Homer's Daughters: Women's

Responses to Homer in the Twentieth

Century and Beyond Fiona Cox
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 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

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   . 
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece
and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to
authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has
been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal
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abuse, of the classical past.
Homer’s Daughters
Women’s Responses to Homer
in the Twentieth Century
and Beyond

 
Fiona Cox and
Elena Theodorakopoulos

1
3
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For Miranda,
Peter, and Paul.
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 contains excerpts from Doolittle, H. and Martz, L., Collected

Poems (CP) (New York: New Directions, 1986), Doolittle, H., Helen in
Egypt (New York: New Directions, 1961), and Doolittle, H., Compas-
sionate Friendship (as yet unpublished journal, ts. Norman Holmes
Pearson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale
University, New Haven, CT).
• Excerpts from the poems ‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’ (pp. 372–7),
‘Calypso’ or ‘Callypso speaks’ (pp. 388–96), ‘At Ithaca’ (pp. 163–4),
‘Circe’ (p. 119), ‘Calypso’ (p. 390), ‘Odyssey’ (pp. 93–8), and ‘Helen’
(pp. 154–5), from COLLECTED POEMS, 1912–1944, copyright
© 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp.
• Excerpts from HELEN IN EGYPT, by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle),
copyright © 1961 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by per-
mission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
• Excerpts from COMPASSIONATE FRIENDSHIP (p. 16) by H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle), copyright © 2018 by The Schaffner Family
Foundation; used by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corporation, agents.
Chapter 8 contains excerpts from Oswald, A., Memorial: A Version of
Homer’s Iliad (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2012) and Memorial: An
Excavation of the Iliad (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2011). Also from
Köhler, B., Niemands Frau (Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2007). Acknow-
ledgements also given in a footnote.
• Excerpts from MEMORIAL: A VERSION OF HOMER’S ILIAD by
Alice Oswald. Copyright © 2011 by Alice Oswald. Used by permis-
sion of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
• Excerpts from MEMORIAL: AN EXCAVATION OF THE ILIAD
by Alice Oswald. Copyright © 2011 by Alice Oswald. Used by
permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
viii 

• Excerpts from NIEMANDS FRAU by Barbara Köhler. Copyright

© 2007 by Barbara Köhler. Used by kind permission of Suhrkamp
Verlag © Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin.
Chapter 11 contains excerpts from Atwood, M., Selected Poems 1965–75
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; Toronto: Oxford University Press,
1976), Duffy, C. A., The World’s Wife (London: Picador; New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), Glück, L., Meadowlands (Hopewell,
NJ: Ecco, 1996), Graves, R., Collected Poems (London: Cassell, 1975),
Doolittle, H. and Martz, L., Collected Poems (CP) (New York: New
Directions, 1986), and Pastan, L., The Imperfect Paradise (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co, 1988). Acknowledgements for the last of these also
given in a footnote.
• Excerpts from ‘Siren Song’ and ‘Circe: Mud Poems’, from
SELECTED POEMS 1965–1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright
© 1976, renewed 2004 by Margaret Atwood. Reproduced with
permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of
O. W. Toad Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Oxford
University Press, Canada. All rights reserved.
• Excerpts from ‘Circe’, from THE WORLD’S WIFE by Carol Ann
Duffy. Copyright © 1999 by Carol Ann Duffy. Reprinted by per-
mission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of
Pan Macmillan.
• Excerpts from the poems ‘Siren’, ‘Circe’s Power’, ‘Circe’s Torment’,
‘Circe’s Grief ’, from MEADOWLANDS by LOUISE GLÜCK.
Copyright © 1996 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins Publishers and Carcanet Press Limited.
• Excerpts from Robert Graves’ ‘Ulysses’ (p. 56), from Graves, R.,
Collected Poems, reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Limited.
• Excerpts from ‘Circe’ by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from COLLECTED
POEMS, 1912–1944, copyright © 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doo-
little. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
• Excerpts from ‘Circe’ and ‘The Sirens’, from THE IMPERFECT
PARADISE by Linda Pastan. Copyright © 1988 by Linda Pastan.
Used by permission of Linda Pastan in care of the Jean V. Naggar
Literary Agency, Inc. (permissions@jvnla.com). Used by permission
of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
  ix

Chapter 12 contains excerpts from Aguirre, F., Ithaca (translated by Ana

Valverde Osan) (Rochester, New York: BOA Editions, Ltd, 2004) and
Cavafy, C. P., C.P. Cavafy Collected Poems: Bilingual Edition (trans.
Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; ed. George P. Savidis) (revised
edition; Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992).
• Francisca Aguirre, ‘Ithaca / Itaca’ and excerpts from ‘From Without /
Desde fuera’, ‘The Comrades / Los camaradas’, ‘Orderliness / El
orden’, ‘Autophagy / Autofragia’, and ‘Loom / Telar’ from Ithaca.
Copyright © 1972 by Francisca Aguirre. Translation copyright
© 2004 by Ana Valverde Osan. Used by permission of The Per-
missions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd, www.
boaeditions.org.
• Excerpts from ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, ‘The City’, and ‘Ithaka’,
excerpted from C. P. CAVAFY COLLECTED POEMS: Bilingual
Edition trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by
George Savidis. With a new foreword by Robert Pinsky. Published
by Princeton University Press, 2009. Copyright © C. P. Cavafy.
Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge &
White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Bilingual edition
copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. English translation
copyright © 1975, 1992, 2009 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.
Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
While every effort has been made to secure permissions, we may have
failed in a few cases to trace the copyright holders. We apologize for any
apparent negligence. Should the copyright holders wish to contact us after
publication, we would be happy to include an acknowledgement in sub-
sequent reprints.
Editors’ Acknowledgements

We are immensely grateful to the Series Editors, Lorna Hardwick and

James I. Porter, for their support and help with bringing this project to
completion. We owe further thanks to Lorna Hardwick, who has been
unfailingly generous with her time and advice more widely. We are also
grateful to OUP’s anonymous readers, whose incisive and thoughtful
feedback improved the volume and to Georgina Leighton for her hard
work and organization. Special thanks to our copy editor, Ingalo Thom-
son, whose qualities of patience, sensitivity, and attention to detail are
unparalleled.
We have been extraordinarily fortunate to have worked with contribu-
tors who have produced essays that we have found wonderfully stimu-
lating and enriching, but who have also responded with good humour
and forbearance to the ups-and-downs entailed by a project of this size.
Our thanks go to all of you.
Contents

List of Figures xv
List of Contributors xvii

Introduction 1
Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos
1. ‘After his wine-dark sea’: H.D. in Homer 21
Genevieve Liveley
2. Romantic Encounters with Homer in Elizabeth Cook’s
Achilles 39
Polly Stoker
3. Female Homers: A Feminist nostos? 57
Catherine Burke
4. Christa Wolf ’s Cassandra: Different Times, Different Views 73
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz
5. Feminist at Second Glance? Alice Oswald’s Memorial as
a Response to Homer’s Iliad 89
Carolin Hahnemann
6. Kate Tempest: A ‘Brand New Homer’ for a Creative Future 105
Emily Spiers
7. Rereading Penelope’s Web: The Anxieties of Female
Authorship in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad 125
Jasmine Richards
8. Excavations in Homer: Speculative Archaeologies in Alice
Oswald’s and Barbara Köhler’s Responses to the Iliad
and the Odyssey 143
Georgina Paul
9. Between Night and Day: Barbara Köhler’s Lyric Odyssey 161
Elena Theodorakopoulos
10. Monologue and Dialogue: The Odyssey in Contemporary
Women’s Poetry 177
Isobel Hurst
xiv 

11. The Forecast is Hurricane: Circe’s Powers and Circe’s

Desires in Modern Women’s Poetry 193
Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah H. Roberts
12. Iberian Sibyl: Francisca Aguirre on Cavafy and
the Journey Out of Ithaca 211
Victoria Reuter
13. ‘Cut down to size’: Female Voices and Adventure
in Adèle Geras’s Ithaka 231
Francesca Richards
14. ‘Health isn’t making everybody into a Greek ideal’:
Overcoming Abjection in Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital
Odyssey 249
Ruth MacDonald
15. ‘Thinking through our mothers’: Cixous and Homer
beyond the Third Wave 265
Fiona Cox
16. Epilogue: Translating Homer as a Woman 279
Emily Wilson

Bibliography 299
Index of Names 331
Index of Passages 339
List of Figures

6.1. The Battersea Arts Centre production of Brand

New Ancients 114
Photograph courtesy of Christina Hardinge
6.2. Tempest’s physical performance draws on the gestures
of hip-hop and the pulpit 115
Still taken from Brand New Ancients, Kate Tempest & Battersea
Arts Centre On Film, directed by Joe Roberts, 2014: courtesy of
Battersea Arts Centre
6.3. Co-designing preferable creative futures in the UK
(Focus Group 2017) 121
List of Contributors

C B is a PhD candidate and part-time assistant lecturer at

University College Cork.
F C is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Litera-
ture at the University of Exeter.
C H is a Professor of Classics at Kenyon College in
Gambier, Ohio.
I H is Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, University of
London.
G L is Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol.
R MD currently works as the Access and Outreach Officer
at St John’s College, University of Oxford.
S M is the Alfred Reginald Allen Memorial Professor
of Greek at the University of Pennsylvania.
G P is Associate Professor of German at the University of
Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in German at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
N S R is Professor of Comparative Literature at
Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.
V R is a comparative literature scholar and literary trans-
lator who received her PhD from the University of Oxford. She teaches at
Gettysburg College and York College of Pennsylvania.
F R is Research Impact Facilitator for the Social
Sciences Division, University of Oxford.
J R is a Lecturer in English at Goldsmiths, University of
London.
D H. R is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and
Comparative Literature at Haverford College, Pennsylvania.
xviii   

