Why Homer Matters

by Adam Nicolson

  This may seem a presumptuous comparison, but it is clear to me that anyone who has ever stood up in front of an audience, of any kind, and made a speech, knows what is meant by composition-in-performance, particularly if you have made the speech before, or over the course of a few months had the chance of making it a few times to different audiences, in different atmospheres and for different purposes. You know, in essence, the stories you have to tell, the morals you would like to draw. You know the moments where pathos is available and those where people will laugh. You know what has worked before and what has died as it left your lips. You know, above all, but just how you know is difficult to know, how to establish a kind of gut-dialogue between you and the audience, to feel them feeling what you are saying, to understand point by point what might be the right development of the tale.

  It is not improvization, because you know at least where you might be going. You have your formulas, conscious, semi-conscious, unconscious, the tics that make you who you are, that are your inheritance. You have passages that run in familiar ways, that allow the intuition to consider the shape of what you are making, the way you might go next, the goal it must aim for. And you have your ingredients, your set terms, the passages where you need not invent, where you can say what was said before, and those passages where invention seems to come easily to the mind, not in the sense of making up a new substance for the story, but in finding words that will work for it. All this is easier when there is some darkness in the room.

  This is not to say that I speak in hexameters or devise complex reflective schemes and ironies, that I keep in train a thousand characters over 14,000 lines. But at a very basic level I understand that between memory, the present moment and the spoken word, is a kind of three-part dance. When my children were small, we used to play this Homeric game. Last thing at night, I would tell them long rhythmic poems about our lives and our holidays, the little adventures we had in boats or trains, all designed to send them to sleep. Nothing was repeated more often than the story of taking the night train to Scotland, feeding off the atmosphere of excitement and anticipation we got from it every summer and Christmas. The poem was never quite the same from one telling to the next, but it used all the easy techniques of repetitive phrasing and a thumping rhythm which, as Milman Parry said of his own storytelling to his children when they came with him to Bosnia, are the overused recourse of the bad epic poet and almost untouched by the good.

  But this is epic verse as it is made today in England, in the evening, upstairs in the bedroom, traditional, formulaic, with lumps of the culture embedded in it, full of memories, lullingly soporific. I never wrote anything down at the time, and I have typed this now straight onto the keyboard as it came to mind, nothing predetermined, except the formulas and the memory of having done something like it often before.

  That was the night and it was very very dark

  That the children found their way to the station

  and there at the station waiting in the dark

  was the long long train that they knew from before.

  Dark was the train and wonderfully shiny

  the lights from the station shining on its flanks

  and the lights in the cabins glowing inside

  and there as the children stood in the station

  watching the train that was dark in the night

  they said to each other Can we climb aboard?

  Can we find our way to our beds in the train?

  And their father said No to them, No not yet.

  Wait till the guard opens the doors.

  So they stood in the cold and longed for the warmth

  Of the long night train as it made its way north.

  Together they stood and huddled in the dark

  Waiting for the moment when the doors might open

  and then at last they heard far away

  The banging of doors and the shouting of men

  as each of the guards got out his big key

  and opened the doors for the night to begin.

  I usually fell asleep before they did, lulled by my own pump-engine rhythm, but this is Homeric in its parataxis, its telling of the story with no subordinate clauses, accumulating one detail after another, its rapidity, its formulaic phrases taking up reliable positions in the pattern of the lines, its cherishing of memories and heroizing of the ordinary, its love of the shared experience between speaker and listener, its cavalier way with facts.

  What can you say? Only that this sort of rhythmic, inherited storytelling is part of the human organism, and that the world in which the Iliad and the Odyssey began was an outgrowth and fulfillment of this basic capacity, one in which the telling of your own great tales was not something done by a father at bedtime but in the gathering of people for whom these stories were the foundation of their lives, the thing that might last when everything else might not.

  * * *

  Between 1933 and 1935, prompted by his Parisian professors, Parry made his journeys through the remote mountain villages of Yugoslavia. It was quite a caravan: his assistant, a Harvard student, Albert Lord, several typists and interpreters, and Nikola Vujnović, a singer himself from Herzegovina, who would ease the way with the people they met. They met and listened to over seven hundred singers, each with their gusle, the single-stringed violin that accompanied the words. Almost 13,000 separate songs were written into eight hundred notebooks, and hundreds more recorded on 3,500 twelve-inch aluminum disks. When he returned to Harvard, Parry delivered to the library almost exactly a ton of archive material.

  The excitement was real. Here was the past made flesh and blood, stubble and cigarettes, sawing out its epics in front of them. On market day they would drop in at a coffeehouse and make inquiries. Were there any guslari nearby? Were they good? Could they come? One morning at Bijelo Polje, a small town in the hills of northern Montenegro, they found, lying on a bench in a coffeehouse, a Turk smoking a cigarette with an antique silver cigarette holder. He was Bégan Lyútsa Nikshitch, “a tall, lean and impressive person” who spoke to them like a warrior from the depths of the past.

