The Riddle of the Labyrinth (31 page)

Despite her efforts,
Scripta Minoa II
was no closer to publication when Kober sailed for New York in September. Apart from the deplorable state of the manuscript itself was the fact that she and Myres disagreed on a fundamental organizing principle: how to classify and present the nearly two thousand Knossos inscriptions. He wanted to present them much as Evans had, organized by the location in the palace in which they were found. In her own work, by contrast, Kober had spent years grouping the inscriptions together by subject: all the tablets about grain discussed together; the ones about wine; about men, horses, and so forth. To her, this was the more meaningful classification, as it spoke to the tablets' focus on lists, which in turn let her pluck out the nouns and their various inflected forms.

Myres came around to her way of doing things, but a huge sticking point remained: He didn't think the language of Linear B was inflected. “He wants to use my classification of the inscriptions but still insists there are no cases!” Kober had written Daniel in frustration from Oxford. “My classification depends on case.”

From this point on, the tone of her correspondence about Myres, once worshipful (“I am really very much in awe of that great historian, J.L. Myres,” she had written to Myres himself in 1946), starts to change. In a letter to Sundwall written shortly after her second trip, Kober said that Myres “still thinks . . . that there are no cases, also, that anything he doesn't understand is due to the fault of the Minoan scribe.” To Emmett Bennett of Yale, she wrote: “Somewhat against my better judgement, I permitted Sir John Myres to use my classification as a basis for his discussion of the Linear B inscriptions. I didn't like the idea because I would prefer to explain my classification myself, since he still thinks all words are nouns, and all in the nominative case. But I finally said he could do so, provided he stated his interpretation was his own, and not mine. . . . I now plan to publish the classification with my own interpretation as soon as SM is out.”

ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1948, Kober arrived in Brooklyn to the start of a new term. Soon she was swamped. “I've been home almost a month now, and haven't done as much as I could do in a couple of days of uninterrupted work,” she wrote Myres in October. “It is annoying to have to stop what I'm doing at 11 at night, often right in the middle of something, get ready for bed so that I can get up for school in time, then find that committee meetings, and unexpected visitors, keep me from continuing for a couple of days.”

She had not only her school duties to occupy her time but also Myres's typescript of
Scripta Minoa II
to correct for the printer, as well as his handwritten manuscript of
Scripta Minoa III
to begin typing. All this left her barely an hour a day for her own work on Linear B. She could look ahead with pleasure, at least, to Daniel's return from overseas in five months, when they could discuss plans for the Minoan center and even, just possibly, a faculty appointment at Penn. “Wishing you the best of luck and looking forward to seeing you again in February,” he had written her in early September, before he set sail.

On December 18, 1948, in Ankara, Turkey, John Franklin Daniel died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight.

T
HE NEWS CAME AS A terrible shock, as you can imagine,” Kober wrote Myres in late December 1948. “At present I feel depressed. Daniel was a friend of whom I was fond, as well as the person on whom practically all of my Minoan plans for the immediate future depend. I don't know what's going to happen. . . .” A letter she wrote to Sundwall in March 1949 betrays the increasingly darkening tone of her correspondence. “I did not write more about Daniel because I myself had no information,” she said. “He was taken to Cyprus, and buried at Episcopi. That's all I know. It is very sad. I still can't believe it.” She added, in an aside of a sort rarely seen in her letters: “I am afraid our civilization is doomed. Whatever happens, the freedom of the individual will be lost, and for generations we will—.” The rest of the letter has not survived.

Through all this, Kober continued her work. She had her classes to teach and her papers to grade; she also had the hundreds of inscriptions she had fiendishly transcribed on her second trip to Oxford, which she was now sorting, cataloguing, and copying neatly for reproduction by the Clarendon Press. At this point, she was dealing with about 2,300 inscriptions, more than ten times as many as when she began.

Myres was still sending her batches of the manuscript of
Scripta Minoa III
, the volume on Linear A, written in his nightmarish hand. “I'm neck-deep in Sir John's manuscript about Linear Class A, which I'm supposed to be editing for him,” Kober wrote to Emmett Bennett toward the end of 1948. “First, though, I have to type it out—it's manuscript,
manu scriptum
. And in typing, I find he makes errors—so I have to correct them. Considering that I think Linear A isn't going to be much help for decipherment it's a complete waste of time, for me.”