E S is an Anniversary Lecturer in Creative Futures at the

Department of Languages and Cultures and the Institute for Social
Futures at Lancaster University.
P S completed her PhD in Classics in 2019 and currently
coordinates the Classics for All Schools Hub at the University of
Birmingham.
E T is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the Uni-
versity of Birmingham.
E W is a Professor of Classical Studies and Chair of the
Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania.
 Introduction
Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos

In Jo’s Boys (1886) Josie Brooke, the niece of Little Women’s irrepressible
Jo March, railed against the positions of weakness bestowed upon
women in the Iliad:
‘Why, we were pegging away at the Iliad and came to where Zeus tells Juno not to
inquire into his plans or he’ll whip her, and Jo was disgusted because Juno meekly
hushed up. I said it was all right, and agreed with the old fellow that women
didn’t know much and ought to obey men,’ explained Ted, to the great amuse-
ment of his hearers.
‘Goddesses may do as they like, but these Greek and Trojan women were poor-
spirited things if they minded men who couldn’t fight their own battles and had
to be hustled off by Pallas, and Venus, and Juno, when they were going to get
beaten. The idea of two armies stopping and sitting down while a pair of heroes
flung stones at one another! I don’t think much of your old Homer. Give me
Napoleon or Grant for my hero.’
Josie’s scorn was as funny as if a humming-bird scolded at an ostrich, and
everyone laughed as she sniffed at the immortal poet and criticized the gods.
(Alcott 2017: 408)

The episode represents far more than a rather quaint incident in the
family history of one of the best-loved characters in fiction, however.
Like her aunt before her, Josie realizes at a very early age that literature
carves out very different roles for women than for men.¹ Behind the
figure of the indignant, small girl stands Louisa M. Alcott, all too aware

¹ See Gordon 2017: 27. ‘Mary (Shelley) had an urge for classical learning, which would
reappear in Mary Ann Evans (before she became George Eliot) and Virginia Stephen
(before she became Virginia Woolf), mopping up Greek in her back room in her father’s
Kensington house. For them, Greek epitomised the education closed to women.’
Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos, Introduction In: Homer’s Daughters: Women’s
Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Edited by: Fiona Cox and Elena
Theodorakopoulos, Oxford University Press (2019). © The editors and several contributors.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802587.003.0017
     

of the ways in which the foundation texts of the Western tradition have
conspired to silence women, and to marginalize them in books that
nevertheless depict highly regrettable behaviour on the part of the male
protagonists. If the ‘immortal poet’ can be mocked and condemned as
deficient towards the end of the nineteenth century, it is unsurprising to
see a myriad of ways in which women writers across the globe have
subverted, questioned, parodied, and turned to Homer over the course of
a century from 1914 to the present day.
We begin our enquiry in 1914, since the experience of the two world
wars plays a decisive role in women’s responses to Homeric epic. In 1914
the young Vera Brittain, newly arrived at Oxford, painstakingly worked her
way through passages from the Iliad: ‘the lovely lines from the Iliad which
describe Andromache holding out the child Astyanax to Hector before
Troy and “smiling through her tears”, will be for ever associated for me with
those poignant early days of the war.’² Just over a hundred years later
Caroline Alexander, in the Introduction to her translation of the Iliad (the
first complete translation into English by a woman), observes bleakly: ‘If we
were to take any random hundred-year-period within the last five thousand
years, it has been calculated, we would find on average ninety-four of that
hundred to have been occupied with large-scale conflicts in one or more
regions of the globe.’³ Brittain later looks back to that earlier period of
reading in order to draw comfort from it and to establish solidarity with all
those who have suffered calamitous losses through war. She speaks of the
way in which the ‘loveliness’ of the Greek lines ‘came back to me in quieter
days, more potent than life, more permanent than war’.⁴ It is notable that
Brittain focuses upon one of the few episodes in the Iliad where a woman is
the centre of attention; in this, she sets a pattern to be followed by the
women writers under discussion in this book, of slanting the works of
Homer, so that they speak of the experiences and concerns of women,
rather than remaining the preserve of a select, male readership.
A very recent reworking of Homer, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls
(2018), is an example of this trend, since it is a retelling of the Iliad from
the alternating viewpoints of Achilles and Briseis. Here, Barker follows
Emily Hauser whose novel For the Most Beautiful (2016) explores the
ways in which Briseis and Krisayis (Hauser’s version of Homer’s Chryseis)

² Brittain 2014: 129. ³ Alexander 2015: xxxi–xxxii. ⁴ Brittain 2014: 138.

  

experience the Trojan War. Barker opens her book with a corrective to the
presentation of the war as an episode of glory and heroism: ‘Great Achilles.
Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets
pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the
butcher”.’ (3) The women’s name for Achilles overlays the Trojan war
with the horrors of subsequent atrocities, by echoing the language used for
war criminals such as the ‘butcher of Bosnia’ or for the Holocaust criminal
Klaus Barbie, ‘the butcher of Lyon’.⁵ It is, however, the First World War
that above all overlays Barker’s presentation of the Trojan war. This is, in
part, due to her use of anachronism—characters speak of needing ‘half a
crown’ (104), and the ribald, jaunty singing of the soldiers has a flavour of
well-known First World War songs—but is also due to the echoes of her
own First World War Regeneration trilogy.⁶ This was the first war to be
commemorated by Remembrance Sunday, when the names of the fallen
are honoured by being read out in a list, posing a contemporary version of
the problem that Barker’s Briseis articulates: ‘But you see the problem,
don’t you? How on earth can you feel any pity or concern confronted by
this list of intolerably nameless names?’ (217) We shall see how Alice
Oswald found one answer to the question through what she refers to as
the ‘biographies’ of some of the minor characters of the Iliad. Working
from the short but often tender and touching details given in the Iliad itself
when young men fall in battle, Oswald’s biographies make room for the
world of family and domesticity, of which the Iliad occasionally allows a
glimpse.⁷ Barker adopts a comparable approach, but her soldiers are
humanized by the details of their early lives remembered by those who
brought them up. Her catalogue of soldiers aches with the sorrow con-
tained within these stories told by mothers, offering domestic details that
ought to have no place on the battle plains, among the heaps of dying men:
And then there was Mulius, the one with Achilles’ spear point sticking out of his
ear. ‘Six months old he was when he walked—never crawled, never shuffled

⁵ In Christa Wolf ’s novel Kassandra (first published 1983) Achilles is given the epithet
‘das Vieh’ (translated as beast, or brute), used almost every time his name is mentioned.
Wolf ’s narrator, Cassandra, also describes Achilles as a ‘butcher’ and speaks of how he
‘butchered’ the twelve captives at Patroclus’ funeral.
⁶ See Wilson (2018).
⁷ See for instance Oswald’s treatment (p. 38) of young Iphidamas (Iliad 11.221–47) who
is eager to take up arms and dies, without yet having taken pleasure in his young wife. See
Minchin 2015: 207–8.
     

around on his bum or anything like that, he just straight stood up. I used to walk
him around, holding on to his hands, bent double—hours, hours—and the
minute he sat down he wanted to be up again. Me back was broke.’⁸
Or Iphition’s mother, remembering the first time his dad took him fishing, the
frown of concentration on his face as he tried to get the worm on to the
hook . . . ‘Oh, and the minute he stood up, it fell off again. I didn’t dare laugh.
Poor little soul. But give him his due, he went on trying. He was like that—he
wouldn’t give in. (218)

Barker’s decision to foreground the experiences of women in her account

of the Iliad leads her to rewrite in the most brutally graphic terms one of
the most moving scenes in Western literature:⁹
I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed
my son.
Those words echoed around me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on
all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: And
I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for
the man who killed my husband and my brothers. (267)

The power of Priam’s famous gesture of supplication stems to a great

extent from the way in which the scene evokes the powerful bonds
between fathers and sons (and Barker highlights this by having her
Achilles mistake Priam for his father, Peleus, when he first becomes
aware of his presence in the tent). Barker’s Briseis problematizes the
universal ‘humanity’ of this scene by forcing us to acknowledge the
horror of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Briseis breaks the ‘silence
of the girls’ to offer a distinctive and unbearably moving account of how
war is experienced by women—by the mothers, and wives, and slaves of
the warring men. But if we look carefully at the receptions of Homer
since the First World War by women writers, it becomes apparent that
Barker is working within a well-established tradition.
Female consciousness is at the centre of Jacob’s Room, first published
in 1922. Through the voice of a female narrator and a range of female
characters Virginia Woolf challenges the values and ideology which
assimilate heroic epic glory or kleos with the ‘glory’ promised to the
young men whose lives were lost in the war. Jacob Flanders, the central

⁸ The phrase ‘bent-double’ glances at its most famous use in Wilfred Owen’s depiction in
‘Dulce et decorum est’ of First World War soldiers: ‘Bent double, like old beggars under
sacks.’
⁹ See Wilson (2018).
  

character in the novel, is one such young man. The novel articulates the
thoughts and anxieties of a range of women, all of whom have Jacob on
their mind while he first travels to Greece and then enlists to fight. In a
particularly poignant scene, one of the women, Clara, is walking her dog,
Troy, in Hyde Park and approaching the statue of Achilles known as the
Wellington Memorial. The monument is comically garlanded with
everyday objects, in a marked juxtaposition with the immense, to mod-
ern eyes rather crass, masculinity of the statue:
The loop of the railing beneath the statue of Achilles was full of parasols and
waistcoats; chains and bangles; of ladies and gentlemen, lounging elegantly,
lightly observant.
‘ “This statue was erected by the women of England . . . ” ’ Clara read out with a
foolish little laugh. ‘Oh, Mr. Bowley! Oh!’ Gallop—gallop—gallop—a horse
galloped past without a rider. The stirrups swung; the pebbles spurted.
‘Oh, stop! Stop it, Mr. Bowley!’ she cried, white, trembling, gripping his arm,
utterly unconscious, the tears coming. (Woolf 2008: 232)

