1 Young Albert and Mr. Parry When she asked where they were going and why, Milman Parry's daughter, Marian, would recall, my father explained that Jugoslavia was an uncivilized country at the edge of the world, on the border of the Slavic wilderness which stretched from the Adriatic to Alaska. Since hardly anyone could read or write Jugoslavians still had retained their oral poetry and their ancient native national civilization. There were still heroes, and heroic acts and the ancient heroes were celebrated in ballads by guslars, or bards, who knew by heart so much poetry that if it were written down it would fill libraries. But the whole thing depended, my father explained, on the fact that they couldn't write it down; as soon as literacy becomes common in a country, everyone gets lazy; they don't bother to learn things by heart anymore and poetry is no longer a part of their daily life. ln 1934 and 1935, Parry spent fifteen months in Yugoslavia, driving his black Ford sedan from town to town with his young assistant, Albert Lord. They stopped at village coffeehouses, spread word they were looking for local singers, recorded the songs they sang while strumming their rude, raspy one-stringed gusles. For a few days, or a week or two, Parry would stay, then head off for the next town, for Gacko or Kolasin, Bihać or Novi Pazar. In that hardscrabble, mostly mountainous backcountry, of roads rutted and electricity scarce, of dialects, religions, ancient wars, and tribal resentments all butting up against one another, they struggled with equipment and supplies and bedbug-infested village inns. They powered their recording instrument with a battery charged by the engine of the Ford, shipped over from the States. Along with their native translator, Nikola, they'd periodically return to Dubrovnik, in a Croatian corner of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where Parry's wife, daughter, and son awaited them. Then, the Parry house, halfway up the hill above the city, with its fine views of the harbor and the sea, became headquarters of almost military stamp, as transcribers set to work, typewriters clattering, taking down the words of the old songs. In the end, Parry would gather half a ton of twelve-inch aluminum discs--phonograph records, the size of old vinyl LPs but in white metal--filled with a young nation's, and an old world's, cultural tradition. But Parry was interested in them not primarily for what they said of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and elsewhere in the Balkans, but for what they might reveal, by analogy, of the older world of ancient Greece that had produced Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Finally, in a town nineteen hundred feet up into the mountains of northern Montenegro, an old man named Avdo Međedović, singer of tales of weddings and war that took days and days to tell, led Parry to conclude that in him they had found their own living Homer. In September 1935, the Parrys and young Albert Lord returned to America. On November 16, Parry, back at Harvard, where he was assistant professor of Greek and Lord was a recent graduate, wrote his sister that his wife was just then in Los Angeles. He gave her mailing address, which was that of his financially distraught mother-in-law. On November 17, Parry was to give a talk on Yugoslav folk songs at Harvard. On the eighteenth, he met with a student and reported on his progress. A day or two later, he left for the West Coast. On December 3, in a Los Angeles hotel room with his wife, a bullet fired from a handgun, said to have become entangled in his luggage as Parry rummaged through it, struck him in the chest and nicked his heart. He died later that day. He was thirty-three. When hotel employees responded to Mrs. Parry's call, they assumed she had killed her husband; she was the only other person in their suite. The police, however, concluded otherwise, that it was an accident. No autopsy was performed. No charges were brought. Some would suspect that Parry had committed suicide. Later, among Parry's own children, that their mother had killed him was regarded as a real possibility: Maybe in one of her fits of fierce, irrational rage. Or maybe as cool-headed revenge for real or imagined infidelities, or other hurts he'd inflicted on her over the years. Mrs. Parry and her daughter, twisted by a lifetime's mutual antagonism, were both named Marian. Marian the younger was all but certain her mother had killed her father and held to this view all her life. On December 5, 1935, Parry's body was cremated in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, back at Harvard, a memorial service was held in Appleton Chapel. In the eulogy it was said that Parry had returned from Yugoslavia "with copious material which no future investigators in his field can afford to neglect. His work will endure long after him." In early 1936, Mrs. Parry donated most of her husband's books, recordings, and papers to Harvard and, with remarkable efficiency, decamped from Cambridge with her children, moved across the continent to Berkeley, California, returned to school at the university, and in little more than a year had earned the BA degree that