Читать книгу An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017 - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 10

One of the rare stories that my father liked to tell about his youth—rare, that is, while we were growing up, since as he got older he became increasingly talkative about his past, although it must be said that his stock of anecdotes could never really compete with the funny and dramatic tales that my mother and her father told—was the one about how his classical education had come to an end.

One day, he would begin, one spring day toward the end of the war (my father always referred to World War II simply as “the war,” the way that some ancient bard might say the word “war” and mean “Troy”), it must have been the end of my junior year in high school, my Latin teacher, who was a very natty guy, a European refugee—a German, I remember, he got away just in time—my Latin teacher asked a bunch of us what we were planning to do the next year. We were fourth-year students, we’d been taking Latin since the seventh grade, and that year we’d been reading selections from Ovid.

Oh-vid.

My father might, at this point, clear his throat. He was a German guy, he repeated. I remember he always tried to dress well, although you could see his clothes had been washed a lot, the collar was frayed and the elbows of his suit were shiny. So that day, he asked us who was planning to continue with the Latin language into our senior year. See, senior-year Latin was the climax of Latin study, when you finally got to read Virgil. The Aeneid.

During more recent retellings of this story I would note the way in which he would linger on the details of the teacher’s clothes: the frayed collar, the shiny elbows. The fact that he’d even noticed such things would have struck me, earlier on, as odd, since my father was notorious for his indifference to clothes; he had as an unerring a sense for wearing the wrong thing as certain people do for wearing the right thing. On the first night of the “Retracing the Odyssey” cruise, as we were dressing for the captain’s cocktail party, he started to button himself into a shiny brown shirt, and I said, Daddy, we’re on a Mediterranean cruise, you can’t wear brown polyester, and I took the shirt and walked to the balcony and threw it into the sea. Whaaat!?! he cried, that was an expensive shirt! He strode across the stateroom to the balcony and looked forlornly down as the shirt, which on contact with the water had taken on a dense animal gleam, like the skin of a seal, briefly bobbed along until it finally sank under its own weight. Only when he was entering his late, nostalgic phase—I must have been in my mid-thirties at the time—did he surprise me with an anecdote that explained his fastidious attention to his long-ago teacher’s dress. While he was studying as an undergraduate at NYU, he said one day (a university, he liked to remind us, that he’d been able to attend because of the GI Bill; which, in turn, he had been able to take advantage of because he had joined the army at the age of seventeen, precisely for the purpose of being able to go to college, to get an education)—while he was in college he had worked at Brooks Brothers. He gave his tight little grin when he saw me reacting to this news. Well, he said, it was only in the packing room, but I learned something! As he said this I could feel the presence of a shy, stubborn pride just beneath the surface of his self-deprecation, a slight vainglory about his brief entrée into the rarefied world of patrician American taste: as if to say, See where I got? Not bad for a boy from the Bronx. When he said, but I learned something, I had a sudden vision of him as a youth of twenty, impossibly slender as he was then, his trousers awkwardly crimped around the narrow waist, held in place by a belt, tiptoeing through the vast mahogany-paneled sales floors on Madison Avenue, clutching some paper-wrapped package as he loped beneath the coffered ceilings and the chandeliers, gawking at the gleaming paneling with its sleek brass fittings—not at all very different, I like to think, from the way in which, in the fourth book of the Odyssey, Odysseus’ young son goggles at the rich decor of the palace of the Spartan king Menelaus, the long-suffering husband of Helen of Troy, when Telemachus visits him as part of his fact-finding mission about his missing father. “Zeus’ court on Olympus must be like this!” exclaims the naïve youth, who in the poem is twenty, the age my father was when he worked at Brooks Brothers.

So, my father would repeat as he recalled his German-refugee Latin teacher, the one who’d tried to dress with flair even though his clothes were so poor, so he asked us who was going to go on into the fifth year, to read Virgil.

Here my father would pause. He was re-creating the silence that had fallen in the classroom in the Bronx all those years ago.