The statue, an enormous bronze (thirty-six feet high), was erected in memory
of Wellington’s victories in the Napoleonic war and is a perfect example of
the role played by classical antiquity in articulating the national self-image of
imperialist Britain.¹⁰ Clara’s embarrassed laughter at the idea of the monu-
ment having been funded entirely by women wishing to remember the
heroism of their men is usually said to allude to the scandal over the statue’s
(fig-leaved) nudity. It seems to us that this is also the laughter of Woolf
herself, evoking the kind of humour with which she mocks ‘great men’ in
Three Guineas, for instance (see Stoker 2019: 108–17). But laughter is not far
from tears, here as in Vera Brittain’s favourite scene from the Iliad: the
riderless horse shocks and frightens Clara, who has been anxiously thinking
about Jacob all this time. Thus the scene anticipates the death of Jacob
Flanders with which the book ends, and points out the hollow and bombastic
ideology—and the misreading of Homeric epic—that are responsible for it.
We know from her diaries, and from her famous essay On Not
Knowing Greek, that Woolf loved the Odyssey. In Jacob’s Room it is
alluded to, like the Iliad, through a statue. The differences are instructive:
while the Achilles statue, which stands for the Iliad, is a neoclassical

¹⁰ See Turner 1981. See also Hoberman 1997: 15–24 on the implications of the anthropo-
logical turn of the end of the nineteenth century for women’s interpretations of ancient
Greece culture.
     

construct, made only a hundred years before the publication of Jacob’s

Room itself, the Odyssey is alluded to via a marble head in the British
Museum referred to by Woolf as ‘the battered Ulysses’. This head of a
(perhaps) middle-aged man wearing a kind of conical cap is indeed very
battered, its nose and mouth pretty much destroyed. It is as far from the
muscular heroism of the Wellington monument’s Achilles as it is pos-
sible to be, and provides a good example of the shift towards the
Odyssean model of heroism that tended to replace the Achillean in
the wake of the trauma of the First World War.¹¹ For Fanny in Jacob’s
Room, the battered Ulysses is an ideal representation of the poor doomed
young man:
Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny’s idea
of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever. To reinforce her
vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes
downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and
got a fresh shock of Jacob’s presence, enough to last her half a day.
(Woolf 2008: 238)

This is a good reminder to us of the fact that both Homeric epics have
appealed, in different ways, to women writers of the last hundred years.
During the time we are considering it seems that the assumed mascu-
linity and nationalism of epic have become increasingly complicated.
Ezra Pound himself found his own definition of epic as ‘the speech of a
nation, through the mouth of one man’ to be incompatible with the
realities of the twentieth century.¹² Today, nationhood is itself not what it
was before the First World War, and the mouth may now be a woman’s
as much as a man’s.¹³ Indeed, Vanda Zajko has pointed out that, while
the modernists in general look to the Odyssey for their Homer, female
modernists such as H.D. and Laura Riding appear to have by preference
looked to the Iliad.¹⁴ In Laura Riding’s novel A Trojan Ending, published
in 1937, we see an early precursor of the ‘revisionist mythmaking’
espoused by second-wave feminists, as Riding sets out to demolish
Homer’s authority and replace it with a multitude of other voices, mainly
Trojans and women, whose meandering and wide-ranging talk about

¹¹ Zajko 2004: 311–12. See Graziosi and Greenwood 2007: 14 on modernism and Homer.
¹² Flack 2015: 30. The quotation is from a letter to Pound’s mother, in Rachewiltz,
Moody, and Moody 2010: 175.
¹³ See Friedman 1986. ¹⁴ See Zajko 2004: 313.
  

mythology, ritual, and religion, taking place in the domestic quarters

behind the walls of Troy, makes up the substance of the novel. The
‘mouth’, to use Pound’s terminology again, is replaced by many mouths,
and they are mainly the mouths of women.¹⁵
Responses to Homer by women writers form a part of the wider
phenomenon of contemporary women shaping the field of classical
reception in new and distinctive ways.¹⁶ But to examine the circum-
stances that enabled writers such as Margaret Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy,
Alice Oswald, and Francisca Aguirre to produce such poignant and
powerful responses is to become aware of the pioneering work done by
less well-known authors, whose treatment of similar themes and con-
cerns altered the Zeitgeist, enabling some of the radical rereadings that
we are currently enjoying. In 2001 the French feminist Annie Leclerc
(perhaps best known for her 1974 work Parole de femme) offered us a
Penelope who resembles Carol Ann Duffy’s self-contained and confident
Penelope, who has no need for the return of her husband indicated by the
distinctive footfall outside her door.¹⁷ Leclerc’s Penelope glories in her
own creativity:
Dissimuler n’était pas sans risque. Mais en même temps par la ruse et le secret
s’ouvrait un espace insoupçonné de liberté. Tu découvrais qu’on pouvait voler
comme les oiseaux, nager comme les poissons, passer au-dessus, s’insinuer
au-dessous, se faufiler entre les mailles des contraintes.¹⁸
(There was some risk involved with dissimulation. But at the same time a space of
freedom, unimagined, was opened up by guile and secrecy. You discovered that
one could fly like a bird, swim like a fish, soar above, slink below, worm your way
inside the chinks of constraints.)

¹⁵ See Hoberman 1997: 57–72 for a substantial discussion of A Trojan Ending.

¹⁶ See Cox and Theodorakopoulos 2013a and 2013c and Theodorakopoulos 2012 for
women’s writing as an under-researched trend in classical reception. See Cox 2011 for
contemporary women’s writing and Virgil and now Cox 2018 for Ovid and women’s
writing.
¹⁷ This moment recalls Duffy’s poem ‘Eurydice’, where Eurydice’s blood runs cold with
horror when she hears Orpheus’ distinctive ‘knock-knock-knock’ at the door, and realizes
that he has pursued her even as far as the underworld. Duffy 1999: 58–9.
¹⁸ Leclerc 2001: 34. See also Leclerc’s Introduction to this book, where she comments on
the links between the words ‘to unravel’ and ‘to analyse’ in ancient Greek: ‘Je ne suis ni
érudite ni fine lettrée, mais capable de fouiller là où se cachent les trésors. Ainsi j’ai appris
que le verbe utilisé par Homère pour “détisser” la toile est une forme de analuô, analyser’
(15) (I’m not erudite or especially well read, but I am capable of scouting out treasures. And
so I learned that the verb Homer uses for ‘to unravel’ the web is a form of analuô—to
analyse’).
     

For Leclerc Penelope’s power lies in the process of weaving and unravelling
and re-weaving, which she likens to the process of telling stories—finding
one’s own story, undoing the narratives of the past and reshaping them to
enable them to speak more widely and to accommodate more life stories.
The endpoint of Penelope’s life story, as imagined by Leclerc, is an Ithaca
that represents her ideal life—a place where men will have laid down their
weapons and where women’s voices will be heard: ‘Non, il n’est pas
impossible, le poète l’a promis, que les hommes déposent les armes, que
les femmes disent ce qu’elles taisent et soient entendues. Il n’est pas
impossible, Pénélope, l’histoire est si longue et incertaine, qu’on arrive un
jour à Ithaque’¹⁹ (No it’s not impossible, as the poet promised, that men
should set aside their weapons and women should voice what they’re
keeping quiet and should be heard. Penelope, history is so long and
uncertain—it’s not impossible that we should arrive one day in Ithaca).
One of the women’s stories from Homer that Leclerc voices is the hanging
of the servant girls, the episode that subsequently featured large in
Atwood’s The Penelopiad. Though her life may seem static, she is engaged
in a constant process of creativity: ‘Partir et revenir n’est pas ton mouve-
ment, mais bien plutôt, immobile, tisser et détisser pour retisser encore,
sachant mieux désormais, pour avoir si souvent dénoué les fils, comment ils
se nouent’²⁰ (Leaving and coming back again is not your movement, yours
is indeed rather to remain motionless while weaving, unravelling in order
to ravel up once more, knowing better after this, since you have unknotted
the threads so often, how they knot together again). It is the smallest of
jumps to move from this image of Penelope’s work to the presentation of
intertextuality, and how texts (which are of course ‘woven structures’) pull
away from each other before becoming closely knit in different patterns
once again.
Marguerite Yourcenar highlights this process of constant rewriting in
her Préface (1967)²¹ to Feux, originally published in 1936,²² where she
argues that her presentation of key literary figures from the ancient world
is not an attempt to see them as they were seen by their contemporaries,
but rather to highlight the course of their literary journey that has

¹⁹ Leclerc 2001: 230. ²⁰ Leclerc 2001: 222.

