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PREFACE by Steven James Bartlett xiii

SAPPHO'S JOURNAL

FOREWORD by Willis Barnstone 3

SAPPHO'S JOURNAL 5

CHRIST'S JOURNAL 155

LEONARDO DA VINCI'S JOURNAL 221

SHAKESPEARE'S JOURNAL 343

LINCOLN'S JOURNAL 511

COLOPHON 625

PREFACE Steven James Bartlett

Senior Research Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University

and

Visiting Scholar in Psychology & Philosophy, Willamette University

oices from the Past is a quintet of novels that describe the inner lives of five extraordinary people. Progressing through time from the most distant to the most recent they are: Sappho of Lesbos, the famous Greek poet; Jesus; Leonardo da Vinci; Shakespeare; and Abraham Lincoln. For the most part, little is known about the inward realities of these people, about their personal thoughts, reflections, and the quality and nature of their feelings. For this reason they have become no more than voices from the past: The contributions they have left us remain, but little remains of each person, of his or her personality, of the loves, fears, pleasures, hatreds, beliefs, and thoughts each had.

Voices from the Past was written by Paul Alexander Bartlett over a period of several decades. After his death in an automobile accident in 1990, the manuscripts of the five novels were discovered among his as yet unpublished papers. He had been at work adding the finishing touches to the manuscripts. Now, more than a decade and a half after his death, the publication of Voices from the Past is overdue.

Paul Alexander Bartlett's life was lived with a single value always central: a sustained dedication to beauty, which he believed was the most vital value of living and his reason for his life as a writer and an artist. Voices from the Past reflects this commitment, for he believed that these five voices, in their different ways, express a passion for life, for the creative spirit, and ultimately for beauty in a variety of its forms--poetic and natural , spiritual , scientific and artistic , literary , and humanitarian . In this work, he has sought, as faithfully as possible, to relay across time a renewed lyrical meaning of these remarkable individuals, lending them his own voice, with a mood, simplicity, depth of feeling, and love of beauty that were his, and, he be- lieved, also theirs.

The journal form has been used only rarely in works of fiction. Bartlett believed that as a form of literature the journal offers the most effective way to bring back to life the life-worlds of significant, unique, highly individual, and important creators. In each of the novels that make up Voices from the Past, his interest is to portray the inner experience of exceptional and special people, about whom there is scant knowledge on this level. During the many years of research he devoted to a study of the lives and thoughts of Sappho, Jesus, Leo- nardo, Shakespeare, and Lincoln, he sought to base the journals on what is known and what can be surmised about the person behind each voice, and he wove into each journal passages from their writings and the substance of the testimony of others. Yet the five novels are fiction: They re-express in an author's creation lives now buried by the passage of centuries.

I am deeply grateful to my wife, Karen Bartlett, for her faithful, patient, and perceptive help with this long project.

For my father,

Paul Alexander Bartlett,

whose kindness, love of beauty and of place

will always be greatly missed.

SAPPHO'S JOURNAL

"Violet-haired, pure

honey-smiling Sappho"

- Alcaeus

FOREWORD

Willis Barnstone

Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature

Indiana University

aul Alexander Bartlett's journal of Sappho is a masterful work. I had recently completed a translation of the extant lines of Sappho and am familiar with his problems. He was faced with the almost impossible task of reconstructing the personality of Sappho and her background in ancient Lesbos. To my happy surprise he did so, in a work which is at once poetic, dramatic and powerful. In Sappho's Journal he does more than create a vague illusion of the past. He conveys the character of real people, their interior life and outer world. A mature artist, he writes with ease and taste.

Sappho's poetry, quoted in this novel, is included with the translator's permission. The poems appeared in Sappho, Lyrics in the Original Greek, with translations by Willis Barnstone, Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1965.

For clarity, the calendar used by Sappho has been translated into our modern calendar.

SAPPHO'S JOURNAL

Sappho, walking on her island beach,

pauses by a broken amphora:

With one foot, she nudges the terra cotta and black jar,

its painted chariot, charioteer and horses:

The charioteer wears a laurel wreath.

Sappho, about 30 years old,

her hair braided around her head,

naked, sandaled, saunters along the Mediterranean,

gulls and pelicans flying, surf and gull sounds in early morning yellow.

Villa Poseidon, Mytilene

he great storm beats across the island, rattling the olive and the cypress, piling the surf on the beach, hissing the rain across my roof. It is cold and the light of my terra cotta lamp is cold. Some say that a storm will wash away our island, but I do not believe it. Our island will be here long after I have gone, and so will our town, my dear Mytilene, so wrong, so right.

Alcaeus would revel in this gale and go out in it and let the rain lash him and then he would come and take me in his arms.

The storm will rage all night and the gutters spew, and I will rage at my solitude, a solitude that grows and grows.

Growl on, spew on, beat and tramp--tomorrow's sun will return and the sea's eye will glitter and I will gaze across the bay--and Alcaeus will not be here.

My feet are cold and the lamp is weak and the wax hard, and I must go to bed.

Yesterday, the wine workers gathered at a nearby vineyard, old men and girls, in tattered clothes, some lazy, some hard-working, pressing the grapes, many of them my friends. Spade-bearded Niko directed the pressing, sitting at the base of an oak, wearing a stained robe, his voice low. Women carried hampers of grapes loaded with purple clusters, the women's skirts wet with dew, the grapes mottled with damp. Clouds made the day cool. Someone toyed with a flute, the men treading, emptying husks over sandy soil, now and then pausing to talk under the oak, the circular press letting out its red, everyone tasting. Many amphorae were broken, before they were finally filled and capped.

I wanted to help. How sweet the smell flooding my nose.

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