The Tidewater Tales

by John Barth

Well. They are smiling, amiable. Their cheese and olives are delicious. Though Peter is no fan of retsina, this is ice-cold and only slightly resinous and certainly appropriate. Now: We don’t want to pry, but who’s going to get to the point?

  I see neither wheel nor tiller, Peter observes, smiling. Do you really use a steering oar? Diana looks at her senior companion with light amusement; he replies offhandedly and not very informatively that an autopilot does most of their actual steering. He does not know whether we know well The Odyssey, one of the great epic poems of the ancient Greeks. . . .

  We know it well, Peter assures him. Adds Katherine Practically by heart, in English alas. My husband is a writer and I’m a storyteller, she goes on straightforwardly—I mean I’m a library-science person who’s learning oral narrative. Peter makes ‘em up and I tell ‘em, and your Odyssey is practically our favorite story in the entire world.

  Her American candor wins Diana, who (when Ted has done reminding us that the dream-swift ships of the Phaeacians, that godly race of sailors in Homer’s poem who finally deliver Odysseus back to Ithaca, had no mechanical means of steering at all, for they could sense where their skippers wished to go and aim unerringly in that direction) identifies her companion as a former classicist and undersea archaeologist, herself as his former protegee and associate, now his wife. To your good health, long life, and lasting happiness, Peter proposes, lifting his glass. Fair winds, snug harbors, et cet. The Dmitrikakises wish us likewise. Says Kath cheerily As soon as we sailed in here we said Phaeacian Thirty-five, and when you guys came on deck in your chitons we said It’s Odysseus and Nausicaa.

  Responds Ted smoothly You do us honor. But he does not go on to explain the chitons; instead he says, with clear interest, Storytellers, are you. Are you quite famous for it? Dee and I are out of touch.

  He’s famous, says Katherine, among people who know. He’s the best. I’m only an apprentice. Says Peter Some apprentice: You should hear her do the Catalogue of Ships. You can sing the Catalogue of Ships? Ted asks her, impressed. With enough retsina, K acknowledges—but in English, remember. And in prose.

  Our hosts exchange a glance. Will you have dinner with us? Diana asks. Lamb kabobs: We’ve enough for four. Katherine says unhesitatingly We’d love to; I’ll help; and we sip more retsina. The watermen in the restaurant over there this afternoon, reports Peter, thought your boat was a Viking replica on its way to a museum somewhere.

  Amused Dee cries Viking! Serious Ted says We rarely go ashore. All right, thinks Katherine: If we have to pry, we’ll pry; you wouldn’t invite us to dinner and expect us not to ask questions. Underwater archaeology must be exciting, she declares to Ted straight: Is this about what you’d guess from The Odyssey that the Greek ships looked like?

  Not from The Odyssey, says Ted. He reminds us that the paradoxical scarcity, in that great sea-story, of knowledgeable nautical detail (compared to the authoritative ship-lore in The Iliad) is one of the characteristics which, with others, has led some readers to infer, erroneously, that its author was a woman—indeed, that it was “Nausicaa” herself.

  Ted’s self-assurance, in our opinion, borders upon the arrogant, but somehow does not cross the border; we let that “erroneously” go. The vessel, we are now told, is indeed “a sort of replica, more accurate than anyone could likely imagine.” But it is not bound for any museum, nor do he and Diana sail it for reasons of nostalgia—we have noted, surely, that some of the rigging is of materials unknown in classical times. Declares Ted We prefer it because it is faster and more seaworthy than any other vessel its size. Not that we’re interested in racing.

  Her voice rich in disbelief, Katherine asks Really? It goes to windward? Diana replies, amiably if not quite to the point, that certain of their archaeological discoveries in the Mediterranean proved profitable enough for them to retire from their profession, build the boat to their specifications, and cross the Atlantic in record time. Now they migrate like wild waterfowl up and down the flyway from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean.

  We Sherritt-Sagamores find it hard to believe—impossible, actually—that so primitive a design, with its single, yardarmed sail, could perform well even against our little Story, not to mention a modern ocean racer, especially to windward. If we are not experts in naval architecture and ancient history, neither are we ignorant of them: Odysseus’s crew did more rowing than sailing, except offwind. Peter ventures this observation, by no means contentiously. To our surprise, Diana appears to take some offense; she excuses herself to get dinner going. Ted frowns too, but explains that the boatyard was in Diana’s hometown, a certain Greek island. The designers and builders were her relatives. And—our understandable skepticism notwithstanding—the boat sails much better than we suppose.

