An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

First published: 1978

Type of work: Historical romance

Time of work: Approximately 8 to 18 c.e.

Locale: Tomis, an outpost of the Roman Empire, between the Danube and the Black Sea

Principal Characters:

• Ovid, the famous, exiled Roman poet
• The Child, a wild boy adopted by Ovid
• Ryzak, the village headman
• His Mother
• His Daughter-in-Law
• Lullo, his grandson

The Novel

For reasons which even Ovid seems not to know clearly, the poet, at the height of his career, is exiled from Rome to a small village in the wilds near the Black Sea. Although he is able to continue writing and to correspond with friends and relatives in Rome, he is faced with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in this primitive backwater where the natives, obviously ordered to take care of him, do not even speak Latin, and whose lives are spent working barely to survive. Eight months out of the year, the land is cold, and the village is threatened by packs of wolves or marauding barbarians. Ovid, unhappy and unused to taking care of himself, is a burden to the village. He is housed with the headman, Ryzak, and the headman’s family.

Slowly, reluctantly, Ovid shakes himself out of his self-pity, busies himself with his writing, and starts to take an interest in the community, to learn the language, and to help in the communal chores. He also makes some attempt to civilize his surroundings by growing a few flowers and by trying to teach the grandson of the headman’s family to speak Latin. He puts his life into some perspective, recognizing the appropriateness, in a sense, of his return to the country, for he was born in a rural part of Italy. He is less unhappy, realizing that these people, if ignorant and unimaginative, are not unkind. Ryzak, the old headman, becomes a close friend.

On the annual deer-hunting expedition, Ovid thinks that he sees something which looks like a child, and he is determined, if possible, to capture the animal. Over a period of a few years, the Child does in fact appear, becoming less and less timid and Ovid sets out food for him, and eventually, with the grudging permission of the community, Ovid does capture the Child. Bringing the boy into the village upsets Ovid’s relationship not only to Ryzak’s immediate family but also to the tribal group in general. Ovid particularly fears the influence of Ryzak’s mother, who has considerable power, and there is constant danger that the Child, who slowly responds to Ovid’s kindness and instruction, may be killed.

On the death of Ryzak, Ovid realizes that he and the boy are not safe. They escape the compound, working their way north into the depths of the wilderness. The boy now leads and cares for Ovid, who, on their journey into the natural, uncivilized world, dies happily.

The Characters

It is helpful to be clear about what this novel is not doing or attempting to do. David Malouf is not attempting to portray the real Ovid. Indeed, little is really known about Ovid, save for that which can be guessed from his substantial body of work. What is known, however, suggests that he was not quite as romantic or deeply sensitive as Malouf would have him. The last of the great Augustan poets, Ovid is usually seen as the least profound of the group and, in many ways, closest to the high sophistication of Roman society. Malouf is aware of this, and his afterword to the novel is helpful in revealing his intentions for the Ovid of what is cheerfully admitted is “an imaginary life,” taking for its basis a character whose response to adversity has lyrical and mystical implications which are not to be found in the work of the historical Ovid, whom Malouf perceptively calls “this glib fabulist.”

The character who dominates this novel, and who is the sole speaker in the same, is a man of considerable range of feeling. The first-person narration allows for an intimacy which is enriched by the fact that Ovid is speaking directly to a later audience, to the modern reader, presuming that this record of his life will be read some centuries hence. This tale of exile, of the pain and suffering in both the physical and psychological sense visited upon the mature darling of high Roman society, is not seen by Ovid as meaningless, and the manner in which he responds to squalor and barren poverty is shaped with some propriety in poetic terms. Ovid may be in the wild ranges of barbaric danger, but his natural inclination is to make some sense of the world, however arbitrarily cruel it may seem. Self-pity is, as a result, refreshingly absent from his tale, and, from the start, he speaks candidly and simply to what he has been and what he must become if he is to survive.

Part of his attraction lies in his simplicity. There is no sense of the sophisticated literary figure mocking the natives, no sense that he despises them in their primitive ignorance. The language is straightforward, and, if sophisticated and intelligent, it has no satiric edge to it. This is probably the most successful part of the Ovid portrait.

The fact that Ovid is a poet is not forgotten, and the tale gathers lyric proportion on those occasions when the mystery of the Child is explored. This stylistic density is pleasingly strong in the prologue to the tale and reaches its aesthetic height in the last pages as Ovid and the Child work their way deeper into the wilderness to meet the waiting death of the poet. Ovid is appropriately seen as how he, as an artist, makes shape out of the chaos of his disgrace, how he makes art out of life, whether on the simplest level in growing flowers or on the more refractory level of how he makes friends in the obvious social sense or on the deeper metaphysical level.

What readers know of the others is what Ovid sees, and what he sees is often strongly touched by his magnanimity, his curiosity, and his willingness to give of himself. Ignorant and incoherent, living inside a timid animal sensibility, the natives, and later the Child, respond to the patient tenderness of Ovid and become more fully realized characters as he gets to know them and gets them to trust him. What readers know of them is seen through his eyes, but the eyes are so unjudgmental, so determined to see the best (while watching for primitive panic to flood back), that characters such as Ryzak and the Child achieve a weight which belies their atavistic silences.

Critical Context

Malouf came to the novel form somewhat later than to poetry, and there is an aspect of experiment in An Imaginary Life which suggests that it is not quite polished. This may be unfair, since a better appreciation of the work might lie in seeing it as somewhere in between fiction and poetry. Certainly the later passages are best read as poetry, redolent as they are with ambiguity and visual and oral densities.

It would be difficult to guess Malouf’s nationality on the evidence of this novel, but he is, in fact, an Australian, and he has used variations on the themes of An Imaginary Life to deal with his own country. He is from Brisbane, and his 1975 novel, Johnno, is about that town, as is his most successful novel, Harland’s Half Acre, published in 1984. In both of these works, Malouf brings the intelligent, disciplined man into confrontation with the savage, if, in the case of these novels, not quite so savage as the Child. The problem of how a man learns from that which is contrary to his own inclinations and training and of how it broadens him regardless of whether he likes it is clearly a constant in Malouf’s work. In An Imaginary Life, the problem is explored in lyrically tragic terms; in Harland’s Half Acre, that metaphysical aura is eschewed for a broader, realistic, and sometimes satirical look at how that civilization which Ovid imagined has not gone quite right.

Bibliography

Eldred, Kate. Review in The New Republic. CLXXVIII (May 13, 1978), p.36.

Kramer, Leonie, ed. The Oxford History of Australian Literature, 1981.

McNeil, Helen. Review in New Statesman. XCVI (September 15, 1978), p.338.

Matthews, John Pengwerne. Tradition in Exile: A Comparative Study of Social Influences on the Development of Australian and Canadian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, 1962.

Pollitt, Katha. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXVIII (April 23,1978), p. 10.

Portis, Rowe. Review in Library Journal. CIII (March 1,1978), p. 587.

Ramson, W. S. The Australian Experience: Cultural Essays on Australian Novels, 1974.