Parry had crossed the boundary into the mental world occupied by Homer. He was thirty-three when he returned in triumph to Harvard with his ton of notebooks and aluminum disks. A life’s work stretched ahead of him, but in December 1935, on a visit to his mother-in-law in Los Angeles, he died in a stupid accident when a revolver mixed in with his clothes in a suitcase went off and killed him. Something resembling the book he was planning to write about Homer and the guslari was written much later by his assistant and student Albert Lord, after a long and fruitful career spent fulfilling the promise of the visionary man who had once led him to the Balkans.
* * *
A rainy early-autumn day in the Hebrides, the cloud down low over the islands, a sheen of wet on the grass. We have been gathering sheep for the September markets. The sea around us is bruised by the wind. Hardly a word has been spoken all morning, as the four of us have been strung out in a line across the hillside half a mile long, two or three hundred yards between each of us, our arms flailing at the gloomy and reluctant sheep. The sky is torn into shreds and patches. The only words have been the violent insults thrown at the dogs.
Now the lambs are down at last in the pen on the beach, ready to be taken off by dory and fishing boat tomorrow morning. The sheepdogs nip at them through the bars. The shepherds, Kennie, Nona and Toby, are all leaning on the hurdles of the pen and discussing the animals in front of us, their fleeces shriveled and lank in the rain. They are not as good as anyone had hoped.
NONA: It was the wet spring that did it.
TOBY: That was what kept them back.
NONA: Aye, and the dry summer.
TOBY: Aye, that would have kept them back too.
NONA: And it’s been cold these last few weeks.
TOBY: That wouldn’t have helped.
NONA: No, they are not as good as they might have been.
TOBY: But there are some big ones in here.
NONA: Monsters some of them.
TOBY: There’s some good lambs in there.
NONA: Look at that horned ewe with her twins.
TOBY: There’s some very heavy lambs here.
KENNIE: It’ll be heavy work getting them into the dory.
TOBY [TO HIS DOG]: Come into heel, will you.
NONA: You are not going to get that quality every time.
TOBY: No, not every time, that’s right.
KENNIE: No, not every time. You can’t hope for it every time.
This was a chat, a break from work, with a roll-up and a cup of tea and caps on the backs of heads, but it is the talk that has been had since the Neolithic. Its buried musicality, the repetition of its phrases, the antiphonal give and take of each repeating gesture—all of that presses up under the surface of the words. Perhaps this is the natural way we have of speaking, just hesitating on the lip of the musical, but it is a quality of language that is usually shut down and denied in a written culture.
* * *
Parry’s new understanding of the Homeric poems undoubtedly pushed them into the preliterate centuries before 800 BC. Homer comes from an oral and aural world, a world of public speech and shared listening. But how far back? And how much of that ancient world could survive in the telling and retelling? Can one really reach back through the words of Homer to that moment in about 1800 BC when the Greek-speaking people, whatever they were called, came south to the Mediterranean world of sailing ships and stone-walled cities?
There is a real difficulty: the reliability of these storytellers. They inherited the past, they were conscious of that inheritance, but how much did they transform what they had been given? Milman Parry and his team asked the Serbian singers if their stories had any truth in them, a question, it soon became clear, that did not entirely make sense to them.
Ibrahim Bašić, the guslar known as Ibro, answered casually enough: everything in his songs was true, except for details he added to make them more fitting. His stories might have required heroic furniture—swords, horses—to sound right, but that didn’t make them any less “true.” It might even have made a story “truer,” more like the heroic past Ibro had in mind. These songs were epics, extensions of memory over deep reaches of time. They weren’t history. They celebrated a heroic ethos, and their purpose was not to preserve events. They existed in the “now,” standing as a bridge between the present moment and the distant past.
There is one extraordinary discovery from Crete, made by the American-Greek scholar James Notopoulos, a follower of Parry and Lord, that relegated the question of historical truth in ancient epics to a category that was at least moot. Notopoulos was a professor in Hartford, Connecticut. His father had been a poor Greek immigrant from the Peloponnese who became rich by building and operating theaters in small-town Pennsylvania. At Oxford, James had become entranced by Homer and Parry’s discoveries. An intense romantic, he was remembered by his students gazing dreamily at the ceiling through clouds of pipe smoke during Greek classes in Hartford. But he was also a precisionist, capable of “making the wince into an art-form” when a pupil failed to pronounce the Greek properly or get the meter right.
