The Riddle of the Labyrinth (34 page)

After she finished her hundreds of drawings, Kober's next task was to go over Myres's typescript of
Scripta Minoa II
page by page before it could be dispatched to the Clarendon Press for typesetting. In late 1948 she told Sundwall that she was living with Myres's manuscript night and day, and had to read it very carefully, “because he makes so many little errors.” “The truth is,” she added, “that he really can't read the Minoan scripts.”

In the spring of 1949, the final proofs of
Scripta Minoa II
began arriving in Brooklyn at last—in maddeningly small installments. Whenever new ones showed up, Kober had to drop what she was doing, read them, correct them, and ship them back to Myres. “I never know when proofs are coming,” she wrote Bennett in June. “They drive me crazy. I just don't approve of the method. I can correct, but in the end, in my opinion, the whole thing isn't right. Oh, well, it's Sir John's work, not mine. I refuse to take credit or blame for it.”

By this time she was utterly exhausted. “School is just finishing,” she wrote Myres that month. “I have to have a short rest before I plunge into Minoan again. My health hasn't improved yet—but then, I haven't had a rest yet. . . . I'm a little homesick for England, and for an ocean voyage, but this summer I shall stay here and rest.”

Myres also continued to send her batches of the manuscript of
Scripta Minoa III
, the Linear A volume. He was using her, in essence, as a typist, and as Kober's reams of typed correspondence, with their thickets of cross-outs and overstrikes, attest, she was not an especially good one. But for her, the real labor lay not in the typing but in the unrelieved correcting and editing she found his manuscript needed. From this point on in her correspondence, her tone toward Myres grows genuinely bitter.

“Sorry that at times my notes take more space than your text,” she wrote him in October 1948, as she returned some pages of
Scripta Minoa III
. “I've just reread them, and am sorry to say that I meant some of them to be funny, but they no longer sound that way.” In early November, she told him, “I want to get back to my own job, which is deciphering Linear B. . . . It would be a waste of time at present for me to do this work.” But then, in a postscript, she promised to send Myres “another batch of text soon.”

“What I would like to do right now is go to sleep for an entire month,” Kober wrote a few days later. Not long afterward, in a letter to Myres on November 28, she tried to abandon the whole project:

Myres asked her to carry on and she agreed, but by the spring of 1949, she had had enough. “I've come to the conclusion that the kind of work I'm doing is useless,” Kober wrote him. She continued:

IN EARLY JULY 1949, Kober, feeling especially unwell, went to the doctor. On July 27, she was ordered to the hospital for three weeks' observation. On August 15, she was told she would need surgery, which meant weeks more in the hospital. “I'm sorry,” she told Bennett, “but it seems you'll have to mark time till I recover and finish what should have been finished long ago, except for my illness.”

Just what illness Kober had is nowhere stated in her correspondence. “I managed to acquire something very unusual, and it took the doctors more than a month to find out what it was—and then they were stumped about a cure,” she wrote Myres. It is in keeping with midcentury taboo that a serious illness would never have been named, even in correspondence with valued associates. Nor does any of the published obituaries of Kober list the cause of death, also a customary omission then. Even her death certificate sheds no light on the question: Cause of death is routinely redacted from New York City death certificates of the period. It seems probable, given Kober's heavy smoking, that she had some type of cancer. A much younger cousin, Patricia Graf, who was a child when Kober died, says it was whispered among the women in the family that “Aunt Alice” had a rare form of stomach cancer. (Her father, Franz, had died of the disease.)

It has also been suggested that Kober's doctors never told her precisely how ill she was. Given the low esteem in which the medical establishment of the period held patients—especially female patients—this, too, is possible.

In a short letter from late August 1949, Kober apprised Sundwall of her health, writing in an uncharacteristic huge, childish scrawl: She was too weak, she explained, to sit at a typewriter. “Naturally,” she said, “I got no work done on Minoan.”

That summer—the summer she was supposed to rest—Bennett continued to send her lists of signs and vocabulary words to check. But over time, Kober began to feel he was getting the better end of the deal. “It is too bad that illness had to strike this summer when I hope to accomplish so much with Minoan,” she wrote Myres in late August, when she was housebound after her operation. “My illness will hold up Bennett, but, when I had time to think in the hospital, I realized he is demanding a great deal from me—and so far has given me almost nothing—except I copied
his
copies of the Pylos material. I shall hereafter proceed only on terms of strict reciprocity. He gets my photographs if I get his. Otherwise not.”

By autumn, she was worse. In late October 1949, Kober returned from a second, six-week hospital stay and was again housebound. Yet she remained full of plans for Linear B. “Professor Blegen at last relented and I was allowed access to the Pylos material,” she wrote Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation on October 29. “I have great hopes, because the new material supplements the old, and there is now almost enough for valid statistical analysis. . . .
Scripta Minoa II
is still held up. I'm beginning to think it will never appear. In another year, I will be ready, if health permits, to start a monograph on Minoan
provided
the material is published. I'll write it in any case, but it may have to wait years before it can be published.”

