An Odyssey: A Father, A Son and an Epic: SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE 2017

A proem, therefore, can not only summarize its own action, look into its own future, and forecast, in miniature, what is to come, but can nod gratefully backward in time at the earlier epics, the archetypes, to which it is indebted.

When I was growing up, there was a story my father liked to tell about a long journey he and I once made, a story that hinged on a riddle. How, my father would inevitably ask at some point as he told this story, not quite looking you in the eye while he talked—a habit my mother disliked and about which she would sometimes scold him because, she would say, it makes you look like a liar, a reproof that amused us children because one thing that everyone knew about my father was that he never lied—How, my father would ask when he told this story, can you travel great distances without getting anywhere? Because I was a character in this story, I knew the answer, and because I was only a child when my father started telling this story, I naturally enjoyed spoiling his telling of it by giving the answer away before he reached the end of his tale. But my father was a patient man, and although he could be severe, he rarely scolded me.

The answer to the riddle was this: If you travel in circles. My father, who was trained as a mathematician, knew all about circles, and I suppose that if I had cared to ask him he would have shared with me what he knew about them; but because I have always been made nervous by arithmetic and geometries and quadratics, unforgiving systems that allow for no shadings or embellishments, no evasions or lies, I had an aversion even then to math. Anyway, his esteem for circles was not the reason he liked to tell this story. The reason he liked to tell it was that it showed what kind of boy I had once been; although now that I am grown up and have children of my own, I think that it is a story about him.

A long journey he and I once made. In the interests of precision, a quality my father much admired, I should say that the trip we made together was a homecoming. The story starts with a son who goes to rescue his father, but, as sometimes happens when travel is involved, the journey home ended up eclipsing the drama that had set it in motion.

The son in question was my father. It was the mid-1960s, and so he would have been in his mid-thirties; his father, in his mid-seventies. I must have been four or so; at any rate, I know that I wasn’t yet old enough to go to school, because that’s why I was the one chosen to accompany my father. It was January: Andrew, four years older than I, was in the second grade, and Matt, two years younger, was still in diapers, and my mother stayed home with them. Why don’t I take Daniel, Marlene? I remember my father saying, a remark that made an impression because until then I don’t think I’d ever done anything alone with him. Andrew was the one who went places with Daddy and did things with him, handed him tools as he lay on the concrete floor of the garage under the big black Chevy, stood next to him in front of the workbench in the basement as they pored over model airplane instructions. I thought of myself, then, as wholly my mother’s child. But Andrew was in school, and so I went with Daddy down to Florida when my grandmother called and said, Come quickly.

In those days my father’s parents lived on the ninth floor of a high-rise apartment building in Miami Beach overlooking the water—a building, as it happened, that was located next door to the one in which my mother’s father and his wife lived. I doubt that the two couples spent a lot of time with each other. My mother’s father, Grandpa, was garrulous and funny, a great storyteller and wheedler; vain and domineering, he devoted a good deal of thought each day to the selection of the clothes that he was going to wear and to the state of his gastrointestinal tract. Although he had only one child, my mother, he’d had four wives—and, as my father once hissed at me, a mistress. The average length of these marriages was eleven years.

My father’s father, by contrast—Poppy, the object of our traveling that January when I was four—barely spoke at all. Unlike my mother’s father, Poppy wasn’t given to displays of, or demands for, affection. A small man—at five foot three he was dwarfed by my tall grandmother, Nanny Kay—he always seemed vaguely surprised, on those occasions when we drove to Kennedy Airport to pick up the two of them, when you gave him a welcoming hug. He liked being alone and didn’t approve of loud noises. He’d been a union electrician. You’ll hurt the wiring! he would cry out in his high, slightly hollow voice when we ran around the living room; we would tiptoe for the next fifteen minutes, giggling. He took his modest enjoyments, listening to comedy shows on the radio or fishing in silence off the pier in back of his building, with quiet care—as if he thought that, by being cautious even in his pleasures, he might not draw the attention of the tragic Fury that, we knew, had devastated his youth: the poverty so dire that his father had had to put his seven brothers and sisters in an orphanage, his mother and all those siblings and his first wife, too, all dead by the time he was a young man. These losses were so catastrophic that they’d left him “shell-shocked”—the word I once overheard Nanny Kay whisper as she gossiped with my mother and aunts under a willow tree one summer afternoon when I was fourteen or so and was eavesdropping nearby. He was shell-shocked, Nanny had said as she exhaled the smoke from one of her long cigarettes, explaining to her daughters-in-law why her husband was so quiet, why he didn’t like to talk much to his wife, to his sons, to his grandchildren; a habit of silence that, as I knew well, could be passed from generation to generation, like DNA.