In 1953, with a Guggenheim scholarship, Notopoulos traveled to the far west of Crete, one of the most heroic landscapes in Europe. In the wild and stony mountain province of Sfakia, gorges are sawed thousands of feet down into the barren, dry White Mountains. I have seen fences around sheepfolds there held up with the rusted barrels of old machine guns, and have sat eating my lunch in a café while at the table next to me a man first cleaned his automatic pistol and then fired it out of the door to see that it worked.
Notopoulos arrived only eight years after the end of a war in which the Cretans had maintained bitter and heroic resistance against the German occupiers. He found Sfakia in a “ferment” of song. Everywhere the American ethnographer went, men were singing about the 1941 airborne invasion, the cruelty of the Germans, their burning of villages, their shooting of the innocent, the heroism of the Sfakiots themselves, the sons no less heroic than their fathers and grandfathers, and the bitter reprisals carried out by them against their own traitors and fifth columnists. The long island tradition of daring manliness, the kidnapping of brides, the maintenance of unforgivingly violent blood feuds and of loathing for the outsider—Roman, Arab, Venetian and Turk—was pouring out in this new generation of song. It is a suggestive connection: are the years after a war the great moment for epic? With the dreadful realities of the crisis over, can the miasma of epic descend?
The mountain bards in their black tasseled kerchiefs, knee-high boots and baggy trousers sang as Parry had led Notopoulos to expect, formulaically and repetitively, composing in performance, versions of songs sung in the morning different from how they were sung at night. Notopoulos recorded them all. One of his bards was a young man, Andreas Kafkalas, only thirty-nine, particularly gifted in what Notopoulos called “spontaneous improvisation,” the ability to sing a story for the first time without rehearsal.
After one of his epics about the German invasion and occupation, Notopoulos said he was surprised Kafkalas had not mentioned anything to do with General Kreipe, the commander of the German garrison on Crete. No, Kafkalas said, but in response to the American’s prompting, he thought he could sing a poem about him now. Notopoulos turned on the recording equipment, and Kafkalas began. His tale was about as long as one of the shorter books of the Odyssey. His formulas filled whole passages of the song, all in the traditional fifteen-syllable Cretan line. How did he know, Notopoulos asked him later, to put fifteen syllables in a line? “I didn’t know the line had fifteen syllables,” he said. “I don’t count the syllables, I feel them—it’s the melody that shapes the lines.” The tradition was singing through him.
The kidnapping of General Kreipe was the most famous act of bravura special operations in the whole story of occupied Crete. Two British officers, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss, had captured him, their whole enterprise conceived in Cairo but dependent on the networks of andartes, the Cretan resistance
fighters. One evening in late April 1944, on the road between the general’s HQ at Archanes and his quarters outside Knossos in central Crete, the two Englishmen and a band of andartes stopped the German car, a new Opel, hit the driver, dragged him onto the road (he was later killed) and bundled the general into the back of the Opel with a knife at his throat. The two British officers sat in the front, Moss impersonating the German driver, Leigh Fermor Kreipe himself, with the general’s hat on his head.
After a terrifyingly anxious drive through Herakleion, passing slowly through twenty-two German checkpoints, inching along streets filled with the men of the garrison who had just come out of the cinema, they drove out into the wild lands at the foot of Mount Ida, abandoned the car and headed off on foot into that harsh, dry and fissured mountain. For the next twenty days, as the Germans attempted to encircle them, looking for them with spotter planes but never detecting them, the general was led west halfway across mountain Crete, the party hiding in sheepfolds and caves in the daytime, stumbling on difficult mountain paths, often in the rain, at night, until they finally came down to a small bay west of Rodakino on the south coast. There they boarded a British motor launch that had been summoned by radio and, high on excitement and triumph, with their general safely aboard, made off for Alexandria.