Nobody said anything, he would then say, not quite meeting my eye. The teacher asked the question once, and then he asked again, and no one said a word.

Sixty-five years after this event took place, long after the teacher and his frayed collars and dashed hopes had disappeared, long after many of the boys who had squirmed in that embarrassed Bronx silence had become men and then fathers and then grandfathers and then, like my father, old men who had become, suddenly and improbably, nostalgic about old and unredeemable mistakes—sixty-five years later, my father shook his head and pursed his narrow lips into the tight familiar line.

I still remember the room, he said, because it was so quiet. We were too embarrassed to talk. And the teacher suddenly looked at us and pointed his finger at each of us like this—(here my father put on a stagy German accent) and said, “You refuse de riches of Fergil! Diss, you vill regret!” And then he closed his briefcase and walked out of the room.

After a moment my father said, As I remember it, that was the end of Latin instruction in that school.

Remember, he added, it wasn’t the best high school, but still it was a good school.

I did remember, dimly: some story that someone had once told us, my mother, my aunt, I can’t recall who, maybe one of my uncles. Daddy had been the smartest kid in junior high school, a math whiz, but for some reason he hadn’t gone on to the most competitive high school, a place called Bronx Science, which is where math and science whizzes went. But I couldn’t remember the rest of the story, and didn’t know why he hadn’t gone to the best school.

So it was a very good school, my father was saying. There weren’t many of us who were taking Latin, so the program depended on us! But we didn’t go the distance. And I think that a couple of years after that spring, Latin just petered out and died.

You could see that it still bothered my father, after all those years—the way he and his classmates had rejected the teaching of the mild-mannered German Jew who’d come so far with only this rarefied knowledge to give. You could see, when he told this story, that he was still angry with himself for the way in which, having come so far himself in his study of the ancient language, he’d failed to travel the final leg of his classical journey and read the greatest work in that language—a work about a man who rescues his aged father from the burning ruins of his vanquished city and then travels far to a new and unknown land, carefully keeping both his father and his young son in tow, in order to make a new life with them there. Aeneas, that paragon of filial dutifulness; which quality, as my father knew well, is no trivial thing.

When I was a child and first heard the story of my father’s failure to pursue Latin—and, even later, when I was in college and then graduate school and the subject of higher education or advanced degrees or Classics would come up, which would occasion his telling this tale again, speaking in the slightly musing way that he had, almost as if by telling it over and over he might finally understand why the rest of his life had come out the way it had—when I was young and used to hear this story, I was so taken with the drama and the poignancy of it, the poor German Jew and his narrow escape, the heedless teenagers looking longingly out the windows on a warm day in New York City just after the end of the war, indifferent to the riches of the past, above all the almost unbearable image of a teacher filled with knowledge that no one wanted, that it never occurred to me to ask why my father would have given up studying a subject at which he had excelled, had been a star; just as it hadn’t occurred to me to ask why such a star had ended up in the second-best school.

A lonely boy sits off to the side of a crowded room, dreaming of his absent father.

The boy is Odysseus’ son, Telemachus. Two decades have passed since his father left for Troy, never to be heard from again. Since then, the palace has been overrun by dozens of young men from Ithaca and the islands beyond who, assuming that Odysseus is long since dead, are courting the still-beautiful Penelope, hoping to become her husband and assume the kingship of Ithaca. But their presence there constitutes a grotesque violation of the laws both of courtship and of marriage: for instead of observing custom, instead of bringing offerings and bride gifts to Penelope, they have made themselves at home in her palace, draining its stores of food and wine, carousing day and night, seducing the servant girls. The social fabric of the island kingdom has frayed, too, its government ground to a standstill. Some citizens are still loyal to the absent king, but others have chosen to throw their lot in with the Suitors; meanwhile, no assembly of the island’s citizens has been held since Odysseus left.

