The Riddle of the Labyrinth (37 page)

Ventris's “self-education” program also included learning as many new languages as he could. One was Russian, which he was teaching himself in order to write to Gabo in his native tongue. “My knowledge is gradually getting on,” Ventris reported to Lois, “though I can only give a couple of hours a week to it. Still, soon I'll be able to read most simple stuff straight off. When I know Spanish as well [& that's the easiest to learn of them all] that'll be the 5 European ones spoken by the most people in the world.”

Nor was he neglecting Linear B. Ventris was serving in the RAF as a navigator, and the job suited him: All about maps and mathematics, geometry, logic and reason, it interested him far more than actual flying did. “It's a desk job, really, in the middle of the plane,” an AA classmate, Oliver Cox, recalled his having said. Returning to England after his Canadian training, Ventris took part in bombing runs over Germany. Navigation came so easily to him that, as the British journalist Leonard Cottrell has written, “on one occasion he horrified his captain by navigating his way back from Germany with maps he had drawn himself. On other raids he would set course and then, clearing a space on the navigator's table, happily set to work on his Linear B documents, while the aircraft groaned its way home, searchlights stretched up their probing fingers, and bursts of flak shook the bomber.”

At war's end, Ventris hoped to meet with Myres in Oxford and see Evans's transcriptions firsthand. But because of his foreign-language prowess, he was kept on for another year to help interrogate German prisoners. Finally discharged in the summer of 1946, he returned home to his wife and children (a daughter, Tessa, had been born that spring) and resumed his studies at the Architectural Association. He also met with Myres and began copying inscriptions for publication.

IN THE SUMMER of 1948, Ventris and Lois graduated with honors from the AA and were now qualified architects. To celebrate, they parked the children with her family and, with their classmate Oliver Cox, set out on a grand tour of the European continent. But when they reached the south of France, Ventris abruptly insisted on returning to England, much to his companions' surprise. A letter from Myres had caught up with him, summoning him to Oxford for six weeks' intensive work preparing
Scripta Minoa II
for the printer. Ventris went there at once, joining Myres and Kober, then in the middle of her second visit.

But after just a day or two, Ventris fled. His real reasons for backing out of the project were known only to him, but it seems fair to assume that alongside the eminent archaeologist Myres and the brilliant philologist Kober, Ventris was painfully conscious of his status as an amateur.

What is known is that soon after arriving in Oxford, Ventris returned to London, mailing a brutally self-lacerating letter to Myres from the train station on his way out of town. It anticipates a letter he would write eight years later, in 1956, shortly before his death—again involving a retreat from an important project, and again shot through with doubt, pain, and shame.

Ventris's 1948 letter, dated only “Monday night,” begins, “Dear Sir John”:

Myres's reply has not been preserved, but it is clear that Ventris was forgiven: At Myres's request, he would continue copying batches of Linear B inscriptions from his home in London for several years to come.

As Myres made plain throughout his correspondence, he was immensely pleased with Ventris's copying. But his regard for his young colleague's abilities evidently went deeper still—despite Ventris's own recurrent self-doubt. In 1950, the journalist Leonard Cottrell, who wrote often about archaeology, visited Myres at his home. The talk turned to the script, still undeciphered after half a century.

“The man who may decipher Linear B,” Myres told Cottrell soberly, “is a young architect named Ventris.”

I
N SEPTEMBER 1949, MICHAEL VENTRIS took a job with the British Ministry of Education in London. He had been hired to help design new schools, part of the collective effort to rebuild the nation after the war's devastation. As those who knew him attest, he was as brilliant in his vocation as he was in his avocation. In her memoir
The Morning Light
, the journalist Prue Smith recalled meeting Ventris during this period. “He was,” she wrote, “a very gifted architect with a particular power of analysing the complex sets of data which school building requires and the many constraints which in the difficult post-war days it had to observe—all unseen things which architects have to attend to before the design process can begin.”

Smith could just as well have been describing the sifting and sorting and analysis that underpins a successful archaeological decipherment. Besides his remarkable interpretive powers, Ventris also brought to his profession an extraordinary capacity for innovation. With his colleague Oliver Cox, he invented what Smith describes as “a strange architectural drawing aid” that was “made of transparent plastic and resembled a young giant sting-ray, with a broad, rounded head and a long tail.” The device, she wrote, allowed an architect “with instant accuracy, instead of sheaves of calculations, to draw perspectives of the insides or outsides of buildings.”

At the same time, Ventris conducted his on-again, off-again affair with Linear B. Though he had appeared to bow out in February 1949, exhorting Kober to “hurry up and decipher the thing,” by autumn he was working feverishly on the script during lunch breaks at the ministry, much as he had worked in his “office” at the back of the plane on wartime bombing raids. Before long, he found his day job could not compete with the lure of the script. “It is hard to see how designing schools could have excited or challenged his mind for long,” Andrew Robinson wrote, “especially as he . . . had not much enjoyed his own school days, and was not very interested in children.”

By the end of 1949, Ventris had received ten answers to the questionnaire he had circulated and was working feverishly to collate them. He combined them into a single large document, translating the replies as needed from French, German, Italian, and Swedish. The result was a thick state-of-the-field summary he titled “The Languages of the Minoan and Mycenaean Civilizations, New Year 1950,” which came to be known informally as the Mid-Century Report. At his own considerable expense, he duplicated and mailed it to each scholar.

The last section of the report contains Ventris's own detailed answers to his twenty-one questions. But at the end of his contribution, he bowed out of the hunt yet again, writing: “I have good hopes that a sufficient number of people working on these lines will before long enable a satisfactory solution to be found. To them I offer my best wishes, being forced by pressure of other work to make this my last small contribution to the problem.”