Why Homer Matters (4 page)

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These conversations seem as distant as the Bronze Age. Where now is our violence on behalf of a poet? Who feels this much about Homer? The Goncourts, with their skepticism and their modernism, their contempt for antiquity, have won the day. Their prediction has come more than true: the ancient world is now the daily bread not of schoolmasters but of academics. Everyone has heard of Homer, probably of the two poems, and many have read some passages; but no one today ends up shouting at dinner about him. Mention Homer across a table and a kind of anxiety comes into the face you are looking at, a sort of shame, perhaps a fear of seeming stupid and ignorant. Almost no one loves the poems he wrote or the phrases that recur in them.

Why should they? The place of Homer in our culture has largely withered away. I can only say that, for me, the growing experience of knowing Homer, of living with him in my life, has provided a kind of ballast. He is like a beautiful stone, monumentally present, a paternal foundation, large, slightly ill-defined, male and reliable. He is not a friend, a lover or a wife; far more of an underlayer than that, a form of reassurance that in the end there is some kind of understanding in the world. Goethe thought that if only Europe had considered Homer and not the books of the Bible as its holy scripture, the whole of history would have been different, and better.

That quality does not exist in some floating metaphysical outer sphere. It is precisely in the words he uses, and on that level something like “the unharvestable sea” is a beautiful expression. It is the twin and opposite of another of Homer's repeated, metrically convenient, perfect and formulaic phrases, “the grain-giving earth.” And why is it beautiful? Because it encapsulates the sensation of standing on a beach and looking out at the breaking surf, and seeing in it the unforgiving brutality of the salt desert before you. Everything you are not stares back at what you are. It is a phrase which knows that, as you are looking out at that hostility, behind you, at your back, are all the riches that the earth might give, the olive and the grape, the security of home, the smell of cut hay, the barn filled with the harvested wheat and barley, the threshed grains, the sacks tight with them in the granaries, the ground flour, the bread at breakfast, the honey and oil. “The unharvestable sea”—two words in Greek,
pontos atrygetos
—is a form of concentrated wisdom about the condition of life on earth. It states the obvious but also provides a kind of access to reality, both painful and revelatory. All Homer is in the phrase.

Those words occur many times in both the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, often poignantly. Almost at the beginning of the
Odyssey
, Odysseus's son Telemachus, at the end of almost twenty years' waiting for his father to return, first from the war against Troy and then from his vastly extended and troubled journey home across the sea, has decided to go in search of him, to ask in the mainland of Greece, in Pylos and Sparta, if there is any news of the man most people now consider dead.

Homer, over the course of thirty-five lines, prepares the ground for the climactic words. Telemachus needs to get ready for his journey, and to do so he goes down into his father's treasure chamber in the palace in Ithaca, his
thalamos
. Upstairs, all is anarchy and chaos. The young men who are living in the palace, clamoring to marry Telemachus's mother, Penelope, are eating up the goods of the household. But down here, like a treasury of the past, of how things were before Odysseus left for the wars half a lifetime ago, all is order and richness. Clothes, gold and bronze are piled in the chamber, but also sweet-smelling oils, wine, which is also old and sweet, all lined up in order against the walls. All the accumulated goodness of the land is in there. Telemachus, whose name means “far from battle,” meets an old woman, Eurycleia, down here. She was his nurse as a child, feeding and raising him. Now that he is a man, she tends and protects these precious fruits of the earth. He asks her for the best wine to be poured out for him into small traveling jars, and for milled barley to be put into leather sacks. He must take the earth's goods out onto the sea.

But Eurycleia—the name of this private nurse, this tender of things, means “wide-fame”—dreads Telemachus going where his father has gone to die. A wail of grief breaks from her when he tells her his plans, and she suddenly addresses him as she had years before:

Ah dear child, how has this thought come into your mind?

Where do you intend to go over the wide earth,

you who are an only son and so deeply loved?

Odysseus is dead, has died far from home in a strange land.

No, stay here, in charge of what is yours.

You have no need to suffer pain

or go wandering on
the unharvestable sea
.

Nothing could be clearer: the unharvestable sea is not to be visited. It is the realm of death. When Odysseus does finally come home (and Eurycleia plays a key role in that return), Homer has a one-word synonym for the sea: “evil.” The word she uses here for wandering is also dense with implication:
alaomai
is used of seamen, but also of beggars and the unhomed dead. The unharvestable sea is where life and goodness will never be found. Everything Eurycleia has devoted her life to, the nurturing and cherishing of the goodness of home, has been the harvest of an unwandering life. The man standing in front of her is one of those fruits. The unharvestable sea is a kind of hell, and in that phrase the drama of his life, her life, Odysseus's life, the life and death of those Ithacans who have not returned from Troy, of Penelope weaving and unweaving the cloth that will not be woven until Odysseus returns—all of it is bound up in
pontos atrygetos
.

For all the Goncourts' wit and skepticism, I am on the side of Renan, and Hippolyte Taine, and Sainte-Beuve, and even the ludicrous Comte de Saint-Victor. Homer, the most miraculous and ancient of survivals in our culture, comes from a time of unadorned encounter with the realities of existence. It is absurd now to call the sea “unharvestable,” but it is also beautiful and moving. For all of Saint-Victor's despised sententiousness, he was right in this. Homer's simplicity, its undeniably straight look, is a form of revelation. Its nakedness is its poetry. There is nothing here of ornamentation or prettiness, and that is its value. “Each time I put down the
Iliad
,” the American poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote toward the end of his life,

after reading it again in some new translation, or after reading once more the somber splendor of the Greek, I am convinced, as one is convinced by the experiences of a lifetime, that somehow, in a way beyond the visions of artistry, I have been face to face with the meaning of existence. Other works of literature give this insight, but none so powerfully, so uncontaminated by evasion or subterfuge.