pregnancy, marriage to Milman, and life with him in France and Cambridge had interrupted. Meanwhile, Parry's young assistant, Albert Lord, was left with the Yugoslav materials. After working with the man he would call his "master and friend" for fifteen months, he was now almost alone responsible for making something of them. Parry himself had had no chance to do so. Back in Yugoslavia, the winter before coming home, he'd dictated a few pages of notes and ideas; Lord typed them up. And he had a title for the book he hoped to write, Singer of Tales. Now it was all in the hands of Lord, who, at age twenty-three, was scarcely equipped to tackle the job. Approaching graduation from Harvard in June 1934, Lord "had not the slightest idea of what to do with himself," reports David Bynum, a student and admiring younger colleague of Lord's from a later period. Yugoslavia had come at an opportune time--immediately after graduation, in the middle of the Depression, a time of few other job prospects. Lord served Parry as typist, gofer, and "recording engineer," freeing Parry for more substantive and intellectually challenging work. He had "no opportunity whatever, as well as no personal inclination, to inquire or know anything meaningful concerning what Parry was about or why in Yugoslavia." The shiny white aluminum discs were, in their thousands, logistical monster and intellectual mystery. What transformed this untenable situation was this: However much or little his time in Yugoslavia might make him responsible in the eyes of the world for making something of Parry's work, Lord seemed to feel it did. And he felt it all the more with the passage of time, as a deep, pressing, personal need, one impossible to shirk. He had worked beside Parry for fifteen months; he would help advance and enrich Parry's ideas for more than fifty years. "In spite of moments when it seemed otherwise," Lord would write, "my life has been devoted to Parry's collection and to the work which he had only begun to do." * Milman Parry was arguably the most important American classical scholar of the twentieth century, by one reckoning "the Darwin of Homeric Studies." At age twenty-six, this young man from California stepped into the world of Continental philologists and overturned some of their most deeply cherished notions of ancient literature. Homer, Parry showed, was no "writer" at all. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not "written," but had been composed orally, drawing on traditional ways that went back centuries. Generations of high school and college students can recall descriptive flourishes of Odysseus, as "much-enduring," or "the man of many schemes"; or of the goddess Athena as "bright-eyed"; or of "swift-footed Achilles." Parry showed that these "ornamental epithets" were not odd little explosions of creativity. Nor, in their repetition, were they failures of the imagination. Nor were they random. They were the oral poet's way to fill out lines of verse and thus keep the great river of words flowing. They were the product of long tradition, and many voices. Parry wrote of the fifth-century BCE Greek sculptor Phidias that his work was not his alone but shot through with "the spirit of a whole race"; much the same, he said, applied to the Homeric epics. Homer, of course, was no trifling asterisk of classical studies but stood at the very roots of Western civilization, his epic poems filled with stories of the warrior Achilles and the goddess Athena and the other gods and heroes enshrined on every ancient Greek potsherd, represented in paintings, sculpture, and literature for three thousand years, inspiring Shelley and Keats, Shakespeare and James Joyce. After Parry, just how Homer had come into the world and become embedded in the memory of humankind came to be seen in a new way. As Walter Ong summed up the case in his groundbreaking 1982 book, Orality and Literacy, The Iliad and the Odyssey have been commonly regarded from antiquity to the present as the most exemplary, the truest and the most inspired secular poems in the western heritage. To account for their received excellence, each age has been inclined to interpret them as doing better what it conceived its [own] poets to be doing or aiming at. That is, they tended to be seen like the poems of one's own age, whatever it was, only better. But no, said Parry, Homer was different, and not just from the literature of our own time, or from Victorian literature, or from that of the Middle Ages, but even from almost all other ancient Greek literature. A rough, ill-formed thought might place the Odyssey and, say, Aeschylus's three-part tragedy, the Oresteia, under the same broad heading--ancient "classics," revered literary products of Greece, stalwarts of the Western literary tradition. But Parry showed they were different animals altogether, because Aeschylus wrote, as you and I write, while the Odyssey was something else entirely, percolating up from oral performance over the centuries, shaped by its own, maddeningly "unliterary" rules: The literary critic sees repetition, stereotype, and cliché as unwelcome or worse. But for on-the-fly oral composition they were virtually essential, characteristic