Post-Homerica!

Our books today all share a common theme, and it's a theme with which countless writers have been intimately familiar over the millennia: the great matter of Homer. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer passed on an entire world as complex and immediate and real as our own, full of characters that all Western culture has long since thought of as actual people.  In passage after passage, in virtuosic turn after turn, Homer shifts from panoramic action to quirky, telling little human details, and all of it is etched against an impressive natural landscape (and seascape) of winds and sunrises and cool wooded hills. The Iliad's story of the events leading to the death of the great Trojan prince Hector and the Odyssey's tracing of Odysseus' long and arduous voyage back to his native Ithaca ... these stories and the hundreds of characters who wander through them ... have warned, instructed, thrilled, and entertained us as long as there's been an 'us.'

And more to our point today, they've done something else too: they've inspired us. In Homer's own time, that inspiration took the form of all the 'Homeric' material that doesn't survive to our own time: all the 'little epics' that are echoed or adumbrated in the two huge epics we have. And every century that followed has followed suit - virtually all Western literature is indebted to Homer in one way or another, and not only would that literature look incalculably different had Homer's epics not existed, that literature would unquestionably be much smaller too.

The third century a.d. was no exception, and it was then that the Greek poet and scholar Quintus of Smyrna wrote his epic in 14 books, attempting to tell us the bulk of what happened in between the celebration of Hector's funeral games and the launching of the Greeks back to their homes after ten years away at war. There were many such works in and around Quintus' time, and some of them make interesting reading even in fragments - but none of them is finished as Quintus is finished, and none of them is half so entertaining.

Critical opinion throughout the centuries would dispute that last bit. Quintus' great book has been lavishly abused almost since the day it was written - his critics have largely misunderstood his odd and hyper-alert ways, and they've been aided in their errors by the general run of translators with whom Quintus has usually been saddled. A great exception came in 1913 with Arthur Way's blank verse translation of the whole work for the Loeb Classical Library - although Way's work caught some of the same critical denigration as Quintus', it's nonetheless a nimble and hugely enjoyable work of basically Edwardian high poetics (and, miracle of miracles, it's also now widely available in a reasonably-priced paperback put out by Barnes & Noble).

Alan James, whose 2004 work The Trojan Epic is far and away the best scholarly edition Quintus has ever received in English, is warily cognizant of his predecessor's worth. Here's his grudging passage:

Although it is often far too free to be a reliable reflection of the Greek and its style is marred by indulgence in pseudo-archaism, it is not without scholarly and poetic merit. Not infrequently it conveys the right meaning in English that cannot be bettered, and for that reason no translator can afford to ignore it.

Wording like that makes it ever so clear that James would have ignored it, if he thought he could - but fans of Way's work will take whatever meager praise they can find. And in the meantime, James has created a Quintus that is superbly supple and smart. Even if his verse were clunky, his version would still be a milestone, since it comes loaded with brilliant critical apparatus. But his verse isn't clunky (well, almost never); instead, it has an appealing directness that's nowhere to be found in Way. Here's the malediction Achilles pronounces over his fellow soldier, the insolent Thersites, after first punching a hole through his head:

'Lie there in the dust, your follies all forgotten.

It's not for men of the baser kind to challenge their betters.

On a former occasion you grievously provoked

Odysseus' patient heart with your endless stream of insults.

But I the son of Peleus have proved a different man.

I've robbed you of your life, though with less than a heavy hand

I struck you. A pitiless fate has swallowed you up;

Your feebleness has cost you your life. Now leave the Achaians

And make your abusive speeches among the dead."

We can follow the thread as it unspools right into the present era: the history of Homeric pastiche is the history of Western literature. In 1976 Doris Gates continued her popular series of Young Adult retellings of ancient Greek myths with A Fair Wind for Troy, in which she tells the story of the Iliad in extremely abbreviated form, paying special attention (as the title suggests) to the Greek High King's sacrifice of his daughter Iphigeni, who is summoned to Aulis with her mother Clytemnestra on the false promise of marriage to the young Achilles - but really in order to be sacrificed to placate the enraged goddess Artemis and lift the doldrums that have held the Greek fleet in harbor. Gates' prose is clear and tense:

Suddenly the priest raised his arm, there was a flash like lightning as the sun caught the blade before its swift descent. There was no outcry from the victim, only her bright blood spilling across the altar. Artemis had been appeased.