That day, she wrote Bennett: “I hope I am now really on the way to recovery, but it will take some time. . . . As soon as I can, I hope to get back to inflection. . . . Sorry that my illness is holding you up as well, but I can't do a thing about it, except hope.” By return mail, Bennett wished her a rapid recovery and asked for her suggestions on the order of the Linear B signary.

By the fall of 1949, Kober was officially on sick leave from Brooklyn College, though she continued her work for Myres. “My health is, unfortunately, not what it should be,” she wrote him in November. “I am not bed-ridden, but am at present house-bound, because 10 weeks in hospitals in the last 12 have weakened my legs so that I cannot manage stairs. But enough about that. Naturally, all this has held up my work with Minoan, for which I have high hopes—if I can ever get the preliminary analysis finished.”

She dreamed of Crete. “I haven't done anything about going to Greece next summer, since most fellowships, etc., demand a health certificate—which at the moment I could not give,” she said in the same letter. “I'll have to have some subsidy now, since I spent all my reserve money on doctors. But I'm sure that if the Museum is open, I'll get there some way.”

BY THE END of 1949, Michael Ventris found he could not resist the lure of Linear B after all. Back in the hunt, he launched his largest-scale assault on the script thus far. He drew up a detailed questionnaire and sent it to a dozen scholars around the world, Kober included—and here the pair's stories dovetail for the last brief, painful time.

It had been nearly half a century, Ventris reminded his correspondents, since Evans dug up the first tablets at Knossos. The few serious analysts of the script were working largely in isolation, cut off from one another by threadbare communications technology and the congenital reluctance of scholars to part with trade secrets. “I began to day-dream” about “a symposium from everyone at present working on Minoan language and writing, explaining the position they had reached, and suggesting the next lines of approach—possibly developing into a series of mutual bulletins routed through someone with a duplicator,” Ventris had written in 1948. He began to do just that.

What he did, in short, was to create the kind of “mutual aid society” that Kober had envisioned for her Minoan center at Penn: an international clearinghouse through which decipherers could keep abreast of the latest developments.

Like Kober, Ventris saw the decipherment as a collaboration rather than a competition. His approach, as Andrew Robinson points out, owed a great deal to a way of doing architecture, known as Group Working, that was then coming into vogue in Britain. Traditionally, decisions on any architectural project had been made by a single, powerful Great Man—the lead architect—and handed down by fiat to the team's junior members. But by the time Ventris entered the field, architectural offices had begun to adopt a more democratic approach, soliciting opinions from each member of a team, and sharing them among the team as a whole, in a collegial round-robin. (A few years later, Ventris would embark on a project—a prestigious and, as things turned out, searingly painful enterprise—that studied the ways in which information could be disseminated efficiently among architects.)

In preparing and distributing his questionnaire, Ventris appears to have applied the Group Working ethos directly to the problem of decipherment. Among the twenty-one questions he included were these:

       • What kind of language is represented in the Linear B inscriptions, and to what other known languages is it related?

       • Is the Linear B language identical, or closely related, to that of Linear A?

       • What phonetic or other values . . . do you assign to the common signs of the Linear B signary?

       • Do you consider that a reasonable degree of decipherment can be achieved?

Of the dozen scholars he solicited, ten replied, including Sundwall, Bennett, and Myres. Only two refused to take part. The first was the Czech investigator Bedřich Hrozný, who felt he had already deciphered the script. The second was Alice Kober. Her reply to Ventris, dated February 2, 1950, reads, in its entirety: “I have no intention of answering the questionnaire. In my opinion it represents a step in the wrong direction and is a complete waste of time.”

Wrenching in its stark brevity, Kober's letter is startling but not surprising. The questionnaire trafficked in the very stuff that galled her, soliciting speculations on the nature of the language and the values of the symbols. And she had truly no time to waste: She was by then incurably ill. (Her position on the questionnaire's usefulness was vindicated, at least in part: Of all the replies Ventris amassed, not one, including his own, identified the language that Linear B actually turned out to write.)

IN JANUARY 195O, with Kober still out on sick leave, Brooklyn College promoted her from assistant professor to associate professor. It was clearly a gesture of charity, for she would not return to school. By February, the references in her letters to her own health, previously optimistic, had grown more measured. Writing to Myres that month, she apologized for returning two sets of
Scripta Minoa II
proofs “at long last.”

“It took a very long time to go over them because I can work only a short time each day,” she continued. “My doctors are not too encouraging about an early recovery. . . . My work, has, of course, not been progressing. I spend most of my time recuperating.”

In a brief, scrawled letter to Sundwall in early March, she wrote: “I am still sick. I am still not able to leave the house, and find writing letters very hard. Of course, I'll do my best to answer anything dealing with Minoan as soon as possible but please excuse me if I am slow.”

That day, in a postcard to Bennett, Kober asked for the return of photographs he had borrowed. The request is painfully ambiguous: It can be read either as a declaration of her continued intent to work with them, or as an acknowledgment that the time had come to put her affairs in order.

On April 4, in another postcard to Bennett, she wrote that she was “still busy checking” his photos and drawings of Pylos inscriptions. “I am still very ill, and may have visitors only 15 min. at a time, so can't ask you to come yet,” she continued, adding: “Proofs of SM II arrive sporadically.”