How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (15 page)

Hughes, it should be said, wasn't the first widower poet for whom the opportunity to translate the
Alcestis
served as the vehicle for a corrective shift in emphases. In Robert Browning's long historical poem
Balaustion's Adventure
(the subtitle is “Including a Transcript of Euripides”), which was composed after the death of his wife, Elizabeth, a poetess comes to Athens from Rhodes to meet Euripides, and then sets about adapting
Alcestis
. But her version—and, by extension, the Browning version—turns out to be a redemptive one. In it, “a new Admetos” rejects out of hand Alcestis's offer to die in his place: “'Tis well that I depart, and thou remain,” he tells his wife, with whom, indeed, he gets to enjoy a fairy-tale posterity. (“The two,” Browning writes, “lived together long and well.”) Hughes's adaptation renovates Euripides along comparable lines. If the ancient dramatist's
Alcestis
forces us to ask, “If a husband lets his wife die for him, what manner of man must that husband be?” then the contemporary poet's
Alcestis
asks, “If God lets people die, what manner of god must He be?” In Hughes, as in Browning, there are no guilty husbands—no profound delving into the emotional (if not moral) squalor that often goes with being the survivor. There are just guilty abstractions.

 

Disturbing silences like the one with which Euripides'
Alcestis
concludes are a leitmotif in the drama of Plath and Hughes. In
Bitter Fame
, her biography of Plath, Anne Stevenson describes a tiff between Plath and Hughes's sister, Olwyn, that took place during the Christmas holidays in 1960: depending on whose side you're on, the episode demonstrates either Plath's irrationality or Olwyn Hughes's coldness. In response to a remark of Olwyn's that she was “awfully critical,” Plath “glared accusingly” at her sister-in-law but refused to respond, keeping up her “unnerving stare” in total silence. “Why doesn't she say something?” Olwyn recalled thinking. (
That
would have been an excellent translation of Admetos's climactic line, conveying vividly the frustration and unease of someone faced with this particular brand of passive-aggressiveness.) As recently as a few years ago, Olwyn Hughes, in a letter to Janet Malcolm, was clearly still smarting from what Malcolm, in her book about Plath and Hughes,
The Silent Woman
, called Plath's “Medusan,” “deadly, punishing” speechlessness.

But if Plath was, like Alcestis, the “silent woman,” Hughes himself was the silent man—aggressively, punishingly so, at least in the eyes of those who wanted to know more about the characters in this famous literary/domestic “tragedy,” the passions of whose “characters” only the language of Greek myth and classical drama, it sometimes seems, can capture. (“They have eaten the pomegranate seeds that tie them to the underworld,” Malcolm wrote; “I go about full with the darkness of my flame, like Phèdre…,” Plath herself wrote.) When Hughes's
Birthday Letters
appeared in 1997, it met with a variety of reactions: horror, joy, shock, surprise, anxiety, enthusiasm, etc. But what everyone agreed on was that it was, in essence, a relief: finally, Hughes was speaking.

And why not? “Ted Hughes's history seems to be uncommonly bare of the moments of mercy that allow one to undo or redo one's actions and thus feel that life isn't entirely tragic,” Malcolm wrote.
Birthday Letters
was viewed by many as a kind of second chance, an opportunity to undo, or perhaps to redo, his public image with respect to his dead wife. (The same is true of the personal effects—passports, letters, photographs, manuscripts—that had belonged to Hughes, and which appear
to have been the bases for several of the “Letters.” “He is thought of by critics as being so self-protective and so unrevealing of himself,” said Stephen Enniss, the curator of literary collections at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. “I think the archive will make him appear more human, more sympathetic than the detached voice and aloofness we had known.”)

Writers—even those who appear aloof and voiceless about their private lives—can reveal themselves inadvertently. Reading Malcolm's description of the trapped Hughes, I found it hard not to think of Euripides'
Alcestis
, a play that notoriously allows a flawed man to undo and redo the fatal past. The undoings and redoings you find in Hughes's almost inadvertently moving adaptation of that work—the elisions, omissions, and reconfigurations—suggest that the poet's most revealing public utterance with respect to Plath may not have been
Birthday Letters
after all. In her way—her “veiled” way—the most eloquent figure, among so many strange and tragic silences, has turned out to be Euripides' silent woman.

—The New York Review of Books,
April 27, 2000

W
ho, contemplating the vast catalogue of vanished works of literature from the ancient world, really regrets the lost epics about the Trojan War known as the
Cypria
and the
Little Iliad
? To have just one more complete poem by Sappho (bringing the grand total to two); to have any of the seventy-five lost plays of Aeschylus, the hundred and sixteen by Sophocles, the seventy by Euripides; to recover Ovid's lost
Medea
, or even a single one of the much-admired love elegies of Vergil's friend Cornelius Gallus, which once comprised four whole books and of which a single line now survives; to have the crucial missing books of Tacitus's
Annals
—for any one of these, there is very little that even the most upstanding classicist wouldn't do. Any one of these, after all, would add immeasurably to our understanding of classical civilization; any one of these would, indeed, add unimaginably to the treasure house of world literature.

