On the Classics

Back to the Future, Again

It wasn’t easy to find which version of The Iliad I have been listening to on Spotify.

The narrator, the American actor John Lescault, was credited. And Homer was, too. But the translator, Samuel Butler (1612-1680), had long become public domain, and wasn’t mentioned anywhere.

I’d started listening almost by accident, then become addicted. At first, I thought John Lescault was Hugo Weaving — the actor who played Agent Smith in The Matrix.

Lescault has the same nasal sneer when voicing the vaunting that the Greeks do over defeated Trojans as Agent Smith does when he thinks he’s about to waste Neo.

But then I started to get past that voice, and listen to the voice of the story in the poem.

I was overwhelmed by the savage directness of the action, and the clarity of the description.

Years ago, at university, I’d read The Odyssey, but I’d never found a way in to The Iliad, and this — earbuds in and eyes closed and not angsting if I missed a few lines — was it.

A very large gap in my education was being filled.

The poem is just over twelve hours long.

On finishing, I remembered T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919). This has just been reissued as part of a new Faber Collected Prose in four volumes.

I’ve quoted it before, but it’s worth repeating to get a fresh sense of just how intimidating it is.

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

A man, yes — that’s what Eliot was expecting; Europe — that was his horizon. And that’s what he was witnessing as he read James Joyce’s Ulysses being serialised in The Little Review.

We can put that man and Europe in their place and time, and look back at Eliot’s general assertion about what all writers need to go through in order to stand a chance of being significant, of joining the canon. They need, in our recent terms, to have accumulated and assimilated a vast amount of global cultural capital. They need to become rich.

It’s hard to explain to anyone of university age how much of a crushing presence Eliot still was in the 1980s.

I don’t think any English undergraduate nowadays will feel the same oppression in reading those words — the same sense of just how much labour acquiring ‘tradition’ will take them.

Seeing an advert for the new Faber editions, I felt a frisson of my old terror. Oh God, I thought, look who’s back.

But in some ways, I am glad at this return. Eliot’s expectation of writers is monumentally high. In his own work, you can feel the weight of European (and Sanskrit and Buddhist) traditions shattering ‘The Waste Land’ into flattened fragments. After he was finished with that exhausting, exhausted effort, he was muted for a long time afterwards. He’d intimidated himself.

Thinking, I have to take on Homer, is going to help no one write their next paragraph.

Perhaps this was one of the reasons I’d felt able to live and write so long without knowing The Iliad.

It can be killing to tell writers that they need to be rich with the riches of Europe before they can start to cut any kind of figure. But it’s also false to pretend that vital writing — the writing a writer grows by reading — only began in the late twentieth century, and to ignore the classics, or to pretend they don’t exist.

(Even to call them ‘the classics’ feels outmoded.)

We each, I think, have to find our own way to approach the heft of them (not just European; the classics of all traditions) — be that Spotify, the Penguin Classics, or a close retelling.

We have limited time in our lives, but we know this won’t be a waste.

Now for The Aeneid, read by Simon Callow.

John Lescault, reader of The Iliad.