An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn

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СКАЧАТЬ every weekday morning at nine o’clock, and we would recite, precisely the way you might play scales, the paradigms of nouns and verbs, each noun with its five possible incarnations depending on its function in the sentence, each verb with its scarily metastasizing forms, the tenses and moods that don’t exist in English, the active and passive voices, yes, those I knew about from high-school French, but also the strange “middle” voice, a mode in which the subject is also the object, a strange folding over or doubling, the way a person could be a father but also a son. And yet I happily endured these rigorous exercises because I had a clear idea of where they were leading me. I was going to read Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the elaborately unspooling Histories of Herodotus, the tragedies constructed as beautifully as clocks, as implacably as traps … Years after all this, whenever my father made this comment about how you couldn’t see the world clearly without calculus, I’d invariably reply by saying that you couldn’t really see the world clearly without having read the Aeneid in Latin, either. And then he’d make that little grimace that we all knew, half a smile, half a frown, twisting his face, and we’d laugh a sour little laugh, and retreat to our corners.

      So he might have been studying his Latin, perhaps even taking a stab at Virgil, that night when we circled for hours in the airplane bringing us back from Florida, where my dutiful father had hurried to be with his silent parent. Years later, when he said he wanted to take my course on the Odyssey, it occurred to me that you might devote yourself to a text out of a sense of guilt, a sense that you have unfinished business, the way you might have a feeling of obligation to a person. My father was a man who felt his responsibilities deeply, which I suppose is why, when I asked him a certain question years later, he replied, simply, Because a man doesn’t leave.

      That night when I was four years old I sat there, quiet next to my quiet father, as the plane leaned heavily on one wing so that it could spin its vast arcing circle, not unlike the way in which, in Homer’s epics, a giant eagle will wheel high in the sky above the heads of an anxious army or a solitary man at a moment of great danger, the eagle being an omen of what is to come, victory or defeat for the army, rescue or death for the man; I sat as the plane went round and my father read. I don’t remember how long we circled, but my father later insisted that it was “for hours.” Now if this were a story told by my mother’s father, I’d be inclined to doubt this. But my father loathed exaggeration, as indeed he disliked excess of all kinds, and so I imagine that we did, in fact, circle for hours. Two? Three? I’ll never know. Eventually I fell asleep. We stopped circling and began our descent and landed and then drove the thirty minutes or so through the cold and were safely home.

      When my father told this story, he abbreviated what, to me, was the interesting part—the heart attack, the (as I saw it) poignant rush to my grandfather’s side, the drama—and lingered on what, to me at the time, had been the boring part: the circling. He liked to tell this story because, to his mind, it showed what a good child I had been: how uncomplainingly I had borne the tedium of all that circling, all that distance without progress. He never made a fuss, my father, who disliked fusses, would say, and even then, young as I was, I dimly understood that the gentle but citrusy emphasis on the word “fuss” was directed, somehow, at my mother and her family. He never made a fuss, Daddy would say with an approving nod. He just sat there, reading, not saying a word.

      Long voyages, no fuss. Many years have passed since our long and circuitous return home, and during those years I myself have traveled on planes with small children, which is why, when I now think back on my father’s story, two things strike me. The first is that it is really a story about how good my father was. How well he had handled it all, I think now: downplaying the situation, pretending there was nothing unusual, setting an example by sitting quietly himself, and resisting—as I myself would not have done, since in many ways I am, indeed, more my mother’s child, and Grandpa’s grandchild—the impulse to sensationalize or complain.

      The second thing I am struck by when I think about this story now is that in all that time we had together on the plane, it never occurred to either one of us to talk to the other.

      We were happy to have our books.

       Twists and turns.

      It is not for nothing that, in the original Greek, the first word in the first line of the twelve thousand one hundred and ten that make up the Odyssey is andra: “man.” The epic begins with the story of Odysseus’ son, a youth in search of his long-lost father, the hero of this poem; it then focuses on the hero himself, first as he recalls the fabulous adventures he has experienced after leaving Troy, then as he struggles to return home, where he will reclaim his identity as father, husband, and king, taking terrible vengeance on the Suitors who tried to woo his wife and usurp his home and realm; then, in its final book, it gives us a vision of what “a man” might look like once his life’s adventures are over: the hero’s elderly father, the last person with whom Odysseus is reunited, now a decrepit old man alone in his orchard, tired of life. The boy, the man, the ancient: the three ages of man. Which is to say that, among the journeys that this poem charts, there is, too, a man’s journey through life, from birth to death. How do you get there? What is the journey like? And how do you tell the story of it?

      The answers are deeply connected with Odysseus’ own nature. The first adjective used to describe the man with whom the proem begins—the first modifier in the entire Odyssey—is a peculiar Greek word, polytropos. The literal meaning of this word is “of many turns”: poly means “many,” and a tropos is a “turning.” English words containing the element -trope are derived, ultimately, from tropos. “Heliotrope,” for instance, is a flower that turns toward the sun. “Apotropaic,” to take a less cheery example, is an adjective that means “turning away evil”: it is used of superstitious rites that are intended to avert bad luck—such as the custom, common among Eastern European Jews of my grandparents’ era, of tying a red ribbon around the wrist of an infant in order to keep the Evil Eye away. Oh, my mother loved you so much, my mother will occasionally say to me, even now, when she took you to the park she would tie a red ribbon around your wrist! And then she’ll cluck her tongue sadly, tskkk, and sigh. The anecdote, I am aware, is not just about my grandmother’s great devotion to me: her deep emotion in this story is meant to stand in contrast to the relative lack of interest in me shown by my father’s parents, who didn’t meet me until I was two years old as the result of one of the grim silences that occasionally arose between my father and his brothers and his parents.

      It is difficult to resist the notion that there is something suggestive, programmatic, about making this particular adjective, “of many turns,” the first modifier in the first line of a twelve-thousand-line poem about a journey home. Odysseus, we know, is a tricky character, famed for his shady dealings and evasions and lies and above all his sly way with words; he is, after all, the man who dreamed up the Trojan Horse, a disguise that was also an ambush. So in one sense polytropos is figurative: this is a poem about someone whose mind has many turns, many twists, not all of them strictly legitimate. And yet there is a plainer sense of polytropos. For “of many turns” also refers to the shape of the hero’s motion through space: he is the man who gets where he is going by traveling in circles. In more than one of his adventures, he leaves a place only to return to it, sometimes inadvertently. And then of course there is the biggest circle of all, the one that brings him back to Ithaca, the place he left so long ago that when he finally comes home he and his loved ones are unrecognizable to one another.

      The Odyssey narrative itself moves through time in the same convoluted way that Odysseus himself moves through space. The epic begins in a present in which Odysseus’ son, grown to manhood in his father’s absence, goes searching for news of his long-lost parent (Books 1 through 4); it then abandons the son for the father, zooming in on Odysseus at the moment when the gods, having decided that he has wandered enough and should be allowed to go home, free him at long last from the clutches of Calypso and bring him to the island kingdom of a hospitable СКАЧАТЬ