²¹ Reprinted in Yourcenar 1982: 1043–9.
²² We are referring here to the edition printed in the Pléiade collection of Yourcenar’s
fiction—see Yourcenar 1982.
  

brought them to the twentieth century: ‘Achille et Patrocle sont vus

moins d’après Homère que d’après les poètes, les peintres et les sculp-
teurs qui s’échelonnent entre l’antiquité homérique et nous; ces deux
récits bariolés çà et là des couleurs du XXe siècle débouchent d’ailleurs
dans un monde onirique sans âge’²³ (Achilles and Patroclus are per-
ceived less in Homeric terms and more according to the poets, painters,
and sculptors who straddle the years between Homeric antiquity and our
world; these two stories variously coloured by the hues of the twentieth
century appear moreover in an oneiric, ageless world). Feux in fact
anticipates the techniques and preoccupations of works such as The
World’s Wife, insofar as many of its sections entail a rewriting of
canonical texts from a female perspective, for example ‘Phèdre ou le
désespoir’, ‘Marie-Madeleine ou le salut’, or ‘Clytemnestre ou le Crime’.
Even when Yourcenar focalizes her narrative through a male, the writing
is still dominated by the world of women. In ‘Achille ou le mensonge’, for
example, she opens the section with an evocation of weaving, feminine
activity, and aligns it to the female power that the Parcae hold: ‘On avait
éteint toutes les lampes. Les servantes, dans la salle basse, tissaient à
l’aveuglette les fils d’une trame inattendue qui devenait celle des Par-
ques’²⁴ (All the lamps had been extinguished. In the low room the maid
servants were blindly weaving the threads of an unexpected fabric, which
became that of the Parcae).
Lying is also at the heart of Claude Cahun’s interpretation of Homeric
females. For a long time overlooked, Cahun has recently begun to be
reappropriated as one of the heroines of the transgender movement,²⁵
and in 2017 formed part of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
in London with the British artist, Gillian Wearing, which foregrounded
themes of identity and gender through photographic self-portraits. Born
in 1894, Cahun was heavily influenced by the surrealist movement, and
produced a series of self-portraits throughout her life—many of them
ludic in nature—which allowed her to explore both the male and female
identities that were a part of her. As well as exploring gender fluidity in
visual representations she also penned a volume, Héroïnes (1925), which

²³ Yourcenar 1982: 1044. ²⁴ Yourcenar 1982: 1059.

²⁵ For example see a recent article published on the BBC culture website in 2016: http://
www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160629-claude-cahun-the-trans-artist-years-ahead-of-her-time,
accessed 26 Feb 2019.
     

anticipates Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife (1999) by more than
seventy years and which is beginning to enjoy recognition, thanks to a
recent new edition.
Cahun calls her Penelope ‘L’Allumeuse—Pénélope l’irrésolue’. Part of
her lack of resolution stems from a pervading sense of ennui. Already
fatigued with the effort of choosing coloured threads for her needlework,
Penelope is too wearied to make any effort to choose a suitor, and by the
time of Cahun’s writing such ennui has deepened and congealed across
the millennia to such an extent that she has been frozen into a male-
authored position that shows scant interest in her own private thoughts.
Cahun’s Penelope, like Duffy’s, secretly hopes that Ulysses might not
return, and combines such hope with the thrill of weaving garments for
whichever suitor happens to have taken her fancy that day: ‘Pour mon
favori du moment je tisse une tunique assortie à son beau corps, un
manteau qui résume son âme. Et la changeante trame, couleur du temps,
me sert de prétexte: “C’est le linceul de Laërte,” leur dis-je de ma bouche
la plus subtile; “je ne choisirai point qu’il ne soit terminé” ’²⁶ (For my
current favourite I’m weaving a tunic that matches his beautiful body, a
coat that is an expression of his soul. And the changing weft, the colour of
time, gives me my excuse: ‘It’s Laertes’ shroud,’ I tell them in my most
guile-filled voice. ‘I won’t choose at all that it gets finished’). Penelope
unravels her text, even as she weaves her own dreams. But this image of a
woman, daring to believe that she can write her own future and forge her
own destiny, is brutally crushed by ‘le retour inespéré d’Ulysse’ (24)
(Ulysses’ unhoped-for return). Penelope is cruelly aware of the fate
that awaits her:
Il exaltera sa très chaste épouse, et la violera lâchement par-derrière—et la fera
crier entre les murs épais.
Ô dieux qui brutalisent les mortels!—Choisir, subir: mots flatteurs, mots
menteurs.
‘C’est la même chose.’ (25)
(He’ll extol his most chaste wife and will rape her, taking her from behind—the
coward—and will make her cry out within the thick walls.
O gods who brutalize mortals!—To choose, to submit: flattering words, lying
words.
‘It’s the same thing.’)

²⁶ Cahun 2006: 23.

  

Penelope is not the only female to suffer from and to contribute to the
network of lies within the Homeric epics. Responding to the Iliad, as well
as to the Odyssey, Cahun presents us with a Helen whose very raison
d’être is predicated upon a lie: ‘Je sais bien que je suis laide, mais je
m’efforce de l’oublier. Je fais la belle. En tout, et surtout en présence de
l’ennemi, je me comporte absolument comme si j’étais la plus belle. C’est le
secret de mon charme. Mensonge!—et je finirai moi-même par m’y laisser
prendre’ (27) (I know perfectly well that I’m ugly, but I make myself
forget it. I play the part of a beauty. In everything, and especially in front
of the enemy, I behave in every respect as if I were the most beautiful.
That’s the secret of my charm. A lie!—and I myself shall end up duping
myself ). As a liar herself, Helen is well placed to recognize the
duplicity of others, and quickly determines that ‘Ulysse est un de ces
monstres étranges dont le corps même est tissu de mensonge: ils font
l’amour à des pierres si ça leur convient! De plus, il peut bavarder. Qui le
croira? Qui prend au sérieux le roi d’Ithaque?’ (31) (Ulysses is one of
those strange monsters who has lying woven into his very body: they
make love to stones, if it suits them! What’s more he can talk the hind leg
off a donkey. Who’s going to believe him? Who takes the king of Ithaca
seriously?).
At the start of the twentieth century we can see patterns emerging that
only acquire clarity when viewed through the prism of later responses on
the part of women writers to Homer. Brittain focuses upon the female
experience of war, in her association of the Iliad with the terrible, bloody
days of the First World War. Cahun, through her presentation of Helen
in particular, alerts her readers to the lies woven into the fabric not just
of the Iliad but also of the Odyssey, whose hero’s very being is mined by
the lies that he tells. And, of course, lies take many forms, can appear as
omissions and misrepresentation, as well as of deliberate untruths. Para-
doxically it is as a consequence of such skewed narratives and wanton
lacunae that this volume has come into being.²⁷ As women benefitted

²⁷ It is noticeable that Graziosi and Greenwood’s 2007 volume contains no chapter on a

woman author, although Elizabeth Cook and Margaret Atwood are mentioned in the
introduction. There is an excellent survey of women writers responding to Homer in Hall
2008: 115–29, although this ranges from Anne Dacier in the sixteenth century via Elizabeth
Barrett Browning to authors including Marina Carr in the present day, and it includes not
just female-authored books, but books by male authors such as Robert Graves, presenting
the epics from a female perspective. A brief chapter in Manguel 2007: 183–92 focuses
     

from greater educational opportunities in the course of the twentieth

century, and encouraged each other through waves of feminism to
rework the foundational texts of Western civilization in order to ensure
that they voiced women’s experiences as well as men’s, they forged a host
of responses that, as a collective, constitute one of the most powerful and
overlooked aspects of Homer’s reception. Through the works of the
women writers studied in this volume Homer speaks of the First
World War, the Second World War, the horrors of Franco’s dictatorship,
and the war in Vietnam. He voices the distress of a marriage ending
in divorce. He enters the world of ‘children’s literature’ (an art form
that really began to flourish in the twentieth century), becomes part
of the narratives of illness and dying, and returns to his roots of orality
in the contemporary performance poetry and ‘rap’ culture of Kate
Tempest. He also finds himself at the vanguard of a new and important
trend—namely the translation of classical epic by women.
In collecting the present essays we have sought to represent a range
of cultures and genres in order to show how wide-ranging and diverse
female responses to Homer have been over the last one hundred years.
While it has often been assumed that women are more drawn to the
Odyssey, with its multiple female voices, its domestic rather than martial
setting, and its preference for cunning and trickery over violence, our
volume shows that the two epics in fact hold almost equal appeal for
women writers of the last one hundred years.²⁸ Indeed, one of the most
popular responses to Homer in recent years—Madeline Miller’s The
Song of Achilles (2012)—is a retelling of the Iliad, which has been
followed very recently by Miller’s latest book, Circe (2018), a response
to the Odyssey .Women read the Iliad’s violence and glorification of war
through the lenses of pacifism and mourning, and they read the Odys-
sey’s narrative of family reunion through the eyes of the ‘other’ women.

mainly on Samuel Butler before a brief discussion of Margaret Atwood. A handful of

women writers appear in his index—such as Mme de Staël, Anne Dacier, Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz, and Nancy Sherman. Wyles and Hall 2016 contains chapters on Anne Dacier,
Simone Weil, and Jacqueline de Romilly.
²⁸ For the Odyssey’s appeal to women see the much-cited Butler, and Steiner 2002 on
Butler’s ‘intuition . . . eliciting modern echoes’. But see also, for instance, remarks such as in
Griffin 1980: 66 on how the Odyssey displays ‘the feminine way of going to work, achieving
its ends by subtlety and indirection’. See Clayton 2004: 1–19 on the question of whether ‘the
Iliad [is] to the Odyssey as Man is to Woman’.
  

