Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  “The dream forbids me to write what lies inside the sanctuary wall,” Pausanias goes on to say, “and what the uninitiated are not allowed to see they obviously ought not to know about.” Earlier, in Athens, Pausanias had visited the Eleusinion, an Athenian sanctuary presumably sacred to Demeter, and he writes that he wanted to “describe the contents . . . but I was stopped by something I saw in a dream. I must turn to the things it is not irreligious to write for general readers.” The trail of the content of the Mysteries goes cold there, back in the early Roman era.

  One of the loveliest things I saw at Elefsina was a stele, or grave marker, showing a relief of a seated woman with a little girl at her knee. The woman was straight-backed; the child, trusting, holds something out to her. It was the only image I saw at Elefsina that might be interpreted as an illustration of the mother love that is so abundant in the myth. Back home, I had been struck, over the past several years, observing some of my friends as young mothers, by the affection between mother and daughter. I don’t remember ever experiencing that as a girl, except with my grandmother, when she held me on her lap and read to me—probably the beginning of my love of reading. My early childhood coincided with dark days in our house. My mother, like Demeter, had lost a child. He was a boy, named Patrick, and he was two years older than me. I have no memory of Patrick himself, but I grew up hearing my mother tell the story of the day he died, in all its detail, over and over, implanting the family mythology. It was March—a bad month—and Patrick was just a few weeks shy of his third birthday. There was bacon for breakfast. My mother told Patrick to wait, that she would cut up his bacon for him as soon as she was finished feeding the baby. But he didn’t wait, and he choked on a piece of bacon. My father was there at the breakfast table, and he turned Patrick upside down and whacked him on the back, trying to dislodge it. (Nobody yet knew about the Heimlich maneuver, now posted by law in every restaurant.) It was all my father knew to do, but it didn’t work.

  My mother would go on to describe my father’s grief, how he never talked about it during the day, but at night, in bed, he would sob, his whole body shaking. He even went to see the parish priest and ask for help, and the priest said that they should have another baby. So they had my little brother. “But my heart wasn’t in it,” my mother would say. She would say it right in front of the child who was conceived to replace Patrick. (And I thought I had it bad.) Who could compete with the broad-shouldered auburn-haired boy in the maroon corduroy shirt with the troubled little face who lived in the tinted photograph on our parents’ dresser? His funeral things—a lock of hair and a wreath—were kept in a long flat box at the back of the kitchen closet. They couldn’t find his shoes, my mother said, the shoes had disappeared, so he was buried without them. When we got back on Friday nights from driving my grandmother home after her weekly visit, we would stand out on the back porch and look up at the stars and ask my mother, “Which one is Patrick’s star?” She would point one out.

  It was not until years later that I realized I felt guilty for my brother’s death—if it hadn’t been for my presence there at the breakfast table, he wouldn’t have died. I spent my childhood in the impossible position of having to try to console my inconsolable mother. We were both too worn out for me to learn or for her to teach me anything practical or domestic. I couldn’t scramble an egg or get a stain out of a shirt. By the time I got to college and took that course in mythology, I was still helpless, stubbornly protesting my innocence.

  Somehow that mythology course with Professor Zeitlin was the beginning of releasing me from guilt. Professor Zeitlin, in her lecture on the Eleusinian Mysteries, had pointed out that the ravishing of Kore combines in one act the three rites of passage of womanhood: birth, marriage, and death. In being raped, Kore dies as a maiden daughter and is born as Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. At the time, I identified with Kore—I was a virgin, I gloried in the lilacs blooming around the edges of the cul de sac of cozy gray houses that served as our dormitory. I was a flower child. That campus was the meadow that Kore was playing in with her friends when Hades erupted out of the earth and came for her. Until that day in the lecture hall, I had been afraid to grow up, to trade in my girlhood for the life of a woman.

  Professor Zeitlin’s class had woken me to the fact that I could have other models: be a bitch, be a huntress, be an Amazon, be a maenad, one of the crazed followers of Dionysus. Mythology taught me that I didn’t have to limit myself to virgin, bride, and mother—there were many other roles to play. I didn’t have to be like my mother and wear a girdle every day of my life, I didn’t have to be constrained. I could let myself live.

