Coming Home

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn.  Vintage.  306 pp.   $16.00 ****

I’m a sucker for father-son stories, and this one is unique; several years ago, Daniel Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father asked if he could attend the freshman seminar on The Odyssey that Mendelsohn was teaching at Bard College.  The elder Mendelsohn had lived as a research science, but had abandoned an early interest in the classics and classic languages, and wanted to take them up at the end of his life.  He promised he would keep quiet—a promise he crashingly did not keep—and that he would try not to be much trouble for his son.

Not only did Daniel allow it, but the two men then, on an impulse, went on a cruise that traced the route of Odysseus.  They sat there having drinks and listening to Sinatra records while a luxury cruise liner re-enacted that famous journey.  To make the story even more dramatic, Jay Mendelsohn was to die almost exactly a year after the course began, after a fluke fall in a parking lot led to an eventual stroke.  This pairing over The Odyssey was their swan song, and took place during a single year.

I had heard about this book, and been intrigued by it, but hadn’t decided to read it until I read an extended review Mendelson wrote of the final volume of My Struggle (a project I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to tackle).  That piece seemed so intelligent, and so beautifully written, that I went out and bought this book immediately, without knowing anything else about Mendelsohn.  I’m glad I did.

The first thing to say is that I wish I’d had Mendelsohn as a teacher of The Odyssey, a book which I studied in school several times.  Not only does he understand the epic tradition, he has a deep understanding of this classic work.  As I’ve gotten older and read them again, I’ve been astonished at the greatness of the true epics, like The Iliad (which I read in a translation by my brother) and Don Quixote (which I’ve read three times, in three different translations, and would happily start again tomorrow.  I think that if I read it again I’ll try the Smollett translation).  These great books are different every time we read them.  It’s good to encounter them when we’re young, but we’re really not ready for them.

The Odyssey, in Mendelsohn’s reading, is the father-son story par excellence; it begins with Telemachus going in search of his father, discovering multiple stories of his exploits (Odysseus had left when his son was an infant), and ends when Laertes, Odysseus, and Telemachus together—three generations of the same family—confront the suitors who have been pestering Penelope for twenty years and violating the laws of hospitality.  In that moment, at the end of the journey, we see the three ages of man.  But the whole poem is about the longing of the son to know his father, the sorrow of the older father that his own powers are diminishing and that his son doesn’t seem to be coming back.  The Iliad is the great poem about war, but The Odyssey is about our quest, once we have done the work of our life, to come back home, to know what home is and return to it successfully.  In a way it’s a domestic book, though it contains plenty of adventure.

Mendelsohn writes about the successive sections of the poem, and the way his twenty-first century students react to it.  Their comments are often naïve but sometimes uncannily accurate, and Mendelsohn as a teacher never puts them down, but leads them, skillfully, to see things in a larger way.  In the meantime his father, who went through World War Two (though he didn’t see much action) is persistently skeptical: how is Odysseus such a hero?  He lost all his men.  Why is he crying all the time?  Jay Mendelsohn had gone through the war and never seen his compatriots cry.  Furthermore, every time Odysseus does something successful, it’s because Athena has helped him.  How can you call the man a hero when it’s a goddess who does the job for him?  Daniel Mendelsohn is getting it from both sides, the naïve students who know nothing of life and the elderly skeptic who thinks he knows it all.

It’s like Telemachus on one side and Laertes on the other.  Somehow Mendelsohn remains patient.

And somehow, through the telling of all this, he manages to be faithful to The Odyssey and also to the story of him and his father, which is the real subject of his book.  Early on he talks about what he calls ring composition, where Homer brings up one situation only to circle back and tell us all that led to it, leaving us in suspense about what actually happens.  It’s a little like Tristam Shandy, except that the narrative finally gets to the point and gives satisfaction.  Mendelsohn himself is a master of that technique, and time after time brings up a tantalizing detail—like the fact that he is gay, that he came out to his parents when he was young and was completely accepted by them, that his father said at the time “Let me talk to him; I know something about this”—but then circles away and addresses something else entirely.  But by the end of the book all the loose ends have been tied, and we not only have a new vision of an epic poem, we’ve heard a wonderful story of a modern-day father and son.

It made me want to read other books, not only the new translation of The Odyssey  (my brother is laboring away, but hasn’t finished), but also Norman’s Fischer’s book about how the poem portrays the spiritual odyssey we all face.  I love a book that opens me up to other reading.  This one does that superbly.