of it, understood and expected by audience and performer alike. For Parry they were the clue to how the epic poems had been made. In time, Parry's ideas came to constitute their own orthodoxy, with scholars questioning them as they would anything else, placing them under relentless scrutiny. And yet in all the years since--it is now nearly a century since Parry first asserted them--they have become one of the cornerstones on which Homeric studies stand. And extended into new realms, they have altered understanding of other early cultures as well--not just in the West but in Asia, Africa, and around the world; and not just in past centuries but our own. Parry's ideas have forced us to rethink the role of books and print generally. The Yugoslav singers, like those of ancient Greece, could not read or write. Milman Parry helped us to imagine, understand, and respect another species of human creativity. "The effects of oral states of consciousness," Walter Ong has written, "are bizarre to the literate mind." * I come to Milman Parry from outside the world of classical studies. While for a dozen years in the early 2000s I held a faculty position at a university, MIT, most of my working life has been spent outside academia altogether, as an independent writer. In the early years, I wrote articles, essays, and reviews for magazines and newspapers. Then, beginning in the 1980s, books--about mentor relationships among elite scientists, about tourism in Nice, about an Indian mathematical genius. A servant to my enthusiasms, I never much restricted myself by subject. In 2007, the object of my fascination became a tiny island community off the far west coast of Ireland, known as the Great Blasket, inhabited by a few hundred Irish-speaking fishermen, visited by scholars, writers, and linguists from all over Europe. One of these scholars was an Englishman, George Thomson, who first arrived on the island in 1923 and took a lively interest in it for the rest of his life. Professionally, he was a classicist, a student of Greek lyric poetry, of Aeschylus, of Homer. For most of his life he was professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham. Through his books, correspondence, and personal story I found him a warming and inspiring figure. Such were his sensibilities, and such were mine, that I could not confine my interest to his place in the Irish story; I became intrigued by whatever intrigued him. Soon I was reading his translation of the Oresteia, from which I came away thrilled by the astonishing transformation wrought by Athena in the third play, where vengeance metamorphoses into something like justice. From Aeschylus, then, it was on to the Odyssey and the Iliad through the lustrous and lucid Robert Fagles translations; these were my first forays into Homer since junior high school. Ultimately, I was caught up in Thomson's ideas about the Homeric Question, the fertile, endlessly fascinating, centuries-old debate about who Homer was, when and where he'd lived, and what it meant, if anything, to attribute to him the authorship of the ancient epics. And the Homeric Question, in turn, led me to Milman Parry. As one over-neat formulation of his achievement put it, Parry "never solved the Homeric Question; he demonstrated that it was irrelevant." Jettisoning contradictions in Homer that to his mind weren't contradictions at all, he opened the world of classical scholarship to new notions of literary creation. And he did so in a peculiarly single-minded way that made for its own, charmingly geekish story: In the decade after first asserting his ideas, Parry enriched his original insights with such deep analysis of the hexametric line in which the epics were written, such abundance of detail, such obsessive regard for closing off alternative explanations, that, in a scholarly world riven by fractious debate, few could doubt their truth, leaving others to pick at the periphery of his big idea. Classicists today refer to "before Parry" and "after Parry." They speak not of Parry's "theory," or "argument," but of his "discovery." This isn't quite true, but it is true enough, many of his demonstrations and proofs seemingly airtight. Over the years much attention has been paid to Parry's ideas; less to the progression of his thought set against the times and places in which he lived, or the sensibilities and personal history of Parry himself. This book is a story of intellectual discovery rooted in a field, classical studies, often relegated in the popular imagination to the outlands of the irrelevant and the obscure. But success in any field, however recondite, is always a story of humans at work, in all their hope and glory, and in the face of all their foibles and excesses. Homer and ancient Greece stand near the center of this book; but nearer still is Mr. Parry himself. Our story plays out in the times and places in which he lived--across just a dozen years in the 1920s and 1930s, in California, in Paris, at Harvard, and on the Balkan peninsula, where Parry went to test his ideas on a living tradition. Excerpted from Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry by Robert Kanigel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