I walked the whole of their route, from where they dumped the car to the little bay where they embarked near Rodakino. It took me two weeks. I slept in chapels and vineyards, I burned in the sun in the daytime, froze at night at six thousand feet on top of a snowy Ida and was often lost in the dry, echoing gorges coming down to the valleys. Griffon vultures swung across the sky. I ate cherries in the villages and for days at a time brushed through the dry, scented smoke of the Cretan garrigue. My boots after two weeks’ walking were shredded by the limestone shards of the mountains, my body crawling with lice from the places I slept, but my mind was filled with the mountain distances of that epic and beautiful island. A shepherd taught me a phrase—Yiassou pantermi Kriti!: (Bless you, desolate Crete!)—as the only words to be said when facing the long, dry emptiness of the mountains, stretching as a desert into the haze. It is a brutal world, and later in 1944 the Germans executed brutal, slaughtering attacks on the people of mountain Crete. In every one of the villages through which the Kreipe group passed, in between the cherry trees and the figs, the little tavernas and the shady plane trees, there is a tall marble memorial on which the names of their dead are listed.
The Leigh Fermor party never got as far west as Sfakia, but Kafkalas told his tale with only a little hesitation. He had heard it from another Cretan when in the hospital in Athens. And now, he told Notopoulos, he was singing the song to him “to fulfil the obligations of Cretan hospitality.” But the song Kafkalas sang was an intriguing oddity. Almost nothing survived in it from the original story; truth had disappeared under a slew of the heroic. A single (untrue) English general (untrue) arrives in Crete and summons a hero from Sfakia, Lefteris Tambakis, to see him. (Untrue: Tambakis was a real figure, but he had never been anywhere near this operation.) The English general draws himself up to his full height, weeps over the cruelties being done by the Germans to the people of “desolate Crete” and reads out the order to the Sfakiot hero that Kreipe is to be captured dead or alive. (All untrue—no such order existed.)
For the honor of Cretan arms, Tambakis knows what to do. In disguise he goes to Herakleion and finds a beautiful girl there. (He didn’t.) She is the secretary to the German general. (He didn’t have one.) He tells her that if she helps him, her name will be immortal in Cretan memory. She will join the catalog of heroes. She agrees and “sacrifices her woman’s honor” with the German general. Kreipe—called Kaiseri in this song—whispering across the pillow, tells her his plans. (Of course he didn’t.) She passes them on to Tambakis, and Tambakis goes to meet the English general at Knossos. (There was no meeting there.) The ambush is laid. The andartes get “a long car” with which to block the road (they didn’t), but Tambakis himself waits there on a beautiful horse. (No horses were involved, but they always are in old Cretan songs.) The English general is by now pretty marginal to the story. The Cretans stop Kaiseri’s car, strip him naked (they didn’t), he begs for mercy for the sake of his children (he didn’t, but this is a motif that usually appears at these moments in Cretan poetry), and they start on the long trek over Mount Ida. Dogs (not used) and airplanes, called “birds of war,” hunt for the kidnappers, but to no avail. They arrive in Sfakia (they didn’t), where the people try to kill Kaiseri (they didn’t) before a submarine (it was a launch) sweeps him off to Egypt. Hitler is in despair. (He probably was in June 1944, if for other reasons.) “Never before in the history of the world has such a deed been done.”
Nine years had passed between these events and this telling of them. Nothing in the Kreipiad is true beyond the kidnapping of a general and his leaving for Egypt. Whole characters and a different Sfakiot geography, plus the luscious fantasies of a Mata Hari seductress-spy, are laid over the top of any historical truth. If this is what could happen to a modern story in nine years, how could anyone hope that anything true might survive in the Iliad or the Odyssey?
* * *
At almost exactly the moment James Notopoulos was hearing the Kreipiad sung to him in Crete, and the idea was collapsing of an inheritance transmitted through song from the deepest past, precisely the opposite conclusion was being reached at the other end of Europe. In September 1953 a group of forty Celtologists gathered at a conference in Stornoway on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, flown in from all over Europe by the British Council. The key session in Stornoway was boringly advertised as “Paper on Folktales with Live Illustration.” No one guessed that they were about to hear something that would turn the Parryite orthodoxy on its head.