  Katherine assures him we were merely questioning, not challenging—Peter’s father was a boatbuilder, too!—and excuses herself to go straighten out Diana and help with the meal. Her directness and goodwill carry the day, as Peter has seen them carry many a yesterday: In five minutes the little tension is dispersed; the four of us fall to building a splendid dinner of lamb-onion-and-tomato kabobs, grilled over a brazier on deck and accompanied by a good unlabeled red table wine which Ted decants and serves mixed with mineral water, again pouring the first glass overside.

  Our conversation keeps to the less touchy ground of our common enthusiasm for classical Greek literature, especially Homer’s Odyssey. Though we are not scholars, P knows as well as loves the poem, and K is wise in the ways of the bardic tradition.

  Over the meal, as the red sun sets into battleship-gray haze, Ted asks us what our favorite moment is in that story. Without hesitation Peter Sagamore replies that his is the scene in Book Thirteen, halfway through the poem, where after ten years of war and nine of wandering, Odysseus wakes at last on the beach of his homeland, having been fetched there by the Phaeacians in their dream-dark ships and put ashore in his sleep. The man doesn’t know he’s in Ithaca, says Peter; he laments that the Phaeacians, who seemed so obliging, have tricked him after all and put him ashore in one more alien country, and that still more wandering lies ahead. He walks up and down the beach in despair—dragging his feet along the shore, Homer says.

  We all know the passage, and so listen with pleasure to P’s paraphrase. Athene appears in the guise of a young shepherd, tells Odysseus he’s in Ithaca, and asks him teasingly who he is. Out of a nature deeper than his fatigue, Odysseus conceals his elation at being home and spins out one more false identity, one more elaborate fiction, all the while kneeling on the beach in supplication before the stranger. With a smile, Athene casts off her disguise and stands before him: tall, beautiful, and wise. Even as he yarns on with his umpteenth cover-story, she reaches out and caresses him. In a voice full of love, she chides him for his cunning—so like her own, she says—and for not recognizing the goddess who has watched over him right through his odyssey.

  Peter shakes his head: What a moment.

  Our hosts are clearly pleased and affected by his choice—which he has also done an okay job of rehearsing, K thinks, given that telling stories is famously not her friend’s long suit. Theodoros is actually moved to breathe in deeply and drain his wineglass. Diana touches his arm. What I think about that scene is this, declares Peter Sagamore: To recognize that his nature is the earthly counterpart of Athene’s, and to realize that he’s home at last—they’re the same thing, right? He won’t need to disguise his identity any further.

  Ted nods and gruffly says Just so! Of course, puts in quick Katherine, five minutes later Athene disguises him as an old peasant, and off he goes to live incognito with Eumaeus the pig-man. But that’s another story, I suppose. Ted repeats Just so: The story of his wandering is done, and the story of his homecoming is begun.

  Exclaims beautiful Diana You two really do know our poem! And to Katherine What’s your favorite moment?

  Kate has seen her turn coming—the Dmitrikakises, we think, play this game with all their dinner guests
—and has considered. I’m glad you asked, she declares, though we are not certain our hosts understand American irony. The fact is, I had a dream only last night about my favorite passage in The Odyssey. Murmurs Peter Quelle coincidence. I guess it’s in Book Twenty-three, the reunion scene, goes on unperturbed Katie. The big bow has been drawn, the suitors have been massacred, the collaborationist maids have been forced to clean up the mess and then hanged, the place has been fumigated, and Penelope’s out of danger. In fact, she slept through the whole thing, the way Odysseus slept through the boat ride home. Nineteen years of stalling for time and hoping against hope are over with; the old nurse wakes her up and tells her that her husband’s home at last—and the poor woman can’t quite believe it. Not only that: She can’t set aside two decades of waiting and worrying in five minutes. She comes downstairs, but she doesn’t know how to handle the situation. Should she run up and kiss the guy? Should she stand back and question him awhile, look him over and make sure? But she can’t even think what to ask him. She sits by the fire, opposite him, and finds she can’t say a word; she just looks and looks at him. Their son scolds her. She admits she’s in shock, that she can’t even look the man in the face—although she’s been busy doing just that. But if it really is Odysseus, she says, they’ll work it out, ‘cause they have secrets between them that no one else has heard of.

