The Riddle of the Labyrinth (19 page)

What she had created, in pure analog form, was a database, with the punched holes marking the parameters on which the data could be sorted. But for all their rigor and precision, the file boxes also “reveal a gentler side to Alice Kober,” as Thomas Palaima and his colleague Susan Trombley have written. On one occasion, they note, Kober “took extra care in cutting a greeting card used as a tabbed divider, perfectly centering a fawn lying in a bed of flowers.”

ALL THE WHILE, Kober was shouldering a full course load at Brooklyn College. “I . . . teach in my spare time, so to speak,” she wrote with bitter humor to a colleague in 1942, and she was scarcely joking. The college was part of New York City's public university system, and for faculty members of that period, the emphasis was on teaching rather than research. “Brooklyn College never did anything for me in a scholarly way,” Kober lamented a few years later. She shared an office with four other people (this alone would have made on-campus scholarly work impossible); in addition to her classes she was active in the customary round of university work, serving on a spate of faculty committees.

In 1943, asked to give private instruction in Horace to a blind student, Kober taught herself Braille—itself a writing system—and from 1944 onward, she brailled textbooks, library materials, and final exams for all the blind students at the college. It took as many as fifteen hours to braille a single exam.

In a letter to her department chairman in May 1946, Kober itemized her schedule for the coming weeks:

“The less said about teaching assignments, the better,” Kober complained to a fellow classicist in 1949. “Blankety-blank-blank will have to do. Too bad we can't get paid for doing what we want to do.”

But with her pupils, she was warm and involved, even quietly passionate. In the early 1940s, at her students' request, she established the Hunter chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, the national classics honor society, and was its faculty adviser. When she taught archaeology, she took her students excavating in nearby vacant lots, where they unearthed cutlery and broken dishes.

“I think I'm a good teacher, at least my students come to class with a smile, laugh at my jokes,” Kober wrote in 1947 when applying for a prestigious job at the University of Pennsylvania. Her appraisal was seconded by at least one grateful student. Among Kober's papers is a letter she received in 1944 from a young woman in Detroit named Fritzi Popper Green:

It was clear that in her “soberly undramatic” way, Kober transmitted to her students the passion she felt for the life of the mind. Her former pupil Eva Brann remembered her telling the class, “You know a great work when the back of your neck tingles.”

IN LATE 1945, with Linear B beckoning, Kober applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for one of its coveted fellowships. If she was good enough to get it, she would have a year free from teaching for the first time in more than a decade—a blissful year alone with the script. Perhaps then she could make real headway toward the day when the ancient Cretan tablets could be read once more. It was not the content of the tablets that interested her per se, but the riddle of the script as a pure cryptographic problem. As she told the young Phi Beta Kappa initiates at Hunter that June evening, the decipherment of the Minoan tablets might not yield high drama, but to the decipherer, it would bring satisfaction of the deepest kind anyway:

I
N APRIL 1946, THE NEWSPAPERS announced the 132 recipients of that year's Guggenheim Fellowships. There were luminaries on the list, including the photographer Ansel Adams, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Also on the list, receiving the first major award of her career, was Alice Kober. The $2,500 stipend would free her from teaching for twelve months, time she could devote without interruption to Linear B.

Congratulations streamed into Brooklyn. Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a Scotsman who was, in Kober's words, “one of the ‘grand old men' of classical scholarship,” wrote her, “Your learning is great, your courage is immense, and your problem is altogether delightful.” Leonard Bloomfield, the most eminent linguist of the first half of the twentieth century, sent Kober an even more arresting tribute. He wrote: “The very notion of your problem scares me.”

Kober arranged for a year's leave from Brooklyn College, to begin on September 1. As the foundation required, she underwent a physical exam; in light of the devastating illness that would overtake her in little more than three years' time, it is heartbreaking to read her doctor's report today. “I find she is in excellent physical condition,” he wrote. “There is no evidence of any organic [or] functional disease.”

Even before her fellowship began, she had much to keep her busy. She started work on a major review, for the
American Journal of Archaeology
, of volume 1 (there would eventually be two) of Bedřich Hrozný's “decipherment” of Linear B. Hrozný, the decipherer of Hittite cuneiform, was determined to show that the language of Bronze Age Crete was also a form of Hittite. “It seems the sheerest balderdash,” Kober wrote privately to John Franklin Daniel, the journal's new editor. “But Hrozný has been lucky with Hittite . . . so I want to consider very carefully before I make the nasty comments I feel like making.”