For my father, too, liked peace and quiet, liked to find a spot where he could read or watch the ball game without interruption. And no wonder. I’d heard from my mother about how tiny his family’s apartment in the Bronx had been, and I’d always imagined that his yearning for peace and quiet was a reaction to that cramped existence: sharing a foldout bed in the living room with his older brother Bobby, who’d been crippled by polio (I remember the sound as he leaned his iron leg braces against the radiator before we got into bed, he told me years later, shaking his head), his parents just yards away in the one small bedroom, Poppy listening to Jack Benny on the radio, Nanny smoking and playing solitaire. How had they managed before his oldest brother, Howard, went off and joined the army in 1938? I couldn’t imagine … And yet since he himself had gone on to have five children, I had to believe that my father also, paradoxically, craved activity and noise and life in his own house. Why else, I sometimes asked myself, would he have had so many kids? Once, when I was talking about all this with Lily—the boys were small, Peter maybe five or six, Thomas, never a good sleeper, tossing restlessly in his crib, muttering little cries as he slept, not yet two—I asked this question about my father out loud. Lily looked at me and said, Well, you grew up in a crowded house with lots of siblings, and you wanted to have kids, didn’t you? And it was a lot more complicated for you! I grinned, thinking of how it had all begun and how far we’d come: her shy request, when she’d first started thinking of having a child, whether I might want to be some kind of father figure to the baby; how nervous I’d been at first and yet how mesmerized, too, once Peter was born, how increasingly reluctant I’d grown to return to Manhattan after a few days visiting with them in New Jersey; the gradual easing, over months and then years, into a new schedule, half a week in Manhattan, half in New Jersey; and then Thomas’ arrival somehow cementing it all. Your first kid, it feels like a miracle, almost like a surprise, my father had said when I told him about Thomas. After that, it’s your life. All that had been five years earlier; now, as I wondered aloud why my father had had so many children, Lily cocked her head to one side. I thought she was listening for Thomas, but she was thinking. It’s funny, she said slowly, that you ended up doing just what your father did.

For this reason—because the men in that family didn’t talk much to others, didn’t share their feelings and dramas the way my mother’s relatives did—it seemed strange to me that one day we had to rush down to Florida to be with Poppy, my small, silent grandfather. Only gradually did I perceive the reasons for Nanny’s frantic phone call: he was gravely ill. So we went to the airport and got on a plane and then spent a week or so in Florida in the hospital room, waiting, I supposed, for him to die. The hospital bed was screened by a curtain with a pattern of pink and green fish, and the thought that Poppy had to be hidden filled me with terror. I dared not look beyond it. Instead, I sat on an orange plastic chair and I read, or played with my toys. I have no memory of what my father did during all those days at the hospital. Even when his father was well, I knew, they didn’t talk much; the point, I somehow understood, was that Daddy was there, that he had come. Your father is your father, he told me a decade later when Poppy was really dying, this time in a hospital near our house on Long Island. Many of my father’s pronouncements took this x is x form, always with the implication that to think otherwise, to admit that x could be anything other than x, was to abandon the strict codes that governed his thinking and held the world in place: Excellence is excellence, period; or Smart is smart, there’s no such thing as being a “bad test taker.” Your father is your father. Every day during Poppy’s quiet final decline in the summer of 1975, my father would drive to this hospital on his lunch break, a drive of fifteen minutes or so, and sit eating a sandwich in silence next to the high bed on which his father lay, seeming to grow smaller each day, as desiccated and immobile as a mummy, oblivious, dreaming perhaps of his dead wife and many dead siblings. Your father is your father, Daddy replied when I was fifteen and asked him why, if his father didn’t even know he was there, he kept coming to the hospital. But that would come later. Now, in Miami Beach in 1964, he was sitting in the tiny space behind the curtain with the fish, talking quietly with his mother and waiting. And then the tiny old man who was my father’s father, who had had a heart attack, did not die; and the drama was over.

It was when we flew home that the strange return, the circling, began.

Who wandered widely.

The English language has several nouns for the act of moving through geographical space from one point to another. The provenances of these words, the places they came from, can be interesting; can tell us something about what we have thought, over the centuries and millennia, about just what this act consists of and what it means.

“Voyage,” for instance, derives from the Old French voiage, a word that comes into English (as so many do) from Latin, in this case the word viaticum, “provisions for a journey.” Lurking within viaticum itself is the feminine noun via, “road.” So you might say that “voyage” is saturated in the material: what you bring along when you move through space (“provisions for a journey”), and indeed what you tread upon as you do so: the road.

“Journey,” on the other hand—another word for the same activity—is rooted in the temporal, derived as it is from the Old French jornée, a word that traces its ancestry to the Latin diurnum, “the portion for a day,” which stems ultimately from dies, “day.” It is not hard to imagine how “the portion for the day” became the word for “trip”: long ago, when a journey might take months and even years—say, from Troy, now a crumbling ruin in Turkey, to Ithaca, a rocky island in the Ionian Sea, a place undistinguished by any significant remains—long ago it was safer and more comfortable to speak not of the “voyage,” the viaticum, what you needed to survive your movement through space, but of a single day’s progress. Over time, the part came to stand for the whole, one day’s movement for however long it takes to get where you’re going—which could be a week, a month, a year, even (as we know) ten years. What is touching about the word “journey” is the thought that in those olden days, when the word was newborn, just one day’s worth of movement was a significant enough activity, an arduous enough enterprise, to warrant a name of its own: journey.

This talk of arduousness brings me to a third way of referring to the activity we are considering here: “travel.” Today, when we hear the word, we think of pleasure, something you do in your spare time, the name of a section of the paper that you linger over on a Sunday. What is the connection to arduousness? “Travel,” as it happens, is a first cousin of “travail,” which the chunky Merriam-Webster dictionary that my father bought for me almost forty years ago, when I was on the eve of the first significant journey I myself ever made—from our New York suburb to the University of Virginia, North to South, high school to college—defines as “painful or laborious effort.” Pain can indeed be glimpsed, like a palimpsest, dimly floating behind the letters that spell TRAVAIL, thanks to the word’s odd etymology: it comes to us, via Middle English and after a restful stop in Old French, from the medieval Latin trepalium, “instrument of torture.” So “travel” suggests the emotional dimension of traveling: not its material accessories, or how long it may last, but how it feels. For in the days when these words took their shape and meaning, travel was above all difficult, painful, arduous, something strenuously avoided by most people.

The one word in the English language that combines all of the various resonances that belong severally to “voyage” and “journey” and “travel”—the distance but also the time, the time but also the emotion, the arduousness and the danger—comes not from Latin but from Greek. That word is “odyssey.”

We owe this word to two proper nouns. Most recently, it derives from the classical Greek odysseia: the name of an epic poem about a hero called Odysseus. Now many people know that Odysseus’ story is about voyages: he traveled far by sea, after all, and (ironically) lost not only everything that he started out with but everything he accumulated on the way. (So much for “provisions for a journey.”) People also know that he traveled through time, too: the decade he and the Greeks were besieging Troy, the ten arduous years he spent trying to return home, where sensible people stay put.

