HEARING HOMER'S SONG

The story of a classics scholar who decisively changed views of Homer’s artistry.

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. Because Parry was hard to know—colleagues recall the “impermeable steadfastness” of a man who shared little with anyone—Kanigel portrays him largely through the work that consumed him. Analyzing Homer’s epic poems for patterns of words and phrases, Parry argued that they were “born in song and speech,” not written but handed down orally. Rather than taking up the question of authorship—whether the Iliad and Odyssey were created by one person or several—Parry believed that they were part of a tradition that “placed scant premiums on invention or originality.” Often performed by illiterate singers, they were “forever altered in performance,” responding to listeners’ expectations about style and language. Kanigel chronicles Parry’s youth in Oakland, California; education at Berkeley, where he was influenced by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, among others; and completion of doctoral studies at the Sorbonne, where his thesis, published in 1928, “built a new intellectual edifice” and, through the efforts of his student Albert Lord, created the new discipline of oral studies. Beginning in 1933, Parry undertook extensive visits to Yugoslavia to find and record modern-day epic singers, returning with more than 1,000 recorded discs. While still an undergraduate, Parry married a fellow student after she became pregnant, but she was hardly a soul mate, and Kanigel uncovers evidence of her volatile personality and rage about her husband’s alleged infidelities. The quality of their marriage looms over the circumstances of Parry’s death: While he and his wife were in a Los Angeles hotel, he died of a gunshot wound. Ruled an accident, some family members—their daughter, for one—suspected that his wife killed him. As in previous books, Kanigel’s skill as a biographer is on full display, though general readers may get lost in some of the technical analysis.

A vivid chronicle of intellectual passion.