Why Homer Matters (3 page)

Like Shakespeare and the Bible, we all know his stories in advance, but one in particular struck me that summer sailing on the
Auk
. We had left the Arans late the evening before, and George had taken her all night up the dark of the Galway coast. We changed places at dawn, and in that early morning, with a cup of tea in my hand and the sun rising over the Irish mainland, I took her north, heading for the Inishkeas and the corner of County Mayo, before turning there and making for Scotland.

The wind was a big easterly, coming in gusts over the Mayo hills, the sun white and heatless. George and my son Ben, who had joined us, were asleep below. There were shearwaters cruising the swells beside us, black, liquid, effortless birds, like the sea turned aerial, and a fulmar now and then hung in the slot between the headsail and the main, flying with us on the current of air. The
Auk
surged on the wind that morning, heeling out into the Atlantic, churning her way north, horselike in her strength. I don't know when I have felt so happy.

Steering across the swells, holding the wheel against them as they came through, releasing it as they fell away, I tied the great Robert Fagles translation of the
Odyssey
on the compass binnacle, holding it open with a bungee cord against the wind. That morning I read the story of the Sirens. Just as we do, Odysseus knows he will be exposed to the songs that the strange, birdlike creatures sing to mariners and with which they lure passing ships onto the shore, wrecking them there and then leaving the men to linger until they die. The only way Odysseus can get past the Sirens is to cut up a round cake of beeswax, knead it in his hands, softening the wax in the heat of the sun, and then press plugs of it into the ears of the sailors. Once they are deafened, he has himself lashed to the mainmast, so that any desire he may have to steer toward the delicious honeyed voices can have no effect on his men. Only if he is powerless can he listen to them singing from their meadow, as Robert Fagles described it, “starred with flowers.”

That meadow of death is the most desirable place any man could imagine. It is yet another island into which a man might long to sink and die. A dead calm falls on the sea. The men brail up the sail and then sit to their oars. The Sirens, just within shouting distance of the ship, taunt Odysseus as he passes. They can give him wisdom if he will come to them and listen. If he will let them, they will make him understand. They press on him the comfort and beauty of what they have to offer. They sing to him, and Odysseus longs for them, his heart
throbbing
for them, as Fagles says, and with his eyebrows gestures to the crew to set him free. But the crew won't respond. Deaf to all persuasion, they bind him tighter and row the ship through and past.

Never is Homer more rapid. Like Odysseus's “sea-swift” ship, the whole scene sweeps past in forty lines. Rarely can something so brief have spread its ripples so wide. But the point is this: the song the Sirens sing is not any old crooning seduction tune. It is the story of the
Iliad
itself.

“We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured

On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so—

All that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all.”

The Sirens sing the song of the heroic past. That is the meadow of death. They want to draw Odysseus in with tempting stories of what he once was. And Odysseus, after his years of suffering and journeying, of frustration in the beautiful arms of Calypso, whose name means “the hidden one,” the goddess of oblivion, longs to return to the active world, the world of simplicity and straightforwardness he had known at Troy. The Sirens are wise to that; they know the longing in his heart. The prospect of clear-cut heroism summons him, and he struggles to escape his bindings. But his men, like the poem itself, know better, and they tie him tighter to his ship. They won't be wrecked on the illusions of nostalgia, the longing for that heroized, antique world, because, as the
Odyssey
knows, to live well in the world, nostalgia must be resisted; you must stay with your ship, stay tied to the present, remain mobile, keep adjusting the rig, work with the swells, watch for a wind-shift, watch as the boom swings over, engage, in other words, with the muddle and duplicity and difficulty of life. Don't be tempted into the lovely simplicities that the heroic past seems to offer. That is what Homer and the Sirens and Robert Fagles all said to me that day.

I can still see the sunlight coming sheening off the backs of the swells that morning, as they made their way past and under me, combed and slicked with the sea-froth running down them, every swell the memory of storms in the Atlantic far to the west, steepening to the east and then ruining themselves ashore. The
Auk
sailed north with the shearwaters, and the morning became unforgettable. It was when this book began.

I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the
Odyssey
in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, “Why has no one told me about this before?”

The more I looked at the poems in different translations, and the more I tried to piece bits of them together in the Greek with a dictionary, the more I felt Homer was a guidebook to life. Here was a form of consciousness that understood fallibility and self-indulgence and vanity, and despite that knowledge didn't surrender hope of nobility and integrity and doing the right thing. Before I read Pope's Preface to the
Iliad
, or Matthew Arnold's famous lectures on translating Homer, I knew that this was the human spirit on fire, rapidity itself, endlessly able to throw off little sidelights like the sparks thrown off by the wheels of an engine hammering through the night. Speed, scale, violence, threat; but every spark with humanity in it.

 

2 • GRASPING HOMER

Paris, 11 May 1863, Le Repas Magny, a small restaurant up a cobbled street on the Left Bank in the Sixième. Brilliant, literary, skeptical Paris had gathered, as usual, for its fortnightly dinner. The stars were there: the critic and historian Charles Sainte-Beuve; the multitalented and widely admired playwright and novelist Théophile Gautier; the unconscionably fat Breton philosopher, the most brilliant cultural analyst of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan; the idealistic and rather intense Comte de Saint-Victor, a minor poet and upholder of traditional values; and observing them all the supremely waspish Jules de Goncourt, with his brother Edmond.

