The Riddle of the Labyrinth (36 page)

In 1931, when Michael was about nine, his family returned to England, although the coming years would be punctuated by stays on the Continent for Edward's health. In England, Michael was sent to Bickley Hall, a preparatory boarding school in Kent. On school holidays, he came home to a house of little warmth. As Robinson and others have remarked, the Ventrises displayed a coldness toward their only child that was remarkable even for their time, place, and class. There was a reason: In Switzerland, Edward and Dorothea had undergone psychoanalysis with Freud's disciple Carl Jung, and their treatment of their son was per Jung's instructions, intended to prevent Michael from forming an Oedipal attachment.

As Jean Overton Fuller, the daughter of a Ventris family friend, recounted in
A Very English Genius
, the 2002 BBC documentary about the decipherment: “Colonel Ventris said we must come and meet Michael. But Mother gave me a warning: I must on no account touch Michael. It had been explained to her that Michael was never to be touched by anybody. This was to avoid his having complexes.” She added: “What my mother was afraid of was that he would never be able to make a natural, warm relationship, never having had one.”

Fuller, who was nine at the time of the visit (Michael was two), later wrote of overhearing Edward Ventris confide in her mother, whom he had known in India:

Jung, Fuller wrote, “had complicated matters by falling in love with Dora, so that . . . it was improper he should entertain such feelings for her and continue to treat them both as his patients.” He discharged both Dorothea and Edward from his practice. “So then they were left stranded,” Fuller wrote. “My personal feeling is that whatever they were like before they met Jung, he made them not better but much worse, over engrossed in the analysis of their complexes, depressed.”

In 1935, at thirteen, Michael was sent to the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, about fifty miles northwest of London. A progressive secondary school, it emphasized culture and the classics over athletics, a time-honored staple of English boarding school education. In the BBC documentary, a classmate, Robin Richardson, recalled the young Ventris as “an aloof, slightly abused and detached member of our own community who didn't make great friends with the rest of us. . . . He regarded all of us with a degree of puzzlement and amusement.” Ventris himself has written of his school days, “I think they rather thought me a black sheep while I was there and it'd be rather insincere to make out I had any deep tradition implanted in me!”

His teachers recalled him as a middling student who expended little effort on subjects that did not interest him. But it was at Stowe that Michael joined the fateful class trip to the Royal Academy in London. It was at Stowe, too, that night after night, after lights-out in the dormitory, he pored over the few available transcriptions of Linear B tablets, most likely from volume 4 of Evans's
The Palace of Minos
, published in 1935.

By this time, Edward and Dorothea's marriage, a strange match from the start, had taken an even stranger turn. From about 1932 on, as Jean Fuller recalled, the couple lived in Eastbourne, on England's south coast, occupying separate hotels along the seafront. They would meet each day on a bench in between the two. “If they were apart, they pined for each other's society, but if they were together, they hurt each other,” she said. “They were like porcupines.” The couple formally divorced when Michael was about fourteen. Edward died two years later, in 1938.

After the divorce, Dorothea and Michael moved into a newly erected London apartment building known as Highpoint. A blocky tower of white concrete, Highpoint had been designed by the Russian émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin to be the apotheosis of Modernism. Inside, their flat gleamed with work by the modern artists Dorothea cherished, many of them her personal friends. There were two Picassos on the walls, as well as sculptures by Gabo and Moore. From Breuer, she commissioned much of the furniture, with its clean lines, light wood, glass, and chrome. The collection he designed for her included a small glass-topped sycamore-and-chrome desk, now in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, on which her son would one day decipher Linear B.

Dorothea and Michael loved the clean, modern aesthetic of their new home. “I count myself extraordinarily fortunate to have this little centre which you made . . . your interior with its shapes and colours and textures of which I never tire,” Dorothea wrote to Breuer. “Other people appreciate it too, but no one as much as Michael, who has such a firm affection for his room that I am sure he will never let me give up the flat.”

All the while, Michael continued his investigations into Linear B. He had already taken it upon himself to write to Evans with his theories on script, a correspondence he initiated not long after his life-changing class trip.