They remind us of victims of war and of the aftermath of war, and they
often show us that the Homeric texts themselves are more sensitive to
alternative voices than we assume, given what we think we ‘know’ about
Bronze Age Greek culture.
In the responses to the Iliad discussed in this volume we find women
converging in challenging the poem’s violence, and along with this also
challenging the primacy of heroic epic itself as the master genre. We see
in the work of H.D. the ‘lyricization’ of epic, for instance, and we learn of
Alice Oswald’s sense that in the Iliad’s laments there is a lyrical, pastoral
tradition waiting to be uncovered. In Elizabeth Cook’s mediation of
Achilles via Keats we see epic and its masculine values deconstructed.
In Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, as in Christa Wolf, the inhumanity
of the Iliad’s violence, personified for Wolf in the figure of Achilles, is
subjected to ethical scrutiny and the masculinity which underlies it found
dysfunctional. But new forms of heroism and new forms of epic arise
from such critique, which uncovers the overlooked voices of the mothers,
wives, and sisters whose story the Iliad also is. In Kate Tempest’s work
kleos, or glory, is translated into female heroism in the character of Gloria
and her heroic defeat of her would-be rapists. Many women writers have
been critical of the Iliad’s focus on Helen as the cause of the war—
inscribed as it is in Helen’s often-expressed self-hatred in the poem (e.g.
Iliad 3.172–81). Women writers have also been keen to hear Helen’s
voice and see her as a possible epic narrator in the Iliad—the epic
suggests this through her famous tapestry and her conversation with
Priam on the walls.
The first of the chapters in this volume analyses the Homeric vision
of H.D. It is pointed out by Genevieve Liveley that H.D. both reflects
feminism’s first-wave concerns of women acquiring political recognition
and anticipates one of the chief tenets of second-wave feminism, which is
the necessity of finding a woman’s voice through the rewriting of canon-
ical texts. Liveley argues that H.D. makes Homer’s female characters
interchangeable, and that her interest lies in foregrounding women
and asserting female authority. She cites H.D. who, rather beautifully,
presents the ‘shimmering’ figure of her Helen; the term which connotes
elusiveness, perhaps even evasiveness, suggests a figure who is closely
related to Cahun’s Hélène, whose raison d’être is rooted in deception.
Liveley argues that Homer’s text is capacious enough for the many
different manifestations of Helen and the related female characters and
     

that H.D.’s Helen in Egypt establishes a new kind of epic narrative, the
quest of the female nostos (homeward journey).
This merging of the different waves of feminism is a phenomenon that
we shall see reappearing throughout the volume, and many of the
rewritings also anticipate the wider social and political concerns that
characterize third-wave feminism. The inadequacy of classical epic as a
genre to convey women’s concerns and preoccupations is also an abiding
theme, since many of the women under discussion here either subvert
and transform the genre, or transpose elements of the Homeric epic into
other genres entirely.
In Elizabeth Cook’s slender masterpiece, Achilles, Homeric epic finds
itself transformed into what might best be described as a prose poem.
Parts of the text were written for performance, to musical accompani-
ment, and, as with other works discussed in this volume, recordings of
the author’s reading of the text make up an important part of its
reception. Polly Stoker’s essay, however, concentrates on the final section
of the book, written after the initial performance script and intended
only for printed publication. Stoker’s reading draws out the full range of
implications of Cook’s mediation of the Iliad via the poetry and diaries of
John Keats. Stoker shows us how Cook creates an eroticized, sensual,
rather gender-fluid Iliad, and an Achilles who embodies far more than
what George Steiner referred to as the poem’s ‘unflinching vision of
masculinity (Steiner 1996: xvii)’.
The subversion of the values of masculine, warfaring glory is explored
by Catherine Burke, Nancy Rabinowitz, and Carolin Hahnemann. In
Burke’s study of two French-speaking writers who turned to the Iliad as a
way of responding to the horrors of the Second World War she argues
that both Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff (the former through her
analysis of ‘force’ and the latter through her presentation of Hector as
résistant) emphasize Homer’s humanity. Burke suggests that this is a
humanity that transcends movements such as feminism, so that their
works ‘represent neither a feminist nor a female nostos, but rather a
Homeric one’. In employing Homer to explore the wider political land-
scape of the world they were living through—for Weil, the working
conditions of factory employees and for Bespaloff, the ever-present threat
of deportation and death—both writers anticipate the imperative within
third-wave feminism to engage in a wider political and social sphere than
had been the case with second-wave feminism. Christa Wolf ’s reference
  

to Achilles as ‘Achill, das Vieh’ (Achilles, the beast) in her novel

Kassandra encapsulates the lack of humanity Wolf associates with
masculinity and warfare. Wolf writes powerfully of the need for women
to break free of a male-dominated tradition that largely excludes female
experience. In Nancy Rabinowitz’s essay we see how Wolf, like Bespaloff
and Weil, and Oswald, focuses upon the ‘humane’ and on straining
towards a utopia that lies beyond sectarian categorizations, such as
different forms of feminism. Rabinowitz argues that it is empathy that
both transcends feminism and engages with contemporary politics.
The humanity at the core of Weil’s and Bespaloff ’s responses to
Homer is shared, in Carolin Hahnemann’s reading, by Alice Oswald’s
way of presenting us with the consequences of war. Like a physical war
memorial, Oswald’s poem undercuts the glory of war by making a
monument of the names of the fallen. Hahnemann movingly recalls
the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, DC, but in Oswald’s
world such monuments also include the village war memorials erected
across Britain after the First World War. Hahnemann discusses the
possibility of a feminist or feminine point of view for Memorial, but
she ultimately concludes that while Oswald’s poem does undermine
what Bespaloff called the ‘virile love of war’, it does so from a humanist
rather than a feminist position.
In Emily Spiers’s essay on Kate Tempest’s hip-hop epic Brand New
Ancients, we learn that Tempest aims to move her audiences through
‘radical empathy’ to engage with the contemporary world, just as Rabi-
nowitz suggests, and to envisage and work for a better future. Tempest’s
‘everday epics’ and ‘small heroics’ remind us of Elizabeth Barrett Brown-
ing’s vision, expressed in her own epic Aurora Leigh, that ‘all men are
possible heroes: every age / heroic in proportions’. In Spiers’s account
of Tempest’s work humanity is called to action rather than mere
contemplation—this is a new form of epic for a new age.
In working with the Odyssey the women writers discussed in this
volume have responded to the poem’s many representations of feminin-
ity. While the poem itself predominantly suggests a patriarchal view of
its female characters, it is also, not least because of the ‘layeredness’ of its
narrative, open to new interpretations of these characters. As Seth Schein
has argued, the poem may ‘tempt its audience’ into acceptance of the
views and judgements expressed by male characters such as Agamemnon
or Odysseus, but it also leaves itself to some extent open to different
     

voices, and thus is characterized by a certain amount of open-endedness

and a degree of indeterminacy.²⁹ As the first woman to translate the
Odyssey in its entirety into English, Emily Wilson has paid extremely
close attention to those places in the poem where inconsistency or ‘gaps’
open the androcentric values of the text up to the challenge of a more
open reading.³⁰ The contributors to this volume have all considered the
ways in which the many female voices of the Odyssey clamour to be
heard in women’s poetry, from Augusta Davies Webster and H.D. to
Linda Pastan and Carol Ann Duffy. We see a recurring interest in
Penelope, of course, in her role as weaver and artist—a motif which
features a great deal in feminist criticism outside the disciplines of
Classics and Classical reception, and informs the work of both Margaret
Atwood and Barbara Köhler. The figure of Penelope has lent itself to the
theme of female subjectivity, and the construction and articulation of an
authentic female self in Francisca Aguirre, Barbara Köhler, and Margaret
Atwood. The Odyssey is also a poem about the home, or oikos, about
family and marriage—and we see in the works of both Gwyneth Lewis
and Hélène Cixous how this theme engenders a new, feminine turn
towards the nostos theme—as the ‘everyday odysseys’ Kate Tempest
speaks of take women writers on painful personal journeys, facing their
own or their family’s illness and decline and claiming for themselves
perhaps the excellence, or arete, that becomes the glory, or kleos, of
Penelope in Agamemnon’s famous assessment (Odyssey 24.194–8).
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad is unlikely to be the song envisaged by
Agamemnon’s ghost when he makes his prophecy about (in Emily
Wilson’s translation) ‘a poem to delight all those on earth / about
intelligent Penelope’ (Odyssey 24.198). In Jasmine Richards’s discussion
of Atwood the focus is on how Atwood treats Penelope as the author of
her own ‘delightful song’ in which she presents an alternative account of
her story in competition with the many male voices (e.g. Telemachus,
Antinous, Agamemnon, Amphimedon, and Odysseus himself ) whose
judgement the Odyssey appears to privilege. Taking seriously Atwood’s
complex and multi-layered feminism, Richards offers a nuanced critique
of the intricacies of what she terms the ‘anxieties of female authorship’ in
the Penelopiad’s rewriting of the Odyssey.

²⁹ Schein 1995: 25–6. See Katz 1991 for indeterminacy, especially with reference to Penelope.
³⁰ See Doherty 1995: 23 and 41–2 on ‘fissures’ in the text, and ‘open’ versus ‘closed’ readings.
  

