Hearing Homer's Song

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature.

In this literary detective story, Robert Kanigel gives us a long overdue portrait of an Oakland druggist's son who became known as the "Darwin of Homeric studies." So thoroughly did Milman Parry change our thinking about the origins of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey that scholars today refer to a "before" Parry and an "after." Kanigel describes the "before," when centuries of readers, all the way up until Parry's trailblazing work in the 1930's, assumed that the Homeric epics were "written" texts, the way we think of most literature; and the "after" that we now live in, where we take it for granted that they are the result of a long and winding oral tradition. Parry made it his life's work to develop and prove this revolutionary theory, and Kanigel brilliantly tells his remarkable story--cut short by Parry's mysterious death by gunshot wound at the age of thirty-three.

From UC Berkeley to the Sorbonne to Harvard to Yugoslavia--where he traveled to prove his idea definitively by studying its traditional singers of heroic poetry--we follow Parry on his idiosyncratic journey, observing just how his early notions blossomed into a full-fledged theory. Kanigel gives us an intimate portrait of Parry's marriage to Marian Thanhouser and their struggles as young parents in Paris, and explores the mystery surrounding Parry's tragic death at the Palms Hotel in Los Angeles. Tracing Parry's legacy to the modern day, Kanigel explores how what began as a way to understand the Homeric epics became the new field of "oral theory," which today illuminates everything from Beowulf to jazz improvisation, from the Old Testament to hip-hop.“[Kanigel's] biography (the first) of Milman Parry, set in California, Paris, Yugoslavia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, would translate well to the big screen (or Netflix). Although an ideal beach read for the classics scholar, the book is aimed at the layperson; Kanigel eschews jargon and in-depth technical discussion while still attempting to convey the magnitude of Parry’s theory.” —A. E. Stallings, The American Scholar

“In his elegant biography . . . Kanigel tells this complicated story to the general reader with inspired calm . . . Parry’s life story has enough quotidian quirks, and such a crashing, inexplicable finale, that he looms above his own work like a ghost . . . [His] is the story of an idea, the Western Idea writ (or sung) large, and Kanigel traces how a devoted, obscure scholar who died in a hotel room at 33 managed to transform our understanding of written and oral traditions.” —Tim Riley, Los Angeles Review of Books

“One man’s inspired effort to recover Homeric song, not through books and research but lived experience . . . Kanigel, a biographer of intellectual pioneers, has captured [its] excitement.” —James Romm, The New York Review of Books

“Mr. Kanigel has made a career of writing books about eccentric geniuses, such as the urbanist Jane Jacobs and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan . . . [He] proves the ideal synthesizer of Parry’s ‘brief life and big idea' . . .  This compelling book gives us the argument and the enigma of [an] unfinished life.” —David Mason, Wall Street Journal

“Milman Parry’s thesis was simple but momentous . . . When he published his landmark papers, Parry was just thirty years old, [but] as Robert Kanigel shows in the new biography, Parry, as an undergraduate at Berkeley, had been seized by Homer, in much the same way that the deities in the Iliad seize their favorite humans . . . It is Parry’s consuming idea that is the real subject of Hearing Homer’s Song.” –Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker

“In the story of the tangled-up gun [that killed Parry in a Los Angeles hotel room] . . . Kanigel gives us Parry’s brief career in miniature:  It doesn’t make sense, and yet it happened, and it changed the humanities forever.” —Jo Livingstone, The New Republic
 
“Biographer Robert Kanigel offers the first full-scale account of Milman Parry’s short life, mysterious demise and long-lived influence . . . [He shows] that Parry’s work has had wide-ranging ramifications, ushering in an emphasis on orality that has become increasingly central to modern literary culture—from professional storytellers and TED talks to podcasts and audiobooks." —Robert Cioffi, The New York Times Book Review

“Perhaps only a complete outsider to the field like Robert Kanigel, free of the passionate intensity that has long characterized Homeric studies, could have understood Parry’s discovery so well and explained it with such clarity for the benefit of both scholars and the wider public . . . Kanigel has uncovered and deftly deployed remarkably rich sources about his subject.” —Richard Janko, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

“Challenges our disciplinary approach to the history of Classics . . . A fascinating read, written in an engaging and accessible style.” —Blaž Zabel, The Classical Review

“Gripping . . . Kanigel offers a sterling portrait of American poetry scholar Milman Parry (1902–1935) and his ‘big idea’ that the Iliad and Odyssey were the products of generations of pre-literate ‘singers’ . . . On the personal front, Kanigel delivers a fascinating account of Parry’s marriage and the mysterious circumstances around his death by gunshot . . . Expertly weaving the personal and the academic, Kanigel movingly notes that Parry’s fixation on his theory and his inexorable work ethic drove a wedge between him and his wife. Meticulously researched and full of fascinating detail, this is a remarkable account.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Readers join the young Parry as he ventures into Balkan mountains traversed by barely passable roads, sustained by the unquenchable conviction that the songs of unlettered Balkan lyricists called guslar that he is collecting with rudimentary equipment will validate his revolutionary theory about how the ancient Greek bard forged The Iliad and The Odyssey . . . With penetrating insight and humanizing empathy, Kanigel recounts the labors of Parry’s traveling companion, Albert Lord, as he preserves, extends, and promulgates the epoch-making discovery of his now-departed mentor. Readers see how, through Lord, Parry’s breakthrough ultimately reorients not only classical studies, but also other fields studying works shaped by oral creativity . . . Scholars will appreciate the technical aspects of Parry and Lord’s accomplishment as 'literary archaeologists,' but readers of all sorts will value the personal drama.” —Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)