“Dear Sir,” begins one letter, of twenty-three pages, written in the spring of 1940, when Ventris was not quite eighteen: “I don't know whether you remember my writing to you a few years ago about some theories I had on the elucidation of Minoan. Actually, I was only fifteen at the time, and I'm afraid my theories were nonsense; but you were very kind and answered my letters. I was convinced that the key would prove to be in Sumerian, but am glad to say I have given these ideas up long ago. However, I have continued to work at the problem off and on, and I am coming round more and more to the view that the language contained in the inscriptions is a dialect closely related to Etruscan.”

Ventris went on to flesh out his new theory in minute philological detail. He also posited sound-values for many Linear B characters, and meanings for entire words and phrases. In closing, he wrote:

Around this time, Ventris began work on a scholarly article about Minoan, which he would mail to the
American Journal of Archaeology
. (He would discreetly neglect to tell the editors how old he was.) He and Dorothea were also planning his postsecondary schooling. Though it is seductive to imagine Ventris reading classics at Oxford or Cambridge, that scenario would never come to pass: There was no money for a university education. Since her divorce, Dorothea had depended crucially on income from her family's holdings in Poland. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Janasz lands were seized. Lacking tuition, she had already been forced to withdraw Michael from Stowe before he could graduate. University, too, was now out of the question.

But Dorothea's love of aesthetics, which she had passed on to her son, would provide an alternative course: Michael could train for a career in architecture, bypassing a university stay altogether. He wrote to his mother's friend Marcel Breuer for advice on where to apply. Breuer suggested the Architectural Association School of Architecture, known as the AA, then as now an independent professional training ground in London. Ventris enrolled there in January 1940, at seventeen.

As the war engulfed England, Dorothea, fragile at the best of times, grew increasingly depressed. “She had already lost her brother in the First World War and her husband was dead,” Andrew Robinson has written. “Now her father was a refugee in London and her only son . . . faced the prospect of military call-up.” On June 16, 1940, less than a month before Michael's eighteenth birthday, Dorothea took an overdose of barbiturates while staying at a seaside hotel in Wales. “The coroner's verdict,” Robinson reports, “was ‘suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.'” To the end of his life, Robinson added, Ventris would never speak of what happened. After his mother's death, he stayed for a time with family friends, then returned to Highpoint alone.

IN THE MONTHS that followed, Ventris continued his studies at the AA. He also worked feverishly on his Minoan article, doubtless a welcome distraction. He tore up two drafts before he was satisfied. In December 1940, the eighteen-year-old Ventris sent it off to the
American Journal of Archaeology
with the following cover letter:

The journal accepted the paper at once, publishing it in its last issue of 1940 as “Introducing the Minoan Language,” by M. G. F. Ventris. Rife with speculation, it was, as the classicist Thomas Palaima points out, “close to worthless . . . both in its unsound methods and in what Ventris' own decipherment would demonstrate was its erroneous guesswork.” Except for positing an Etruscan-like tongue as the language of the tablets—a reasonable surmise given geographic and historical realities—Ventris's article is not all that different from the writings of some of Kober's more outlandish amateur correspondents.

It is striking, Palaima notes, that in the large bibliography of articles about Linear B that accompanies Kober's 1948 paper, “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory,” she chose to omit Ventris's 1940 article entirely. Perhaps she did so out of contempt for the paper, so clearly the work of an amateur. Or perhaps, as Palaima suggests, she did so as an act of mercy, to spare the adult Ventris a reminder of his juvenile effort.

WHILE STUDYING AT the AA, Ventris became romantically involved with a classmate a few years older than he, Lois Elizabeth Knox-Niven, known to her friends as Betty, or Betts. A letter he wrote to a family friend, the sculptor Naum Gabo, in early 1942, when he was nineteen and his personal circumstances were about to change dramatically, displays his characteristic mixture of reserve, candor, and dry, detached wit:

Ventris and Lois married in London in April 1942; their son, Nikki (“the nicest present St. Nicholas ever brought,” Ventris wrote), was born in early December.

By the time his son was born, Ventris was at war: Called up in the summer of 1942, he had joined the Royal Air Force. His letters home to Lois from his training camps, first in England and later in Canada, betray his formal, almost Holmesian, rationalist mien; insatiable curiosity; ardent youthful romanticism; impassioned liberal humanism; fundamental discomfort around other people; and, beneath all this, a deep wellspring of tenderness. In a letter from his camp in Yorkshire composed shortly after Nikki's birth, the nineteen-year-old Ventris writes: