Alfred A. Knopf (2021) h/b 321pp £20.00 (ISBN 9780525520948)
This elegantly produced book by K. (a prolific biographer, whose previous works include a biography of the remarkable Indian mathematician Ramanujan) is not aimed at specialists in Classics (on p.104 K. explains the dactylic hexameter) nor is K. himself a classicist, though it is likely that it will naturally find its readership among those with an interest in the ‘Homeric Question’. As an account of Parry’s life, it gives us much welcome detail, though K. has not answered the questions still surrounding the circumstances of Parry’s death. This notice naturally concentrates on Parry’s scholarly work, but K. also rounds the picture by setting out the household picture, where circumstances cannot always have been other than fraught.
Born in 1902, the son of an autodidact pharmacist, Parry spent his early years in Oakland, California; he eventually did well enough at school to gain entry to University of California at Berkeley, where he enrolled for a number of courses, including economics, as well as English, medicine, political science and public speaking—and Latin and Greek, doing notably well at the last of these, at which he took no fewer than fifteen courses. Additionally, in 1922-3 he met and married a fellow-student Marian Thonhauser, and soon became a father of a girl, also called Marian; he wrote a paper about Homer, and obtained his Master’s degree. It appears to be about now that he discussed his future with Ivan Linforth, a Greek Professor at UCB. Initially, he wanted to be a writer; yet at a second meeting (date uncertain), all Parry wanted to talk about was Homer, which became the subject of Parry’s MA thesis.
At this point, K. gives an elementary introduction to Homer for the reader. As for Parry, we learn from Sterling Dow’s discussion or discussions with Linforth in 1964, that his ‘eureka’ moment came on a beach in Los Angeles (where Parry had never been). What we do know is the title of Parry’s 1923 thesis: ‘A Comparative Study of Diction as one of the Elements of style in Early Greek Epic Poetry’. Sterling Dow unearthed it in 1964, and declared ‘The great discovery is there—firm, detailed, bold’ (and, indeed, arrogant): as Hugh Lloyd-Jones put it some years later, ‘An astonishing piece of work … imagine it being written by a boy of 20!’.
Parry had his MA, but no job, little money, and few prospects. In 1924 the decision was made to move to Paris, funded by Marian’s access to a family inheritance: there life was cheap (Paris was crowded with indigent American would-be writers), and there Parry would—not immediately—begin work on the thesis which made his name and κλέος ἄφθιτον with it. Marian of course had a very young child, and another—Adam—followed before long.
They started at Clamart (later at Sceaux), in the suburbs of Paris, but with little or no command of the language. Nor did Parry know how to proceed. He was turned down as a student by the Homerist (and public figure) Victor Bérard (as bad a decision as that of André Gide, rejecting, for Gallimard, Proust’s first volume of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu!); work on the thesis did not start till 1926, when, after Parry’s first and only visit to Greece, he met Maurice Croiset and Aime Puech, enabling him to enrol at the Sorbonne. Of course once there he needed guidance, which came not only from the austere Puech, but especially from Antoine Meillet, who helped him on the improvisations within Homeric poems. (At this point, K, gives the readers a brief history of the Homeric Question—Unitarians versus Analysts, or Separatists).
Parry’s work inevitably involved much reading in German (he wrote to his sister in 1926 that ‘My head is too full of German documentation to feel kindly to the good and gentle world’—but how did he learn it?), and an important name is that of Heinrich Düntzer, who had written ‘On the Interpretation of Fixed Epithets in Homer’ in 1862: Parry freely acknowledged his debt to him. The connection Düntzer formed between the epithet and its metrical value was, he wrote, ‘undoubtedly the most important step since Aristarchus towards the understanding of the fixed epithet in Homer’. It was then Parry’s task—and achievement—to ‘remove from Homeric studies the haze of generalization … Parry’s statistical orientation emulated the procedures of the exact sciences’ (wrote James P. Holoka). Of course the thesis passed the examiners’ requirements, with a mention très honorable, the highest honour. All that was missing was the necessary conclusion: the Homeric epics were oral compositions, Volksepos, not Kunstepos.
K. goes on to describe Parry’s return to the USA and his appointment at Harvard as instructor and tutor in Greek and Latin (after a brief spell in Iowa), itself followed by his long and arduous work in Bosnia listening to and recording the songs of the guslars; here he was accompanied by Alfred Lord, later author of The Singer of Tales. It was on his return to Los Angeles in 1935 that he met with his death in what was determined to be a bizarre gunfire accident—K. gives a full account, not omitting the belief of Parry’s daughter that his wife was directly responsible.
Although Parry’s remarkable work gives this book its raison d’être, it by no means dominates the contents, which puts the man and his family circumstances in full context. Notably, Marian, as a Jewess, was miserable at Harvard because of its ‘toxic anti-Semitism’, with Parry’s colleague, John Finley feeling free to say ‘unpleasant, blatantly anti-Semitic things’. Parry himself found that not all were ‘enthralled’ by his arrival, doubtless owing to jealousy (Parry was quickly elevated to assistant professor) while Marian, included ‘only at the periphery’ of Harvard’s social life, missed her happy earlier years in Milwaukee, and even her year at Des Moines. One tiny anecdote deserves mention: when Parry, at Harvard, asked Robert Fitzgerald what his plans were, Fitzgerald replied that he intended to go to New York, and become a journalist: ‘“You go to your destruction”’, said Parry ‘in his formal manner’. Photographs of Parry do not show him smiling, but it seemed that he roared with laughter at a performance of Antigone, because of the terrible standards of the acting.
There are endnotes and an index. Despite its specialist raison d’être, the book can be warmly and generally recommended.
Colin Leach