The Riddle of the Labyrinth (30 page)

Kober's grid illustrates the web of contingencies that emerges when an analyst plots the changes in the “bridging” character across different cases of the same word. To modern eyes, her grid has the quality of a Sudoku puzzle, in which the interdependencies among its cells (“If I've already used a 5 in this square, I can't use a 5 in an adjacent square”) help the investigator arrive at the only logically possible solution. For, as she clearly knew, once the sound-values of just a few Linear B characters were discovered, the entire grid, in explosive chain reaction, would start to fill itself in.

What Kober showed is that when an inflected language is written with a syllabic script, mapping the inflection pattern is a way to “force out” hidden information about the relationships among the signs. It was this information, so masterfully presented in her new article of 1948, that furnished the first viable key to the mapping between sound and symbol in the lost Cretan language.

Near the close of the article, she wrote:

The task before us is to analyze these scripts thoroughly, honestly, and without prejudice. . . .

When we have the facts, certain conclusions will be almost inevitable. Until we have them, no conclusions are possible.

IN LATE DECEMBER of 1947, Kober had received a special-delivery letter from Daniel warning of a “slight setback” regarding the job at Penn. “You are no. 2 on nearly everyone's list,” he wrote:

In reply, Kober asked him point-blank: “Don't you think a lot of the opposition is really based on the fact that I'm a woman? Even if it isn't specifically mentioned.” She went on: “As for the ‘boning up'—anybody must ‘bone up' for a graduate course, or for a course one has never taught. All my great teachers . . . do their homework, even for courses they've taught over and over again. Of course I'll have to work at preparation.”

Daniel answered, “The fact that you are a woman has absolutely nothing to do with the case.” The trouble, he wrote, lay with several members of the search committee, Indo-European scholars at the university. One was “weak, lazy, and impressionable”; the other “has the first two qualities, but has a stubbornness which [the first man] seems to lack.” A third “has been an assistant professor for seven years, and . . . told me perfectly frankly that he felt that he had to oppose any appointment at a higher rank than that, because it would shut him out forever. Isn't that nice?”

Of the committee members as a group, Daniel wrote, “I am not being unduly bitter when I say that their controlling criterion seems to be mediocrity. They are third raters themselves . . . and simply do not want to get people here who will show them up. . . . While he has not said so in so many words, I am sure that Crosby, who is chairman of the department, has made up his mind that he will block you if he possibly can. . . . I certainly have learned a lot about human nature, the genus professoricus [
sic
], in this matter!” The university's intransigence continued through the start of 1948, and in February Daniel wrote her, “I am limiting my activities to trying to undermine your rivals.”

Finally, in May 1948, Penn made up its mind. “I have bad news,” Daniel wrote. The university had appointed the eminent Indo-European linguist Henry Hoenigswald to the post. “I am terribly disappointed about it, perhaps more so than you will be,” Daniel continued. “I was dreaming wonderful dreams of the terrific set-up we would have here with you and the Minoan collection. . . . Hoenigswald is a good man, but it won't be quite the same. It may give you some satisfaction to know that you were very close to getting it; if one person had swung from opposition . . . to support, I think that we could have swung it. But that is spilled milk.”

“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” Kober replied. “I can't say your news was unexpected, because I am a pessimist from 'way back.”

There was one silver lining: Penn wanted to go ahead with the Minoan center anyway, with Kober spending one weekend a month in Philadelphia to tend to it. In anticipation, she was named a research associate at the university museum, an honorary title with no stipend.

By mail, she and Daniel began to draw up their plans. Kober compiled a list of people she would invite to be associates of the center—forming a “mutual aid society,” as she called it, to share the fruits of their research. “If it works as we hope,” she wrote to Henry Allen Moe in July, “scholars of a dozen different countries, now working more or less in isolation, will be able to cooperate, and perhaps our united efforts will solve the problem.” At the top of the guest list she put Sundwall and Myres, followed by a few other scholars. Next-to-last she put Bedřich Hrozný, the object of her frequent scorn, whose name she followed with three question marks. In last place was Michael Ventris, followed by four question marks.