The Magny dinners, every other Monday, were ten francs a head, the food “mediocre” apparently, everyone shouting their heads off, smoking for France, coming and going as they felt like it, the only place in Paris, it was said, where there was freedom to speak and think. Jules de Goncourt transcribed it all.

*   *   *

“Beauty is always simple,” the Comte de Saint-Victor said as the waiters brought in the wine. He had a way, when saying something he thought important, of putting his face in the air like an ostrich laying an egg. “There is nothing more beautiful than the feelings of Homer's characters. They are still fresh and youthful. Their beauty is their simplicity.”

Magny's restaurant, in the rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine, Paris.

“Oh for Christ's sake,” Edmond groaned, looking over at his brother. “Must we? Homer,
again
?”

Saint-Victor paused a moment, went white and then very deep red like some kind of mechanical toy.

“Are you feeling well?” Goncourt said to him across the table. “It looks as if Homer might be playing havoc with your circulation.”

“How can you say that? Homer, how can I put it … Homer … Homer is … so
bottomless
!”

Everyone laughed.

“Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,” Gautier said calmly. “They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he's a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.”

“Any modern novel,” Edmond said, “is more moving than Homer.”

“
What
?” Saint-Victor screamed at him across the table, banging his little fist against his head so that his curls shook.

“Yes,
Adolphe
, that lovely sentimental love story by Benjamin Constant, the sweet way they all behave to each other, his charming little obsession with her, the way she doesn't admit she wants to go bed with him, the lust boiling away between her thighs, all of that is more moving than Homer, actually more
interesting
than anything in Homer.”

“Dear God alive,” Saint-Victor shrieked. “It's enough to make a man want to throw himself out of the window.” His eyes were standing out of his head like a pair of toffee-apples.

“That would be original,” Edmond said. “I can see it now: ‘Poet skewers himself on street-lamp because someone said something horrid about Homer.' Do go on. It would be more diverting than anything that has happened for weeks.”

Chairs were shoved back from the table, somebody knocked over a bottle of wine, the waiter was standing ghoul-faced at the door, Saint-Victor was stamping and roaring like a baby bull in his own toy bullring, as red in the face as if somebody had said his father was a butcher and his mother a tart. Everyone was bellowing.

“I wouldn't care if all the Greeks were dead!”

“If only they were!”

“But Homer is divine.”

“He has got nothing to teach us!”

“He's just a novelist who never learned how to write a novel.”

“He says the same thing over and over again.”

“But isn't it deeply moving,” Saint-Victor said imploringly, “when Odysseus's dog wags the last sad final wag of his tail?”

“You can always tell a bully,” Edmond said quietly to his brother. “He loves dogs more than their owners.”

“Homer, Homer,” Sainte-Beuve was murmuring through the uproar.

“Isn't it strange,” Jules said to Renan afterward. “You can argue about the Pope, say that God doesn't exist, question anything, attack heaven, the Church, the Holy Sacrament, anything except Homer.”

“Yes,” Renan said. “Literary religions are where you find the real fanatics.”

*   *   *

Homer loomed up again at another Magny dinner the following October. They were talking about God, whether God was definable or even knowable. Renan ended up by comparing God, his particular God, in all possible piety and seriousness, to an oyster. Uniquely itself, beautifully self-sufficient, not entirely to be understood, mysteriously attractive, mysteriously unattractive, wholly wonderful—what was not godlike about the oyster? Rolling laughter swept up and down the table.

That was when Homer emerged. To the Goncourts' horror, these modern, skeptical destroyers of faith, the most fearless critics of God that France had ever known, burst into a song of Homeric praise which made the brothers retch. The diners at le Repas Magny might have been partisans of progress, but all agreed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work was written in which everything was divine, above all discussion and even all examination. They began to swoon with admiration over individual phrases.

“
The long-tailed birds
!” [Hippolyte] Taine [the philosopher and historian] cried out enthusiastically.

“
The unharvestable sea!
” exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, raising his little voice. “A sea where there are no grapes! What could be more beautiful than that?”

“
Unharvestable sea
”? What on earth did that mean? Renan thought some Germans had discovered a hidden significance in it. “And what is that?” asked Sainte-Beuve.

“I can't remember,” Renan replied, “but it's wonderful.”

The Goncourt brothers sat back, regarding this mass expression of Homer-love with their habitual, jaundiced eye.

“Well, what do you have to say, you over there,” Taine called out, addressing them, “you who wrote that antiquity was created to be the daily bread of schoolmasters?”

So far the brothers had said nothing and had let the Homer-hosannas go swirling around the dining room without comment, but now Jules said, “Oh, you know, we think [Victor] Hugo has more talent than Homer.”

It was blasphemy. Saint-Victor sat as upright as a fence post and then went wild with rage, shouting like a madman and shrieking in his tinny voice, saying that remarks like that were impossible to stomach, they were too much, insulting the religion of all intelligent people, that everybody admired Homer and that without him Hugo would not even exist. Hugo greater than Homer! What did the Goncourts know? What idiot novels had they been producing recently? He shouted and screamed, dancing up and down the room like an electrified marionette. The Goncourts shouted back, increasingly loudly, raging at the supercilious poet, who for some reason thought he was more in touch with the meaning of things than they ever could be, sneering at them down his peaky red nose, while they could feel nothing but contempt for the man they would think of forever after as the nasty, little self-congratulatory Homer-lover.