So we know about the voyages and the journey, the space and the time. What very few people know, unless they know Greek, is that the magical third element—emotion—is built into the name of this curious hero. A story that is told within the Odyssey describes the day on which the infant Odysseus got his name; the story, to which I shall return, conveniently provides the etymology for that name. Just as you can see the Latin word via lurking in viaticum (and, thus, in voiage and “voyage” as well), people who know Greek can see, just below the surface of the name “Odysseus,” the word odynê. You may think you don’t recognize it, but think again. Think, for instance, of the word “anodyne,” which the dictionary my father gave me defines as “a painkilling drug or medicine; not likely to provoke offense.” “Anodyne” is actually a compound of two Greek words which together mean “without pain”; the an- is the “without,” and so the -odynê has to be “pain.” This is the root of Odysseus’ name, and of his poem’s name, too. The hero of this vast epic of voyaging, journeying, and travel is, literally, “the man of pain.” He is the one who travels; he is the one who suffers.

And how not? For a tale of travel is, necessarily, also a tale of separation, of being sundered from the ones you are leaving behind. Even people who have not read the Odyssey are likely to have heard the legend of a man who spent ten years trying to get home to his wife; and yet, as you learn in the epic’s opening scenes, when Odysseus left home for Troy he also abandoned an infant son and a thriving father. The structure of the poem underscores the importance of these two characters: it begins with the now-grown son setting out in search of his lost parent (four whole books, as its chapters are called, are dedicated to the son’s journeys before we even meet his father); and it ends not with the triumphant reunion of the hero and his wife, but with a tearstained reunion between him and his father, by now an old and broken man.

As much as it is a tale of husbands and wives, then, this story is just as much—perhaps even more—about fathers and sons.

And knew the minds of many men.

From Miami we flew home to New York. It was night. As we settled into our seats, the stewardess mentioned that there was “bad weather” waiting at home. Daddy briefly looked up from the book that he was reading, registered the information, and then went back to the book. Soon after we were in the air, however, the pilot announced that, because of the weather, there would be a lengthy delay before we could land; we would have to “circle.” The plane started to bank gently, and for a long time we went round and round. Up where we were, there was no weather at all: the night was as dense and matte as the piece of velvet a jeweler might use to display his stones—like the jeweler from whom, my mother once whispered to me, her own father had bought her engagement ring, haggling in a narrow back room on Forty-Seventh Street with an old Jewish man, one of Grandpa’s many, many friends, who rolled some uncut brilliants onto the black cloth as he and my grandfather argued in Yiddish, all because my father didn’t have enough money to buy the kind of stone her father thought she should have—the sky was like a piece of black velvet and the stars were like those brilliant winking stones. I knew that we were going in circles because the moon, as round and smoothly luminescent as an opal, kept disappearing and then reappearing in my window. I had a book of my own that night but ignored it when the circling first began, happily looking at the moon instead as it went past once, twice, three, four times, I eventually stopped counting how many times it showed its bland face to me.

My father wasn’t looking at the moon. He was reading.

But then he always seemed to be reading. My father, whose parents never got beyond high school, once told me a story about how he became a great reader. Having been misdiagnosed with rheumatic fever in the seventh grade, he’d had to stay in bed for months, and during that period he became attached to books. There’s nothing you can’t do if you have the right book, he liked to tell his five children, and he, at least, lived by his own rule. He was never happier than when puzzling over his latest haul from the public library, some volume about how to play jazz guitar, how to play drums and recorder, violin and piano, how to write pop lyrics, how to construct a built-in wet bar, how to build an accelerator for the barbecue coals, how to make a compost heap, Colonial furniture, a harpsichord. At the end of Book 5 of the Odyssey, when the love-mad nymph Calypso finally allows Odysseus to leave her island and make his way toward home, she fetches a set of tools that she had hitherto kept locked away and gives them to the shipwrecked man; it is with these few tools, and whatever trees and plants there are to hand, that the hero builds himself the raft on which he begins the final legs of his journey home. Whenever I read this passage, I think of my father.