The missing king’s family is falling apart. The dejected queen has withdrawn to her chambers above the banquet hall, having long since exhausted her repertoire of tricks designed to keep the Suitors at bay: as the pressure mounts daily for her to make a choice, she swoons and weeps. As for Odysseus’ careworn father, Laertes, he is so disgusted by the mayhem in the palace that he

no longer comes down into town,

but toils alone in the countryside, far from men;

an old woman-servant is there to serve him food and drink

when his arms and legs are gripped by weariness

from scrabbling up and down the vineyard’s slopes.

So not only is Telemachus’ father gone, but his father’s father has vanished, too. The melancholy youth now teeters at the brink of manhood with no one to show him the way.

This is how the Odyssey begins: the hero himself nowhere in sight, the crises precipitated by his absence taking center stage. However long the proem of the Odyssey actually is—ten lines, twenty-one lines—it turns out to be misleading: despite its promise to tell us about “a man,” the fact is that this man appears at first only as a memory, a ghost about whom we hear stories, reminiscences, rumors. He’s on his way home, someone says; someone else recalls having glimpsed him back in Troy, disguised as a beggar on a spying mission. Another, rather unsavory story surfaces: Ah yes, Odysseus, he once came looking for some poisoned arrows. (These, we understand, are not at all the weapons that noble warriors are supposed to use.) The rumors whirl and eddy, but the hero himself—“the man”—is nowhere to be seen, either on Ithaca or in Homer’s narrative. And all the while, the wife weeps, the populace seethes, the son daydreams hopelessly. It’s as if the Muse had mischievously decided to take the words of the proem literally—to begin at random, at “some point or another,” and that starting point turns out to be a different one altogether from the one we had expected.

It is hard not to feel that Homer’s decision to obscure and blur and postpone our view of the epic’s main character is designed to pique our curiosity about this shadowy figure, who, in these crucial first pages, seems to lurk at the far edges of his own story, curiously small and difficult to make out, like one of those tiny figures in a Dutch painting that you risk not noticing at all because your eye is drawn to the painting’s ostensible subject, the figure in the foreground, and only when you peer at the picture more closely do you realize that this smaller, more distant, even partial shape is of deeper interest after all, is the element that will reward the closest study—is, perhaps, the painting’s true subject. The most famous example of this visual sleight of hand is a painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by the Netherlandish master Pieter Brueghel, which hangs in a museum in Brussels and takes as its subject another of antiquity’s many father-son dramas: the myth of the great inventor Daedalus and his son Icarus, who sought to fly on artificial wings made of feathers bound by wax. In the best-known version of the myth, which appears in a poem by Ovid, Daedalus warns his son not to fly too high, since the sun’s warmth will melt the wax; but the heedless son, giddy with excitement, disobeys his father, soars too high, loses his wings, and crashes into the sea. With poignant irony, Brueghel’s canvas illustrates the split second in time just after Icarus has fallen: the painting is almost entirely taken up by the shore and the sea and, especially, by three peasants who go about their business, plowing, herding, and fishing, utterly unaware of the catastrophe—the only sign of which is a tiny detail off in the corner, which turns out to be poor Icarus’ legs waggling pathetically just above the waterline. In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture.

The character who stands front and center as the Odyssey begins, and who remains the center of our attention during its first four books, is the person who slowly gathers all the rumors, gossip, and stories: Odysseus’ son. When we meet him, a little after the proem ends, Telemachus cuts a melancholy figure. He is, Homer says, “sorrowing in his heart” as he sits forlornly in the great hall of the royal palace at Ithaca, watching powerlessly as the Suitors laugh and feast uproariously around him. Having no idea how to assert himself, Odysseus’ only child is reduced to helpless fantasies,

picturing his noble father in his mind, wishing that

he’d come and sweep the Suitors from the house!

The problem is not simply that no one knows for sure just where his noble father is; the greater dilemma is that nobody knows if he’s even alive. This uncertainty triggers further questions: whether Penelope is a wife or a widow, still married or now marriageable; whether the hero’s son can, if necessary, be the king and man his father had been. At present, the answer to this last question is clearly no.

