Word: hadrian
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British Novelist Johnson parodies Rolfe to perfection in all his attributes save one; the mad genius that cut Hadrian the Seventh into one of the diamonds of modern fiction. But she tells her tale waspishly and well, and transports to the canals of Bruges much of the sacred luster and glory that Frederick Rolfe adored in Venice...
...studied for the priesthood but was expelled from his seminary in Rome. For the rest, he was a weirdly gifted writer, schoolmaster, painter, photographer, workhouse inmate, homosexual, paranoiac, and perhaps the most merciless autobiographer ever to snarl at his own image. In his famed, partly autobiographical novel, Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe created a fantasy in which the College of Cardinals chooses as Pope an expelled English novice (like himself) who reforms the church and the world, and dies a martyr. In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Rolfe told the truth, little less fantastic, about his years...
...maintain that a single African ancestor, however remote, makes a man Negro. About 60 generations have passed since the heyday of the Roman Empire; so an American of European ancestry is descended from 2 60 (1,152,921,504,606,846,976) ancestors at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. This immense figure is not to be taken literally, but it surely means that people with ancestors who lived in the Roman Empire, including England and part of Germany, are descended from a broad cut of the empire's population...
...White soldier, who usually performs the executions with his pistol, comes to Erick and reports: "She orders . . . that is, Miss Sophie asks . . She wants it to be you." Erick obliges. His first shot blows half her face away. "On the second shot everything was over." With this, Novelist Yourcenar (Hadrian's Memoirs, TIME, Nov. 29, 1954) contrives to inject her own sharp sense of history in what is told within the emotional limits of three private destinies...
Mark Roskill's poem about Hadrian is straightforward but unconvincing. Its impact depends upon the reading of two words, "resurrect," and "facile," words which the poetic context does not define for me. As a result, the poem is, for me, an amusement...