way past and under me, combed and slicked with the sea-froth running down them, every swell the memory of storms in the Atlantic far to the west, steepening to the east and then ruining themselves ashore. The Auk sailed north with the shearwaters and the morning became unforgettable. It was when this book began.
I thank God I met Homer again that summer. He was suddenly alongside me, a companion and an ally, the most truly reliable voice I had ever known. It was like discovering poetry itself, or the dead speaking. As I read and reread the Odyssey in translation, I suddenly felt that here was the unaffected truth, here was someone speaking about fate and the human condition in ways that other people only seem to approach obliquely; and that directness, that sense of nothing between me and the source, is what gripped me. I felt like asking, ‘Why has no one told me about this before?’
The more I looked at the poems in different translations, and the more I tried to piece bits of them together in the Greek with a dictionary, the more I felt Homer was a guidebook to life. Here was a form of consciousness that understood fallibility and self-indulgence and vanity, and despite that knowledge didn’t surrender hope of nobility and integrity and doing the right thing. Before I read Pope’s Preface to the Iliad, or Matthew Arnold’s famous lectures on translating Homer, I knew that this was the human spirit on fire, rapidity itself, running, going and endlessly able to throw off little sidelights like the sparks thrown off by the wheels of an engine hammering through the night. Speed, scale, violence, threat; but every spark with humanity in it.
PARIS, 11 MAY 1863, Le Repas Magny, a small restaurant up a cobbled street on the Left Bank in the Sixième. Brilliant, literary, sceptical Paris had gathered, as usual, for its fortnightly dinner. The stars were there: the critic and historian Charles Sainte-Beuve; the multi-talented and widely admired playwright and novelist Théophile Gautier; the unconscionably fat Breton philosopher, the most brilliant cultural analyst of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan; the idealistic and rather intense Comte de Saint-Victor, a minor poet and upholder of traditional values; and observing them all the supremely waspish Jules de Goncourt, with his brother Edmond.
Magny’s restaurant stood at the head of the rue Contrescarpe-Dauphine on the Left Bank in Paris.
The Magny dinners, every other Monday, were ten francs a head, the food ‘mediocre’ apparently, everyone shouting their heads off, smoking for France, coming and going as they felt like it, the only place in Paris, it was said, where there was freedom to speak and think. Jules de Goncourt transcribed it all.
‘Beauty is always simple,’ the Comte de Saint-Victor said as the waiters brought in the wine. He had a way, when saying something he thought important, of putting his face in the air like an ostrich laying an egg. ‘There is nothing more beautiful than the feelings of Homer’s characters. They are still fresh and youthful. Their beauty is their simplicity.’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Edmond groaned, looking over at his brother. ‘Must we? Homer, again?’
Saint-Victor paused a moment, went white and then very deep red like some kind of mechanical toy. ‘Are you feeling well?’ Goncourt said to him across the table. ‘It looks as if Homer might be playing havoc with your circulation.’
‘How can you say that? Homer, how can I put it … Homer … Homer is … so bottomless!’ Everyone laughed.
‘Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,’ Gautier said calmly. ‘They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.’
‘Any modern novel,’ Edmond said, ‘is more moving than Homer.’
‘What?’ Saint-Victor screamed at him across the table, banging his little fist against his head so that his curls shook.
‘Yes, Adolphe, that lovely sentimental love story by Benjamin Constant, the sweet way they all behave to each other, his charming little obsession with her, the way she doesn’t admit she wants to go bed with him, the lust boiling away between her thighs, all of that is more moving than Homer, actually more interesting than anything in Homer.’
‘Dear God alive,’ Saint-Victor shrieked. ‘It’s enough to make a man want to throw himself out of the window.’ His eyes were standing out of his head like a pair of toffee-apples.
‘That would be original,’ Edmond said. ‘I can see it now: “Poet skewers himself on street-lamp because someone said something horrid about Homer.” Do go on. It would be more diverting than anything that has happened for weeks.’
Chairs were shoved back from the table, somebody knocked over a bottle of wine, the waiter was standing ghoul-faced at the door, Saint-Victor was stamping and roaring like a baby bull in his own toy bullring, as red in the face as if somebody had said his father was a butcher and his mother a tart. Everyone was bellowing.
‘I wouldn’t care if all the Greeks were dead!’
‘If only they were!’
‘But Homer is divine.’
‘He has got nothing to teach us!’
‘He’s just a novelist who never learned how to write a novel.’
‘He says the same thing over and over again.’
‘But isn’t it deeply moving,’ Saint-Victor said imploringly, ‘when Odysseus’s dog wags the last sad final wag of his tail?’
‘You can always tell a bully,’ Edmond said quietly to his brother. ‘He loves dogs more than their owners.’
‘Homer, Homer,’ Sainte-Beuve was murmuring through the uproar.
‘Isn’t it strange,’ Jules said to Renan afterwards. ‘You can argue about the Pope, say that God doesn’t exist, question anything, attack heaven, the Church, the Holy Sacrament, anything except Homer.’
‘Yes,’ Renan said. ‘Literary religions are where you find the real fanatics.’
Homer loomed up again at another Magny dinner the following October. They were talking about God, whether God was definable or even knowable. Renan ended up by comparing God, his particular God, in all possible piety and seriousness, to an oyster. Uniquely itself, beautifully self-sufficient, not entirely to be understood, mysteriously attractive, mysteriously unattractive, wholly wonderful: what was not Godlike about the oyster? Rolling laughter swept up and down the table.
That was when Homer emerged. To the Goncourts’ horror, these modern, sceptical destroyers of faith, the most fearless critics of God that France had ever