  Bégan Lyútsa Nikshitch, a Turkish bard from Montenegro, “a tall, lean and impressive person.”

  Bégan knew a certain Avdo Meédović, a peasant farmer who lived an hour away, and he was insistent that the Americans had to hear him.

  Finally Avdo came, and he sang for us … We listened with increasing interest to this short homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goiter. He sat cross-legged on the bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. He sang very fast, sometimes deserting the melody, and while the bow went lightly back and forth over the string, he recited the verses at top speed. A crowd gathered. A card game, played by some of the modern young men of the town, noisily kept on, but was finally broken up.

  The next few days were a revelation. Avdo’s songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines. Other singers came, but none could equal Avdo, our Yugoslav Homer.

  The guslari always sang their long epic songs of battle and disaster with a kind of hard energy, loud, at a high pitch, the singer’s whole frame gripped with the effort. This was no smooth crooning but a passionate engagement of mind and body.

  It takes the full strength of the man to sing in this way. The movement of the body in playing the instrument, the laboring of the lungs needed for the breath needed for the volume of song, the strain on the muscles of the throat and mouth that go to forming the words, make the singing a toil, and a good singer after a half hour of his song is drenched in sweat.

  Nothing about the sound of the gusle is charming, and the way in which the poems are sung has little apparent melody. The string of the instrument screeches from one line to the next, the guslar chants his lines without any attempt at a flourish or grace notes. This is not an exhibitionist performance. It is more serious than that, the voice of concentration, as he composes
with his formulaic phrases and passages, the meter heavily emphasized in every phrase he uses. It is the words that matter, their recounting of tragedy and suffering. But the unbroken presence of the instrument is there not for its tune but for its strangeness, the signal it makes that this is another world.

  Each singer sang usually for between twenty and forty minutes, sawing away at the gusle on his lap, singing up to twenty lines of his song every minute, more slowly at first, speeding up as he reached the crisis of the tale and then stopping for a cup of coffee, a cigarette, a glass of burningly fierce plum raki or simply for a break. They didn’t always get to the end of their song before the session tailed off into the night. Some singers did not even know the endings of their songs, and when they did come to the last part, they were always more various than the beginnings.

  In June 1935 Halil Bajgorić, a thirty-nine-year-old stockman from a remote mountain village in Bosnia, sang them a long song about a young and resourceful hero, called “The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey.” Even as he began, after a thirty-second introduction on the gusle alone, setting the rhythm, establishing the meter in his mind, it was clear that Bajgorić’s tale was driven along by the formulaic pattern, not only at the level of individual phrases but in the shape of scene after scene.

  Bajgorić’s epic is simple, but it shares many things with Homer. First, as in Homer, the adventure begins with the break of day and the waking of the hero.

  Oj! Djerdelez Alija arises early,

  Ej! Alija, the tsar’s hero,

  Near Visoko above Sarajevo,

  Before dawn and the white day

  Even two full hours before dawn,

  When day breaks and the sun rises

  And the morning star shows its face.

  In epic, it is not enough to say “One morning…” It needs expansion, space opening out around the story, the luxury of time expanding around the singer. And it can joke about that need for a little more time.

  When the young man gets himself up,

  He kindles a fire in the hearth

  And on the fire he puts his coffee pot;

  After Alija brews the coffee,

  One, then two cups he pours himself—

  One, then two, he feels no spark,

  Three, then four, the spark then seizes him,

  Seven, then eight, until he has enough.

  Finally, its hero sufficiently stoked with caffeine, the formulaic sequence can begin: the preparation of “a long-maned bay horse” for the journey, the horse made beautiful with all her trappings, “Like a careless young shepherdess up on a mountain/Clothed in her hood and motley jacket,” the fitting of the hero with his beautiful equipment, his swords and daggers, his elegant pistols, one from Venice, one from England, to the point where he can set out on his journey, swim a great river while still mounted on his precious mare—she knows what he wants without him saying so—until at last he arrives at the city where “He quenche[s] his thirst with dark red wine/And he smoke[s] two pipefuls of tobacco.”

  Translate the Homeric situation to the valleys of early-twentieth-century mountain Europe, and the poem translates itself. That is Parry’s point: this poetry was the product not of a unique glowing genius but of a world in which the spoken epic is the vehicle that carries the meanings of the past into the present and in which the need to tell the poem again and again is itself the most powerful force in its shaping. Formulaic verse is a response to social need.