  Old Odysseus likes that; he also sees that the woman needs time and mustn’t be rushed. So he and grownup Telemachus work out a trick for dealing with the dead suitors’ families—it’s a typical Odysseus-trick, and he explains it in Penelope’s hearing as a sort of preliminary proof. Then he goes and gets himself cleaned up and dressed to the nines, and only then comes back to the hall where Penelope’s still waiting and wondering. He scolds her, in an affectionate way, for her obstinacy: Homer’s people are forever scolding one another, like a big happy Mediterranean family. What other wife could keep herself out of her husband’s arms after twenty years? As if the question shouldn’t be What other wife would still be waiting patiently and faithfully after twenty years! And Homer has Penelope say this wonderful, womanly thing: You’re strange, too, she tells Odysseus. I’m not being haughty or indifferent, she says; I’m not even unduly surprised. But I have such a clear picture in my mind of the way you looked twenty years ago, when you sailed off to Troy in your long-oared ship. . . .

  Then she plays the bed trick, telling old Eurycleia to move Odysseus’s big bed out into the hall for the night, when she knows that the real Odysseus knows that it can’t be moved: The secret of the marriage bed is that it’s there for keeps. Seems to me she’s testing not only whether this handsome middle-aged stranger is really Odysseus—that fact must be pretty clear to her by now—but whether he’s her Odysseus: the one she remembers so clearly. If he has forgotten the secrets of their marriage bed, then no matter what his name is, he’s not her husband.

  Bravo, Diana says. Hear hear, agrees proud Peter. Theodoros nods. Continues Kath He takes the bait, no faking now, and explains in a great swivet that the bed can’t be moved, ‘cause he built it around a live olive tree, blah blah blah. So that proves he’s Odysseus. What he doesn’t know, he says very pointedly then, is whether their bedpost-tree still stands, or whether someone has cut it down in his absence. That does the trick: Penelope melts, and it occurs to me now that there’s a similarity between this scene and the one Peter told. First we see that Athene loves Odysseus because he’s so much like herself: She shows herself to him for the first time undisguised, and that means he’s home. Now we see that Odysseus and Penelope are perfect for each other because she’s just as cagey and resourceful as he is. She demonstrates that, and then they put by all such game-playing—and that means he’s really home, and the story’s over.

  Bravo again! cheers Peter. Kate’s heart tingles. Our hosts have grown mighty pensive. Ted nods at his wineglass; Diana regards first him and then the gray-and-salmon sky to westward. Says Peter Sagamore So: I’d say that that’s another one of those bits that led people like Samuel Butler and Robert Graves to imagine that The Odyssey was composed by a woman. The Homer’s Daughter business.

  Ted sits up, pours out another round of red and water, which we’re learning to like though Kath’s is nine-tenths water. The author of The Odyssey was not a woman, he firmly informs us. You might say that it was a man who had learned to pay attention to women as well as paying attentions to them.

  Says Kate Sherritt Okay—once again because while the man’s self-assurance is potentially insufferable, what he said was so nicely and unarrogantly put that we can’t take offense. Peter now asks Diana directly what their favorite moment is (something tells us they do not have separate ones). She and Ted at once exchange so loving and wistful a smile that we excuse them any amount of over-self-confidence. And we have guessed correctly: Their joint favorite episode in all of literature, Diana tells us, is another beach scene: the story in Odyssey Book Six of young Princess Nausicaa of the Flashing Arms doing laundry with her maids at the river shore and then playing ball with them on the beach, while unknown to them poor shipwrecked Odysseus—naked, sea-grimed, exhausted from swimming, and alone—sleeps dead to the world in a clump of wild olive bushes nearby.

  Yeah! cries athletic Kath, delighted at the memory. Playing ball! Old Nausicaa there with her major-league arms. I love it!