A few hours later a gentle wind began to ruffle the smooth surface of the harbor. It grew in strength and it was from the right quarter. The chiefs began bellowing orders. Warriors hurried aboard their ships while sailors sprang to their stations.

Agamemnon hurried to Clytemnestra's tent to take a last farewell of his queen. He was met by the old slave ...

"Queen Clytemnestra has departed for Mycenae," he informed his master. "She left no message."

We can see in those paragraphs the creeping-in of modern sensibilities, and those sensibilities are on full display in Sarah Franklin's incredibly winning 1998 novel Daughter of Troy, which tells the whole story of the Iliad from the viewpoint of the high-spirited and wryly observant Briseis, the war-captive whose new ownership is the pivot on which the 'plot' of the Iliad turns. Franklin empowers her, imagining her as the rightful queen of Lyrnessos (which, in Franklin's telling, follows the 'old ways' of hereditary rule through the female), allied with doomed Troy and possessed of goddess-inspired fortune-telling abilities.

Briseis throughout this fantastic book is no simpering slave girl but a vibrant, intelligent character, narrating her own story with a voice Franklin has mastered perfectly:

"And what brings you so far from home, son of Laertes?" I retorted.

Father and Alcathous were nonplussed, but a flash of amusement lit Odysseus' eyes, the first I had seen there.

"A favor for a friend, a matter of honor. Troy is impressive, but I am eager to return home to my humble Ithaca, to my dear wife and parents."

Alas, he was married! But he was being slick again. If his parents were both alive, then he ruled as king consort. He had just informed his audience that Ithaca followed the old ways, as Lyrnessos and the Dardanians did, as Troy did not.

"No children?" I asked, in case he had overlooked the source of his pathos.

"Not yet. But soon."

"And when you do return, will you stay there and dwell in peace?" I sucked my fingers with ladylike delicacy.

"Unless of course I come back here to fight a war."

A burst of jeering laughter at the far side of the hall coincided with angry yells nearer to hand. In that roiling, choking megaron, I was moved to an indiscretion.

"You, my lord? What reason have you to make war on Troy - just loot, common larceny?"

Imagine a large bull, standing at the front of its herd. Imagine frail little me going up to it and kicking it on its soft, tender, black nose. A bubble of shocked silence seemed to close off our group from the rest of the crowd.

There's no doubt in my mind that Homer - or all the Homers who went into making the blind old poet of legend we so rightly venerate - would have loved the thousands of such variations on his theme that writers like Franklin and countless others have produced in the last three thousand years. It's like I've said here before: pastiche is the sincerest form of literary flattery, and no writer in the world has been flattered like Homer. These three books (all three of which you should instantly buy - but do yourself a favor and read Franklin's book first ... I really can't recommend it strongly enough) span a spectrum, and legions of such works stand behind them.

I know about that allure first-hand, as some of you will know: I myself have written two such pastiches: Troy War (dedicated to Arthur Way!) and Steve Donoghue's Ulysses. Both gave me more sheer fun in the writing than any other fiction I've ever done, but I honestly thought I was done with that particular exercise. When 2011 began, I started writing a new historical novel (about the romantic, um, entanglements of two famous Elizabethan poets) and gave no thought to anything else. Then that allure came upon me as it's come upon so many others since Homer first smote his lyre ... and suddenly my plans were changed, and I was writing a third Homeric pastiche - and finding it hard to drag myself away from it to write anything else! So I can personally attest: that magic still exists, and it's mighty strong!

Penguins on Parade: The Anger of Achilles!

Some Penguin Classics are distinctly odd, but there's nothing wrong with that. The field of books is limitless, after all, and it's never possible to tell right at the moment of publication that a particular book has all the earmarks of a classic.