The more Kober considered, the more furious she grew at Hrozný's unscientific approach to the script. “I hope he will not be too annoyed with my review,” she wrote to another colleague, “but I feel that in scholarly matters the truth must always be told.” By the time she sat down to write the review, she was so inflamed that she told Daniel he would need asbestos paper on which to print it. “Don't cool off too much before writing your review of Hrozný,” Daniel replied cheerfully by return mail. “I have checked and find that we have a small stock of asbestos paper available.”

Daniel, a young archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the few people in Kober's field whom she genuinely respected. (Ventris, by contrast, was not.) In 1941, Daniel had published an important article on the Cypro-Minoan script, a Late Bronze Age writing system used on Cyprus and thought to have been derived from Linear A. He and Kober began corresponding in the early 1940s, after Daniel succeeded Mary Swindler as the
AJA
's editor; by the middle of the decade, he would become the most important person in Kober's professional life.

The months before her fellowship also let Kober expand her linguistic repertory in preparation for Linear B. She had long since mastered a host of languages ancient and modern: Greek and Latin, of course, as well as French and German, all standard issue for a working classicist, plus Anglo-Saxon. Starting in the early 1940s, she had set about learning Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Tocharian, Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque, and Chinese. From 1942 to 1945, while teaching full-time at Brooklyn, she commuted weekly by train to Yale to take classes in advanced Sanskrit. She knew far better than to expect to find any of these languages lurking in the tablets. What she was doing, as she made clear in her correspondence, was arming herself with them “against the happy day when they may do me some good.”

Kober had also prepared by studying Old and New World field archaeology: In the summer of 1936 she took part in an excavation in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico; in the summer of 1939, she explored ancient sites in Greece. Years later, she would write of being “homesick for Athens,” wistfully recalling “my scrambles up and down the north slope of the Acropolis.”

She did manage a vacation of sorts before her fellowship began, driving with friends through the American West and down into Mexico in the summer of 1946. (Her brief account of the trip is one of only two passing references to social life in her entire archived correspondence, which comprises more than a thousand pages.) But as a letter she wrote to Daniel mid-voyage, on hotel stationery from Boulder, Colorado, indicates, she took Linear B along.

It was so like Kober to do two things at once, squeezing as much as she could from every available moment. For relaxation, she occasionally knit, or read detective stories. Unlike most people, however, she did them simultaneously. The mathematical elegance of each pursuit must have appealed to her greatly, as did the possibility of their efficient combination.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1946, Kober's Guggenheim year officially began. She spent the first several months “clearing up the background,” as she called it—analyzing more Asia Minor languages like Lydian, Lycian, Hurrian, Hattic, and Carian “and some remnants of others.” Many of these had no published word lists available, and she had to make card files for each language from scratch. “It's a thankless job, and most scholars wouldn't undertake it,” she wrote Daniel that fall. “As a result, every person working in the field must do all the work over again.” For Lydian alone, she said, it took “about a month of extremely intensive work” just to set up her files.

Nonetheless, her joy in the freedom from teaching was palpable. “I had never before been able to work uninterruptedly for such long periods,” Kober wrote in a progress report for the Guggenheim Foundation in December. “It takes about a month to do what was formerly a year's work.” In closing, she added, “I only hope my results equal my gratitude.”

To a great extent, those results would depend on the reply to a letter she had written the month before, in November 1946. A model of diplomacy, yet shot through with barely concealed yearning, it was something she had been steeling herself to compose for some time.

The letter was to Sir John Linton Myres, a distinguished archaeologist at Oxford University. Forty years earlier, Myres had been Evans's young assistant at his excavations of Knossos. After Evans's death in 1941, Myres inherited from him the mantle of grand old man of Aegean prehistory. Unfortunately for all concerned, he also inherited Evans's work on Linear B, and it was he who was charged with putting four decades of notes and transcriptions into publishable shape. Evans, as Andrew Robinson observes in
The Story of Writing
, had left “a disorganized legacy.” His planned second volume of
Scripta Minoa
, devoted to Linear B, never materialized in his lifetime. The thankless task of producing it now fell to Myres, who by the mid-1940s was elderly and ill himself.

When Kober wrote to him, scholars still had access to only two hundred inscriptions. Myres had Evans's transcriptions and photos of nearly two thousand more: Evans had decreed that they were to remain unseen until
Scripta Minoa II
was published. If Kober could see them privately beforehand, her store of inscriptions would increase almost tenfold. But knowing Evans's desire for control of his material—even, it would seem, from beyond the grave—she held out little hope.