The agonizing suspense in which the royal family, the Suitors, and the populace have been languishing is vividly evoked by means of a story we hear during these first few books of the Odyssey, the books from which Odysseus himself is absent. The tale, which concerns the best known of the ruses that Penelope has employed to keep the Suitors at bay, has an obvious symbolic meaning. The queen, one of the Suitors angrily complains, had once promised to marry one of them at last, but only after she finished weaving a funeral shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, the decrepit old man who now glumly tends his farmstead far from the scene of his absent son’s humiliation. The Suitors agreed to her plan; but every night, in secret, the cunning queen would unravel what she had woven during the day, thereby indefinitely postponing the completion of her handiwork. This deceit worked for several years, until one of Penelope’s maids, a faithless girl who’s been sleeping with one of the Suitors, exposed the ruse. The Suitors confronted the queen, who was then forced to complete the shroud. Since then—all this, we learn, took place three years before the Odyssey begins, three years before the moment when the prince sits helpless and forlorn in his hall, wishing his father could miraculously appear—the queen has disappeared into her chambers.

This story tells us a great deal about Penelope’s desperation—and about her cunning, which is every bit a match for her husband’s well-known wiles. But even more, the weaving and unweaving, knotting and then loosening, speeding and then delaying, beautifully capture the torpor, the lack of forward motion, that characterizes life on Ithaca during Odysseus’ long absence. This seesawing, the surf-like back-and-forth, is, too, the rhythm of the Odyssey itself: the forward push of the plot, the backward pull of the flashbacks, of the backstories and digressions without which the main narrative would seem thin, insubstantial.

So the great epic of travel, of voyages, of journeying, begins with its characters frozen in place. The unwholesome sense of stalemate that characterizes that state of affairs on Ithaca also raises a number of questions that are, in essence, literary. How to start the poem? Where does a story begin? How do you put an end to the past and turn it into the present?

One answer to that question is, By an act of will. After the proem ends, the action moves to the lofty peaks of Mount Olympus, the heavenly home of the gods, where Athena, moved by pity for her favorite mortal, prods her father, Zeus, to break the ten-year-long deadlock. Recalling his affection for the wily mortal, the king of the gods agrees. The divine plan to get Odysseus home will have two parts. First, Hermes, the messenger god, will hasten to the island where the lovesick nymph Calypso has been holding Odysseus captive for the past seven years, and there he will order her to let her prisoner go. But this scene is, in fact, postponed until Book 5—the book in which the action will finally pick up Odysseus’ story. Until then, the poem is preoccupied with the other part of the divine plan, which unfolds on Ithaca and involves the hero’s son.

After flying down to the island kingdom, Athena infiltrates the palace disguised as an old friend of Odysseus’ called Mentes; slipping into the banquet hall where the Suitors are feasting and dancing, she contrives to meet Prince Telemachus. (The youth’s name means “the far-off warrior”: the son who defines himself by the absence of his father has a name that recalls both the absence and the reason for it.) As he politely converses with the disguised Athena, Telemachus bitterly betrays his insecurities, which run very deep indeed: at one point, he sulks that although his mother, Penelope, has always insisted that Odysseus is his father, he can’t know for sure. After pausing to remark on the “outrageous arrogance” of the Suitors’ insulting behavior, Athena seeks to assuage the young man’s anxieties. She assures him, first, that Odysseus is not at all dead but in fact alive on an island, being held captive by “savage men” (with amusing delicacy, she edits out the lovely nymph Calypso); she comments, too, on the young man’s strong physical resemblance to his father: the head, those fine eyes …