Emerging from an interest in female authorship, the German poet Barbara

Köhler’s 2007 volume Niemands Frau (Nobody’s Wife) approaches the
Odyssey from the perspective of the many female figures it features. In
Georgina Paul’s essay we discover how much more Köhler achieved
during the nearly twelve years she worked on creating the polyphonous,
varied intertextual web, as though she herself were working on Pene-
lope’s great loom. Paul translates passages from the complex and allusive
text and enables those without German to appreciate Köhler’s lyrical
explorations of what the poet calls ‘a different kind of translation’.
Comparing Köhler with Alice Oswald, Paul draws our attention to the
fact that both authors refer to their work as translation, and both authors
complicate and question what translation of Homer consists of. Paul
coins the phrase ‘speculative archaeologies’ for the two poets’ work and
she shows that in both cases a disruption or disintegration of narrative is
in play. In Elena Theodorakopoulos’s essay Köhler’s resistance to narra-
tive linearity becomes the focus for a close examination of the final
section of Niemands Frau and its correspondences with Books 19 and
20 of the Odyssey. Theodorakopoulos draws out the ways in which the
preoccupation of feminist scholarship with Penelope’s unreadability
converges with Köhler’s interest in uncertainty to produce an insightful
portrayal of the unsung lyrical songs of Penelope.
The ‘dramatic monologues’ discussed in Isobel Hurst’s and in Sheila
Murnaghan and Deborah Roberts’s essays take us beyond Penelope to
include the voices of the ‘other women’, Calypso and Circe. The poems
discussed in both essays focus precisely on those gaps and fissures talked of
by Wilson and Doherty. Hurst draws our attention to authorship and
storytelling in the Odyssey and its reception in a chapter that shows how
crucial the medium of the dramatic monologue is in the tradition of
revisionist myth-making, from Tennyson’s Ulysses all the way to Atwood’s
Penelope. While the Odyssey does include some female narratives, not only
Penelope’s, but also for instance Calypso’s angry speech and Helen’s
mysterious story from Troy, the epic is dominated by the voice of Odysseus
himself (albeit in a range of disguises). The dramatic monologues offer
different, but personal, points of view. In the absence of a narrator, Hurst
shows how such lyric is a particularly open, ‘democratic’ form as it
addresses the reader with the task of interpretation and engagement.
The Circe poems discussed by Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah
Roberts focus on one of the most engaging and mysterious characters
     

in the Odyssey. Unlike Calypso, Circe does not get to voice her feelings
about Odysseus—we see her cheerfully weaving and singing, and offering
sexual and other favours, but we know nothing about how she feels about
her role as ‘the other woman’—or about her ability to turn men into
swine. From a woman’s point of view there are many questions in need
of answers when it comes to Circe. Murnaghan and Roberts show us
how women’s poetry goes about addressing these. In paying attention to
Circe’s character and voice, poems such as those in Louise Glück’s
Meadowlands and Atwood’s ‘Circe/Mud Poems’ complicate and ques-
tion Circe’s otherness, and thus destabilize the priority given to Pene-
lope’s role as ‘the one’ in the Odyssey.
An insight into quite how widely the Penelope myth has travelled is
offered by Victoria Reuter’s chapter which focuses upon a Spanish
poet—Francisca Aguirre, whose long poem Ítaca Reuter reads through
Cavafy, contrasting Aguirre’s experience of Ithaca as a woman to the one
available to Cavafy as a man. The poem charts Aguirre’s struggle between
the self she wants to construct and the one that she is allowed by society
to have. In addition to this second-wave response Aguirre also uses
the myth of Penelope to explore her feelings about the Francoist Spain
of the 1970s, and the attendant ideology that restricted women to the
private sphere.
The waves of feminism that are the undercurrents of the writers of the
book crash against each other and merge, reminding us to be cautious of
overly rigid time-frames and pigeon-holes. Aguirre is indisputably pur-
suing a second-wave agenda, yet her interest in engaging with the wider
social and political legacies of Franco’s dictatorship betray a more third-
wave position. As women have turned to myth to illuminate more and
more discrete areas of everyday living, Homer has appeared in ever more
surprising areas. The pioneering work of contemporary women writers
responding to classical texts has seen a variety of genres respond in new
and dynamic ways to Homeric texts.
Francesca Richards’s vivid reading of Adèle Geras’s children’s book
Ithaka features Penelope as teller of stories, woven at her loom. Geras
happily acknowledges the feminist angle of her work, her eagerness to
encourage young girls to have confidence in their voice and their right to
expression, reinforced by her decision to portray the Odyssey’s adven-
tures through Penelope’s work. Moreover, Geras is careful to include
female characters who chafe against the restrictions imposed upon them,
  

especially in comparison with their brothers. Such episodes serve as a

useful reminder of the long tradition of young girls turning to the classics
in order to keep up with their male counterparts, from the works of
George Eliot and Louisa M. Alcott to this new manifestation of the
phenomenon in the hands of Geras. Richards argues that Penelope’s
weaving creates new boundaries for the Odyssey, as the scenes on her
tapestry transmute into modern female interpolations.
The appearance and acceptance of the personal voice in work
responding to classical epic is a new phenomenon, especially in the
form of illness narrative. In this volume Ruth MacDonald analyses
Gwyneth Lewis’s A Hospital Odyssey, which is an account in poetry of
how Lewis had to care for her husband when he was diagnosed with stage
4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma. MacDonald demonstrates how epic is trans-
posed from a traditionally masculine genre, celebrating battle and hero-
ism, into the domestic, everyday world of all too many people and
meditates upon the terminology of cancer discourse, overly studded
with exhortations to ‘fight’ and to engage in a ‘battle’ against the disease.
The fantastic elements of epic are preserved, with Lewis depicting the
tumour and the disease as the monsters that are threatening her hus-
band’s life and their domestic happiness. MacDonald argues that this
contemporary odyssey, set in a modern NHS hospital, demands that we
think again about how we respond to the sick and urges empathy and a
common humanity. Homer also enters the sick room in Hélène Cixous’s
account of her elderly mother’s final decline and death, analysed by
Fiona Cox. For Cixous, as for Lewis, the monsters and horrors con-
fronted by Odysseus and his men metamorphose into the different
manifestations and terrors of illness. However, for Cixous’s mother the
nostos is not a journey back to health and a return to home, but rather the
final journey into the underworld that each of us must travel alone. As
Cixous’s personal world falls from its axis, she depicts how she is forced
to evaluate anew the literary works that form the bedrock of her being.
This fusion of the literary and the personal is indicated by the highly
charged title that she bestows upon her memoir, in which Homer is both
gendered as a woman and is dead—Homère est morte . . .
We end our volume with Emily Wilson’s reflections on her new
translation of the Odyssey. In her essay Wilson speaks of her sense of
ethical responsibility when faced with aspects of the poem that repel her.
Her approach to translating the Odyssey includes making problems and
     

inequalities enshrined in the text and its culture visible to the modern
reader, rather than accommodating them, for instance by adopting an
archaizing turn of phrase. Wilson’s essay gives us insight into her ethics
and her practice of translation, and in doing so provides us with a strong
sense of the Odyssey as a living, breathing text, rather than a museum
piece. Her essay includes a detailed analysis of her understanding of the
famous reverse simile, in which Penelope’s joy as she finally embraces the
weeping Odysseus is compared to the feelings of shipwrecked sailors
reaching dry land.³¹ By explaining precisely how she went about inter-
preting what the simile tells us about the relationship between Penelope
and Odysseus, Wilson reminds us of just how open a text the Odyssey can
be, and how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.
In their responses to the two epics the women writers discussed in this
volume have taken up the challenges put to them by the Homeric texts:
the challenge of war and violence in the Iliad, and the challenge of song
or speech in the Odyssey. They have looked to the wrath of Achilles
and its dire consequences, and to the complicated relationships of the
Odyssey.³² In doing so, they provide direct answers to the rebukes uttered
by Hector and Telemachus to Andromache and Penelope respectively.
By the Scaean gate, after they had laughed together at their baby son,
Hector told Andromache to go and see to her weaving and her hand-
maids, and let war be men’s business. Telemachus echoes precisely
Hector’s form of words when he tells his mother Penelope that she
should go and see to her weaving and her handmaids, and let speech
(mythos) be men’s business. While Andromache expresses a view on
battle strategy, Penelope makes a judgement on the bard’s performance:
each woman has attempted to influence the core of the epic she
inhabits—war in the Iliad, storytelling in the aftermath of war in the
Odyssey—but neither woman’s view is wanted.³³ The women’s writing
discussed in this volume could be read as the unspoken answers to the
silencing of Andromache and Penelope: yes, war is women’s business,
and yes, speech is women’s business too.

³¹ Foley 1978.
³² See Emily Wilson’s striking and illuminating translation of polytropon in Odyssey 1.1
as ‘complicated’.
³³ See Iliad 6.491–4 and Odyssey 1.357–60. The lines are identical up to the middle of the
final line in each excerpt, except for the words πόλεμος (war) in Iliad 6.493 and μῦθος
(speech) in Odyssey 1.359.
 1
‘After his wine-dark sea’
H.D. in Homer

Genevieve Liveley

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary

writers, whose extensive literary canon (stretching from 1912 to 1961)
includes an epic catalogue of classically inspired poems, translations,
re-imaginings, and ‘fragments’, repeatedly turns to—and away from—
Homer.¹ Again and again her poetry questions the (im)possibility of
telling stories, of writing poetry, after Homer. Again and again H.D.’s
Homeric heroines (Penelope, Calypso, Circe, Helen) question the roles
that have been scripted for them, seeking to revise and retell their
familiar histories, ostensibly attempting to resist and rewrite the master
narratives that have shaped their identities and stories in the classical
tradition. In doing so they not only reflect first-wave feminist calls in the
early 1900s for the political recognition of women’s voices and women’s
viewpoints, but they anticipate and prefigure second-wave feminist
interrogations and rejections of culturally scripted female identity that
would begin in the 1960s.² Indeed, feminist readings (largely biograph-
ical and psychoanalytical in approach— informed by H.D.’s own letters
and notebooks, including those detailing her therapeutic sessions with
Freud in the 1930s) dominate the scholarship on H.D.’s poetry and