“An engaging, thoroughly researched biography of a fascinating figure . . . [with] an underlying quiver of suspense . . . Kanigel has given readers a thoughtful look at a man whose theories have helped us to better understand the ancient world.” —Library Journal

“A vivid chronicle of intellectual passion . . . Drawing on considerable archival sources, Kanigel recounts in thorough, engaging detail the life of Milman Parry (1902-1935), a Harvard classics professor whose investigation of Homer’s works proved groundbreaking . . . As in previous books, Kanigel’s skill as a biographer is on full display.” —Kirkus ReviewsROBERT KANIGEL is the author of eight previous books, most recently Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. He has received many awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship and an NEH "Public Scholar" grant. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; it has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and was the basis for the film of the same name starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel. Kanigel, Professor Emeritus of Science Writing at MIT, lives in Baltimore with his wife, the poet S.B. Merrow.1

Young Albert and Mr. Parry

When she asked where they were going and why, Milman Parry’s 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 couldn’t write it down; as soon as literacy becomes common in a country, everyone gets lazy; they don’t 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 Kolašin, Bihać 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, they’d periodically return to Dubrovnik, in a Croatian corner of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, where Parry’s 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 discs—phonograph records, the size of old vinyl LPs but in white metal—filled with a young nation’s, and an old world’s, 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 Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Finally, in a town nineteen hundred feet up into the mountains of northern Montenegro, an old man named Avdo Međedović, 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. Parry’s 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 Parry’s 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 he’d inflicted on her over the years. Mrs. Parry and her daughter, twisted by a lifetime’s 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, Parry’s 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 husband’s 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 and Cambridge had interrupted.

Meanwhile, Parry’s 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, he’d dictated a few pages of notes and ideas; Lord typed them up. And he had a title for the book he hoped to write, Singer of Tales. Now it was all in the hands of Lord, who, at age twenty-three, was scarcely equipped to tackle the job.

Approaching graduation from Harvard in June 1934, Lord “had not the slightest idea of what to do with himself,” reports David Bynum, a student and admiring younger colleague of Lord’s from a later period. Yugoslavia had come at an opportune time—immediately after graduation, in the middle of the Depression, a time of few other job prospects. Lord served Parry as typist, gofer, and “recording engineer,” freeing Parry for more substantive and intellectually challenging work. He had “no opportunity whatever, as well as no personal inclination, to inquire or know anything meaningful concerning what Parry was about or why in Yugoslavia.” The shiny white aluminum discs were, in their thousands, logistical monster and intellectual mystery.

What transformed this untenable situation was this: However much or little his time in Yugoslavia might make him responsible in the eyes of the world for making something of Parry’s work, Lord seemed to feel it did. And he felt it all the more with the passage of time, as a deep, pressing, personal need, one impossible to shirk. He had worked beside Parry for fifteen months; he would help advance and enrich Parry’s ideas for more than fifty years. “In spite of moments when it seemed otherwise,” Lord would write, “my life has been devoted to Parry’s collection and to the work which he had only begun to do.”

*

Milman Parry was arguably the most important American classical scholar of the twentieth century, by one reckoning “the Darwin of Homeric Studies.” At age twenty-six, this young man from California stepped into the world of Continental philologists and overturned some of their most deeply cherished notions of ancient literature. Homer, Parry showed, was no “writer” at all. The Iliad and the Odyssey were not “written,” but had been composed orally, drawing on traditional ways that went back centuries.

Generations of high school and college students can recall descriptive flourishes of Odysseus, as “much-enduring,” or “the man of many schemes”; or of the goddess Athena as “bright-eyed”; or of “swift-footed Achilles.” Parry showed that these “ornamental epithets” were not odd little explosions of creativity. Nor, in their repetition, were they failures of the imagination. Nor were they random. They were the oral poet’s way to fill out lines of verse and thus keep the great river of words flowing. They were the product of long tradition, and many voices. Parry wrote of the fifth-century BCE Greek sculptor Phidias that his work was not his alone but shot through with “the spirit of a whole race”; much the same, he said, applied to the Homeric epics.

Homer, of course, was no trifling asterisk of classical studies but stood at the very roots of Western civilization, his epic poems filled with stories of the warrior Achilles and the goddess Athena and the other gods and heroes enshrined on every ancient Greek potsherd, represented in paintings, sculpture, and literature for three thousand years, inspiring Shelley and Keats, Shakespeare and James Joyce. After Parry, just how Homer had come into the world and become embedded in the memory of humankind came to be seen in a new way.

