a prison of obscurity to me, happily abandoned once the exam was done. Homer stayed irrelevant.
Now I had Fagles’s words in front of me. Half idly, I had brought his translation of the Odyssey with me on the Auk, as something I thought I might look at on my own sailing journey in the North Atlantic. But as I read, a man in the middle of his life, I suddenly saw that this was not a poem about then and there, but now and here. The poem describes the inner geography of those who hear it. Every aspect of it is grand metaphor. Odysseus is not sailing on the Mediterranean but through the fears and desires of a man’s life. The gods are not distant creators but elements within us: their careless pitilessness, their flaky and transient interests, their indifference, their casual selfishness, their deceit, their earth-shaking footfalls.
I read Fagles that evening, and on again as we sailed up the west coast of Ireland. I began to see Homer as a guide to life, even as a kind of scripture. The sea in the Odyssey was out to kill you – at one point Hermes, the presiding genius of Odysseus’s life, says, ‘Who would want to cross the unspeakable vastness of the sea? There are not even any cities there’ – but hidden within it were all kinds of delicious islands, filled with undreamt-of delights, lovely girls and beautiful fruits, beautiful landscapes where you didn’t have to work, dream lands, each in their different way seducing and threatening the man who chanced on them. But every one was bad for him. Calypso, a goddess, unbelievably beautiful, makes him sleep with her night after night, for seven years; Circe feeds him delicious dinners for a whole year, until finally one of his men asks him what he thinks he is doing. If he goes on like this, none of them will ever see their homes again. And is that what he wants?
In part I saw the Odyssey as the story of a man who was sailing through his own death: the sea is deathly, the islands are deathly, he visits Hades at the very centre of the poem and he is thought dead by the people who love him at home, a pile of white bones rotting on some distant shore. He longs for life and yet he cannot find it. When he hears stories told of his own past, he cannot bear it, wraps his head in his ‘sea-blue’ cloak and weeps for everything he has lost.
It was Odysseus I really fell in love with that summer as we sailed north to the Hebrides, Orkney and the Faroes: the many-wayed, flickering, crafty man, ‘the man of twists and turns’ as Fagles calls him, translating the Greek word polytropos, the man driven off course, the man who suffered many pains, the man who was heartsick on the open sea. His life itself was a twisting, and maybe, I thought, that was his destiny: he could never emerge into the plain calm of a resolution. The islands in his journey were his own failings. Home, Ithaca, was the longed-for moment when his own failings would at last be overcome. Odysseus’s muddle was his beauty.
He is no victim. He suffers but he does not buckle. His virtue is his elasticity, his rubber vigour. If he is pushed, he bends, but he bends back, and that half-giving strength was to me a beautiful model for a man. He was all navigation, subtlety, invention, dodging the rocks, story-telling, cheating and survival. He can be resolute, fierce and destructive when need be, and clever, funny and loving when need be. There is no need to choose between these qualities; Odysseus makes them all available.
Like Shakespeare and the Bible, we all know his stories in advance, but there was one in particular which struck me that summer sailing on the Auk. We had left the Arans late the evening before, and George had taken her all night up the dark of the Galway coast. We changed at dawn, and in that early morning, with a cup of tea in my hand at the wheel, and the sun rising over the Irish mainland, I took her on north, heading for the Inishkeas and the corner of County Mayo, before turning there and making for Scotland.
The wind was a big easterly, coming in gusts over the Mayo hills, the sun white and heatless. George, and my son Ben who had joined us, were asleep below. There were shearwaters cruising the swells beside us, black, liquid, effortless birds, like the sea turned aerial, and a fulmar now and then hung in the slot between the headsail and the main, flying with us on the current of air. The Auk surged on the wind that morning, heeling out into the Atlantic, churning her way north, horse-like in her strength. I don’t know when I have felt so happy.
Steering across the swells, holding the wheel against them as they came through, releasing it as they fell away, I propped the great Robert Fagles translation of the Odyssey against the compass binnacle, tying it open with a bungee cord in the wind, and absorbed his words. That morning I read the story of the Sirens. Just as we do, Odysseus knew he would be exposed to the songs which the strange, birdlike creatures sang to mariners and with which they lured passing ships on to the shore, wrecking them there and then leaving the men to linger until they died.fn1 The only way Odysseus could get past the Sirens was to cut up a round cake of beeswax, knead it in his hands, softening the wax in the heat of the sun, and then press plugs of it into the ears of the sailors. Once they were deafened, he had himself lashed to the mainmast, so that any desire he might have to steer towards the delicious honeyed voices could have no effect on his men. Only if he were powerless could he listen to them singing from their meadow, as Robert Fagles translated it, ‘starred with flowers’.
That meadow of death is the most desirable place any man could imagine. It is yet another island into which a man might long to sink and die. A dead calm falls on the sea. The men brail up the sail and then sit to their oars. The Sirens, just within shouting distance of the ship, taunt Odysseus as he passes. They can give him wisdom if he will come to them and listen. If he will let them, they will make him understand. They press on him the comfort and beauty of what they have to offer. They sing to him and Odysseus longs for them, his heart throbbing for them, as Fagles says, and with his eyebrows gestures to the crew to set him free. But the crew won’t respond. Deaf to all persuasion, they bind him tighter and row the ship through and past.
Odysseus, bound to the mast of his ship, its mainsail brailed up, resists the seduction of the Sirens’ song. From a stamnos, or storage jar, made in Athens in about 480 BC but exported to the Etruscan city of Vulci, on the Mediterranean shore sixty miles north of Rome, where it was excavated in the nineteenth century. It is now in the British Museum, which bought it in 1848 from its collector, one of Napoleon’s daughters-in-law.
Never is Homer more rapid. Like Odysseus’s ‘sea-swift’ ship, the whole scene sweeps past in forty lines. Rarely can something so brief have spread its ripples so wide. But the point is this: the song the Sirens sing is not any old crooning seduction tune. It is the story of the Iliad itself.
We know all the pains that the Greeks and Trojans once endured
On the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so –
All that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all.
The Sirens sing the song of the heroic past. That is the meadow of death. They want to draw Odysseus in with tempting stories of what he once was. And Odysseus, after his years of suffering and journeying, of frustration in the beautiful arms of Calypso, whose name means ‘the hidden one’, the goddess of oblivion, longs to return to the active world, the world of simplicity and straightforwardness he had known at Troy. The Sirens are wise to that: they know the longing in his heart. The prospect of clear-cut heroism summons him and he struggles to escape his bindings. But his men, like the poem itself, know better, and they tie him tighter to his ship. They won’t be wrecked on the illusions of nostalgia, on the longing for that heroised, antique world, because, as the Odyssey knows, to live well in the world, nostalgia must be resisted: you must stay with your ship, stay tied to the present, remain mobile, keep adjusting the rig, work with the swells, watch for a wind-shift, watch as the boom swings over, engage, in other words, with the muddle and duplicity and difficulty of life. Don’t be tempted into the lovely simplicities that the heroic past seems to offer. That is what Homer, and the Sirens and Robert Fagles all said to me that
