An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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of Sparta:
If you hear your father lives and is returning home,
then have the patience to wait out one full year:
but if you hear that he has died and is no more
then come you home to your beloved fatherland
and build a tomb for him and heap it high
with grave-goods, as befits him, and marry off your mother.
This passage, in fact, lays out the plots of the Odyssey’s next three books. In Book 2, Telemachus will call the long-overdue assembly of the citizens of Ithaca and confront the Suitors in the presence of the people. In Book 3 he leaves home for the first time in his life, sailing to Pylos, where he meets Nestor and learns a little about his father’s wartime activities; in Book 4 he travels from Pylos to Sparta, where he finds Menelaus and Helen living in great splendor, both of them full of reminiscences about Odysseus’ cleverness and gumption.
All of which is to say that during the first four books of the epic, Odysseus’ son will have his own adventures at last. These travels will allow him to share in the experiences that, according to the proem, Odysseus has had: “to see the cities and know the minds of men.” In this way, the poem ingeniously reassures Telemachus that he is, indeed, his father’s son.
To this unexpected but suggestive opening section, as to certain other episodes of the Odyssey, tradition has assigned a name. Just as Ilias, the Iliad, is a song about Ilion (another name for Troy), just as Odysseia, the Odyssey, is a song about Odysseus, so Telemakheia, the Telemachy—the title of the epic’s first major section—is a song about Telemachus. As the trajectory of these four books suggests, they tell the story of how an absent father’s child starts to learn about his parent, and about the world.
It is the story of a son’s education.
I just don’t see why he’s supposed to be such a great hero!
It was eleven-fifteen on the morning of January 28, 2011, about an hour into the first meeting of Classics 125: The Odyssey of Homer. Since we’d sat down, my father hadn’t stopped complaining about Odysseus.
He’d gotten to my house at nine. Although the weather was bad, he’d insisted on driving. It would be easier to drive than to take two trains, he’d said over the phone a few days earlier, which of course wasn’t true; but then, my father had never liked being a passenger. Earlier that morning, as I waited for him to arrive, I’d pictured him moving cautiously through the heavy snow in his big white car, wearing one of the baggy white sweaters that he favored. In order to get to campus with a little time to spare before class started, at ten past ten, he would have had to leave his house on Long Island well before seven; and although he didn’t say so, I was aware that this added element of hardship, of discomfort, made the idea of driving more attractive to him. If it isn’t hard, it’s not worth doing. I could already hear the boastful complaint that he’d be making the following week to his buddies at Town Bagel, Ralph and Milton and Lenny and the others, as they sat at the bright orange Formica tables, the giant Styrofoam cups of coffee steaming in front of them while they talked, as they had done every morning for many years, about the usual things: their wives and children and divorces and grandchildren, the Mets and the Giants, the arthritis and the prostates. I had to get up at five-thirty! Jesus! Daddy would be telling them.
In his own way, my father, too, was a man of pain.
I could picture him, scowling as he drove, talking to himself silently, his thin lips moving over narrow teeth that were grayish yellow after years of smoking, a habit he had quit all at once one day in 1970, I suspect because “going cold turkey” was the severest way to stop, the most painful. I’d watched my father drive many thousands of times over the years: nosing the car along the hushed streets of the neighborhood we lived in, shaded by maples and pin oaks, the houses seeming to peer out suspiciously through their shuttered windows; grinding along on exhaust-choked interstates and turnpikes to summer barbecues and holiday parties, to the apartment buildings in Brooklyn or Queens where mysterious relations of my mother lived, elderly people whom we could faintly hear, after we rang the doorbell, as they shuffled to answer the brown-painted steel doors, with their many clanking locks and the peepholes through which they would cautiously peer after we rang, one eye looming gigantically, comically, through the convex glass, like the single eye of some mythic monster. I would watch him drive to the school concerts, orchestra, band, choir, chorale, madrigals, autumn, winter, and spring; drive us to summer camp, to piano and cello and guitar lessons, drive us to bar mitzvahs and weddings and, as the years passed and my grandparents and the parents of Mother and Daddy’s friends started dying (and then, later, as their own friends themselves started dying), would drive in funeral processions, too, during which he liked to complain bitterly about motorists who failed to yield to the slow-moving cortège, because as much as he hated ceremony of any kind, which he vehemently did, he had a great regard for the dead, even those he hadn’t much liked while they were alive—out of respect, I suppose, for their having finally done the hardest, most painful thing of all.
As my father drove he would often, spontaneously, hunch his narrow left shoulder, as bony as the wing of a chicken, toward his ear, as if in a spasm, and as he did this his lips would curl into a grimace, the unconscious gesture you might make if you’re carrying on an argument with yourself about something, maybe something to do with your numerous children, their frequently delayed travel plans, or the money they say they need to make the long trip to see you; maybe it is yet another replay of some ancient debate with your wife, perhaps about her reluctance to travel (which is the reason you yourself, who are curious about the world, eager to see it, never go anywhere); perhaps about something else, something even older, the exchanges so familiar by this point that you can play both parts equally well as you drive your big white car, which is one of the few luxuries you permit yourself—a kind of compensation, maybe, for all the places you didn’t go.
It doesn’t matter what you said, it was how you said it.
Oh, stop writing scripts for me already!
Well, Daddy would never have let them talk to me that way.
Oh, your father, your father! Trust me, he wasn’t such a hero. I know things …
My father’s thin frame would tense as he replayed these ancient conversations in his mind, the left shoulder twisting upward, his right hand at the twelve o’clock mark on the wheel, his lips moving soundlessly.
I supposed his lips were moving in just that way as he pulled into my driveway that January day, maneuvering the comically large vehicle with exaggerated caution, as if to say, It wasn’t easy to get here. And the first thing he said, in fact, as he swung both legs out the driver’s-side door and reached for the inside handle above the window to hoist himself out of the soft bucket seat—a thing I had never seen him do until recently—was, as I knew it would be, “You can’t believe the traffic!”
He loved to complain about how difficult it was to get places. You can’t believe the traffic! was the refrain that ran through our childhood, our adolescence, even our adulthood, long after we’d left the neat white house and the trim white car and the baggy white sweaters behind; the sentence would explode out of his mouth as soon as he arrived somewhere, as unvarying and formulaic as the stock phrases that Homer resorts to when describing certain kinds of typical scenes or actions, sunrises or banqueting or arguments, “When Dawn the child of morning appeared with her fingertips of rose” or “When they had put away desire for food and drink” or “What speech has escaped the barrier of your teeth?!” So, too, with my father and driving. The parkway was a nightmare! he would say as he walked through someone’s door, or The Long Island Expressway is one giant parking lot! he would cry as we arrived, late as usual, at some function, and we would all nod, even though, in certain cases, we knew that this wasn’t quite true, wasn’t entirely the reason we were late. (For instance, if our destination was a religious service of any