An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017. Daniel Mendelsohn
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tale to another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return—even if it is sometimes the case that we need to be nudged, to be reminded to get back to our starting point. For this reason, ring composition might remind you of nothing so much as a leisurely homeward journey, interrupted by detours and attractions so alluring that you might forget to stay your homeward course.
And so ring composition, which might at first glance appear to be a digression, reveals itself as an efficient means for a story to embrace the past and the present and sometimes even the future—since some “rings” can loop forward, anticipating events that take place after the conclusion of the main story. In this way a single narrative, even a single moment, can contain a character’s entire biography.
Hence the occurrence of the word polytropos, “of many turns,” “many circled,” in the first line of the Odyssey is a hint as to the nature not only of the poem’s hero but of the poem itself, suggesting as it does that the best way to tell a certain kind of story is to move not straight ahead but in wide and history-laden circles.
In twists and turns.
Fools!
The silence in which my father and I sat all those years ago, on the plane coming home from Miami Beach, was to become typical of what went on between us for a long time. For the first half of my life—until I was in my late twenties—there was a long quiet between us. Perhaps because I had once thought of him as all head, all cranium, the word that came to mind when I thought of him was “hard,” and this hardness made me afraid of him when I was a child and teenager and, indeed, a young man in my twenties. He could be hard on people, certain members of my family would say. He did, indeed, have exacting standards for virtually everything. Grades, certainly, where we children were concerned; but there were other things, too. As I was growing up, I came to understand that everything, for him, was part of a great, almost cosmic struggle between the qualities he would invoke when explaining why a certain piece of music we liked or a movie that was popular at the moment wasn’t really “great,” wasn’t really worth the time we were lavishing on it—those qualities being hardness and durability and, as I think he really meant, authenticity—and the weaker, mushier qualities that most other people settled for, whether in songs or cars or novels or spouses. The lyrics of the pop music we secretly listened to, for instance, were “soft.” A rhyme is a rhyme, you can’t approximate! For him, the more difficult something was to achieve or to appreciate, the more unpleasant to do or to understand, the more likely it was to possess this quality that for him was the hallmark of worthiness.
X is x. His sense that there is a deep and inscrutable essence to things, an irreducible hardness that he had intuited but which many if not most other people had failed to discern, informed his dealings with people, too. Because he had these hard standards—or, rather, because so few people ever met them—there were certain holes in his life, holes that had once been occupied by people: his parents, at one point, during those first two years of my life when he and my mother stopped speaking to his mother and father; each of his three brothers, too, for varying amounts of time, from weeks to years to decades, periods when he would simply not speak to this or that wayward sibling. I was in my thirties before I had a real conversation with Uncle Bobby, with whom some violent quarrel with my father (so we imagined: Daddy never discussed it) had exiled from our lives until the two of them reconciled in the 1990s, when they were in their seventies. And we didn’t even know that he had another older brother, the product of Poppy’s brief first marriage, until my grandfather lay dying and this strange new half-uncle, Milton, showed up in the hospital one day. Milton, Milton, where have you been? Poppy croaked from the high hospital bed as my father looked away in disgust.
So used was I to my father’s habit of silence that it didn’t occur to me until fairly recently to ask why, for him, the obvious way to deal with people who had disappointed his expectations was to act as if they no longer existed.
Hence I was afraid of him for a long time. When I was in grade school and middle school and was having trouble understanding my math homework, I would stand nervously in the doorway to his bedroom, where he would sit at the little teak desk going through bills or reading papers for work, getting up the nerve to ask for his help; once I did, his incredulity in the face of my inability to understand something as obvious to him as the math problem that I couldn’t solve would fill me with shame. This shamed feeling colored my dealings with him through much of the early part of my life, making me want to hide from him. It’s true that I was hiding from many things in those days: I was a gay teenager, it was the 1970s, and we were in the suburbs. I lived cautiously. But the fact is that my anguished, furtive grappling with my sexuality was the least part of my fear of my father back then. I knew well that he and Mother were open-minded and without prejudices on that subject. When I was in high school and a succession of charismatic gay teachers became mentors to me, my parents made efforts to demonstrate that they knew what these men were and had no problem with it. Indeed, my father reacted with surprising gentleness when, as a college junior, I finally came out to my parents. (Let me talk to him, I know something about this, he told my mother, although it would be many years—not until we were on the Odyssey cruise, in fact—before he explained himself.) No: it wasn’t that I was gay. I simply felt that everything about me was hopelessly mushy and imprecise, doomed to fail the x is x test. I didn’t even know what x was—didn’t know what I was or what I wanted, couldn’t account for the turbulent feelings, the heated enthusiasms and clotted fears to which I was prone. And so I hid—from many things, but above all from him, who knew so clearly what was what.
This was the reason, at least on my part, for the long period of quiet between us. What his reasons might be, I never asked.
My resentment of my father’s hardness, of his insistence that difficulty was a hallmark of quality, that pleasure was suspect and toil was worthy, strikes me as ironic now, since I suspect it was those very qualities that attracted me to the study of the Classics in the first place. Even when I was fairly young and first absorbed in books of Greek and Roman myths, I had an idea that beneath the flesh of the lush tales I was reading, with their lascivious couplings and unexpected transformations, there was a hard skeleton that represented some quality fundamental to both the culture that produced the myths and the study of that culture. When I was fourteen, my high-school English teacher instructed us to memorize a passage from a play. Among the austere boxed sets of books on the bookshelves downstairs near the black-upholstered oak rocking chair in which my father liked to read was one called The Complete Greek Tragedies; most of the others were collections of papers about mathematics. I opened one of the volumes in the four-volume set at random and read a speech that turned out to be from Sophocles’ Antigone, a play about a conflict between a headstrong young woman and her uncle, the king, who has issued a harsh new edict that she intends to defy. The speech to which I had randomly turned was one in which Antigone protests that the laws that she obeys are not those made by mortals but the eternal laws of the gods; she declares that she will follow those divine laws even though it means her death. “For me it was not Zeus who made that order, / nor did that Justice who dwells with the gods below / mark out such laws to stand among mankind.” When I read those words, I remember thinking that here at last was the bone beneath the flesh: a play in which x was x, a drama whose action revolves around stark choices between which there was no middle ground. Nothing soft here. When, a few years later, I began to study Greek, I found an equally satisfying flintiness not only in the myths or dramas themselves but in their own bones, the language itself: a syntax that was as stark as Antigone’s choices, that allowed for no messiness or approximation. The paradigms of nouns and adjectives that ran across the pages of the slim black textbook we used in Greek 101 were as crisp and unforgiving as theorems.
Much later I was pleased to learn that my instinct about the “hardness” of Classics itself had been right. The discipline traces its roots back to the late eighteenth century, when a German scholar named Friedrich August Wolf decided that the interpretation of literary texts—an undertaking that many people, among them my father, casually think of as subjective, impressionistic, a matter of opinion—should, in fact, be treated as a rigorous branch of science. For