Those earmarks don't change and haven't changed since the first human drew his own hand on a cave wall by the flickering light of a bison-fat lamp. A classic must be true to itself, must follow its own logic without regard fro the world around it – it's that very egocentrism that will seal it off from the shocks of time and allow it to speak to every successive generation (panderers get fame and money enough to build their Thames-side mansion and entertain in style, but they steal no marches on Helicon and are often as not forgotten before there's even decent ivy on their tombstones).

Classics must also have power, and strangely enough, power isn't always easy to spot – especially after a lapse of many years. That's why my hat's off to the editorial team at Penguin Classics for consistently finding gems big and small that do, in fact, possess power enough to justify the attention of all posterities. Some of their choices mystify me, and others seems self-evident – but the odd ones always delight.

Certainly there could be few odder choices from the whole of the 20^th century than The Anger of Achilles by Robert Graves. He first published the book in 1959 calling it a 'translation' of Homer's Iliad, although a quick scan of the first few lines will suffice to show it's not quite that:

Sing, Mountain Goddess, sing through me

That anger which most ruinously

Inflamed Achilles, Peleus' son,

And which, before the tale was done,

Had glutted Hell with champions – bold,

Stern spirits by the thousandfold;

Ravens and dogs their corpses ate.

For thus did ZEUS, who watched their fate,

See his resolve, first taken when

Proud Agamemnon, King of men,

An insult on Achilles cast,

Achieve accomplishment at last.

It's not the rhymed couplets that are the problem here – after all, they were good enough for Pope. No, it's that 'Mountain Goddess' right there in the first line where “Muse” should be that tips the reader off to the fact that this version of the Iliad will be … well, rather heavily interpretive. Who the Hell is this “Mountain Goddess”? Who the Hell knows?

Some of you may already be familiar with the outline of Graves' life, but for those of you who aren't there's only one sentence of any real import in figuring that life out: in 1929, Robert Graves decamped for Majorca, bought a rambling mountain-top ranch, and proceeded to live there for the rest of his life. He wore fraying white shorts, he wore fraying straw bonnets, he drank from dawn until moon-set, and he conducted a peppy correspondence. In other words, he went nutty as a fruitcake.

The bulk of his good poetry was written before he Majorca'd himself, as was his classic memoir Good-Bye To All That. Then he came into the possession of far too much unstructured personal time. Some of it he put to good use – the world of letters would be a poorer place without Hercules My Shipmate or Count Belisarius, and of course the landscape of historical fiction would be virtually unrecognizable without I, Claudius and Claudius the God. But if a man takes himself to Majorca and holes up on the outskirts of a respectful but uncomprehending village, he deprives himself of the one sure safeguard against mental instability: the presence of knowledgeable old friends who'll refer to him as a jackass on a regular basis. Without that safeguard, even the most intellectually formidable men will soon become positive aphasic with mania. In fact, it happens to the smart ones first.

In between the creditable works of historical fiction, there flowed increasingly from Graves' pen a species of prose that bore all the hallmarks of its author possessing no jelly on his toast. Graves delved far too deeply into the twisted by-ways of Greek and Near Eastern mythology, and he emerged from this safari with hundreds of theories about ancient Greek history and mythology that, well, you won't find anywhere else. The first real expression of these carefully-diagrammed lunacies happens in the two volumes of his The Greek Myths – structurally one single book and hands-down the strangest book written in the 20^th century. And it was just the warm-up for such impenetrably, lavishly wacko wonder-works as King Jesus and especially The White Goddess.

Not far from those thickets of bubbly to that “Mountain Goddess” crack, and the casual way it's dropped in there is the surest sign that Graves knew perfectly well not all his dogs were barking; that casual tone is the lure, the little tease designed to prompt the unsuspecting listener to ask, “Mountain Goddess? Why, what can you mean by that?” - after which the Sage of Majorca is off to the races with his various ethnographic proofs the Greek cult of the Muses originated in Indo-European mountain-worship, or some such claptrap.