But the best medicine for him, she knows, would be to act, and so she takes him in hand. First, she says, he should call a council of Ithaca’s citizens and “speak his mind” to them: “command the Suitors to scurry back home!” Then she tells him to get hold of a ship and travel to the homes of two of his father’s wartime companions, Nestor, the elderly king of Pylos, and Menelaus, husband of Helen and king 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 kind, he would leave the house at the precise time the service was supposed to begin, and then pretend, when we got there an hour late, that we’d hit traffic on the way.) Even when he wanted to get somewhere on time—to his friend Nino’s, for instance, with whom he’d worked when they were both young men pursuing graduate degrees in mathematics, or to play tennis on Tuesday evenings with his work buddy Bob McGill—it seemed that some implacable traffic god was against him. We would pile into the car, all seven of us, Andrew in the front passenger seat because he got “car sickness” if he sat in back, Matt and Eric and Jennifer in the deck, me in the backseat next to Mother (who liked to sit in the back so she could put her right leg, purpled with the varicose veins her many pregnancies had left her with, up on the front seat between my father’s right shoulder and Andrew’s left shoulder, because this way I can rest my bad leg), and pull away from the curbside with plenty of time to spare, and yet even then the traffic would be somehow bad, the expressway like a parking lot, and we’d be late.

You can’t believe the traffic! my father exclaimed as he pulled himself out of the car that January morning, stomping both feet into the white powder, his footprints like angry exclamation marks in the snow. As I stood on the porch awaiting him, I could see how gingerly he made his way up the steps, because of his great fear of falling. As he gripped the handrail, he looked up at me and asked me what we’d be covering in the first day of class, and I said, The beginning.

Now, an hour into the first session of the class, it was clear he didn’t think much of Odysseus.

One week before the start of classes, I’d sent an e-mail to the students enrolled in the course, asking them to read Book 1 in advance of the first class session and to come prepared to share their thoughts about why the epic begins the way it does. The class would be meeting every Friday for just under two and a half hours, from 10:10 in the morning to 12:30, with a short coffee break around 11:15. On this first day of the semester, I wrote to them, we’d spend the first half of the session talking about Book 1. After the break I’d be lecturing about the basics of Homeric poetry: the history of the debate about how Homer’s poems were originally composed, the nature of oral poetry, elements of epic technique, and my expectations for the course.

I also mentioned that my father would be sitting in on the course. Better to warn them, I thought, so his presence on the first day of class wouldn’t be a distraction.

So, I declared, looking down the length of the seminar table at 10:15, I’ve asked you to think about how the Odyssey begins. We can’t have a full discussion of Book 1 today—next week we’ll be talking about 1 and 2 in detail—but we can at least get the ball rolling. What strikes you right away about the opening of our poem—anything strange, anything worth noticing?

A boy who was sitting at the far end of the table grinned and said, It’s long! He had deep dimples that undercut whatever cool his carefully groomed scruff was meant to convey. As I rolled my eyes, the slender, dark-eyed girl sitting next to him elbowed him sharply. Girlfriend and boyfriend. Her eyes were so black that you couldn’t tell the irises from the pupils.

Try harder, I said drily. What’s your name?

The scruffy boy said, Jack. The girl said, Nina.

On the table in front of me lay the printout of the class roster that the registrar’s office had sent. I scanned it for their names. Next to his I wrote “Jack of the Dimples.” Next to hers I wrote “Nina Dark-Eyes.”

I’d gotten into this habit twenty years earlier, when I was a graduate student instructor. On the first day of class, as the students identified themselves, I’d jot down some memorable physical characteristic next to their names on the roster in order to be able to remember who they were. As a result of these jottings it would often be the case that, even after I knew the students well, I would continue to think of them reflexively as Zack of the Tiny Wire-Rimmed Glasses or Maureen Green-Eyes, as if those physical appurtenances and traits, rather than being superficial, were in fact evidence of some inalienable inner essence, a taste for precision or an irrepressible impishness. This isn’t all that different from the way that, in Homer’s epics, certain characters are identified by stock epithets that refer to a physical characteristic or attribute (“swift-footed Achilles” or “gray-eyed Athena”) or by a particular stance or gesture. For instance, every time Penelope comes downstairs from her bedchamber to the great hall of the palace where the Suitors are feasting, the scene is described in exactly the same way, starting with the first such moment, which occurs in Book 1:

She came down the lofty stairway of the house,

nor was she alone: two maidservants came along.

When this goddess among women reached the Suitors

she stood beside the door-post of the well-built hall,

and held the gleaming veil before her cheeks,

a maidservant standing by on either side.

