An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

It used to amuse my father that for a long time I divided my time among so many different places: this house on the rural campus; the mellow old home in New Jersey where my boys and their mother lived and where I would spend long weekends; my apartment in New York City, which, as time passed and my life expanded, first to include a family and then to teach, had become little more than a pit stop between train trips.

There is a term that comes up when you study ancient Greek literature, occurring equally in both imaginative and historical works, used to describe the remote origins of some disaster: arkhê kakôn, “the beginning of the bad things.” Most often the “bad things” in question are wars.

My parenting partner, Lily, and our two boys and I were flying in from New Jersey, my younger brother Matt and his wife and daughter were coming from DC, my youngest brother, Eric, from New York City, our sister, Jennifer, and her husband and small sons from Baltimore. But before any of us got there, my father fell. Like some unlucky character in a myth, he had unwittingly fulfilled his own

All classical epics begin with what scholars call a proem: the introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about—what will be the scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes. These proems, while formal in tone, perhaps a bit stiffer than the stories that follow, are never very long.

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.

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;

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 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.

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.”

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.

such as the custom, common among Eastern European Jews of my grandparents’ era, of tying a red ribbon around the wrist of an infant in order to keep the Evil Eye away.

Indeed, my father reacted with surprising gentleness when, as a college junior, I finally came out to my parents. (Let me talk to him, I know something about this, he told my mother, although it would be many years—not until we were on the Odyssey cruise, in fact—before he explained himself.)

Daddy had been the smartest kid in junior high school, a math whiz, but for some reason he hadn’t gone on to the most competitive high school, a place called Bronx Science, which is where math and science whizzes went. But I couldn’t remember the rest of the story, and didn’t know why he hadn’t gone to the best school.

In Brueghel’s hands, Ovid’s tale of a son’s willful rejection of his father’s wisdom becomes a story about the need for a kind of humility—for, you might say, perspective; an admonition about what we miss when we are intent on our own narratives, about the dangers of mistaking the foreground for the whole picture. The character who stands front and center

A cartoonist might do this kid as a dark splotch atop a single vertical stroke. He looked, in fact, just like the Don Quixote in a Picasso drawing my parents had in the house somewhere, one of the reproductions from the Metropolitan Museum that my mother liked to have framed.

In unison, the students’ heads swiveled in his direction. Instead of sitting with the rest of the students at the seminar table, he’d taken a seat in a corner of the room off to my left and a little behind me, at my eight o’clock, in a blocky wooden chair beneath a window that looked out onto a depressing expanse of gravelly plowed snow. He would sit in this same chair every Friday for the next fifteen weeks.

He sat at the desk holding his hand up in the air. A curious effect of his being in the room with these very young people was that now, for the first time, he suddenly looked very old to me, smaller than I remembered him being,

Whatever else it may mean, the fact that both of these hostile camps could make use of the same examples to prove diametrically opposed interpretations suggests a truth about how all of us read and interpret literary texts—one that is, possibly, rooted in the mysteries of human nature itself. Where some people see chaos and incoherence, others will find sense and symmetry and wholeness.

Like father, like son. Not always, I thought. Not all genealogies, I said to myself that January night after the first class session, are genetic.

The drug is called nepenthê, which means “no grief,” the penthê in nepenthê deriving from the noun penthos, “grief.” It is, indeed, a word formed much the same way that anodyne, “without pain,” the word that points to the origins of Odysseus’ name, is formed.

whatever reason, they both spoke before I did that day. David, who had grown up near Boston and rather endearingly affected a tough-guy Humphrey Bogart air, said, He learns that his father was clever at disguises and was willing to hurt himself if it meant success. The terrified kid said, He learns that his father saved all the Greeks on the night of the wooden horse, that he was a hero. Jenny looked at each of us in turn, as she would sometimes do when waiting for a translation or a comment, and then, using the nickname that, until then, had only been used by my father, said, Dan? I don’t

was able to answer Jenny’s question correctly that day because I had grown up in the house of my mother and my father, listening to their terse back-and-forthing every night during dinner and afterward, the clipped allusions to certain events and people (Oh your father, your father, he wasn’t such a hero, believe me); and, during one particular period when I was in my teens, had learned how to read the fraught silences, too, as my father stalked off after dinner to sit at the tiny desk in his room with his head in his hands and my mother cleaned up the floor on her hands and knees, muttering to herself, and we all slunk off to our rooms to do our homework. During

Sprechstimme. Talking as if singing

the Phaeacians finally deposit him on the Ithacan shore, along with the hoard of treasure they’ve given him, locked in the chest sealed with Circe’s special knot.

his father—will return home to Ithaca laden with valuables. After Telemachus leaves Sparta, he and Peisistratus return to Pylos;

dinner at Flatiron. I’m looking forward to tomorrow, I’d said. Book 16 is one of my favorite books. What did you think? The reunion scene? At that moment, he spit the piece of steak he’d been chewing onto the side of the plate. Oh, come on, Daddy, I sputtered. Jesus. Really. What? he barked, halfway between defensive and irritated. It was all gristle! He glared at me. My

father’s heedless table manners were a perennial embarrassment to my mother and us. But what could we do? As he slurped his soup or coffee, making the zhupping noise my mother had stopped bothering to complain about years ago, we would groan, Daaaaad!!! But he wouldn’t reply. Instead, he would tuck his head deeper into his collar, turtlelike, making you feel slightly girlish for noticing things like table manners. When I was at college in the South, I was particularly embarrassed by my father’s manners, which would be hard to conceal on those

these I was drawn to one in particular: the heavy-browed father of a roommate from Houston, a successful architect who, every time he and his wife would come to Virginia to visit their son, loved to take eight or ten of us undergraduates to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town, quizzing us about the courses we were taking with an exaggerated self-deprecation, as if to say that our studies were way above his capacity to understand, regaling us with amusing Faulknerian stories of his childhood in Mississippi, tales that suggested that he himself was a bit dazzled by the life he had ended up having, although the thing I secretly envied was not the opera or the Petroleum Club or the ocean liners but the easy relationship he had with his handsome son, my friend. This man, to whom I eventually grew very close, would become the most recent in a line of mentors to whom I felt an urgent need to attach myself: men who, it seemed to me, were far more appropriate candidates to father me, with my strange enthusiasms and exotic hobbies, the Fabergé eggs and the hieroglyphics, than my own father had ever been, tinkering endlessly with the transmissions of his failing cars, making the repeated trips to Radio Shack in