The key to surviving such lures is not to fall for them, and fortunately, The Anger of Achilles has plenty enough to recommend it so that you can ignore any and all pretty shiny lures in order to soak up the narrative vigor with which Graves renders the age-old story. When you do start reading it, the thing you'll notice first is that this version is a combination of prose and verse – the rhymed couplets only make up a tiny proportion of the whole text, the rest being straightforward entirely readable prose. Graves justified it this way:

I have … followed the example of the ancient Irish and Welsh bards by, as it were, taking up my harp and singing only where prose will not suffice. This, I hope, avoids the pitfalls of either an all-prose or an all-verse translation, and restores something of the Iliad's value as mixed entertainment.

This is yet more lunacy (poetry lapsing into prose except for the really poetic bits? Song lapsing into speech except when things are really exciting? To put it mildly, Graves never heard anything like that in Ireland or Wales), but it's also beside the point: the main point is that it all somehow works, probably because Graves could exercise a pitch-perfect ear for dramatic timing, when he felt like it. When his Anger of Achilles breaks into verse, damned if it doesn't lend the whole segment a sudden whoosh of drama. You'll get caught up in this distant cousin to Homer – it's certainly one of the 20^th century's most distinctive renderings, and it'll do you good to read it. Just remember: whenever any character starts talking about 'our Holy Mother,' just start whistling for a few paragraphs, until things go back to semi-normal.

Ransom by David Malouf

Ransom
David Malouf
Pantheon, 2009

The main drawback of pastiche-writing is immobility. Writers can tap into all the drama of a story that was often old before they were born, but they risk destroying that drama completely if they alter any of its fundamental ingredients. Some slight movement of the furniture is possible, but the work of pastiche is in essentially trivial elaboration. Tasso can indulge in all the poetic asides he wants, but he must adhere to the punctilio of his virtuous Christians; the various writers of Superman can invent new and fiendish villains, but they can’t make the Man of Steel gay; Shakespeare, that greatest of all pastiche-writers, cannot change the line of succession to the English throne, but he can compress, regress, and digress right up to the edge, in order to sharpen his drama.

That edge – knowing it when you see it, not being afraid to run right up to it – is the key focal point of all successful pastiche; if you fall off that edge, your work is no longer pastiche (and so becomes direct competition with your source – usually a fatally one-sided affair), but if you stay too far away from it, your work becomes a scholar’s parlor game, devoid of drama.

David Malouf’s new novel, Ransom, is a scholar’s parlor game, devoid of drama.

His story is Homer’s: the great city of Troy has been besieged for years by the Greeks, and Troy’s King Priam has lost many of his fifty sons in the defense of his world. The Greeks’ fiercest warrior, Achilles, has quarreled with the leader of the expedition and withdrawn his men from the fighting, which brings about a temporary surge of victory for the Trojans, led by their own best warrior, Hector. Achilles’ lieutenant Patroclus , frustrated with the Trojan victories, dons Achilles’ armor and leads a counter-attack, only to be killed by Hector. This enrages Achilles beyond reason (Malouf talks of the two being “mated,” but one suspects he means the word more in an Australian sense than a literal one), and he goes out and kills Hector, then drags the body around the walls of Troy, then brings the body back to the Greek camp. In one of the Iliad’s most affecting scenes, Priam goes to the Greek camp and begs Achilles to return his son’s body.

Malouf centers his slim (and hence, praised) novel on that trip to the Greek camp – it’s a miniaturist approach that smartly excises virtually all the business of the Iliad and allows an emphasis on one man’s bewildered grief. Unfortunately for Ransom, that man isn’t Priam.

