On the short and momentous life of Milman Parry
“Sappho and Alcaeus,” by Lawrence Alma-Tadema,1881. Courtesy of the Walters Museum of Art.
One afternoon in 1935, Milman Parry, a 33-year-old scholar whose research would revolutionize the study of Ancient Greek poetry, was unpacking his suitcase at the Palms hotel in Los Angeles. According to his wife, Marian, Parry was naked from the waist up and rummaging through his clothes when he accidentally jostled a handgun tangled up in a shirt, which sent a bullet into his heart. Underneath a news photograph of Marian taken later that year, a caption read: “Mrs. Milman Parry, who was widowed in Los Angeles, recently, when her husband, in a tragic example of professorial absent-mindedness, accidentally shot himself to death.”
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
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Now and then when I am absorbed in lists of forthcoming books, whether in the delicious catalogues of university presses (now likely to be digital only, alas) or in the pages of
Publishers Weekly or in some other source of bookish intelligence, a strange thought pops into my head: Books will continue to appear after I am dead. (Perhaps in heaven I will receive a special dispensation. . . .)
In any case, at the moment, I am still here in this fallen but nonetheless beguiling world, still (mostly) in possession of my “faculties.” There are so many books to instruct and divert us, miming Creation itself in their gratuitous abundance.