In part because he seemed always to be coiled over a book, always to be using his own mind and absorbing the contents of others’, when I was a child I thought of my father as being all head. The impression that his head was the greater part of him was enhanced by the fact that he went bald when he was still quite young, certainly by the time I was a small child, and the impression I had was that the massive brain beneath his skull had expanded to the point where it had, somehow, forced the hair from his scalp. Many of my memories of him start with an image not of his face—the sallow oval with its arced brows and narrowly set dark brown eyes, the long broken nose with the rubbery swerve at the end, the thin-lipped mouth that tended to be set in a tight frown—but of his head, which, devoid of hair, seemed almost touchingly exposed, available to injury. A fringe of residual hair made a U around the base of his head, this U being dark throughout my childhood, gray later on, then shaved, and then, bizarrely, a little fuzzy again because of the drugs he had to take. And then there was the forehead, nearly always wrinkled in concentration as he thought his way through a problem, an equation, my mother, one of us.

This was the head that was bent, that night of the long and circling plane ride, over a book.

What was my father reading? It isn’t impossible that it was a Latin grammar, or maybe Virgil’s Aeneid, the Roman epic that nods so elegantly to its Greek archetypes. Although my father spent his working life among scientists and equations and figures—first in his job at Grumman, an aerospace corporation, where whatever he did was unknown and unknowable to us, since the facility he worked in was top secret, and besides, as he later pointed out to me, I wouldn’t understand; and then, after he retired in the 1990s, during a second, decade-long career teaching computer science at a local university—he took pride in the fact that he had once, long ago, been a Latin student. Oh, he would say sometimes, when I was in college and majoring in Classics, Oh, in high school I read Ovid in Latin, you know! And I, instead of being impressed, as he hoped I would be, by this early feat of scholarship, noticed only that he’d pronounced the poet’s name with a long o: Oh-vid. My father’s mispronunciations, which embarrassed me a great deal at one point in my life, were the inevitable result of him having been the bookish child of parents who had no education to speak of; I suspect a good many of the proper names and words he had encountered, by the time I was old enough to disdain his errors, were words he’d never heard uttered aloud. Only now do I see how greatly to his credit it was that he himself would be the first to joke about these gaffes. I was in the army before I realized there was no such thing as “battle fa-ti-gyoo”! he’d say with a tight little grin, and if I happened to be there when he was telling this joke on himself I would wait, with a complicated pleasure, for the person he was telling it to to realize that the word in question was “fatigue.”

So my father liked to boast that he had been good enough in Latin to read Oh-vid in the original, although I came, in time, to know that a great regret of his was that he had stopped studying Latin before he had a chance to read Virgil. The knowledge that my father had never finished Latin, had never read the Aeneid, gave me a faintly cruel satisfaction, since I myself pursued and eventually completed my classical studies and had, therefore, read Virgil in Latin; and Virgil’s Latin, as I would sometimes take pleasure in pointing out to my father, was denser, more complicated, and more difficult than was Ovid’s.

Throughout the years I was growing up, my father would occasionally make a stab at recouping what he had lost all those years ago, back in the late 1940s. I would sometimes come home to Long Island on spring or fall break to find his copies of Latina pro populo (“Latin for People”) and Winnie ille Pu lying next to the black leather recliner downstairs in the den where he would try, and often fail, to find the solitude he craved. Already when I was a child of seven or eight or nine, I was reading books about the Greeks and their mythologies, drawn, no doubt, by the allure of naked bodies and of lascivious acts, by the heroes and the armor and the gods, the ruined temples and lost treasures, and although I never suspected it at the time, I now realize that my father liked the idea that I had an antiquarian bent.