  Parry was entranced by the world he had stumbled on. “The moment he cherished most,” his student Albert Lord wrote later,

  occurred toward the end of one of his earliest days in the Serbian hills, during the summer of 1933. They had settled at an inland village and at length come across a gouslar, the first epic poet Parry had ever known, an old man who claimed to have been a warrior in youth and to have cut off six heads. All afternoon he sang to them about his battles. At sunset he put down his gousle and they made him repeat a number of his verses. Parry, very tired, sat munching an apple and watching the singer’s grizzled head and dirty neck bob up and down over the shoulder of Nikola, the Herzegovinan scribe, in a last ray of sunlight. “I suppose,” he would say, in recalling the incident, with crisp voice and half-closed eyes, “that was the closest I ever got to Homer.”

  It is as powerful a moment in the history of Homeric understanding as the evening when Keats and Cowden Clarke peered into Chapman’s Homer, or when Carl Blegen in the summer of 1939 found the smashed fresco of the singer, destroyed in the fire three thousand years before. Parry, listening to these men and their grating instruments, their sawing voices, heard in them the transmission of epic across the generations, the thousands of years. It was the moment in which the vacuum of life before the written word had suddenly acquired a substance.

  Through Nikola Vujnović, the Herzegovinian singer, Parry asked Halil Bajgorić where he had learned his songs. All came from his father, he said. But how had he actually learned to sing and play when he was a boy? Halil described how he would sneak the gusle away from his father, and in another room, when his father was sleeping, he would sing a little.

  NIKOLA: But why did you feel the need to sneak the gusle away from him?

  HALIL: Because I wanted to know how [to play], I saw there was a place for him among the people because he knew how to sing. He’d come there, when there were gatherings among us, when there were weddings, some celebrations, and I’d go with him. And he’d come there, and there would be a lot of people, and the people all made room and said, “Singer, come on up to the front and sit by the man brewing coffee.”

  NIKOLA: Aha.

  HALIL: Then, by God, I too wanted to learn to play the gusle.

  This is how it must always have been: the father at the center of the listening circle, the boy on the edge of it seeing his father in a different light from the usual man at home with his breakfast, the current of the heroic recognized by the boy, the stirring of ambition to have that scale of existence in his own life, the tentative beginnings in secret, his imagining of the audience, his first attempts in public, the increasing confidence with which the formulas might become his own, that miraculous sensation when he felt he could divert the stream through his own life and mind.

  “The verses and the themes of the traditional song form a web in which the thought of the singer is completely enmeshed,” Parry wrote later, establishing the primacy of the tradition over the individual poet. “The poetry stands beyond the single singer. He possesses it only at the instant of his song which is his to make or mar.” “His to make or mar” is the idea in the mind of the young Halil, practicing with his father’s gusle in the hidden room.

  They asked one singer called Ibrahim Bašić, known as Ibro, a seventy-year-old woodcutter from central Herzegovina, where he got the words for the songs. If he told a tale a second time, did he repeat it word for word? Yes, Ibro said, word for word.

  NIKOLA: What is, let’s say, a word in a song? Give me a word from a song.

  IBRO: Here’s one, let’s say, this is a word:

  Mujo of Kladusha arose early, / At the top of the slender, well-made tower.

  NIKOLA: But these are lines.

  IBRO: Well yes, but that’s how it is with us; it’s otherwise with you, but with us that’s how it’s said … But here’s one, let’s say this is a word: “Mujo of Kladusha arose early”—that is a word for “arose early”; “Before dawn and the sun is arising”—that’s also a word for “arose early.”

  Words are not individual, separated lexical objects but poetic lines, half lines, formulas, metrical units and story units that can slot into the song. This is building a wall not brick by brick but panel by panel. Getting up with the dawn, preparing the chariot, arming the warrior, equipping the ship, rowing for the wind, swift-footed Achilles, much-suffering Odysseus—these are the words in which Homer speaks. To repeat a song “word for word” is to choose any one of these formulas as they come to mind. The tradition is not a fixed object
like the written text of Paradise Lost or the Aeneid; it is a braided stream of possibilities pouring into the present out of the past, essentially multiple, recomposed from its given elements every time it is sung, and in that retelling conceived of as remaining the same. It is a curiously Platonic conception of a story, as if the epic’s essence were in a pure, immaterial, preexistent form, of which the actual words that are sung are an almost incidental bodying forth into our mundane reality.

  “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays/ Upon a ghostly paradigm of things,” Yeats said, and you could say the same of Parry’s Homer: Homer thought his poem but a spume that played upon the ghostly truths that came from long ago.

  Parry was convinced that he had pushed the modern understanding of Homer back beyond the eighth-century BC horizon at which writing arrived in the Greek world. He thought he knew that in the formulaic composition-in-performance of the Yugoslav guslars he had heard the way in which the Iliad and the Odyssey had been composed. Homer was clearly the most extraordinary practitioner—the songs from the Balkan mountains were thin and empty compared to the Iliad and the Odyssey—but this was the practice of which Homer was the master.

  “The more I understand the South Slavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem,” Parry wrote late in his life,

  the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer … I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola’s hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse.