Robert Kanigel - Hearing Homers Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry

When she asked where they were going and why, Milman Parrys daughter, Marian, would recall,

my father explained that Jugoslavia was an uncivilized country at the edge of the world, on the border of the Slavic wilderness which stretched from the Adriatic to Alaska. Since hardly anyone could read or write Jugoslavians still had retained their oral poetry and their ancient native national civilization. There were still heroes, and heroic acts and the ancient heroes were celebrated in ballads by guslars, or bards, who knew by heart so much poetry that if it were written down it would fill libraries. But the whole thing depended, my father explained, on the fact that they couldnt write it down; as soon as literacy becomes common in a country, everyone gets lazy; they dont bother to learn things by heart anymore and poetry is no longer a part of their daily life.

ln 1934 and 1935, Parry spent fifteen months in Yugoslavia, driving his black Ford sedan from town to town with his young assistant, Albert Lord. They stopped at village coffeehouses, spread word they were looking for local singers, recorded the songs they sang while strumming their rude, raspy one-stringed gusles. For a few days, or a week or two, Parry would stay, then head off for the next town, for Gacko or Kolain, Biha or Novi Pazar. In that hardscrabble, mostly mountainous backcountry, of roads rutted and electricity scarce, of dialects, religions, ancient wars, and tribal resentments all butting up against one another, they struggled with equipment and supplies and bedbug-infested village inns. They powered their recording instrument with a battery charged by the engine of the Ford, shipped over from the States. Along with their native translator, Nikola, theyd periodically return to Dubrovnik, in a Croatian corner of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where Parrys wife, daughter, and son awaited them. Then, the Parry house, halfway up the hill above the city, with its fine views of the harbor and the sea, became headquarters of almost military stamp, as transcribers set to work, typewriters clattering, taking down the words of the old songs.

In the end, Parry would gather half a ton of twelve-inch aluminum discsphonograph records, the size of old vinyl LPs but in white metalfilled with a young nations, and an old worlds, cultural tradition. But Parry was interested in them not primarily for what they said of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and elsewhere in the Balkans, but for what they might reveal, by analogy, of the older world of ancient Greece that had produced Homers Iliad and Odyssey. Finally, in a town nineteen hundred feet up into the mountains of northern Montenegro, an old man named Avdo Meedovi, singer of tales of weddings and war that took days and days to tell, led Parry to conclude that in him they had found their own living Homer.

In September 1935, the Parrys and young Albert Lord returned to America.

On November 16, Parry, back at Harvard, where he was assistant professor of Greek and Lord was a recent graduate, wrote his sister that his wife was just then in Los Angeles. He gave her mailing address, which was that of his financially distraught mother-in-law.

On November 17, Parry was to give a talk on Yugoslav folk songs at Harvard.

On the eighteenth, he met with a student and reported on his progress.

A day or two later, he left for the West Coast.

On December 3, in a Los Angeles hotel room with his wife, a bullet fired from a handgun, said to have become entangled in his luggage as Parry rummaged through it, struck him in the chest and nicked his heart. He died later that day. He was thirty-three.

When hotel employees responded to Mrs. Parrys call, they assumed she had killed her husband; she was the only other person in their suite. The police, however, concluded otherwise, that it was an accident. No autopsy was performed. No charges were brought. Some would suspect that Parry had committed suicide. Later, among Parrys own children, that their mother had killed him was regarded as a real possibility: Maybe in one of her fits of fierce, irrational rage. Or maybe as cool-headed revenge for real or imagined infidelities, or other hurts hed inflicted on her over the years. Mrs. Parry and her daughter, twisted by a lifetimes mutual antagonism, were both named Marian. Marian the younger was all but certain her mother had killed her father and held to this view all her life.

On December 5, 1935, Parrys body was cremated in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, back at Harvard, a memorial service was held in Appleton Chapel. In the eulogy it was said that Parry had returned from Yugoslavia with copious material which no future investigators in his field can afford to neglect. His work will endure long after him.

In early 1936, Mrs. Parry donated most of her husbands books, recordings, and papers to Harvard and, with remarkable efficiency, decamped from Cambridge with her children, moved across the continent to Berkeley, California, returned to school at the university, and in little more than a year had earned the BA degree that pregnancy, marriage to Milman, and life with him in France, Cambridge, and Yugoslavia had interrupted.

Meanwhile, Parrys young assistant, Albert Lord, was left with the Yugoslav materials. After working with the man he would call his master and friend for fifteen months, he was now almost alone responsible for making something of them. Parry himself had had no chance to do so. Back in Yugoslavia, the winter before coming home, hed dictated a few pages of notes and ideas; Lord typed them up. And he had a title for the book he hoped to write,