Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry. By Robert Kanigel. Knopf, 2021.
When my wife heard that I was reading a book about the legendary classics scholar Milman Parry, she was heard to exclaim, “Milman? Who names their child Milman?”
Actually, you could react in the same way to the subject of Hearing Homer’s Song: “Oral poetry? Who writes a book about oral poetry?”
For classics nerds like me, that is not our reaction.
Oral poetry is a big deal to us, and this is therefore a landmark book. It was Milman Parry who discovered that, contrary to popular and scholarly belief, the greatest Greek poems of all time, the Iliad and the Odyssey, did not start out as rough drafts scribbled on coffee-stained papyrus.
No, according to Parry and those scholars who followed him, the greatest Greek poems of all time started out in the head or heads of one or more illiterate bards, who composed them from traditional poetic materials and then performed them live in more than one version.
The writing down of the poems came later—how much later is unknown to us, though there are theories—and in the writing down of the poems, one sole version of it became the only version, and the other versions were all lost.
So that means, perhaps, who knows, that the poems we revere so much still today are not the product of one genius mind (a guy named Homer, or another blind poet of the same name), but somehow came about through a weird process of group authorship.
In other words, as another great book on how humans think puts it, “Creativity is an inherently social act.”
For me as a person writing a book about how Greek Mythology took on ideas and stories and deities from other cultures and used them to make itself incredibly strong, long-lasting, and, dare I say genius, this is a big deal.
Even Homer himself is diverse.
But Milman Parry’s big idea, as the title of the book suggests, is only one part of this hugely enjoyable read. His life is brief but full of incredible twists and turns, starting with his childhood as the son of a pharmacist in Oakland, California, continuing on with his turbulent marriage to Marian Thanhouser, who looms almost as large as Milman does in the narrative, then on to his feverish academic career, his doctorate taken in dreamy Paris, his later trips to Yugoslavia to study its native oral poetry, and ending with his death at the age of 33 of a gunshot wound that Marian may or may not have inflicted upon him.
I am reminded of the immortal lyrics of the Blondie song, “Die Young. Stay Pretty.”
The dual focus of the book means that even if you are not that interested in the details of the dactylic hexameter, formulaic epithets, or the inner workings of Harvard University’s classics department in the 1920’s and 30’s, you will still find many things that keep you reading. The chapters on the oral poets of Yugoslavia alone are worth your time.
It’s good stuff.
There is one frustration about Hearing Homer’s Song that I share with the author: despite the cornucopia of detail that he has taken great pains to pack into the book, one never really comes to know either Milman or Marian on a personal level. In this day and age of relentless personal disclosure, it’s odd for a biographer to have to apologize for those times when he wants to tell his reader what’s going on in the couple’s lives, but can’t pry open the clamshell of either one’s brains.
For example, Milman’s notebooks from his first trip to Greece in 1925 could have been a fountain of detail about his youthful psychology. Trips to Greece often bring out the spiritual side of classics nerds. But according to Kanigel,
…it’s mostly a topographic and geographical portrait…Bits of this are charming. But mostly, it’s tedious, certainly in this unedited form, for it goes on and on—up one hill or rocky slope and down the next, a low mound of olives and wheat, a steep hill of red shale—but missing a human face, certainly Milman’s.
As for Marian, we are treated to large excerpts from a 1981 interview she gave to would-be Parry biographer Pamela Newhouse, in which Mrs. Parry talks endlessly about her life with Milman but somehow manages not to disclose much. At one point Newhouse throws up her hands “in evident frustration” trying to get something substantive out of Marian about her life in Milman’s shadow. Theirs was never that happy of a relationship, but in the interview Marian is at pains to make sure Newhouse understands Marian doesn’t hold it against him.
Marian coming clean about hating Milman (if she did) would’ve helped to bring closure to the cause of Milman’s death. The author lays out what details there are, but they are too few to figure out what really happened. Suicide is plausibly ruled out, and an accident (the official cause of death) seems unlikely. That Marian may have shot Milman in a fit of rage could make sense, but we can’t piece the puzzle together with the evidence available.
It’s not like a “Forensic Files” TV show, fortunately or unfortunately.
It’s tempting to fall back on Myers-Briggs typology to explain what was going on: Milman was a classic INTJ, a know-it-all intellectual driven by one goal: to bring his unified field theory to the world and make sure everyone knew what the real right answer was. Happiness in marriage would be secondary to him, especially if his wife was not interested in intellectual things. Marian, for her part, comes out perhaps as an ISFP, the one who sees much but shares little, who would internalize her grief and rage about having to follow around a man who neglected her. They were definitely mismatched and in today’s world almost definitely wouldn’t have married.
Whatever the case, Robert Kanigel has done an amazing job with a recalcitrant subject and a big idea that deserves a wide audience. Kudos.