Some modern readers find the verbatim repetitions of phrases, the oddly mechanical recurrence of gestures and stances, off-putting. But certain scholars have argued that, apart from whatever technical function these prefabricated lines and phrases may have served, they provide insight into the mind-set of the archaic poets—not least, their belief in the underlying consistency of nature and people and objects, whatever the distortions of history and violence and time—a belief in such constancy being of particular importance in this poem, whose characters are striving to recognize one another after decades of separation and trauma. This view of the epithets’ function is rather comforting; and indeed, their recurrence comes to feel reassuring. Like pitons stuck into the vast face of the epic, they give the audience a safe hold as they make their way through the sprawling text.

I looked around the room and repeated my question about what they might have found interesting about the opening of the poem.

After an awkward silence a tall boy with a big Adam’s apple and lots of dark hair, who seemed to be outgrowing his clothes as I stood looking at him—on that late-January morning his wrists were poking out far beyond the cuffs of his sweater—said, I think it’s interesting that Odysseus is barely even present in Book 1.

A cartoonist might do this kid as a dark splotch atop a single vertical stroke. He looked, in fact, just like the Don Quixote in a Picasso drawing my parents had in the house somewhere, one of the reproductions from the Metropolitan Museum that my mother liked to have framed.

Good, I said. Yes. The focus is somewhere else at first.

I asked him for his name.

Tom, he said.

Next to his name I wrote “Don Quixote Tom.”

Good, I repeated. Odysseus is a kind of ghost in Book 1. What’s the book actually focused on?

A gray-eyed girl sitting next to me looked up and said, nodding, I’m Trisha. A mass of fairish curls quivered when she spoke.

I made a mark on the roster. “Trisha of the Botticelli Hair.”

The book’s focused on the situation in Ithaca, she said.

Yes, I said, good. And what exactly is the situation?

It’s like there’s this … stagnation at the beginning, she went on.

Good, I said. So why do you think Homer focuses on the stagnation in Ithaca in Book 1 instead of getting right to Odysseus?

I looked around the table with an encouraging expression, but nobody said anything.

Every now and then when you’re a teacher—not often, but sometimes—you get a group with whom you have no chemistry. You talk and talk, you ask leading questions and feed them half-lines to get them going, but they just sit there, politely taking notes and occasionally venturing a muttered comment with the unconfident, upward intonation of a question. The interactions are inert, one-sided, lacking the fizzy back-and-forth that is the hallmark of a really good seminar. It was too early to tell, but I was worried that this group seemed a little reticent. Oh God, I thought, of course this would be the class that Daddy is observing.

Finally, a large blond kid with a round face and sharp blue eyes behind wide-rimmed glasses raised his hand.

I’m also Tom, he said.

On the printout I wrote “Sancho Panza Tom.” Then I crossed it out and wrote “Blond Tom.”

Is it a kind of setup? He wants to show you how bad things are at home, so when Odysseus finally gets back it feels like a climax?

Nice idea, I said. But let me ask you this: based on our glimpse of Odysseus in Book 1, how likely does that climax seem?

A slender girl down on the right lifted a pale hand about three inches off the surface of the table and gave it a little wiggle, like someone trying to signal to a friend during a church service. Her hair was remarkable: dark red, almost henna-colored, falling straight to her shoulders in a shimmering sheet.

Not very likely! she said. I thought he was kind of mopey, actually—

Excuse me, I said. What’s your name?

She blushed and said, Sorry.

Nothing to be sorry about! Go on.

I’m Madeline?

I found her name on the roster. “Madeline of the Shining Red Hair.”

Okay, Madeline. How, “mopey”?

He’s just very depressed, she went on. When Athena is talking to Zeus at the beginning, when they’re deciding what to do about Odysseus and how he’s stuck on the island with Calypso, she describes him as just moping around the island, crying.

Trisha’s curls bobbled as she wrote in her notebook. Looking up at me, she said, I think the first book is meant to be a kind of surprise. So here we are at the beginning of this big epic about this great hero, and the first reference to him is that he’s a kind of loser. He’s a castaway, he’s a prisoner, he has no power and no way of getting home. He’s hidden from everything he cares for. So it’s as if he can’t go any lower, it can only go uphill from there.