  Now, here at Elefsina, where I’d hoped to have some kind of spring fling, I realized that I had my mother in me after all, and I was glad of it. Women are the continuum. My mother, in her unbearable sadness, went on to make breakfast for us every day, to bear another child, and though my younger brother and I have never had children ourselves, our older brother married a corn goddess (my sister-in-law is from Iowa) and they have two fine boys, both musicians, one named Patrick. Miles is a gardener, something he never learned from our father, who seemed to go out of his way to trample my mother’s chrysanthemums when he painted the house. I came to Greece to get away from my family, but as I set my course for Athens again, they were with me. This time, I took the bus.

  CHAPTER 5

  A TASTE FOR TRAGEDY

  BY MY MID-THIRTIES, I was deep into classical Greek. At The New Yorker, I had settled into my job on the copydesk and was training a series of copy editors, trying to move up to the next level, but reluctant to give up a night shift that allowed me to have days free for my extracurricular activities. The magazine was moving toward a takeover by the Newhouses, who owned Vogue, Vanity Fair, and a lot of other magazines, and speculation about who would succeed William Shawn as the editor-in-chief was ramping up. The New Yorker had been stable for decades—Shawn had been editor since the year I was born, 1952—and we were afraid that new owners would fiddle with our traditions. No. 1 pencils? Tuition reimbursement? Some of the older employees, like Ed Stringham, had settled into well-worn grooves, and it was hard to picture a new owner putting up with them. Shawn’s shop was home to many eccentrics, one of whom I was on the path to becoming.

  I had registered for Elementary Greek at Barnard, choosing a section taught by a venerable classics professor named Helen Bacon. This was a historic opportunity: she was teaching beginners for the last time. But when Professor Bacon defined Hesperus, the evening star (Venus), with reference to the Latin Vespers, prayers at dusk, I could not take her point. It offended me that Greek should be taught through Latin when I was illiterate in that dead language but brimming with modern Greek. I crossed the street to Columbia and enrolled in a section taught by a professor new to Columbia, Laura Slatkin.

  Professor Slatkin was a native New Yorker, educated at Brearley, Radcliffe, and Cambridge, who had come to Columbia on a Mellon Fellowship. She was an Athena type, witty, serious, and attractive, with great winged eyebrows. She would joke that students who came to class unprepared were responsible for the premature gray in her hair. I was closer in age to her than I was to the undergraduates, but that didn’t mean we could pal around. She gave the class an occasional glimpse into her private life. One day she told us that a friend had given birth the night before—she had attended—and the word “contractions,” which we had encountered in certain verbs in ancient Greek, had taken on new and urgent meaning. She laughingly described the efforts of three PhDs to follow the manufacturer’s instructions to assemble a crib.

  Unlike the undergraduates, who were enrolled in organic chemistry and advanced Latin and statistics and the Great Books course that Columbia is famous for—along with rowing crew and making art and smoking dope and screwing around—I had only one class to prepare for, and no social life, with the result that I was able to devote myself completely to my studies, coming out of my Greek swoon for a few hours a day to go to the office and
copy-edit for the purpose of paying the rent.

  Traditionally, the first text that Greek students grapple with is Xenophon’s Anabasis, which records the long march upcountry (anabasis means “going up”) and the retreat of ten thousand (a myriad) Greek mercenary soldiers who fought in Persia from 401 to 399 BC. It is mostly about how many parasangs they cover every day—a parasang, according to Herodotus and Xenophon, is equal to 30 stadiums, or about five and a half kilometers—slogging along in the desert, up hills, over rocks, over more rocks, up more hills, until finally they see the sea and shout, “Thálassa! Thálassa!” (“The sea! The sea!”) At last they are as good as home. Professor Slatkin skipped the Anabasis and instead gave us Plato’s Apology of Socrates, which is about the trial and death of Socrates at the hands of the state. She knew how to make a person fall in love with ancient Greek. She also used a new textbook, Hansen and Quinn, which she said was an improvement on the textbook she had learned Greek from, in which the sample sentences were all about moving rocks from one side of the road to the other. The first day’s homework was to copy a list of Greek words printed in lowercase—λιος, ‘Όμηρος (sun, Homer)—in all capitals (ΗΛΙΟΣ, ΟΜΗΡΟΣ). It was surprisingly useful, and learning the words was an enticement to read outside the textbook.