Instead, Malouf has ransacked the lowest cellars of Shakespeare (or Plautus) and produced (“created” being far too heady a word here) a rude theatrical, a muleteer named Somax who’s quickly drafted to convey to the Greek camp both Priam and the vast heap of treasure the king offers as ransom for the body of his son. In order to serve Malouf’s ham-handed purposes, Somax must be three things: honest, innocent, and stupid. He is duly all three. In the course of their buggy-ride, Priam hears stories about the family of Somax, the mule of Somax, the loves and losses of Somax – when they stop to rest at a cool stream along the way (clearly a favorite scene of Malouf’s and tolerably well-done if one ignores everything about it other than how well done it is), the muleteer hardly shuts up for a second. The character betrays no awareness that he shares a long common history with Priam, although as king and subject this is certainly so – instead, Somax acts like he not only just met the guy but only just heard about him. During this journey Priam is almost entirely passive and silent (a less accurate-feeling portrait of a man in the middle of an extravagant act of grief would be hard to imagine), the better for Somax, who gets all the room in the novel for his profundities (“What creatures we are, eh, sir? With so much life and will, and then, pfff, it’s ended”).

Priam’s motivation is a mystery in which Malouf has no interest. The king tells Queen Hecuba that what Hector’s death requires is “something new,” some extraordinary gesture on his part. But what the narrative tells us is a bit different:

The truth was that none of his sons was in that sense particular. Their relationship to him was formal and symbolic, part of that dreamlike play before the gods in the world’s eye that is both the splendour and the ordeal of kingship. He could not even be sure of their actual number. Fifty, they said.

Dramatically speaking, this is nonsense - but it’s the only kind of nonsense that can come from Malouf’s Priam, who is as pre-programmed and axiomatic as the muleteer. In order for the one-dimensional (and, if you pause to think about it, deeply insulting) morality play here to work, Somax must be rich in soma, the unpretentious felt world, and Priam must be austere and removed to the point of oblivious priggishness. If either one is a real person – say, a lower-class worker who might know nothing of life’s deeper verities, or a king who’s known his share of hardship and dispossession – the “Driving Miss Daisy” tableau Malouf has constructed falls apart.

Still, even prosaic and condescending rest-stops must come to an end, and eventually, with the help of Hermes (only a couple of gods actually appear in Ransom, and they are awkwardly, irregularly handled – obviously bedraggled survivors of some very different earlier draft, or else hastily shoved on-stage for this final version), Priam and his chauffeur reach the Greek camp. The scene in which the old king appears, ghostlike, in the crowded headquarters of Achilles, is very effectively stage-managed – until the characters start talking. At which point every single possibility of drama leeches away. Once they’re both set before Achilles, Priam natters on a bit to Somax about what a fine time he’s had crossing No Man’s Land that afternoon (Somax doesn’t, in fact, say “well, sir, it seems to be that our whole lives we be a-crossing something or other” … but it’s nothing short of a miracle that he doesn’t), and Achilles watches:

Achilles is intrigued by this by-play between the two old men, who belong to such different worlds – the humility of the one, the awkward shyness of the other – and all the more because it has proceeded as if it were a matter strictly between the two of them and he has no place here. He might have taken offense at this, but for some reason he does not. The unfamiliarity of it, the unlikeliness, takes him out of himself. It amuses him.

If you can spot either a bereaved father or the butcher of that father’s son anywhere in that passage, you have sharper eyes than I do. And if you can’t spot either of those things – because they aren’t there, even though they have to be, even though Ransom is almost entirely pointless if they’re not – and you still don’t mind their absence, Malouf is clearly writing his book for you. For my part, I kept looking for some hint of the rage or power of Homer, some hint even of the poignant sadness of Virgil – some indication, however slight, that Malouf had come within distant hailing range of that edge I mentioned. For the entire thirty minutes it took me to read Ransom, I was hoping it would care enough about the drama of its subject to perhaps care a little less about that subject’s decorum. But even in the final pages, that hope was being dashed over and over , as in this moment when man-killing Achilles looks one last time on the body of his fallen foe:

What he feels in himself as a perfect order of body, heart, occasion, is the enactment, under the stars, in the very breath of the gods, of the true Achilles, the one he has come all this way to find.

He sits quietly in contemplation of this.

He sits quietly, in contemplation? Achilles? Somewhere in Elysium, Quintus of Smyrna is not happy.