But for the
Cypria
and the
Little Iliad
, I suspect, no one apart from the most scrupulous philologue sheds a secret tear. These were just two of what was once a grand cycle of eight epic narratives in verse, composed at some point in the preclassical Greek past, which together comprised many tens of thousands of lines and at least seventy-seven “books,” or
papyrus scrolls, and which narrated pretty much everything having to do with the Trojan War, from its remotest prehistory (the wedding of Achilles' parents, Peleus and Thetis) to the final bizarre ramification of its furthest, attenuated plotline (the murder of Odysseus, in his old age, by his son Telegonus, his child by the witch Circe). Of these eight, of course, only two survive: the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. But later summaries, paraphrases, and even quotations in learned commentaries on classical works that have survived give details about the other six. We know that the eleven books of the
Cypria
, for instance, made for rather an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affair, covering all the action from the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis to the Judgment of Paris to the abduction of Helen, all the way through to the first nine years of the war—right up to the moment when Homer's
Iliad
begins.

And we know that at some point after the
Iliad
came the so-called
Little Iliad
—also something of a laundry list of a poem, from the sound of it, narrating as it did much of the action after the death of Achilles, from the suicide of Ajax and the mission to fetch Philoctetes to the construction of the Trojan Horse, from the deceitful embassy of the Greek soldier Sinon (who convinced the Trojans to take the wooden horse, falsely asserting that the Greeks, fearing plague, had returned home), to the Achaeans' terrible entry into Troy. Various other poems filled in the blanks: the
Aethiopis
narrated the deaths of ancillary characters like the Amazon queen Penthesilea and Memnon, an Ethiopian ally of the Trojans (hence the poem's name); another, called the
Nostoi
, or “Returns,” narrated the arduous homecomings of the Greek heroes after the war, particularly that of Agamemnon. It was presumably adjacent to the
Nostoi
in the epic cycle that the
Odyssey
once stood.

 

One reason that we don't hugely regret the absence of most of the lost epics is, in fact, the greatness of the two surviving Homeric works: each is a masterpiece that stands easily on its own, needing neither a prequel nor a sequel. Another reason is that much of the content of the lost epics was recapitulated in later Greek tragedies, to say nothing of Vergil's
Aeneid
, the second book of which provides as harrowing and satisfying an account of the Fall of Troy as anyone could want. But there's
another reason that we shouldn't mind too much the loss of poems like the
Cypria
or the
Little Iliad
. Apparently, they weren't all that good.

In the twenty-third chapter of his
Poetics
, Aristotle suggests why. In this section, he somberly warns about some potential pitfalls in constructing the plots of epic poems; as examples of what can go wrong, he uses, as it happens, both the
Cypria
and the
Little Iliad
. “With respect to narrative mimesis in verse,” he writes (by which he means epic poems),

For those who think that “epic” merely means “big” or “long,” it's worth emphasizing that by “action” Aristotle clearly does not mean a long string of events—such as, for example, the suicide of Ajax, the Greeks' attempt to lure Philoctetes and his magic bow back to Troy, the construction of the wooden horse, Sinon's ruse, and the penetration of the Trojan walls by means of the hollow horse, all of which, as we know, went into the
Little Iliad
. Such events are, in Aristotelian terms,
merely linked together but do not form what he thinks of as a “plot,” a single action—what he calls a
praxis
, a word derived from the Greek verb
prattein
, “to do.” For Aristotle, a poem consisting of lots of little doings nominally linked by chronology (“everything leading up to the Trojan War,” say, or “everything that happened after Achilles died”) was one that, as even a brief summary of the
Cypria
or the
Little Iliad
suggests, was little more than a boring catalogue.

A plot, by contrast, is what the
Iliad
has. For all its great length, the poem is precisely about what is proposed, in its famous opening line, as its subject matter: the wrath of Achilles, its origins, its enactment, its consequences. (So too the
Odyssey
, whose concomitant episodes all refract what it, in its equally famous opening line, purports to be about: the “man of many turnings who wandered wide”: no part of the poem does not illuminate his cleverness, his yearning for home, his humanity.) To be sure, Achilles' rage, as it plays itself out through the poem's twenty-four books, sheds light on a vast host of issues: the meaning of heroism, the nature of war and of peace, the sweetness and bitterness of human life. But the
Iliad
is able to illuminate so much precisely because of its searing focus on one
praxis
, which is what gives it its awesome weight and terrible grandeur. Which is to say, what makes it truly big, truly “epic.”

We do not, of course, possess either the
Cypria
or the
Little Iliad
, but what we know about them suggests that they have much in common with another failed epic: this summer's big blockbuster movie, Wolfgang Petersen's
Troy
, a film that falters hopelessly for precisely the same reasons that those lost, bad poems did.
Troy
claims, in a closing credit sequence, to have been “inspired” by the
Iliad
, but however much it thinks it's doing Homer, the text it best illuminates is Aristotle's.