As Walter Ong summed up the case in his groundbreaking 1982 book, Orality and Literacy,

The Iliad and the Odyssey have been commonly regarded from antiquity to the present as the most exemplary, the truest and the most inspired secular poems in the western heritage. To account for their received excellence, each age has been inclined to interpret them as doing better what it conceived its [own] poets to be doing or aiming at.

That is, they tended to be seen like the poems of one’s own age, whatever it was, only better.

But no, said Parry, Homer was different, and not just from the literature of our own time, or from Victorian literature, or from that of the Middle Ages, but even from almost all other ancient Greek literature. A rough, ill-formed thought might place the Odyssey and, say, Aeschylus’s three-part tragedy, the Oresteia, under the same broad heading—ancient “classics,” revered literary products of Greece, stalwarts of the Western literary tradition. But Parry showed they were different animals altogether, because Aeschylus wrote, as you and I write, while the Odyssey was something else entirely, percolating up from oral performance over the centuries, shaped by its own, maddeningly “unliterary” rules: The literary critic sees repetition, stereotype, and cliché as unwelcome or worse. But for on-the-fly oral composition they were virtually essential, characteristic of it, understood and expected by audience and performer alike. For Parry they were the clue to how the epic poems had been made.

In time, Parry’s ideas came to constitute their own orthodoxy, with scholars questioning them as they would anything else, placing them under relentless scrutiny. And yet in all the years since—it is now nearly a century since Parry first asserted them—they have become one of the cornerstones on which Homeric studies stand. And extended into new realms, they have altered understanding of other early cultures as well—not just in the West but in Asia, Africa, and around the world; and not just in past centuries but our own. Parry’s ideas have forced us to rethink the role of books and print generally. The Yugoslav singers, like those of ancient Greece, could not read or write. Milman Parry helped us to imagine, understand, and respect another species of human creativity.

“The effects of oral states of consciousness,” Walter Ong has written, “are bizarre to the literate mind.”

*

I come to Milman Parry from outside the world of classical studies. While for a dozen years in the early 2000s I held a faculty position at a university, MIT, most of my working life has been spent outside academia altogether, as an independent writer. In the early years, I wrote articles, essays, and reviews for magazines and newspapers. Then, beginning in the 1980s, books—about mentor relationships among elite scientists, about tourism in Nice, about an Indian mathematical genius. A servant to my enthusiasms, I never much restricted myself by subject. In 2007, the object of my fascination became a tiny island community off the far west coast of Ireland, known as the Great Blasket, inhabited by a few hundred Irish-speaking fishermen, visited by scholars, writers, and linguists from all over Europe.

One of these scholars was an Englishman, George Thomson, who first arrived on the island in 1923 and took a lively interest in it for the rest of his life. Professionally, he was a classicist, a student of Greek lyric poetry, of Aeschylus, of Homer. For most of his life he was professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham. Through his books, correspondence, and personal story I found him a warming and inspiring figure. Such were his sensibilities, and such were mine, that I could not confine my interest to his place in the Irish story; I became intrigued by whatever intrigued him. Soon I was reading his translation of the Oresteia, from which I came away thrilled by the astonishing transformation wrought by Athena in the third play, where vengeance metamorphoses into something like justice. From Aeschylus, then, it was on to the Odyssey and the Iliad through the lustrous and lucid Robert Fagles translations; these were my first forays into Homer since junior high school. Ultimately, I was caught up in Thomson’s ideas about the Homeric Question, the fertile, endlessly fascinating, centuries-old debate about who Homer was, when and where he’d lived, and what it meant, if anything, to attribute to him the authorship of the ancient epics. And the Homeric Question, in turn, led me to Milman Parry.

As one over-neat formulation of his achievement put it, Parry “never solved the Homeric Question; he demonstrated that it was irrelevant.” Jettisoning contradictions in Homer that to his mind weren’t contradictions at all, he opened the world of classical scholarship to new notions of literary creation. And he did so in a peculiarly single-minded way that made for its own, charmingly geekish story: In the decade after first asserting his ideas, Parry enriched his original insights with such deep analysis of the hexametric line in which the epics were written, such abundance of detail, such obsessive regard for closing off alternative explanations, that, in a scholarly world riven by fractious debate, few could doubt their truth, leaving others to pick at the periphery of his big idea. Classicists today refer to “before Parry” and “after Parry.” They speak not of Parry’s “theory,” or “argument,” but of his “discovery.” This isn’t quite true, but it is true enough, many of his demonstrations and proofs seemingly airtight.

Over the years much attention has been paid to Parry’s ideas; less to the progression of his thought set against the times and places in which he lived, or the sensibilities and personal history of Parry himself. This book is a story of intellectual discovery rooted in a field, classical studies, often relegated in the popular imagination to the outlands of the irrelevant and the obscure. But success in any field, however recondite, is always a story of humans at work, in all their hope and glory, and in the face of all their foibles and excesses. Homer and ancient Greece stand near the center of this book; but nearer still is Mr. Parry himself. Our story plays out in the times and places in which he lived—across just a dozen years in the 1920s and 1930s, in California, in Paris, at Harvard, and on the Balkan peninsula, where Parry went to test his ideas on a living tradition.