¹ See Brinkman and Brinkman 2016, Gregory 2009, and DuPlessis 1986: 1–30 on H.D. as
classicist, and on H.D.’s divergence from mainstream ‘classical’ modernism.
² See DuPlessis 1979 and Friedman 1981 on the profound influence that H.D.’s poetry
had upon the development of Anglo-American feminism, feminist literary criticism, and
feminist writing in the 1960s–1980s.
Genevieve Liveley, ‘After his wine-dark sea’: H.D. in Homer In: Homer’s Daughters: Women’s
Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Edited by: Fiona Cox and Elena
Theodorakopoulos, Oxford University Press (2019). © The editors and several contributors.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198802587.003.0001
  

represent her writing as straightforwardly revisionist in its attempts at

modernist myth-making.³
Moving beyond this mode of analysis and focusing upon a relatively
neglected aspect of H.D.’s classicism, this chapter investigates the ways in
which H.D.’s poetry engages directly, and sometimes playfully, with
Homeric epic. After analysing a selection of earlier works (‘A Dead
Priestess Speaks’, ‘Calypso’, ‘At Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Odyssey’) for insights
into H.D.’s witty, quasi-counterfactual classicism, it offers a close reading
of the Homeric features of H.D.’s final long poem, the 1961 epic Helen in
Egypt. The readings offered here argue that H.D.’s responses to Homer
ultimately demonstrate a ‘releasing’ of pre-existing narrative emphases
rather than a ‘resistant’ reading against the grain of the Homeric trad-
ition, in a more sympathetic and less antagonistic engagement with the
Homeric source texts than received readings tend to acknowledge.
‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’ is the title poem from a collection mostly
written in the 1930s but only submitted for publication in March 1949,
with an accompanying note in which H.D. refers to this programmatic
poem as one which ‘describes my own feelings’.⁴ In fact, the biographical
identification of the speaker of this poem with H.D. herself is unavoid-
able here. The dead priestess and speaker is named in the course of the
poem as ‘Delia of Miletus’ (CP 372):⁵ ‘Delia Alton’ was one of H.D.’s own
pen names, and in the final poem of this collection Miletus is named as
the place where H.D. meets Freud for psychoanalysis (CP 451). H.D.’s
identification with her character in ‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’ is rich in
significance, then—particularly when she receives praise and fame for
modestly and purposefully refusing to make ‘a song that told of war’
(CP 376) and for failing to write an ‘epitaph / to a dead soldier’ on the
grounds that ‘no one could write, after his wine-dark sea, / an epitaph of
glory and of spears’ (CP 372; italics in original).
Here ‘a dead priestess speaks’ ostensibly of H.D.’s Homeric reception
in and as a mode of resistance and rejection. In the aftermath of one and
possibly (given the submission date) two world wars, no one can write

³ See for example Friebert 1980, Friedman 1981, Ostriker 1982a, DuPlessis 1985, and
DuPlessis 1986.
⁴ H.D.–Pearson Correspondence, H.D. Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University, 16
March 1949. For a nicely nuanced reading of this poem see Flack 2015.
⁵ H.D.’s Collected Poems are abbreviated throughout this chapter as CP; her Helen in
Egypt as HE; her End to Torment as ET. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
 ..   

‘after’ Homer. Any song that tells of war, that treats the topics of classical
epic, risks glorifying death in war or accepting uncritically the literary
and political dynamics of a classical tradition that supposedly insists (in
Owen’s Horatian formulation) ‘dulce et decorum est, / Pro patria mori’
(Horace, Odes 3.2.13; Owen CP 55). Yet, the staging of H.D.’s ‘A Dead
Priestess Speaks’ complicates this apparent resistance. In the voice of
Delia of Miletus, H.D. effectively composes an epitaph not to a dead
soldier but to a dead priestess, an epitaph of secret glory and unseen
bravery, of a woman’s lonely battles. It is an epitaph, moreover, that
stands in parallel to that ‘carved upon the stone’ by the anonymous ‘they’
in the poem: they who revere yet fail to understand their priestess,
prophetess, and poet; they who repeatedly misread ‘the pattern’ of her
life story; they who ‘did not see . . . / . . . could not see’ who she really was
(CP 375); they who do not hear her ‘secret song’ sung at night (CP 373).
‘They’, misreading all the signs, praise her for all the wrong things; ignore
those nocturnal activities that invite censure as witch or whore; see and
say only ‘that [she] was good’ (CP 377). H.D.’s epigraph sees and hears
and speaks otherwise, telling a different story about the life and death of
Delia of Miletus, and about her secret triumphs and trials. It also invites
us to look again at ‘the pattern’ of H.D.’s own songs and stories—
especially those written ‘after his wine-dark sea’ (CP 372).
A poem written in the same period and intended for the same collec-
tion, echoing the same title as ‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’ in its original
formulation, ‘Calypso’ or ‘Callypso speaks’, offers us further insights
into H.D.’s negotiations with the challenges of writing after Homer.
This poem presents an alternative version of Book 5 of Homer’s Odyssey,
re-visioning the shipwrecked Odysseus’ encounter with Calypso
(CP 388–96).⁶ It is presented as a dramatic dialogue between the two
Homeric characters, with stage directions provided to direct our reading.
Indeed, as in ‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’, the dynamics of reading and
misreading, of signs and miscommunication, figure prominently in this
poem. In particular, in the overtly gendered comedy of misunderstanding

⁶ For Friedman 1990: 65 this poem and H.D.’s other Homeric revisions represent
‘directly gendered re-presentations of dominant mythic discourse’ based upon an imagist
pattern. Murnaghan 2009a: 75 suggests that ‘The misspelling in H.D.’s original title suggests
her unscholarly relationship to classical material; the verb “speaks” manages succinctly to
convey that the poem is giving a voice to a character who has previously been denied one.’
For alternative readings see Flack 2015: 175–6 and Friedman 1981: 236–43.
  

that runs throughout the narrative, neither Calypso nor Odysseus is able
to ‘read’ the other.⁷ The apparent dialogue between them turns out to be
an interweaving of monologues, staging independent and irreconcilable
points of view.
The poem begins with Calypso ‘perceiving the long-wandering
Odysseus, clambering ashore’ (CP 388). To the sea-nymph (‘priestess,
occult, nymph / and goddess’: CP 389) Odysseus is a repellent creature:
‘clumsy . . . stupid as an ox . . . oaf . . . ass . . . slow, plodding and silly /
animal, . . . heavy, great oaf, / walrus, / whale . . . Idiot . . . Odysseus, the
land-walrus’ (CP 391–2). Out of his natural environment, the sea (and
perhaps, Homeric epic too), Odysseus casts a ridiculous figure. But as
he comes closer and tracks Calypso to her hidden cave and lookout,
he becomes more dangerous than comic, a ‘vision of obscene force’
(CP 393). As he first ‘clasps her’, makes love to her, and then ‘drops
her’, he is ‘hound— / beast of an insensitive pack’ (CP 393); and when he
leaves her, she sees that he is a man: and ‘man is clumsy and evil, . . . man
is a devil, / man will not understand . . . man is a brute and a fool’
(CP 394–5). This, at least, is how Calypso sees things. Odysseus sees
things very differently: he sees himself ‘at home’ just as much on land as
on sea, equally ‘at home’ on Ogygia as Ithaca, with Calypso as with his
wife Penelope (CP 391). He knows, moreover (and repeats the refrain),
that ‘a nymph is a woman’, and as such to her ‘All men are fathers, /
kings and gods’ (CP 393). For Odysseus, the role of woman is to be
subject to the control of men, to provide men with the little things they
need: food, drink, clothes, sex. But, as Calypso’s refrain reminds us, he
does not understand—anything. He tries to read what looks like a Greek
letter marked on the sand by a fallen branch, alongside ‘a snake, wound
to a cypher’, but he cannot tell whether the sign represents an ‘alpha’ or
an ‘omega’—a beginning or an end (CP 391). He clumsily misreads and
misinterprets everything.

⁷ The humour of this poem is often overlooked, despite Calypso’s own repeated invita-
tions to ‘laugh’ (CP 389); to ‘counter-smile’, ‘to smile awry’, and her confession that she is
‘amused to think [Odysseus] may / fall’ (CP 390); her threat to ‘eat Odysseus, the land-
walrus / to-morrow with parsley / and bean-sauce’, and her wry query: ‘Isn’t he drowned
yet?’ (CP 392). There is also a playful pun in Calypso’s words as she hides in her cave: ‘no
one can find, / no one can follow—’ (CP 392). The no one (outis) who follows and finds her
is, of course, Odysseus (cf. Odyssey 9.364).
 ..   

Thus, in the richly comedic conclusion to the poem, Odysseus sails

away from Calypso’s island reciting an epic catalogue of all the things
that ‘she gave’ him to aid him in his onward odyssey:
she gave me water
and fruit in a basket,
and shallow
baskets of pulse and grain, and a ball
of hemp
for mending the sail;
...
she gave me peace in her cave.
(CP 395–6)

But Calypso reads and remembers the things ‘he took’ from her
otherwise:
he took my lute and my shell of crystal—
he never looked back—
(CP 396)

Odysseus sails away, still cataloguing all the things that Calypso ‘gave’
him, unable to hear her words—or she his.⁸ And as the physical distance
between them grows, their semi-stychomythic exchange of incomplete
lines and internal rhymes emphasizes the fact that this man and woman
were never able to communicate with each other. Even when sex brought
them physically close together and Calypso lay with ‘her hair spread on
[Odysseus’] chest . . . [as] He sleeps’, she could not hear or understand
him, asking of no one, or of us: ‘What did he say?’ (CP 394).
Thus, in this poem it is not Odysseus but H.D. who looks back,
re-visioning, re-reading and rewriting as a romantic comedy the begin-
ning and end, the ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’, of a key chapter from Homer’s
Odyssey. Indeed, this is a recurring motif in H.D.’s writing. She adopts a
similar strategy of textual reworking in her poem ‘At Ithaca’, from the
1924 collection Heliodora, this time taking Homer’s Penelope as her

⁸ H.D. employs the epic catalogue as topos in two other ‘Homeric’ poems from the 1921
Hymen collection: ‘The Islands’, engaging Homer’s epic catalogue of ships (Iliad 2.494–760)
in a lyric catalogue of islands; and ‘Sea Heroes’ evoking the same Iliadic catalogue, here
overlain with the catalogue of lost Phaeacian sailors in the Odyssey (Odyssey 8.111–19). In
Helen, Helen tries to charm Achilles ‘with the names of Greek islands’ (HE 35–7).
  