  After a year of Elementary Greek with Professor Slatkin, I registered for her course in Greek Tragedy. We met on the sixth floor of Hamilton Hall. I swear you needed an advanced degree just to find your classroom, because Columbia counted the basement (and the subbasement, if there was one) as a floor. The Hamilton for whom the building was named was Alexander, of course, a famous alumnus who had dropped out during the Revolutionary War, and it looked as if it might have been built in his day. The roof leaked, and chunks of the ceiling rained down. Professor Slatkin was pleased to be able to say, with some flair, “Après moi, le déluge.”

  At the time, I was living in Astoria, above two Italian-American brothers in the semidetached brick house they had grown up in, and I would sit at a table by my second-floor window early in the morning, like a monk at his devotions, looking up occasionally as a train rolled over the viaduct leading to the Hell Gate Bridge, with my Greek text and my spiral notebooks and my abridged Liddell and Scott, a gift from my little brother.

  Professor Slatkin had suggested that, with my limited Greek, I elect something easier—Herodotus was on offer across the street, at Barnard—but I had developed a taste for tragedy. Maybe it was self-dramatization, maybe it was melodrama, but I had an intimation that whatever we read in Greek Tragedy would put my own troubles in perspective. Professor Slatkin had chosen the two plays that she believed no one should graduate from college without having read: Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus (which classicists refer to as the OT), both by Sophocles. Antigone took up most of the semester, and we squeezed Oedipus into a few weeks at the end, with Professor Slatkin handing out sheets of vocabulary notes to save us time delving in the lexicon.

  I was the class nerd. I copied the Greek text painstakingly into my notebook, about ten lines at a time, observing every diacritical mark, and covered the facing page with vocabulary notes—verbs with their principal parts, nouns with their genders and genitives—and, after negotiating the twists and turns of syntax, penciled in a frail translation of Sophocles. It was thrilling to see the meaning emerge, to observe the subtle uses of tense and aspect and mood, and to feel the force of the untranslatable particles.

  There are words in Antigone that are current in English today—miasma is one—and words that are the roots from which English words have sprung. For instance, hérpo means “to creep, glide,” and has given us herps, as in herpetology, the study of reptiles—snakes, salamanders, and other creeping things. The verb speíro means to sow or scatter, and, combined with the prefix dia (across, through), yields diaspora, a scattering across or throughout. History has given us the Jewish diaspora, the Greek diaspora, and the Diaspora Club, as a group of soon-to-be-former New Yorker editors would call themselves.

  I also lapped up the specialized vocabulary of classicists. They had a name for everything! “Oh, that’s a hapax legomenon,” someone might say, meaning a word that occurred a single time in a given author. Hysteron proteron (“later before”) meant saying what should follow first. My favorite was lacuna, a gap in the text where a worm had eaten a hole in the papyrus. And we were all prone to the occasional haplography, a scribal error in which the copyist’s eye fell on the second use of a word, causing him to omit the lines between the first and second uses. Scholars also had a convention that encouraged them, when it was unclear which of two manuscript readings was authentic, to favor the more difficult or unusual option. I found this perverse, in a good way. There were also notes on poetic form and meter, and exercises in scansion. All this to love before even touching on plot or character!

  The text we were using for Antigone was the work of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, of Cambridge University. For 47 pages of Greek, it had 186 pages of English commentary—abridged from a much larger work, published in 1900. Classicists call it, simply, Jebb. I carried Jebb around with me like a favorite doll, puzzling over it on the train when I went to visit friends in Boston and holding it open on my lap when we were playing bridge, hoping that while I wasn’t looking, some of the words would rearrange themselves into meaningful units, like letters in an anagram, and jump out at me.