This book is driven by a desire to find the source of that directness and that understanding.

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In the early autumn of 1816, John Keats was not yet twenty-one. He had been writing poetry for two years, living with other medical students in “a jumbled heap of murky buildings” just off the southern end of London Bridge, working as a “dresser”—a surgeon's assistant—in Guy's Hospital. He was miserable, good at his job but hating it, out of sorts with “the barbarous age” in which he lived, filled with a hunger for life on a greater scale and of a deeper intensity than the ordinariness surrounding him could provide.

At school in Enfield, his headmaster's son Charles Cowden Clarke, who had ambitions himself as a poet and litterateur, had introduced him to history and poetry, immersing him in Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. Clarke gave him the first volume of the great Elizabethan English epic, Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene
, and, as Clarke remembered later in life, Keats took to it

as a young horse would through a spring meadow—ramping! Like a true poet, too—a poet “born, not manufactured,” a poet in grain, he especially singled out epithets, for that felicity and power in which Spenser is so eminent. He hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, “what an image that is—‘sea-shouldering whales'!”

When Keats at this age saw the wind blowing across a field of barley still in the green, he jumped on a stile and shouted down at Clarke, “The tide! The tide!” Here was a boy, born the son of a London ostler, hungry for depth, for a kind of surging reality, for largeness and otherness which only epic poetry could provide. Poetry for him, as Andrew Motion said, was “both a lovely escape from the world and a form of engagement with it.” It was not about prettiness, elegance or decoration but, in Motion's phrase, “a parallel universe,” whose reality was truer and deeper than anything in the world more immediately to hand. Poetry gave access to a kind of Platonic grandeur, an underlying reality that everyday material life obscured and concealed. It is as if Keats's sensibility was ready for Homer to enter it, a womb prepared for conception. All that was needed was for Homer to flood into him.

Perhaps at Clarke's suggestion, he had already looked into the great translation of Homer made by the young Alexander Pope between about 1713 and 1726, the medium through which most eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Englishmen encountered Homer. But this translation came to be despised by the romantics as embodying everything that was wrong in the culture of the preceding age: interested more in style than in substance, ridiculously pretty when the Homeric medium was truth, a kind of drawing-room Homer which had left the battlefield and the storm at sea too far behind.

Where, for example, Homer had said simply “the shepherd's heart is glad,” Pope had written, “The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight/Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light.” From the point of view of the 1780s, Pope's Homer was about as Homeric as a Meissen shepherdess with a lamb in her lap.

This wasn't entirely fair to Pope. His preface to the
Iliad
, published in 1715, is one of the most plangent descriptions ever written in English of the power of the Homeric poems. Northern European culture had been dominated for too long by what they considered the processed and stable maturity of Virgil's
Aeneid
, the Latin epic par excellence, written in about 20
BC
. Homer represented an earlier stage in human civilization, a greater closeness to nature, to the potency of the sublime, a form of poetry which was not to be admired from afar but which would bind up its reader or listener in a kind of overwhelming absorption in its world. “No man of true Poetical Spirit,” the young Pope had written, “is Master of himself while he reads him; so forcible is the poet's Fire and Rapture.” Translation was not a calm carrying over of the meaning in Greek into the meaning in English, but a vision of the processes of the mind as a flaming crucible in which the sensibilities of translator and translated were fused into a new, radiant alloy.

Pope may have been the darling of the establishment. In his preface, he thanks a roll call of the eighteenth-century British great—Addison, Steele, Swift, Congreve, a string of dukes, earls, lords and other politicians—but for all that, his entrancement with Homeric power is not in doubt. Homer is like nature itself. He is a kind of wildness, “a wild paradise” in which, as the theory then was, the great stories and figures he describes came into being.

What he writes is of the most animated Nature imaginable; every thing moves, every thing lives, and is put in Action … The Course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes,

 

They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it.

This inseparability of Homer and his world is what excited Pope. It seemed to him like a voice from the condition of mankind when it was still simple, quite different from “the luxury of succeeding ages.” Poetic fire was the essential ingredient. “In
Homer
, and in him only, it burns every where clearly, and every where irresistibly.”

Pope grasped the essential point: unlike Virgil, Homer is no part of the classical age, has no truck with judicious distinction or the calm management of life and society. He precedes that order, is a
preclassic
, immoderate, uncompromising, never sacrificing truth for grace. “
Virgil
bestows with a careful Magnificence:
Homer
scatters with a generous Profusion.
Virgil
is like a River in its Banks, with a gentle and constant Stream:
Homer
like the
Nile
, pours out his Riches with a sudden Overflow.”

In this preface to the
Iliad
, Pope can lay claim to being the greatest critic of Homer in English. But what of his translation? Was he able to embody this deep understanding of Homer's “unaffected and equal Majesty” in the translation he made? Perhaps not. Take, for example, a moment of passionate horror toward the end of the
Iliad
. For most of the poem Achilles has been in his tent, nursing his grievance and loathing against Agamemnon, but now that Patroclus, the man he loved, has been killed by Hector, Achilles is out to exact revenge. He is on his blood-run, gut-driven, pitiless, the force of destiny. Among his enemies on the field, he encounters a young Trojan and looks down on him with the vacancy of fate. The young warrior stares back up.

In vain his youth, in vain his beauty pleads:

In vain he begs thee, with a suppliant's moan

To spare a form and age so like thy own!

Unhappy boy! no prayer, no moving art

E'er bent that fierce inexorable heart!

While yet he trembled at his knees, and cried,

The ruthless falchion [a single-edged sword] [oped] his tender side;

The panting liver pours a flood of gore,

That drowns his bosom till he pants no more.