It never occurred to me when I was young, first in my teens and then in my twenties and even into my early thirties, that my fierce attachments to these other, more sophisticated father figures, the evident pleasure with which I went off with Fred and Horst and the others, the constant references, when I was in college, to my roommate’s architect father, might have any emotional effect on my own father—perhaps because I was accustomed to the idea that my father wasn’t very emotional about anything. His seeming coldness, I told myself at the time, was indeed one of the many reasons I needed these other, warmer, more demonstrative men; another of those reasons being my father’s lack of finesse, for instance the atrocious table manners of which I had always been ashamed.

“Admirable”? My father looked at his plate. He said, It must have been hard for him to have to sit there watching while his own son acted like that other guy was his real father.

In the

afternoon I would go into his office where he was working on his computer and say to him, “Jay, my dearest darling, who is your greatest love?” and your father would answer, still looking at the computer screen, “Get the fuck out of here!” My mother loved to repeat that anecdote.

Aristotle in his Poetics, for instance, says that certain plots in tragic drama pivot on a moment of anagnorisis, and others pivot on a sudden and total change of fortune, or metabasis; but the best kind of plot, Aristotle says, is the kind in which the moment of recognition is also, simultaneously, the moment of reversal of fortune. For Aristotle, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is the ideal play in part because it effects this double plot: Oedipus’ recognition that his wife is really his mother is also the moment of his downfall. But this twinning of recognition and reversal happens in the Odyssey, too, although there the outcome is a happy one: the moment when Odysseus’ true identity is recognized is also when his fortunes are restored and he wins back his wife, his family, his household, his kingdom.

like-mindedness, homophrosynê,

said, sitting on the corner of the bed and staring stupidly at the pattern on the bedspread, and my father said, in what was the most surprising of his rare softenings, I know something about this, Marlene. Let me talk to him.

I still remember when we were newlyweds, my mother said, there was a book that had just come out, a sex guide for married couples. We all ran out and bought it, Aunt Alice and Aunt Marcia and Aunt Irma and Aunt Mimi and me, and of course we peed in our pants talking about it. You know, in those days everyone wasn’t always talking about those things. And this book said, “You must express yourself clearly to your husband. You must tell him exactly what pleases you.” She giggled. I remember it had all these sample sentences that you were supposed to use on your husband. “Darling, now I want you to put your hand here,” that kind of thing. And—well, can you imagine? Daddy? I didn’t say anything. She opened her mouth enormously wide, like that figure in Munch’s The Scream, while she put on her lipstick. So one night your father and I were in bed and we started and I took your father’s hand and said, Jay, I want you to move your hand here. And your father looked at me and said, Don’t tell me what to do!

Uncertainty! I raised a brow and he smiled. In those days, he said, we were working on something called Monte Carlo methods. It’s a way of simulating a whole sequence of events where there’s uncertainty at every stage. So you simulate it by taking random numbers and using them as you play, say, ten thousand games: the first time the random number tells you to go this way, the second time a random number tells you to go that way. And then, when you do this ten thousand times, the average result gives you an indication of what would happen under real conditions. Because you’re averaging over contingencies.

This was how I learned that my father, with his devotion to precision and logic, his loathing of anything irrational, his addiction to maps, to websites that would allow him, days in advance of his visiting me in Manhattan, to pinpoint the location of the parking garage closest to my apartment so that he wouldn’t have to wander around in circles like an idiot when he drove in, had spent much of his working life thinking about uncertainty.

And the other was, I always had this feeling that he backed out because he was afraid of failure. I think he had very little reason to be afraid of failure, but there was always that chance. And it’s funny, because, you know, we worked on uncertainty, on chance, averaging, random numbers inserted into otherwise identical scenarios played out ten thousand times, on trying to extract some kind of certainty from randomness, and it’s interesting actually that what I think he was always afraid of was—chance! Of not knowing whether he could succeed. He just did not want to take that risk. Most people would say, “Okay, I tried, I failed, that’s the end of it.” But your father couldn’t handle failure, and so he’d rather not try than risk failing.

“student,” a word that derives from the Latin noun studium, “painstaking application.” He’d been applying himself in ways I hadn’t dreamed of, and I hadn’t seen a thing.

The Greek word for “grave” that Elpenor uses when he asks Odysseus to “heap up a grave” for him is sêma. The word can mean “grave” or “tomb,” but that’s only a secondary meaning: the primary meaning is “sign” or “signal,” a meaning that survives in the English word “semiotics,” which refers to the study of signs and symbols, to the philosophical theory of how meaning itself is generated. As far as the Greeks who

All of which is to say that, in the world of the Odyssey, a sêma is a story made visible: the monument, the mound, the oar, the bed, all are signals that, for those who know how to read them, tell tales as clearly as does the tale in which these sêmata are embedded, the tale the poet himself sings.