Years later—long after I had failed, in high school, to master the math courses that would have allowed me to go on to study calculus—my father would occasionally remark that it was too bad, because it’s impossible to see the world clearly if you don’t know calculus. He said this not to hurt me but from, I believe, genuine regret. It was too bad, he would say; just as, at other times, he would say that it was too bad that I couldn’t appreciate the “aesthetic dimension” of math, a phrase that made no sense to me whatsoever because I associated mathematics with being forced to perform fruitless exercises that had no purpose, and only much later did I realize that they only seemed to have no purpose because I wasn’t working hard enough, or maybe wasn’t being taught well enough (Why isn’t your teacher explaining these things better? he would exclaim, shaking his shiny head in dismay, although when I asked him to explain the same things he would shake his head again, confounded by my inability to grasp what was so clear to him), and so I went on cluelessly through junior high school and high school, uncomprehendingly copying out diagrams and geometric shapes and quadratic equations, having no idea what they were supposed to be leading to, like someone forced to practice scales on a guitar or piano or harpsichord without guessing that there was something called a concerto. Much later, when I was a freshman in college learning Greek, I sat in a classroom with three other students every weekday morning at nine o’clock, and we would recite, precisely the way you might play scales, the paradigms of nouns and verbs, each noun with its five possible incarnations depending on its function in the sentence, each verb with its scarily metastasizing forms, the tenses and moods that don’t exist in English, the active and passive voices, yes, those I knew about from high-school French, but also the strange “middle” voice, a mode in which the subject is also the object, a strange folding over or doubling, the way a person could be a father but also a son. And yet I happily endured these rigorous exercises because I had a clear idea of where they were leading me. I was going to read Greek, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the elaborately unspooling Histories of Herodotus, the tragedies constructed as beautifully as clocks, as implacably as traps … Years after all this, whenever my father made this comment about how you couldn’t see the world clearly without calculus, I’d invariably reply by saying that you couldn’t really see the world clearly without having read the Aeneid in Latin, either. And then he’d make that little grimace that we all knew, half a smile, half a frown, twisting his face, and we’d laugh a sour little laugh, and retreat to our corners.

So he might have been studying his Latin, perhaps even taking a stab at Virgil, that night when we circled for hours in the airplane bringing us back from Florida, where my dutiful father had hurried to be with his silent parent. Years later, when he said he wanted to take my course on the Odyssey, it occurred to me that you might devote yourself to a text out of a sense of guilt, a sense that you have unfinished business, the way you might have a feeling of obligation to a person. My father was a man who felt his responsibilities deeply, which I suppose is why, when I asked him a certain question years later, he replied, simply, Because a man doesn’t leave.

That night when I was four years old I sat there, quiet next to my quiet father, as the plane leaned heavily on one wing so that it could spin its vast arcing circle, not unlike the way in which, in Homer’s epics, a giant eagle will wheel high in the sky above the heads of an anxious army or a solitary man at a moment of great danger, the eagle being an omen of what is to come, victory or defeat for the army, rescue or death for the man; I sat as the plane went round and my father read. I don’t remember how long we circled, but my father later insisted that it was “for hours.” Now if this were a story told by my mother’s father, I’d be inclined to doubt this. But my father loathed exaggeration, as indeed he disliked excess of all kinds, and so I imagine that we did, in fact, circle for hours. Two? Three? I’ll never know. Eventually I fell asleep. We stopped circling and began our descent and landed and then drove the thirty minutes or so through the cold and were safely home.

When my father told this story, he abbreviated what, to me, was the interesting part—the heart attack, the (as I saw it) poignant rush to my grandfather’s side, the drama—and lingered on what, to me at the time, had been the boring part: the circling. He liked to tell this story because, to his mind, it showed what a good child I had been: how uncomplainingly I had borne the tedium of all that circling, all that distance without progress. He never made a fuss, my father, who disliked fusses, would say, and even then, young as I was, I dimly understood that the gentle but citrusy emphasis on the word “fuss” was directed, somehow, at my mother and her family. He never made a fuss, Daddy would say with an approving nod. He just sat there, reading, not saying a word.

Long voyages, no fuss. Many years have passed since our long and circuitous return home, and during those years I myself have traveled on planes with small children, which is why, when I now think back on my father’s story, two things strike me. The first is that it is really a story about how good my father was. How well he had handled it all, I think now: downplaying the situation, pretending there was nothing unusual, setting an example by sitting quietly himself, and resisting—as I myself would not have done, since in many ways I am, indeed, more my mother’s child, and Grandpa’s grandchild—the impulse to sensationalize or complain.