Adam Nicolson - The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters

Contents

T HIS IS TO THANK everyone who, over many years, knowingly or not, has helped me along Homers tangled paths.

George Fairhurst; Vassilis Papadimitriou; Gavin Francis; Robert Macfarlane; Ali Serle; Juliet Nicolson; Rebecca Nicolson; Aurea Carpenter; Andrew Palmer; Paul Johnston; Alexandra Chaldecott; Ivan Samarine; Jim Richardson; Oliver Payne; Claire Whalley; Koenraad Kuiper; Liz Broomfield; Mary Keen; Laura Beatty; Martin Thomas; Matthew Reynolds; Matthew Rice; Nicholas Purcell; Philip Marsden; Robert Sackville-West; Richard Klein; Sarah Longley; Sigrid Rausing; Stephen Romer; Thomas Pennybacker; Casey Du; David Sansone; Garry Fabian Miller; Charlie Burrell; Issy Burrell.

Sofka Zinovieff is the best friend, guide and companion anyone could wish for. Tim Dee took me to all sorts of Homeric places in a way that transformed my understanding of Homer. Caroline Alexander came and talked about my Homeric ideas for many vigorous and illuminating hours. David Anthony provided supremely helpful signposts to the world of the steppe.

I would particularly like to thank Kylie Richardson of Trinity Hall, Cambridge and Matt Hosty of Jesus College, Oxford for the care and trouble they took in saving me from the worst of mistakes. Needless to say, they bear no responsibility for those that remain.

At William Collins, Susan Watt, Helen Ellis, Robert Lacey and Joseph Zigmond have provided unstinting support and expertise. Arabella Pike has been the sort of editor any writer longs for: careful, considerate, encouraging, responsive, generous and above all able to summon the better book that always seems to lurk just beneath the surface. Many thanks also to Hilary Bird who compiled the index

George Capel has been my stalwart friend and ally throughout, and there is nothing I could say to thank her enough.

Above all I would like to thank Sarah and the children for putting up with Homer, who is not the easiest of house-guests, for quite so long. This book is dedicated to them.

Sarah Raven

Molly Nicolson

Rosie Nicolson

Benedict Nicolson

William Nicolson

Thomas Nicolson

Wetland: Life in the Somerset Levels

Restoration: The Rebuilding of Windsor Castle

Perch Hill: A New Life

Sea Room: An Island Life

When God Spoke English: The Making of the King James Bible

Atlantic Britain

Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero

Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History

Arcadia: The Dream of Perfection in Renaissance England

The Gentry: Stories of the English

For

Sarah Raven

Thomas Nicolson

William Nicolson

Ben Nicolson

Rosie Nicolson

&

Molly Nicolson

O NE EVENING TEN YEARS ago I started to read Homer in English. With an old friend, George Fairhurst, I had just sailed from Falmouth to Baltimore in south-west Ireland, 250 miles across the Celtic Sea. We had set off three days earlier in our wooden ketch, the Auk, forty-two feet from stem to stern, a vessel which had felt big enough in Falmouth, not so big out in the Atlantic.

It had been a ruinous journey. A mile or so out from the shelter of Falmouth we realised our instruments were broken, but we had been preparing for too long, were hungry to go, and neither of us felt like turning back. A big storm came through that night, Force 8 gusting 9 to 10, west of Scilly, and we sailed by the stars when it was clear, by the compass in the storm, four hours on, four hours off, for that night, the next day and the following night. The seas at times had been huge, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, solid water coming over the foredeck and driving back towards the wheel, so that the side-decks were like mill-sluices, running with the Atlantic.

After forty hours we arrived. Georges face looked as if he had been in a fight, flushed and bruised, his eyes sunk and hollow in it. We dropped anchor in the middle of Baltimore harbour, its still water reflecting the quayside lights, only our small wake disturbing them, and I slept for sixteen hours straight. Now, the following evening, I was lying in my bunk, the Auk tied up alongside the Irish quay, with the Odyssey, translated by the great American poet-scholar Robert Fagles, in my hand.

I had never understood Homer as a boy. At school it was taught to us in Greek, as if the poems were written in maths. The master drew the symbols on the green blackboard and we ferreted out the sense line by line, picking bones from fish. The archaic nature of Homers vocabulary, the pattern of long and short syllables in the verse, the remote and uninteresting nature of the gods, like someone elses lunchtime account of a dream from the night before: what was that to any of us? Where was the life in it? How could this remoteness compare to the urgent realities of our own lives, our own lusts and anxieties?

The difficulty and strangeness of the Greek was little more than a prison of obscurity to me, happily abandoned once the exam was done. Homer stayed irrelevant.

Now I had Fagless words in front of me. Half idly, I had brought his translation of the Odyssey with me on the Auk, as something I thought I might look at on my own sailing journey in the North Atlantic. But as I read, a man in the middle of his life, I suddenly saw that this was not a poem about then and there, but now and here. The poem describes the inner geography of those who hear it. Every aspect of it is grand metaphor. Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a mans life. The gods are not distant creators but elements within us: their careless pitilessness, their flaky and transient interests, their indifference, their casual selfishness, their deceit, their earth-shaking footfalls.

I read Fagles that evening, and on again as we sailed up the west coast of Ireland. I began to see Homer as a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture. The sea in the Odyssey was out to kill you at one point Hermes, the presiding genius of Odysseuss life, says, Who would want to cross the unspeakable vastness of the sea? There are not even any cities there but hidden within it were all kinds of delicious islands, filled with undreamt-of delights, lovely girls and beautiful fruits, beautiful landscapes where you didnt have to work, dream lands, each in their different way seducing and threatening the man who chanced on them. But every one was bad for him. Calypso, a goddess, unbelievably beautiful, makes him sleep with her night after night, for seven years; Circe feeds him delicious dinners for a whole year, until finally one of his men asks him what he thinks he is doing. If he goes on like this, none of them will ever see their homes again. And is that what he wants?

In part I saw the Odyssey as the story of a man who was sailing through his own death: the sea is deathly, the islands are deathly, he visits Hades at the very centre of the poem and he is thought dead by the people who love him at home, a pile of white bones rotting on some distant shore. He longs for life and yet he cannot find it. When he hears stories told of his own past, he cannot bear it, wraps his head in his sea-blue cloak and weeps for everything he has lost.