Great, I said. Yes. It provides a baseline for the hero’s narrative arc.

It was at this point that my father raised his head and said, “Hero”? I don’t think he’s a hero at all.

In unison, the students’ heads swiveled in his direction. Instead of sitting with the rest of the students at the seminar table, he’d taken a seat in a corner of the room off to my left and a little behind me, at my eight o’clock, in a blocky wooden chair beneath a window that looked out onto a depressing expanse of gravelly plowed snow. He would sit in this same chair every Friday for the next fifteen weeks.

I’ll tell you what I think is interesting about Odysseus!

I turned and stared at him. When we’d first talked about the possibility of his sitting in on the course, he’d promised me that he wasn’t going to talk in class. Nahh, he’d said at some point not long after the November day in 2010 when he’d called and said, I’ve been reading the Odyssey on my iPad, but there’s a lot of stuff I just don’t get. Didn’t you say you were going to be teaching it next term?—which is how all this began. At first I’d hesitated. Did he really want to come up every week, two and a half hours each way, and sit there for two and a half hours more with a bunch of freshmen? Sure, he’d said. Why not? Don’t forget, I was a professor, too. I know how to deal with college kids! I’d reflected for a moment. Okay, I finally said. But remember, it’s a seminar, not a lecture class—it’s going to be a bunch of kids sitting around a table talking about the text. There’s nowhere to hide. Would you be uncomfortable in that kind of setting? Nahh, my father had replied, I’m just gonna sit there and listen.

Now, on the first day of the class, he was talking. I’ll tell you what I think is interesting, he repeated.

He sat at the desk holding his hand up in the air. A curious effect of his being in the room with these very young people was that now, for the first time, he suddenly looked very old to me, smaller than I remembered him being, paler. The shock of perceiving my father as an old man wasn’t entirely new to me by that point, but sometimes his appearance, because of the light or the circumstances, still had the power to startle me. A few months earlier, in September, I’d taken the train from Manhattan out to the suburbs in order to spend a few days with my parents for my father’s eighty-first birthday. No, he had said, when I called to tell him which train I was going to be on, don’t take a cab from the station, I’ll pick you up myself. When I got out onto the platform at Bethpage I scrutinized the mass of cars in the parking lot below and wondered why a desiccated-looking man in too-large clothes was waving at me and then suddenly I thought, Daddy. With some embarrassment, I went down the steps that led from the platform to the parking lot, and he puckered his mouth in the way he sometimes did when he was exasperated by someone’s inexplicable stupidity—a driver who had cut him off, the checkout girl who made the wrong change—and said, I was standing right there, waving! and I said, Sorry, the sun was in my eyes.

Okay, I was saying to my father now. What do you think is so interesting? Why don’t you think he’s a “hero”?

My father cleared his throat and motioned to Trisha. First, I agree with her that he’s a loser—but not only because he’s a helpless prisoner!

The students looked amused.

Am I the only one, my father went on, who’s bothered by the fact that Odysseus is alone when the poem begins?

What do you mean, “alone”?

I couldn’t see where he was going with this.

Well, he said, he went off twenty years earlier to fight in the Trojan War, right? And he was presumably the leader of his kingdom’s forces?

Yes, I said. In the second book of the Iliad there’s a list of all the Greek forces that went to fight at Troy. It says that Odysseus sailed with a contingent of twelve ships.

My father’s voice was loud with triumph. Right! That’s hundreds of men. So my question is, What happened to the twelve ships and their crews? Why is he the only person coming home alive?

Some students looked around the room at one another. Others ruffled the pages of their copies of the Odyssey and stared intently at the print, as if by doing so they could force an answer from the paper.

I said, Actually that’s a good question. Anyone want to try to answer it?

They watched silently as I scanned the room, wildly hoping that some youngster would handily respond to my father’s question.

