Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History
By Peter Brown 
Princeton University Press 2023

Academic memoirs are typically very tedious, soupy things, in whose pages the world’s most boring people tell the world’s most tedious stories to the world’s smallest audience, typically comprised of the tiny handful of ex-students who aren’t also ex-lovers and ex-lovers who aren’t also ex-students. The pages will be full of petty victories won on dusty intellectual battlefields a half-century ago, prizes grudgingly awarded by long-dead judges for long-unread works, and hilariously fraudulent faux-memories of the scholar-as-infant precociously pawing the pages of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 

Readers who’ve appreciated the scholar’s work might make a dutiful trudge through such a memoir in search of a bread-crumb anecdote that sheds light on 1952’s Indo-Phoencian Pottery Shards: A Reconsideration or 1971’s Magyar Monetary Reforms, AD 870-872. But ordinary readers of the type these scholars sedulously avoided will give such books a wide berth. 

At first glance, ancient history scholar Peter Brown seems an ideal candidate to write such a sensory deprivation chamber of a book. He was born in Dublin in 1935, educated at Oxford to hosannas of praise, and taught at UC Berkeley and Princeton for 50 years, along the way publishing a dozen books on late antiquity and winning every award, grant, and fellowship anybody had ever invented – and having a couple invented just for him. Even the many, many readers who found his debut work, 1967’s Augustine of Hippo: A Biography utterly wonderful and who learned from, for instance, his 2012 book Through the Eye of a Needle that time hadn’t dimmed his powers might be justified in regarding a 700-page memoir with wary loyalty.

And that’s partially justified. Brown often indulges in old-saw adages and blowsy recollections, “I learned from Gamaliel Snodfoot, who of course learned his basics from Thaddeus Penceriot back in days of Victoria’s Golden Jubilee,” that sort of thing. He spends an appalling length of time on his schooling, and even though these stories can be pithy (“My parents, as any reader can imagine, were immensely proud,” he writes about getting a “congratulated first.” “But glory lives in the mouth of others”), there are far too many of them for even the most devoted fan. Some of the insider details of life at Oxford are interesting, as when he describes after-dinner talks in Oxford common rooms as disarmingly serious affairs, “a strange mixture of comfort and cutting edge,” and there are peaks inside hidden locations known only to initiates, as when he describes the “small and unfrequented room” devoted to Coptic texts in Oxford’s Ashmolean Library. 

But the thing that saves these unending boyhood-and-youth reminiscences also saves the rest of the book and makes it one of the most unusual academic memoirs to appear in the 21st century: Brown brings to his own life story the same enthusiastic recourse to humanity that he brought to the life of St. Augustine all those years ago. Time and again in these pages, the well-thumbed stories shift aside for a moment or a few pages, and a remarkable living person peeks out. Brown is in the middle of a passage going on about conference talks, for instance, when he mentions, “because of my stammer, speech itself was always something of an achievement for me – a form of hang gliding, at once frightening and exhilarating.” These moments, in addition to the book’s rapid-fire almost kaleidoscopic flash of very short sections, uncannily simulate the uneven nature of even practiced recall. 

Even when the reader starts to expect this, it retains the power to startle. The scholar is almost always aware of the poetry of his own recollections. “The light of the setting sun was diffused by a cold mist and by the smog of Mestre, and filled the sky with pure gold that was reflected in the water as in a mirror, turning the lagoon into a single spread of pale gold satin,” he writes, describing Venice in winter. “Caught in the last rays of the sunset, the windows on the Giudecca and even farther down the coast winked like light buoys.”

“It was then,” he goes on, “on the evening of January 24, 1981, that I sensed that my father had died.” 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.