  Goes on smoothly smiling Diana She never misses a catch. But one of the maids does, and the ball goes into the river, which is deep just there and has a fast current too, and they all make a shriek, the way girls do. The noise wakes Odysseus. He groans and wonders where he is—for all he knows, the people might be cannibals, like the Cyclopes—but he has to ask for food and shelter or die, so he steps out grizzled and naked except for an olive branch to cover up his privates. Diana smiles and smiles. Like a mountain lion, Homer says, she says, forced by hunger to besiege the very walls of the homestead and attack the pens. The girls catch sight of him; they scream; they scatter—

  All except Nausicaa, Ted puts in, turning his wineglass by the stem as if examining a thornless rose.

  Says K Good old flashy-armed Nausicaa: She’s all sand. Ted smiles at her questioningly. Guts, Kath explains. Cojones. Balls. Did she ever get her ball back, by the way?

  Kay-tee, Peter warns. Kate says Excuse me, Dee; I’ll shut up. But this scene knocks me down, too.

  Says Diana Dear Homer draws such a picture of both of them. Odysseus on his knees says just the right things to flatter her and calm her fears and state his case all at the same time. Then, once he washes himself up and puts on the clothes they give him, and Athene makes him particularly handsome, Nausicaa flirts with him shamelessly! She tells her maids that he’s just the kind of man she hopes to marry, and then she tells Odysseus himself that she’s afraid the gossips in town will think she’s bringing this handsome stranger home to be her husband, since she has spurned all the local princes who would like to marry her. Diana grins. She’s shameless!

  I love her, says Kate, grinning too. Peter wonders: Dear Homer?

  Says Ted Every scene between them is beautiful, including the last one, two books later. King Alcinous has offered Odysseus Nausicaa to be his wife, even though they don’t know who he is yet; but Odysseus has declared he must get home—without directly mentioning that he has a wife waiting for him there. Nausicaa was brave down on the beach, but she is even braver when she hears this news and accepts it. She stands in her father’s hall beside one of the great pillars—in all her heaven-sent beauty, Homer says—and greets him. Good luck, my friend, she says. Isn’t that splendid? Not Noble Sir or Distinguished Stranger, but my friend.

  Quotes beautiful Diana, looking at him serenely, warmly, I hope that when you are in your own country you will remember me at times, since it is to me before all others that you owe your life.

  Princess Nausicaa, Ted seriously says back, I do indeed pray Zeus the Thunderer and Lord of Hera to let me reach my home. If he does, then even there I will never fa
il to worship you all the rest of my days. For it was you, lady, who gave me back my life.

  They reach out and touch each other’s fingertips. We are thrilled. We reach out and touch our each other’s fingertips, too. Says Peter Beautiful. Good choices and well told. It is not difficult to see why the Dmitrikakises like that story: its obvious parallels to their own May-September connection. We bet it’s a relatively new marriage, and not Ted’s first.

  Dinner is done, the sun is down, but no one feels like setting about the cleanup yet. Ted fetches a citronella candle from below; passes around some bug repellent with a pleasant pine scent and Greek letters on the phial. Diana brings up baklava and offers coffee, but our consensus is to retrieve the cold retsina for postprandial sipping. Katherine (mineral water for her, thanks) says she’s sure they know all those sequels to The Odyssey in which for one reason or another—Penelope’s infidelity or death, Odysseus’s restlessness, whatever—the old sailor makes a final voyage to meet that “easy death from the sea” that Circe foretold for him. Dante has him leave the Mediterranean and sail for five months down into the Southern Ocean, to sink at last in sight of Mount Purgatory: the classical era overwhelmed by the Christian era. But late-classical writers have him going back to Calypso in search of the agelessness she once offered him. K believes there’s even a version in which he goes back to Nausicaa, who’s still carrying the torch for him in those flashing arms of hers.

  Diana wonders: Carrying the torch? Kate explains the old slang expression, to their amusement.

  Laughs Diana Yes, I suppose she was . . . carrying the torch. We’ve heard all those stories. And some naughty ones, too.

  Ted fingers his red-and-gray beard. My friends: Diana and I do not see people often, and we have enjoyed this evening with you, Katherine, and you, Peter. You seem to us to be wise about both sailing and poetry, and to be in love with each other as well. The three great things, yes?