An Odyssey

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

Daniel Mendelsohn (2018, Vintage)

Daniel Mendelsohn is a critic and classics scholar. You can't be surprised that he begins this book with a proem, an explanation of what the book is about; he has to cite the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid to explain what a proem is, and why he needs one. We learn that when he was teaching at Bard College one spring term, he offered a freshman seminar on the Odyssey, and his father asked to audit it. "At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen who were enrolled in the course, seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home."

The Odyssey is the ideal vessel for this journey they make together; the father is a retired scientist, teacher, and autodidact who, it turns out, had studied Latin in his schooldays; but only through Ovid, not scaling the heights of Virgil. But he will trek in from Long Island and up the Hudson, spending the night with his son to make the trip a little less arduous. The two of them will even spend ten days of the next summer on a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's voyage from Troy to Ithaca. "'Retracing the Odyssey' was an 'educational' cruise, and although he was contemptuous of anything that struck him as a needless luxury–cruises and sightseeing and vacations–my father was a great believer in education."

So this will be the story of a literary journey, and a physical journey, and a journey of understanding between the two men. Mendelsohn is at pains to explain that Homer's storytelling is as full of twists and turns as the journey itself. The technical term is 'ring composition', and it refers to the practice of putting digressions about the past or the future in places where they explain the current action, sometimes at great length. "As complex as it is to describe this technique, the associative spirals that are its hallmark in fact re-create the way we tell stories in everyday life, looping from one tale to another as we seek to clarify and explain the story with which we started, which is the story to which, eventually, we will return–even if it is sometimes the case that we need to be nudged, to be reminded to get back to our starting point." You have to trust that the narrator has control of the direction of the story, the way a captain knows where his ship is, even when the passengers don't.

In a very satisfying way, Mendelsohn is exemplifying everything he's telling us about. He states his major themes and names his characters in his proem, as Homer and Virgil did in theirs. As the class proceeds, week by week, through the Odyssey, he describes the action of the story, and how the class responds to it. His father, who had thought he'd sit quietly, turns out to have definite opinions. Why, he wonders, is Odysseus considered such a hero, when he lost the entire contingent of twelve ships and their men, and staggered home alone after twenty years? As it happens, the first four books of the epic are not about Odysseus at all; he's still imprisoned by Calypso. They're about his son, Telemachus, who was a small child when the Greeks forces were assembled to besiege Troy.

Telemachus has his own voyages to make, and much to learn. Mendelsohn says, "With his unpredictable swings between endearing swagger and utter cluelessness, the Telemachus of the first few books of the Odyssey can remind you of a college freshman." At the same time that we're meeting the (suitably anonymized) freshmen in the seminar, we're getting more of a look at Mendelsohn and his father. The relationship between them is unfolding, and is being set in context of the rest of the family. Mendelsohn, a gay man, has two sons with a friend, and spends most weekends with them in New Jersey. His father grew up in the Bronx, during the Great Depression, which gave him a certain pugnacious prejudice in favor of the little guy. He grew up to be a New York Mets fan, scorning the Yankees for 'buying their success.' And perhaps Telemachus, with the goddess Athena's consistent support, has it too easy...

I'd certainly recommend this book as a companion to a rereading of the Odyssey, but I enjoyed some of its other dimensions even more. We get a glimpse of philology, the 'science' of word origins, and we see a classroom from a skilled teacher's point of view. I especially enjoyed the way Mendelsohn circles around his story like a skilled artist working a sketch up to a finished painting. Done ineptly, ring composition is kind of maddening, but in this case, it's delightful. The proem can tell you what's going to happen, but you still have to read through to find out why it happens, and what it all means. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2022

 

You Never Forget Your First

 You Never Forget Your First: a Biography of George Washington

Alexis Coe (2020, Viking)

People have been writing admiringly about George Washington since before he died; it's reasonable to wonder what can usefully be added to the shelf. You Never Forget Your First stands out for several reasons.

First, it's concise. The text is just a little over two hundred pages; the notes and index add only another fifty-five. Alexis Coe read Joseph Ellis, Richard Brookhiser, Ron Chernow, and all the rest of the doorstops with studiously dull titles: "George Washington: A Biography. George Washington: A Life. George Washington: a President....With titles this stodgy, presidential biographies will always appear as if they are for men of a certain age, intended to be purchased on Presidents' or Father's Day."`

Second, as the title suggests, it's refreshingly cheeky. For instance, Coe dubs the (invariably male) authors of the standard biographies 'the Thigh Men', because they seem so attached to Washington's physical stature and prowess. Their books frequently feature covers with a head-to-toe portrait of Washington, showing his manly thighs.

By no coincidence, perhaps, they are at pains to make some explanation of the fact that Washington had no children of his own. In all likelihood, if he was sterile, it followed from some illness in his early life. In fact, Coe says, "Washington's lack of heirs gave him a distinct political advantage; it comforted people to know that he had no bloodline to preserve, no power-hungry scion to worry about." He clearly had a paternal relationship to his wife Martha's two young children. Martha's son Jacky left four children, two of whom George and Martha took in, in turn. And, after all, he is reputed to have fathered a whole country; what more do you want?

As Washington's first significant female biographer in many decades, Coe makes some corrections to the character of his mother, Mary. Coe cites –in a handy chart!–Chernow's many descriptions of her as shrewish, anxious, and demanding. "For the Thigh Men, Mary's histrionics begin when she declines to enlist her fourteen-year-old son in the navy and continue to the very ends with her griping about elder care."

Considering both the actual epistolary evidence at hand, and Mary's economic and social circumstances, Coe gives us a much fuller view. Her husband died when George, her eldest, was only eleven, so a certain anxiety might be justified; to keep and raise small children, and see her daughter married well, was not an easy job. It was also one she'd have precious little help with, unless she chose to marry again. Her objection to making George a midshipman was that it was more likely to thwart his career than to advance it, and in that she was quite right.

Instead, he learned surveying, in which his horsemanship and his head for math were great advantages. It gave him a chance to see new land first and bid on it early. He sought a position in the Virginia militia. "Despite having no military experience, he worked his connections and ultimately got the job–along with its annual salary of one hundred pounds." He made a name for himself in the French and Indian War of the 1750's - indeed, he partly precipitated it, by killing a French diplomat with whom he was meant to be negotiating.

He moved from the Virginia militia to the British army, serving with Brigadier General Edward Braddock in the Ohio territories, and becoming a hero in the battle of Fort Duquesne–which the French actually won. Still, there were clearly limits to how far a colonial subject could advance in the British forces; he resigned his commission and went back to his land. He married Martha (and her fortune) in 1759, and enjoyed a good decade as a gentleman farmer at Mount Vernon, keeping horses and dogs, and raising cattle, fowl, and bees. (He liked butter and honey with his breakfast hoecakes.)

Coe does not let us forget that Washington's wealth depended on enslaved people. Coe describes their miserable housing, their poor diet, and their general mistreatment, often by way of ironic contrast with Washington's revolutionary zeal for liberty. In his will, Washington directed Martha to free his slave, which she duly did in 1801, shortly before she died. Her own slaves, however, she willed back to her grandchildren. Coe has a heart-breaking breakdown, again in chart form, of the known families who were broken up by this development.

You could certainly give this book to a Dad; you could also give it to a feisty or bookish teenager. (If it's banned from school libraries, it will be for all the best reasons.) But we can all stand a fresh look at Washington's special skills, in diplomacy and espionage even more than in battle. We owe him a lot, all in all. 

 

Any Good Books, December 2022