Why Homer Matters (16 page)

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 heirloom, 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

had in his head more than seventy tales lasting at least one hour each, and some novels lasting seven to nine hours, one of them running to 58,000 words, which is nearly as long as Homer's
Odyssey
 … [He] could talk for eight hours at a stretch, almost without a pause. On the nearby island of Barra, Roderick MacNed is reported to have told tales every winter night for fifteen years without ever repeating himself. On the Scottish mainland, in Lochaber, John Macdonald recorded over six hundred tales, each of them a comparatively short story complete in itself. An Irish taleteller recorded over half a million words of tales he knew.

The idea of human memory in monumental form allows one to push Homer beyond the ninth or tenth centuries
BC
. The epic poem, seen as the deepest of all recording mediums, releases Homer from time constraints, allowing his tales to plunge far back into the centuries before writing. It is a kind of time-release not unlike standing on a peak in Darien, seeing the Pacific widths of the past expanding before you. Parry was only partly right; it now seems clear that his model is one way, but not the only way, that Homer works. Homer unites and combines the formulaically made with the acutely remembered and the sparklingly invented. In the substance of its poetry, Homer is the inherited tradition in its multiple forms: both alive as the poem composed in performance and fixed, as monumental as the stone over a grave mound, the memorial of great things done long ago. Multiple in origin, multiple in manner and multiple in meaning, Homer in this light both knows the deep past and moves beyond it. He is both South Uist and Sfakia. And so the question emerges: what is it that Homer remembers?