Also asked to the meeting, as its star turn, was a seventy-year-old stonemason from a village on South Uist, two ferries and a long drive away down the Hebridean chain. Duncan Macdonald was a small man with an air of untroubled self-possession. He was not Duncan Macdonald but Donnchadh mac Dhòmhnaill ’ic Dhonnchaidh ’ic Iain ’ic Dhòmhnaill ’ic Tharmaid (Duncan the son of Donald the son of Duncan the son of Iain the son of Donald the son of Norman). They were descendants of the MacRury family of hereditary bards who had sung for the chiefs of the Macdonalds at the now ruined and abandoned castle at Duntulm, on the shores of the Minch, within touching distance of the northern tip of Skye. His father and brother were storytellers, his mother a famous singer, her brother a much-loved piper and poet. He was one of the most gifted storytellers in twentieth-century Europe, heir to the great traditions of Celtic storytelling which stretched far back into the Gaelic past.
Anything about the singers Milman Parry had found in the Balkans could be matched by this inheritance, and Duncan did not disappoint. It was not the first time he had been the focus of attention for the folklorists, and on this afternoon in Stornoway he told a tale—it was “The Man of the Habit,” lasting about an hour—which he had told to transcribers four times before, in 1936, 1944, 1947 and 1950. This afternoon the delegates were given a booklet containing a transcription and an English translation of the way he had told it in 1950.
He began, as one of his hearers said, in Gaelic that was “polished, shapely and elegant … Everything he recited was given both weight and due consideration.” But, as slowly emerged, this mild-mannered stonemason’s confidence in the tradition was matched by the extraordinary precision with which he told his tale. Scarcely a word was different from the printed version they held in their hands—a few tiny mistakes, substituting subhachas (“gladness”) for dubhachas (“sadness”), one or two interjections that were different and some synonyms changed, but on the whole the seven-thousand-odd words of the story were exactly as he had told them three years earlier. On analysis, all five of his versions were as good as identical. He had learned it like this from his father and had told it like this ever since first learning it. The family had held it in mind as a kind of remembered he
irloom, a hero tale, composed at least two hundred years earlier—there is an account of it from 1817—which remained alive not just as a plot but in precisely the same words, transmitted unaltered from generation to generation.
In a world overtaken with the Parry hypothesis of composition-in-performance, this was revelatory. Duncan Macdonald had provided another way of seeing Homer, not as the poet who had written the Iliad and the Odyssey as his own works of art; nor as the poet who adapted and transmuted what he had learned to the situation he found himself in; but a poet who worked with a curatorial exactness, resisting the changes imposed by the passing of time, preserving antiquity in detail. For this kind of poet, stories were reliquaries in which precious wisdom and cherished understandings could be kept despite all the mutability of world and time. A poem enshrined memory. Its music denied death.
In Homeric Greek this understanding of the role of poetry focuses on a particular phrase: kleos aphthiton, in which a-phthitos means “without fading,” “undying,” “eternal,” “everlasting”; and kleos, in the most revealing of all Homeric significance-clusters, means “story,” “fame,” “honor” and “glory.” In the Homeric mind, those four things are one. The tale told is itself a form of honor; honor exists in the telling of a tale; fame is to be found in the heroes of tales; their glory in life is the substance of honor; the tale of honor is the denial of death. Only if the tale resists the erosions of time can it make any claim to be the vehicle for glory. Undying fame is both the substance and the purpose of the Homeric poems.
In the years since then, ethnographers have discovered all over the world traditions of oral poetry that do not rely on the Parry method of composition-in-performance, that are not entirely formulaic, but that trust in the power of human memory to preserve with real precision the names, stories and words of the past. Duncan Macdonald’s son wrote down 150,000 words of stories he had heard from his father before he died. The great eighteenth-century illiterate poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre knew at least six thousand lines of his own poetry. According to the Scottish Homer scholar Douglas Young, there was an octogenarian crofter from the Hebridean island of Benbecula, a man called Angus McMillan, who
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