After a moment or two I said, Well, I think there are actually two ways of answering that question. The first has to do with the plot. If you read the proem carefully, you’ll recall that it calls his men “fools”—it says they died “through their own recklessness.” As we go through the poem we’ll get to the incidents during which his men perished, different groups at different times. And then you’ll tell me whether you think it was through their own recklessness.

My father made a face, as if he could have done better than Odysseus, could have brought the twelve ships and their crews home safely. He said, So you admit that he lost all his men?

Yep, I said, a little defiantly. I felt like I was eleven years old again, and Odysseus was a naughty schoolmate whom I’d decided I was going to stand by even if it meant being punished along with him.

He was clearly not convinced.

Nina, the dark-eyed girl, looked across the table. You said there were two ways of answering the question about why he comes back all alone. What’s the other way?

Well, I said, that answer has to do with “narrative,” really. When you think of it, he has to be the only one to make it home.

I looked around the room.

Think about it, I went on after a moment. If he’s the only one still standing, then—what?

Trisha looked up from her notebook. Then he gets to be the hero of the story.

Right, I said; and thought, This one is a live wire.

Think, I said to the whole class, think of what the Odyssey would be like if he’d returned with twelve men, or five—even just one other shipmate. It would never work. To be the hero of an epic, you have to get rid of the competition, so to speak.

Again my father said, Well, I don’t think he’s such a great hero!

He looked around the table. What kind of leader loses all his men? You call that a hero?!

The students laughed out loud. Then, as if fearful that they’d overstepped some boundary, they peered inquisitively down the length of the seminar table at me. Since I wanted to show them I was a good sport, I smiled broadly.

But what I was thinking was, This is going to be a nightmare.

They came back from the campus cafeteria a little before half past eleven, clutching their coffee cups and stomping the snow off their shoes. After they’d settled back into their seats, I launched into my lecture. I ended up talking for most of the remaining hour.

This is the last time I’m going to talk so much in this course, I began. The point of a seminar is for you to do the talking. They don’t pay me enough to talk so much!

There were a few nervous giggles.

I started with the controversy known as the Homeric Question, a centuries-old debate about how Homer’s epics had come into being—whether they had started as written texts or as oral compositions. It was important for the students to grasp the fundamentals of the debate, since significant questions of interpretation hang on which theory you subscribe to.

The Greeks themselves tended to think that there had been a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems. Herodotus thought that Homer must have lived around 800 B.C., four hundred years before his own time; several centuries after Herodotus, Aristarchus, the head of the Library of Alexandria (the greatest scholarly institution of the ancient world) and a renowned authority on Homer’s texts, surmised that the poet had lived about 1050 B.C., a century and a half after the Trojan War itself was supposed to have taken place. It was generally believed that Homer wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey; but some ancient scholars, called the Separatists, thought the poems were written by two different people. No fewer than seven cities in ancient times claimed Homer as a son.

That was the received wisdom until, in the late 1700s, a French scholar called Villoisin discovered a tenth-century manuscript of the Iliad moldering away in a library in Venice. This manuscript was unlike others that had circulated over the centuries: along with the Greek text of the epic it included transcriptions of the marginal notes of ancient commentators, from Byzantine sages back to the Librarians of Alexandria themselves, writing in the 200s and 100s B.C. The notes made it clear that those earlier commentators had had access to different and sometimes competing versions of the poem. Seizing upon this revelation, a German scholar who was reviewing Villoisin’s work—none other than Friedrich August Wolf, as it happens, the great advocate of philology, the scientific study of literature—arrived at a revolutionary insight: the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey that we possess could not have been fixed in writing until relatively late in their history. Wolf argued—shockingly, to many of his contemporaries—that Homer himself must have been illiterate. Rather than writing his poems down, as had previously been thought, he had instead composed a series of ballads (known as lays) that were short enough to be memorized and which were transmitted orally for generations, perhaps by guilds of professional reciters. At some point later on, these discrete lays were assembled into the immensely long and complex poems we have today by a sophisticated editor/compiler who, unlike his predecessors, did know how to write.