  Most people know the story of Antigone. The daughter of Oedipus buries her brother Polynices—or at least throws a handful of dust on his body to ensure safe passage to the Underworld—disobeying her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, and earning the death penalty. Antigone is a spitfire, defying Creon in the serene belief that she is obeying a higher law. If Antigone did not soar like a phoenix above this tragedy, it would be Creon’s play. He needs to be right, and by the time Tiresias enters (always bad news) and the chorus of Theban elders persuades Creon to admit he’s wrong, it is too late. His niece Antigone has hanged herself; his son Haemon, who was betrothed to Antigone (yes, they were cousins), kills himself, whereupon his wife, Eurydice, Haemon’s mother, also kills herself, leaving Creon broken and alone.

  One of the things that impressed me about Sophocles was the way this play is over even before it begins: at the protagonist’s entrance we are already looking at the consequences of what she is about to do, and everything from there on is drawn in unsparing detail, so that we know just how it feels to be Antigone. In one speech, which I was able to translate almost magically, as if I had written it myself (it is thought by some to be spurious), she enlarges on the value of a brother, making the point that if a husband or a child dies, one can remarry or have another child, but a brother engendered by parents who are no longer alive can never be replaced. I thought I understood, and I am not talking about my brother Patrick. I had two other brothers, one older and one younger, and I was particularly close to my younger brother. I felt as if I were losing him, though not to death. That year, my year of Antigone, my brother did the unthinkable: he got married. It brought to an end the years of our youth: both of us in New York, hanging out together, with a shared set of references and inside jokes. I admit that he filled in for the social life I didn’t have. He was funny and wise, and I preferred his company to anyone else’s. Once, we were introduced to a friend’s cousin, an interesting guy, who called the next day to make a date with me—I actually held the phone away from my ear and looked at it as if to say, “Are you sure? My brother is much better company.” I forgot that, to a heterosexual man, I, as a woman, might be more attractive than my brother.

  Sometimes you read something at exactly the right time, whether it’s a classic you missed in childhood that would have been wasted on you as an eight-year-old (I read The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web in bed with my lover in college) or something that you were too snooty to read when it first came out—Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter—that speaks to you profoundly once you give up your pose of superiority. (Ford made me change my mind about di
scretionary commas.) A great book about the Donner Party (Desperate Passage) can make you resolve to never waste a scrap of food again. Who you are when you come to a book (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters) can give you an intimate experience that you would not have had if that book was assigned in class, if you had to read it. I might have felt sorry for myself for not getting Latin early and for being in my thirties by the time I found Greek, but I knew that what I brought to it—in the case of Antigone, my history with my brother—was making it hit me in a way that it wouldn’t have when I was younger. What happened was not even happening to me—I just experienced the fallout of things that were happening to others—but the extreme experience of Antigone (remember, her brother was also her nephew) helped me cope with the feeling of being sidelined in my own family.

  And here we have a riddle worthy of the Sphinx: What goes by the masculine pronoun in youth, the feminine pronoun in middle age, and the singular “they” in old age? My hermaphrodite. After playing Antigone at my brother’s wedding, I took on the role again when my brother, like Tiresias, changed gender, and began a new life as a female. I resisted the word “sister.” I had not had a sister when I needed one, and I didn’t want one now, especially when it was someone who was trying to take my brother’s place. It is not unusual, I learned, for a person to experience a family member’s change of gender as a death, which is very disturbing to the transitioner, who feels she is being reborn. “It’s not nice to hear you’re dead,” my brother said. For me, at first, his transformation seemed like a rejection of our shared past. I would learn to use the feminine pronoun in the present, but when I was talking about the past I felt entitled to revert to the masculine. But this was several years in the future. For now, I had lost access through marriage to my boon companion and it felt as good as death—or as bad. Things would never be the same.