As a scientist by training and a self-made man, Jay Mendelsohn never much liked Odysseus. To him, Odysseus was a smooth talking seducer who made up stories that got other people in trouble, and relied too heavily on the gods to overcome obstacles.
His son, celebrated classicist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn, thinks that typifies the difference between a mathematician and a writer. He sees Odysseus as a ‘proto-Woody Allen’: sexy and smart.
The poem became a kind of a lantern that illuminated aspects of my dad’s personality that I hadn’t really appreciated before.
‘He’s not like Achilles, he’s not the greatest warrior, he’s not the fastest runner, he can’t benchpress 300 pounds, but he seduces people all the time, both literally and figuratively, because he has a way with words,’ Daniel says.
‘How could people like us resist that? How could readers resist that?’
Jay had last studied Latin at school in the 1940s, and decided towards the end of his life he wanted to re-read the classics.
‘I said to him, “I’m actually teaching a seminar for first-year students”... and he said, “I’ll come, I’ll sit in on it.” And that was the beginning of our own odyssey,’ Daniel says.
‘He came every week, he drove three and a half hours from the house I grew up in to where I teach, and he sat in. Not quietly, I must say—cantankerously disagreeing with me about everything.
‘That was the spring term of 2011. Just by coincidence—although I’m beginning to think there are no coincidences—an old mentor of mine said, “I’ve just heard about this cruise that recreates the voyages of Odysseus, from Troy to Ithaca over two weeks.”’
Daniel mentioned the Mediterranean cruise to his ‘notoriously cheap’ father half-jokingly, expecting him to baulk at the cost, but he didn’t.
‘He said, “Let’s go ... I want you to get the nicest cabin." I think he was very pleased with himself that he had followed this course and that he had really mastered this text even though he didn’t much like Odysseus.’
The cruise ship was set to travel through the Greek islands, but it was 'not a thing you go on because you want all-you-can-eat shrimp'. Instead, there were reading lists and two lectures a day by classicists and archaeologists.
Following in the footsteps of Odysseus himself, the eventual goal was Ithaca, but fate intervened.
‘You’re supposed to end in Ithaca, this island, which people think is the Ithaca of Odysseus,’ Daniel says.
‘In June of 2011 there was a general strike. It was when the Greek crisis was at its nadir, and the workers who operate the Corinth canals were on strike.
‘That meant for us to get back to Athens in time for our flights back ... we had to miss Ithaca, because we had to sail around the entire country of Greece basically to get back from where we were to Athens.’
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The other cruise passengers knew he was planning to write a book about the adventure, and were worried the change of plans would spoil it.
‘People kept coming up to me and saying, “This is so terrible for you, after all this you’re never going to get to Ithaca”,’ he says.
‘I said, “No, this is so great, actually—it’s so Odyssean, that your destination always eludes you.”’
With an extra day at sea with no lectures planned, the ship’s captain asked Daniel to give a lecture about the modern Greek poet Cavafy.
‘He said, “Since we’re not going to get to the real Ithaca, would you mind giving a lecture about Cavafy’s poem, Ithaca?"
‘The substitution of literature for life was somehow so Homeric. I thought it was great.’
Daniel says he ended up understanding a lot more about his father from their experience reading the poem together.
‘My father who was a self-made man ... couldn’t bear the idea that Odysseus got any help,’ he says.
‘There are many instances in The Odyssey where he washes up on an island and Athena sort of waves a magic wand and he looks fabulous and his hair is perfect. My father hated that stuff.
‘I had a real sense of that aspect of my dad: that he had done it all himself, and he didn’t like the idea that some smooth talking seducer had a whole epic devoted to him when he gets all this help from the gods.
‘That’s the best thing that can happen when you’re reading—to have insight not only into yourself but into other people as well.
‘The poem became a kind of a lantern that illuminated aspects of my dad’s personality that I hadn’t really appreciated before. His absolute opposition to the idea that you would get help in your project was very touching for me.’
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