BY THIS TIME, Ventris, too, had been enlisted by Myres to help prepare the Knossos inscriptions for publication. The two men had begun corresponding in 1942, when Myres wrote to Ventris to compliment him on his 1940 article in the
American Journal of Archaeology
. At war's end, he wrote to Ventris again, with an offer similar to the one he would make to Kober: permission to see Evans's unpublished transcriptions.

Ventris accepted eagerly, though he would not be able to take up the offer until 1946. Soon afterward, at Myres's behest, he was carefully hand-copying hundreds of inscriptions from Evans's notes and photographs so that they could be reproduced clearly, as Kober was also doing. (With a good two thousand inscriptions, there was ample copying work for them both.) Ventris began spending each night at an elegant table in his London home, drawing Linear B symbols in his impeccable architectural hand.

Where Kober's Linear B transcriptions are serviceable, Ventris's are the work of an artist. Even his everyday handwriting, the letters crisply squared off and perfectly proportioned, the lines absolutely horizontal, is so remarkable-looking that it resembles the penmanship of a skilled blind person writing with the aid of a straight-edge.

“Mr. Ventris would have no trouble getting a job as scribe for King Minos,” Kober wrote after seeing a batch of his copying, a remark that appears at once complimentary and belittling. Ventris might be a superb draftsman, she seemed to be saying, but he was no more than that. What is clear, with hindsight, of both Kober and Ventris is that each underestimated the other deeply.

IN MIDSUMMER 1948, plans for the Minoan center were put on hold temporarily, until both Kober and Daniel returned from overseas trips—hers to Oxford and his a long voyage through Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey. Daniel's trip, to scout sites for future excavations by the university museum, would keep him abroad from September 1948 through February 1949; he was due to set sail for Athens on September 10, the day Kober sailed home from England to New York.

On July 21, 1948, Kober embarked for England once more. She would not only need to rouse the Clarendon Press to action but, should they decide to go ahead, she would also have to continue helping Myres prepare the complex, unwieldy manuscript for submission. So much depended on its being published. “Until it is,” she wrote, “it will be impossible to make progress.”

In Oxford, Kober found Myres even frailer than before, and the state of his health made access difficult. “Lady Myres keeps him in bed Mondays and Wednesdays,” she wrote to Daniel from Oxford in August. She was just then in the midst of revising Myres's vocabulary list, which, she wrote, “is in perfect chaos. . . . Every other word requires correction.” Perhaps that was not surprising—Myres was an archaeologist and not a linguist—but the state of his data did Kober no favors.

For the first time since her association with him began, Kober expressed reservations about the quality of Myres's work. “I only hope he accepts my corrections,” she wrote to Daniel. “I'd hate to have him publish what he has and mention me in connection with it. He is far from well, which makes it difficult to press a point.”

Kober understood that Myres was living only for the volume's publication. But her correspondence from this trip makes clear that dealing with him was a struggle from the moment she arrived. “I've had enough trouble getting him to correct the Linear B,” she wrote in another letter to Daniel that August. “I've just about rewritten Scripta Minoa II and have the Clarendon Press ready to print. Now I'll have to get Sir John to give up the manuscript to be printed. Better burn this letter.” She signed off: “Just now I'm writing out the vocabulary for the Press—a month's work, and less than a week to do it. What a life!”

It is here, in Oxford, that Kober's and Ventris's stories dovetail for the first brief, painful time. Ventris had also been summoned to Oxford in the summer of 1948 to help prepare
Scripta Minoa II
for publication, and he arrived during Kober's visit. But, apparently cowed by the combined scholarly firepower of Kober and Myres, he quickly fled the scene, a pattern of abdication he would repeat throughout his life.

Besides correcting Myres's Linear B vocabulary lists for publication, Kober had a spate of purely scribal duties, including the tedious hand-copying of hundreds of inscriptions for the printer. She also agreed, in retrospect unwisely, to help Myres prepare the manuscript of yet another volume,
Scripta Minoa III
, which would be devoted to Linear A.

There were a few consolations. Foremost was Kober's hope that
Scripta Minoa II
would finally see publication, freeing her to use the inscriptions in her own work. There was the joy of staying again at St. Hugh's College, whose intellectual climate she had pined for in the year since she'd been there. There was also the letter that Daniel mailed to her in Oxford, written days before he sailed for Greece. “Two deans . . . still wish there were some way of getting you a full time appointment at Penn,” he wrote. “Who knows: it may work out yet.”