 

What the makers of
Troy
have is not a single unifying action, but a single unifying notion: that the Trojan War was a war like any other. “This is about power, not love,” the Trojan prince Hector (Eric Bana, an Australian actor who recently played the comic-book character “The
Incredible Hulk,” and who looks not very different from someone you might see on the subway) declares early on to his new sister-in-law, Helen (Diane Kruger, a pretty blond cheerleader type). Such tough pronouncements are clearly meant to demonstrate that Petersen and his screenwriter, David Benioff, are going to give us an epic for our times, and have, accordingly, stripped from
Troy
all traces of the supernatural, the mythic, and even the heroic. Gone are Homer's mischievous gods and goddesses; gone, too, the elaborate shame-culture codes of honor, reciprocity, gift-giving, and booty-apportioning that inform every action taken by every character in Homer.

Benioff has exiled Homeric heroics in favor of something that modern audiences will feel more comfortable with: global geopolitical Realpolitik. Here Agamemnon (played by a scenery-devouring Brian Cox, much given to wicked cackling) is driven not by considerations of family honor (after all, it's his brother, Menelaus, who's been cuckolded by the Trojan prince Paris) but by a desire for world hegemony: an opening title informs us that, having already subdued the cities of Greece, he lusts for Troy, the only city that stands between him and Aegean domination. It's made quite clear that neither he nor any of the other characters, with the exception of the old Trojan king Priam (Peter O'Toole), believes in the Greek gods: during the first day of battle, when Achilles (Brad Pitt) and his Myrmidons storm the Trojan shore (a sequence shamelessly lifted from Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan
), he blithely desecrates a shrine of Apollo, slicing the head off the god's golden cult-image. Back in Troy, meanwhile, Hector, responding to his father's pious declaration that Poseidon will protect their city, snaps back, à la Stalin, “And how many battalions does the sea-god command?”

There is nothing at all wrong with toying with Homeric or epic characters and story lines. The classical canon is full of works that do just that; indeed if, out of some fussy curatorial reverence for “the classics,” we were to dismiss wholesale reconfigurations or adaptations of Homer, we'd have to start by junking, among much else, Aeschylus's
Oresteia
, Sophocles'
Philoctetes
,
Electra
, and
Ajax
, and Euripides'
Iphigenia at Aulis
,
Iphigenia Among the Taurians
,
Electra
,
Orestes
, and
Trojan Women
. This is why, although Benioff makes some startling innovations to myth as we know it—beginning with the deaths of both Menelaus and Ajax during the first major engagement between the Greeks and Trojans, and ending
with the murder of Agamemnon during the Sack of Troy, all of which demises wreak havoc with the extant tragic canon—it's pointless to criticize
Troy
on the grounds that it's not “faithful” to the text of Homer, as so many critics have done. Most of the action of the film, at any event, is not based on the
Iliad
but instead recapitulates almost in its entirety the narrative once related by those lost epic poems of Troy, filling its nearly three hours with everything from pretty Paris's abduction of Helen to the wide-screen destruction of the Trojan citadel itself.

 

The real objection to Petersen and Benioff's reductive ideological updating of the epic story they tell is structural, not pedantic: the “realism” they've opted for goes against the grain of the genre they're working in. For one thing, the authors' jettisoning of Homeric codes of behavior makes a hash of much of the characters' actions. In Homer, Agamemnon's seizure of Achilles' property, the slave girl Briseis, represents a catastrophic affront to Achilles' sense of himself; his subsequent withdrawal from the war is the hinge of Homer's plot, setting in motion awful consequences unforeseen by Achilles himself. (And, indeed, Agamemnon's action is motivated by a similar desire not to lose face: he only takes Achilles' girl after he's told he has to give up one of his own.) But Benioff's bitter and disillusioned Achilles doesn't really believe in anything, and so you don't really know why he bothers. A lot of the action of
Troy
, which blindly follows much of the epic cycle's plot while providing none of the epic motivations, feels similarly hollow.

Or, indeed, downright ridiculous. What sets the climax of the
Iliad
in motion is the killing of Achilles' beloved companion, Patroclus, at the hands of Hector—another loss, but this time one that propels the sulky hero back into vengeful action. Fueled, you suspect, by a desire to expunge the vaguest hint of homoeroticism from the proceedings—by classical times, the question wasn't so much whether Achilles and his beloved Patroclus were doing it, as it was (for instance, in Plato's
Symposium
) who was doing just what to whom—Benioff makes Patroclus Achilles' “cousin.” Particularly today when family ties have never counted for less, this bit of whitewashing has increasingly hilarious results as the action progresses. Watching
Troy
, you'd think that there was no higher value for the Bronze Age Greeks than cousinage. “He
killed my
cousin
!!” Achilles shrieks at Priam when the latter comes begging for his son's body at the end of the story. “You've lost your cousin, now you've taken mine,” a mournful Briseis (in this version, Hector's cousin) tells Achilles. “When does it end?” This film's notion that entire civilizations were destroyed because of excessive attachment to one's collateral relations is, surely, a first in world myth-making.