What is haunting about Kober's correspondence from this period is how often she invokes time: the passage of time, the wasting of time, and the spate of claims on her time. Though she had not yet experienced the first signs of her illness, the very notion of time—and in particular the lack of it—permeates her letters from this point onward.

There were a few bits of good news. One came from the University of Pennsylvania, which in the wake of Daniel's death wanted to go ahead with the Center for Minoan Linguistic Research anyway. With Daniel's successor, Rodney Young, Kober resumed organizing the center, which she planned to have open to scholars by the end of 1949.

Another concerned the Pylos inscriptions. From the time they were unearthed on the mainland in 1939 through the end of the 1940s, only seven inscriptions had been published. Hungry scholars like Kober could do little more than guess at the tablets' contents and steal rare glimpses whenever they could. (In 1942, after attending a lecture by Carl Blegen, the archaeologist who had unearthed the tablets but declined to share them, Kober wrote, “He showed slides of about three inscriptions I had never seen before, so I considered it a perfect evening.”)

The Pylos script looked similar to the one from Knossos, but there were visible differences. Each had characters not found in the other: The symbols
and
, for instance, appeared at Pylos but not at Knossos; the symbol
appeared at Knossos but not at Pylos. Without full access to the mainland inscriptions, Kober would never be able to determine to her own satisfaction whether the scripts were the same. But Blegen continued his refusal. By the late 1940s, Kober had resolved to go quietly to work on his disciple, Emmett Bennett of Yale. “Dr. Bennett . . . is a very agreeable young man whenever he can be,” she wrote to Sundwall in 1948, in a barely veiled swipe at Blegen.

The cautious correspondence between Kober and Bennett had begun in June 1948, when Bennett, who had done his doctoral dissertation on the Pylos tablets, wrote to her with a recommendation. “Bennett suggested I get his dissertation on inter-library loan,” Kober had written happily to Daniel afterward. “I did! 9 inscriptions, and some very interesting ideas!”

After devouring the dissertation, Kober was confident that the scripts at Knossos and Pylos had been used to write the same language. “There can be no doubt now, I think, that the languages are either identical, or very similar,” she wrote to Bennett. What was needed, she knew, was for the two of them to embark on a discreet collaboration, collating their lists of signs and vocabulary into a master list that would cover both Crete and the mainland.

Though relations between the Knossos and Pylos camps had been cool at best, Kober and Bennett were united by similar circumstances: Both had their hands tied by the ego and obstinacy of more senior scholars. As long as Blegen sat on the Pylos inscriptions, Kober could not see them; as long as Myres held on to those from Knossos, Bennett was similarly constrained.

Kober respected Bennett. He was a careful scholar, and had worked as a cryptanalyst during the war, pinpointing patterns in encoded Japanese messages despite the fact that he knew no Japanese. They began to put a tentative modus operandi in place. In a letter of June 7, 1948, Kober formally proposed they work together. “
If
there is a possibility that the publication of the Pylos material will be long delayed, and ditto for the Knossos, it might be worth-while for us to get together on things like sign-list order and content classification. Otherwise, you realize, as soon as both are published, others will start the necessary . . . classifications and all our work will be thrown overboard. If [the publication of the tablets] happens during the coming year, I'll be very happy, but if several years pass (and they have a way of slipping away) it would be silly” to continue working separately.

In the fall of 1948, Blegen at last gave Bennett permission to share the Pylos inscriptions. “Happy, happy day!” Kober wrote on hearing the news. By coincidence, Myres had relaxed the embargo on the Knossos data at around that time. Kober could now share the inscriptions she had copied in Oxford with other scholars privately, he said, though everyone would have to wait until
Scripta Minoa II
came out to publish anything based on them.

“If Bennett is willing,” Kober wrote gleefully to Myres at the end of October, “I'll exchange a set of my drawings for one of the Pylos inscriptions. I didn't know I had horse-trading Yankee blood in my veins, but apparently I do.”

By the end of the year, after some more delicate diplomacy-by-mail that reads like a negotiation for the exchange of hostages, Kober was traveling to Yale to look at Bennett's inscriptions and he was traveling to New York to look at hers. Bennett, who was then comparing the handwritings of the various scribes and liked to spread out a blizzard of photos for scrutiny, once wrote to ask whether she had “a large, well-tabled room” at her disposal. Kober offered the use of the Ping-Pong table in the basement of her home, but alas, he replied, it would not suffice, for “the last time I did it . . . I eventually covered about three or four ten-foot library tables.”