 30 years, and they’d told her she’d never win. I’m sure she was pleased, but I like that initial response.

Since her death, critical studies and memoirs have been published, but no biographies to my knowledge. Patrick French was the authorized biographer, but I read that he died of cancer in 2023 at age 56. How very sad. Then I read that his biography, The Golden Woman, will be published in 2026. I look forward to it, but why must we wait so long? I’d like an advance copy – I mean way, way in advance – like now. But I’ll have to wait like other humans.

A New Biography: “American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton”

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“To know Greek is to know yourself.” -A Professor of Classics

Victoria Houseman’s new biography, American Classicist: The Life and Loves of Edith Hamilton, is sparkling and compelling.  The first half reads like a particularly exciting school story.  Homeschooled by her parents,  Hamilton (1867-1963) became obsessed with Greek and Latin, which she continued to study at Miss Porter’s School with other equally intense, well-educated girls. Later at Bryn Mawr College, which she entered at age 24 due to financial problems, she found rapport with a community of women with similar interests, who worked 10 hours a day, but still found time to socialize. Finally she studied in Germany on a European travel scholarship. 

Hamilton was determined to have an academic career. But instead of going on for a doctorate after she finished her B.A. and M.A. simultaneously in 1894, she accepted a position as headmistress at Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Whether by design or default, many women of Hamilton’s generation, and our own, became teachers, but Hamilton had hoped to teach at Bryn Mawr or some other college. She was reluctant to sign on at a mediocre primary and secondary school for girls. 

Edith Hamilton

But she had to shore up the family finances:   her father had become an alcoholic after his company went bust, and her mother and a sister were frequently ill.  Edith made the best of the situation by shoring up the reputation of the school among the elite of Baltimore.  And she developed a supportive  school community, inspired partly by the culture of Bryn Mawr College and partly by philosophy, which encouraged teachers and students to pursue individual talents.

After 25 years as headmistress, she was exhausted, bored, and often ill. She resigned (for the third time: they didn’t want to let her go) in 1922.  As she told her partner, Doris Reid, she looked forward to getting back to Greek. And she finally had time to translate Greek tragedies. A film version of her translation of Euripides’s Trojan Women was released in 1971, starring Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Irene Pappas, and Genevieve Bujold.   

It is as a twentieth-century writer and “influencer” that  we remember Edith Hamilton. Her popular books, The Greek Way (1930) , The Roman  Way (1932), and Mythology (1942), created a sensation. Hamilton especially admired the Greeks, and inspired the post-war generation, who were struggling in a financially unstable society and a changing culture, to respect Greek philosophy, history, and the arts.

She tried to explain the Greeks’ ability to rise above their problems.

The Greeks knew to the full how bitter life was but also how sweet. Joy and sorrow, exultation and tragedy, stand hand in hand in Greek literature, but there is no contradiction thereby.  Those who do not know the one do not really know the other either.  It is the depressed, the gray-minded people, who cannot rejoice just as they cannot agonize.  The Greeks were not the victims of depression.

Her style is a bit sentimental, but The Greek Way and The Roman Way were Book-of-the-Month hits when they were published in an attractive two-volume set.

Victoria Houseman, the author of this brilliant biography, regards Hamilton as a pioneer among women classicists.  Though Hamilton was a classics superstar at a time when few women had college educations, she may not have been as well-respected among classicists as the biographer implies.

In my undergraduate years, I noted the lack of women’s translations. I asked my Greek professor if Edith Hamilton’s translations were any good.

He took the question seriously and addressed me as an equal. “There’s a lot of Edith Hamilton there, but perhaps not much Euripides.”

I intend to read Edith Hamilton now that I have read the biography. But whatever I may have to say, there is no denying that she influenced generations of common readers and that her books are still in print.

A Role Model for the 1960’s: “Harriet the Spy”

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If you were a girl in the 1960’s, you were nine or ten when you read Harriet the Spy. The cover art was irresistible: a bespectacled girl in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans strolls through a run-down New York neighborhood carrying a notebook, with a flashlight hooked to her belt. You didn’t wonder why the gear: it seemed natural, especially for Harriet, an aspiring writer who spied on people and took notes. And when her writing got her into trouble, we empathized.

I read Harriet several times as a child – probably the last time was in seventh grade. Many Baby Boomers and Gen Xers have cited it as a major influence. In Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, a book about a reading one book a day for a year, Nina Sankovitch mentions that she so identified with Harriet that she insisted on carrying a notebook and a flashlight. Mystery writer Cara Black also read Harriet. “Of course, I ate tomato sandwiches and wanted to be a spy. They wouldn’t take me. So I turned to writing.” And Jonathan Franzen wrote a blurb on the cover of the anniversary edition (see picture at top of page).

Why am I thinking about Harriet the Spy? My husband alerted me to a review in The New York Review of Books of a new biography by Leslie Brody, Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy.

Knowing absolutely nothing about Fitzhugh, I have read the opening chapters with fascination. Fitzhugh was primarily an artist,which makes sense, since her bold, witty illustrations are as important as the text. Her humorous depictions of the characters’ self-absorption and androgynous style underscored the growing resistance to traditional femininity. So many of us identified with Harriet, partly because of the freedom of her clothes. It was the boys’ sneakers we especially liked.

Illustration of Harriet by Louise Fitzhugh

Fitzhugh, raised in the South by wealthy parents, escaped from Memphis when she and her girlfriend Amelia hatched a plan to attend Bard College. She became an artist in New York, with varying degrees of success. In the photos, we see an impossibly tiny Louise who looks like a little boy. Though Fitzhugh was a known lesbian artist, her sexuality was kept under wraps in terms of author information available to the public: it would have ruined her children’s writing career to be known as gay.

Louise Fitzhugh and photographer Gina Jackson, about 1952.

I have always understood that Harriet the Spy is a classic, frequently compared to The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. And so I was astonished to learn that some reviewers disliked it when it was published in 1964.

Brody writes:

Some children’s books critics simply couldn’t get over how “nasty” they thought she was, and what “a horrid example” she set. … When Harriet says, “I’ll be damned if I’ll go to dancing school,” she sends up a howl as staggering – in its way – as Allen Ginsberg’s poem by the same name.

Brody, a witty, compassionate writer, places Fitzhugh’s life and quirky work in the context of her times. She points out that Fitzhugh and Betty Friedan were writing breakthrough books the same year. Women’s lives were changing.

Long live Louise Fitzhugh’s books! By the way, she also wrote two sequels to Harriet the Spy, The Long Secret and Sport. Harriet is the best of them, if I remember correctly, but perhaps the others are worth a second look. I lost my copies long, long ago.