focus. As in ‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’, the autobiographical analogy

between character and poet (and here between Penelope’s weaving and
H.D.’s poetry) is overt. In one of her collections of autobiographical
notes, recollecting her sessions with Freud, H.D. observes of her ongoing
attempt to write and rewrite a novel (itself autobiographical) that ‘It must
be Penelope’s web I’m weaving’ (Advent 153).⁹ She weaves (and unpicks)
a section of that same web in the poem ‘At Ithaca’. Its opening refrain
‘Over and back’ matches the recursive movement of Penelope’s loom
inside Odysseus’s palace to the wash of the surf on the shore outside—
and to the ebb and flow of Penelope’s own ‘weary thoughts’ as she
prepares to ‘bind the end’ of the completed tapestry each night, praying
that one of her many suitors might also bring an end to her ‘long waiting
with a kiss’ (CP 163–4). But each night, over and again, she resists that
pull and exhorts herself to ‘tear the pattern’ and undo the work that she
had thought ‘was done’ (CP 164):
But each time that I see
my work so beautifully
inwoven and would keep
the picture and the whole,
Athene steels my soul.
Slanting across my brain,
I see as shafts of rain
his chariot and his shafts,
I see the arrows fall,
I see the lord who moves
like Hector lord of love,
I see him matched with fair
bright rivals, and I see
those lesser rivals flee.
(CP 163–4)

In this final stanza Athene’s intervention forces Penelope to look at her

work differently, to ‘see’ (as H.D. repeats six times here) both it and the
pattern or story it depicts otherwise. Interwoven (or ‘inwoven’) with the
warp of Penelope’s desire for one of her suitors (one of her husband’s
‘fair / bright rivals’ on the home front, whom she hopes will ‘conquer’ her
virtue and her long wait with an adulterous kiss) runs the woof of desire
for Odysseus himself. In this re-visioning of Homer’s epic and its heroes,

⁹ For Friedman 1990, Homer’s double-weaving Penelope is H.D.’s own double.

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
"Go?" Johnson shrugged, then stretched and yawned widely. "I
guess it went all right. I haven't seen Danny or Flip for forty years.
Wonder what ever happened to them?"
"Ended up in jail, most likely. But what about the crisis? Did you
succeed in avoiding it?"
"Crisis?" Johnson peered at him through narrowed lids. "Are you
daft, man? What crisis could there possible be in a bunch of kids
getting together in a corner sweet shop?"
"But...." Cavendish shook his head. "Things did change!"
"What changed? Name me one concrete thing that's different than it
used to be."
"I...." He shook his head. "I can't."
"Of course you can't. And for the very simple reason that nothing did
change. I'm still the same man I always was. And you'd better start
coming up with some concrete benefits from this gadget of yours.
You know I put myself into hock to raise the money you needed—I
told my wife I was adding another franchise to my line. If she finds
out her jewels were hocked for me to play around with a time
machine, instead of a new line of cars, she'll flip. So how about it,
Cavendish? Some concrete results next time."
Cavendish went to the bar and returned with a generous slug of
whisky.
"What's this?" said Johnson.
"Why, your drink."
"Drink?" He snorted. "You know I don't drink, man. Have you gone
completely daft? I haven't touched alcohol since I was a youngster."
Cavendish seemed near tears. He drank the whisky himself, then
turned back to the machine.
"What are you up to now?"
"I'm looking for a suitable crisis point." The screen wavered, then
filled with a group of men in uniform—heavy winter garb. They were
clustered around a small fire in a cave; one seemed to be heating
coffee in a tin can. Johnson sucked in his breath.
"You know what is going to happen?"
"Yes, dammit! You're a devil!"
"Perhaps." He sighed. "I sometimes wonder.... But no matter." He
adjusted the picture, and events flowed forward a few hours. The
soldiers were now at the base of a snow-covered hill. Above them,
gaunt and bare, the timber-line beckoned with obscenely stretching
limbs.
Suddenly a flare shot up from someplace to the right of the little
band. Its eerie glare picked out unexpected shadows among the
trees above. One of the soldiers, facing the prospect of near and
immediate personal death for the first time in his life, panicked and
began spraying the tree-line with his grease gun. Branches and
splinters of wood kicked out, until the Sergeant reached out and
slapped the gun from the boy's arms.

The men waited until an unheard signal sounded; then the Sergeant
waved them on up the hill. Slowly, cautiously at first, they made
progress through the protecting trees. But then they reached the
timber-line and froze. Cursing, the Sergeant moved from man to
man, shoving them out of the false protection. At last he came to the
boy who had fired earlier. Just as the older man placed his hand on
the boy's shoulder, the boy twisted and broke away, running madly
down the hill....
"That's enough, damn you!"
Cavendish turned off the picture and came back to Johnson's side.
"They court-martialed you, didn't they?"
"You know they did," he said, dully.
"You were unlucky, that's all. Many a soldier spooks his first time
under fire. A lot of them run away."
"How many of them run right into the arms of their Commanding
General?"
"Unlucky," said Cavendish.
"They kicked me out," said Johnson, bitterly. "A dishonorable
discharge—'cowardice in the face of enemy action'. Said I was lucky
I didn't face the firing squad."
"Officers are human, too," said Cavendish. "In times of stress, they
tend to panic."
"They were 'making an example of me'," said Johnson. He laughed,
a humorless sound that grated on the ears. "Some example. It took
me twenty years to live it down."
"But people do forget, eventually."
"Not all of them."
"Shall we get on with it?"
"Of course, man. This is what I have been waiting for!" His words
were sharp and impatient.

"Hey, Art! Got a butt?"

"Yeah, sure." Art Johnson scrabbled around inside his jacket and
came out with a crumpled pack of cigarettes. He passed them over.
"Thanks, buddy. God, but it's cold here!" He stripped off one glove
and warmed the palm of his hand over the glowing coal of the
cigarette. "Now I know what they mean when they call a place
Godforsaken."
"Ease off there, you two!" Sergeant Stebbins glowered their way.
"You want every chink in Korea to hear you?"
"Sorry, Sarge," muttered the cigarette-bummer. He dropped his voice
to a whisper. "Hey, Artie! I hear some of the guys in Fox company
are making book on how many of us live through the day."
"Yeah?" Johnson shook his head. "Some characters'll bet on their
own mother's funeral."
"Or their own." The boy giggled. "Wouldn't it be funny if the winners
couldn't collect because they were all dead?"
"A real scream," said Johnson, sourly. "Look, let's change the
subject, huh?"
The boy shrugged. "Sure, Art. Anything you say."
They lapsed into silence, and Art Johnson considered the
improbable amount of circumstances that had brought him to the
base of this numbered but nameless hill half across the world from
home. There was nothing of home here, and he felt the lack mightily.
There was a very good chance that before another few hours had
passed, he would be dead. And then he would never see home
again.
He shivered. The thought frightened him. He didn't want to die. Not
that he supposed any of the other men wanted to die either. But they
were remote, other beings, alien in Art Johnson's world. What they
felt he could not guess; what he felt he knew.
And he did not want to die!
"Hey, Art!"
"Uh, what is it, Tooey?"
"Chinks, I think. Up there in the trees. God, they're sneaking down!"
"Where? Dammit, where?" He thumbed the safety of his grease gun,
and brought it up to bear on the trees. His fingers tightened around
the stock; the trigger started to depress—
Then—
Something clicked.
"Jesus, Artie, they're coming!"
Art Johnson's eyes took on a faraway look. His fingers loosened
their death grip on the gun. He shook his head.
"Artie!"
"Shut up, Tooey!" Reaching out, he slapped the boy's face. "You're
imagining things."
"But they're up there, Artie!" whimpered the boy.
"Sure they're up there. But not where you think they are. They're dug
in, in the caves. And it's going to be up to us to dig them out. Now
snap out of it!"

Suddenly a flare shot up from somewhere to their right. It whistled,

then popped, the white light hurting their night-adjusted eyes. A
moment later, Stebbins whistled and the men started moving up the
hill.
They paused at the timber-line, and Stebbins cursed, moving from
man to man and urging him out of the false protection of the trees
and onto the broad expanse of boulder-pocked snow. Above them,
another two hundred yards, black dots against the snow showed
where the caves were waiting for them. Johnson could visualize the
little slant-eyed men within. He flopped to his belly and wriggled
forward. Suddenly he stood up and dashed twenty yards, then
flopped again as bullets whined through the space occupied by his
body bare instants earlier.
He lay there, face pressed into the snow, until the muscles of his
legs started tensing of their own accord. Then he was up again, and
running for dear life.
Gun fire was bursting all around now, a seemingly solid screen of
lead pouring down from the caves. But the men were getting through
the barrier; one slammed into the rock wall beside a cave mouth and
started unlimbering grenades, tossing them in as quickly as he could
pull the pins. Seconds later a vast tongue of fire roared out, melting
the snow and scorching the barren earth beneath.
The fire probed down the hill as the side around the cave shook and
roared. The fire reached and passed over Art Johnson, lying in the
snow, fingers digging at the rock beneath.
By its orange light, the spreading circle of red around the soldier
blended into the artificial coloring of the snow.

"Just think of it!" Cavendish pounded his hand on the desk. "The
chance to go back and correct our mistakes, live our lives over
again. The opportunities missed, the chances passed up, the
decisions made wrong—all can be changed."
The man in the chair swirled the dregs of the whisky in the bottom of
the glass. "Go on, Cavendish," he said. "You're keeping my interest."
Cavendish flushed. "Thank you, Mr. Blackwell. I knew a man of your
position would not pass up an opportunity like this. Why, this is
another chance to make the world! A second chance!"
THE END
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SECOND
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