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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 13/02/21, SPi
Imagining Ithaca
Imagining Ithaca
Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War
KAT H L E E N R I L EY
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Kathleen Riley 2021
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949671
ISBN 978–0–19–885297–1
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For my beloved parents
Jean and Frank Riley

Acknowledgements
I owe a special debt to Michael Portillo whose voyage—or railway journey—

round his father Luis, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War, was one of the
inspirations for this book. I have been moved by his great love of his Spanish
heritage and for the places that were dear to his parents. Michael has gener-
ously shared family photographs as well as the painting he commissioned
from Fernando Vaquero of La última lectura de Unamuno. I would also like
to thank him for finding time in a busy international filming schedule to
read draft chapters of my manuscript and for responding with such sensi-
tive appreciation and enthusiasm.
Other friends and colleagues whose interest and encouragement I have
valued in the course of writing the book include Amrita Balachandran,
Betsy Baytos, Ben Holden, Hilary Lemaire, Fiona Macintosh, Edward
Petherbridge, Nigel Rees, and Laurie Rokke.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Bill Bragg, Guy Denning, Martin
Gale, and Fernando Vaquero for allowing me to reproduce their superb
artwork. In the sourcing of other images, particular thanks must go to
Giovanni Forti at Bridgeman Images and to Angela Kepler at the Pritzker
Military Museum and Library in Chicago.
My thanks to Laura Monrós-Gaspar of the University of Valencia for pro-
viding literal translations (and explanatory marginalia) of Luis Portillo’s
poems ‘Arrayanes de la Alhambra’ and ‘Mi Española en Londres’, and for
casting her expert eye over my own translation of shorter quotations. I am
grateful, too, to my friend and mentor, Dexter Hoyos, for his thoughtful
comments on these poems and for reading aloud excerpts in Spanish to
help me appreciate their aural beauty.
Selected excerpts from The Odyssey, translated by Anthony Verity,
Oxford World’s Classics © 2016 and from Aeneid, translated by Frederick
Ahl, Oxford World’s Classics © 2007 are used by permission of Oxford
University Press. All other translations, unless otherwise acknowledged,
are my own.
At Oxford University Press, Charlotte Loveridge, Karen Raith, and Katie
Bishop have provided patient, eager, and unfailingly courteous support at
each stage of the process towards publication. It has been a pleasure to work
viii Acknowledgements
with them and the rest of the team at OUP as well as their production part-
ners at SPi Global. I wish also to recognize Pam Scholefield’s meticulous
work in compiling the Index.
As ever, my most profound debt is to my parents, Jean and Frank, who
have shaped my own Ithacan notions with extraordinary wisdom, under-
standing, and gentleness, and who have taught me (in the words of Oliver
Wendell Holmes) that ‘where we love is home’. This volume is dedicated
to them.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction: Home from Homer 1
I . ‘L I K E S T R A N G E R S I N T HO SE L A N D S C A P E S
O F O U R YO U T H’ : WA R A N D I M P O S SI B L E
N O ST O S
1. Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) 33

2. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western
Front (1929) 43
3. William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) 53
4. David Malouf ’s Fly Away Peter (1982) 64
I I . ‘A D E E P Y E A R N I N G F O R A R E T U R N
T O T H E S O U R C E’ : R EW R I T I N G
HOM E R
5. John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940) 79

6. Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003) 89
7. Tamar Yellin’s ‘Return to Zion’ (2006) 99
I I I . ‘O N E I S A LWAYS AT HOM E I N O N E’ S
PA S T ’ : T H E N O S TA L G IA O F E X I L E
8. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) 107

9. Doris Lessing’s Going Home (1957) and Under My Skin (1994) 118
10. Alan Bennett’s The Old Country (1977) and An
Englishman Abroad (1983) 130
x contents
I V. ‘AC R O S S A S T R A N G E C O U N T RY T O
T H E I R HOM E L A N D’ : N O ST O S A N D
T H E D I SP L AC E D SP I R I T
11. Carson McCullers’s ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ (1940) 145

12. Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence
(1996) 155
13. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011) 166
V. ‘I N T H E P L AC E C A L L E D A D U LT HO O D
T H E R E’ S P R E C IO U S F EW G O L D E N
A F T E R N O O N S’ : R E T U R N I N G T O
T H E P L AC E C A L L E D C H I L D HO O D
14. George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) 183

15. John Van Druten’s The Widening Circle (1957) 195
16. John Logan’s Peter and Alice (2013) 206
V I . ‘A L L S O N S A R E T E L E M AC H U S
F IG U R E S’ : VOYAG E S R OU N D
T H E FAT H E R
17. Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys: Granada to

Salamanca (1999) 221
18. Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things (1991), District and Circle
(2006), and Human Chain (2010) 252
19. Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son,
and an Epic (2017) 268
Afterword 279
Notes 287
Bibliography 311
Index 321
List of Illustrations
0.1–2 Guy Denning, 112, La Feuillée, 2018. 2, 3

Photos © Guy Denning.
0.3 Rupert Brooke as the Herald in Eumenides by Scott & Wilkinson, 1906. 5
© National Portrait Gallery, London.
0.4 Illustration by Bill Bragg for the New York Times, ‘Britain is
Drowning Itself in Nostalgia’, 23 March 2019. 17
© Bill Bragg.
0.5 Ulysses and Telemachus. Wood engraving by Charles Baude,
nineteenth century. 28
Granger/Bridgeman Images.
0.6 Republican fighters flee to France, 1939. 29
© SZ Photo/Scherl/Bridgeman Images.
1.1 When You Come Home—WWI postcard. 39
Lebrecht History/Bridgeman Images.
3.1 The ‘Home Again Special’, Time, 7 August 1944. 54
Photo: Gene Cook.
3.2 Bill Mauldin, ‘We ain’t no lost generation. We just been mislaid.’
20 May 1947. From Back Home series; United Feature Syndicate,
New York. 62
Copyrights held by and image courtesy of the Pritzker Military Museum
& Library.
4.1 ‘The shell-shattered areas of Chateau Wood’ by Frank Hurley. 71
State Library of New South Wales (PXD 19/13).
5.1 Thomas Mitchell (Driscoll), John Wayne (Ole), and Ward Bond
(Yank) in John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940).84
Everett Collection Inc/Alamy Stock Photo.
5.2 John Ford, c.1946, beside Georges Schreiber’s portrait of him,

which was painted during the filming of The Long Voyage Home.87
6.1 The mourning Penelope. Illustration for The Odyssey of Homer,
translated by George Herbert Palmer (Houghton Mifflin, 1929).
Colour lithograph by N. C. Wyeth. 90
Private collection. © Look and Learn/Bridgeman Images.
xii List of Illustrations
8.1 Vladimir Nabokov as a child with his father, 1906. 108

Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American
Literature, The New York Public Library.
9.1 Doris Lessing by Ida Kar, early 1950s. 123
10.1 Guy Burgess, Moscow, April 1957. 132
Bridgeman Images.
11.1 Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in The Petrified Forest, Warner Bros, 1936. 151
© SZ Photo/Bridgeman Images.
12.1 Daisy Kadibil and Molly Kelly, both believed to be in their eighties,
with Molly’s daughter Doris Pilkington, author of Follow
the Rabbit-Proof Fence.162
Photo: Dione Davidson. © West Australian Newspapers Limited.
13.1 Paris by Night, a dance club in Montmartre, from L’Amour et l’Esprit
Gaulois by Edmond Haraucourt, c.1925. Colour engraving by
Manuel Orazi. 170
Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, France. © Archives Charmet/
Bridgeman Images.
14.1 George Orwell (tall central figure) and his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy
Blair seated beside him, Huesca, Spain, 1937. 184
Harry Milton papers, Hoover Institution Archives.
15.1 John Constable, West End Fields, Hampstead, noon (c.1822).
Oil on canvas, 33.2 × 52.4 cm. 197
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1909.
Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
15.2 John Van Druten. 199
Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library.
16.1 Peter and Alice by John Logan, Noël Coward Theatre, London, 2013.
From l. to r.: Ruby Bentall as Alice in Wonderland, Judi Dench as Alice
Liddell Hargreaves; Ben Whishaw as Peter Llewelyn Davies; Nicholas
Farrell as Lewis Carroll; and Olly Alexander as Peter Pan. Directed
by Michael Grandage, designed by Christopher Oram. 209
Photo © Johan Persson/ArenaPAL.
16.2 Alice Liddell by Lewis Carroll, Summer 1858. 210
16.3 Peter Llewelyn Davies; George Llewelyn Davies; Jack Llewelyn
Davies by J. M. Barrie, 1900.215
List of Illustrations xiii
17.1 Luis and Michael Portillo outside the Palace of Westminster in the 1980s. 223
Courtesy of Michael Portillo.
17.2 The Plaza Mayor, Salamanca. 226
Photo © Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Images.
17.3 Cover of Horizon, December 1941. 228
17.4 Fernando Vaquero, La última lectura de Unamuno. Oil on canvas,
2 × 1 m. 2018. 229
© Fernando Vaquero. Courtesy of Michael Portillo.
17.5 Cora Blyth (fourth from r.) with Luis Portillo and some of the
Basque girls, formerly from the Aston colony. 233
Courtesy of Michael Portillo.
17.6 Diego Velázquez, The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’). Oil on
canvas, 122.5 × 177 cm. 1647–51. 248
© The National Gallery, London.
18.1 Anne-Louis Girodet de Rouçy-Trioson (French, 1767–1824),
The Meeting of Aeneas with Anchises in the Elysian Fields, 1820.
Pierre noire and ink wash heightened with white on vellum,
11 × 14 13/16 inches. 254
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St Louis.
University purchase, Plant Replacement Fund, 1962.
20.1 The shofar lent by Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz to the Museum
of Jewish Heritage for the exhibition ‘Auschwitz. Not long ago.
Not far away.’ 283
Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York/John Halpern.
Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos

ducit et immemores non sinit esse sui.
By some sweetness or other our native land leads us all

back and lets us not be forgetful of it.
Ovid, Ex Ponto 1.3.35–6
Introduction
Home from Homer
Πάντα στὸ νοῦ σου νά ’χεις τὴν Ἰθάκη.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Constantine P. Cavafy, ‘Ithaka’
In the centre of the small Breton village of La Feuillée in northern France, a

simple war memorial bears the names of 145 residents who never returned
from the two World Wars. Of those men, 112 lost their lives in the Great
War of 1914 to 1918, a tenth of the village’s population at the time. As the
centenary of the Armistice approached, British artist Guy Denning, a
present-day inhabitant of La Feuillée, began work on a project intended not
only to honour the memory of this lost generation of villagers but also to
restore its visual presence. He executed 112 life-size drawings of the sol-
diers, using charcoal on brown wrapping paper, and pasted them on the
walls of the village square (Figs 0.1 and 0.2). Denning’s previous body of
street art, from Paris to New York, has been celebrated for its grungy lyri-
cism, its political engagement, and emotional punch, and these ‘resurrected’
portraits, in their various informal attitudes, are no less potent or arresting.
Silently eloquent sentinels of time, they constitute a symbolic homecoming
but, as symbols, they purposely lack the lapidary permanence of the little
cenotaph with its solitary stone soldier resting at arms. Instead, Denning
explains, ‘the wind, rain and time would slowly take this modern gesture of
a memorial away again. But to my mind that seemed quite appropriate—to
make a clear note of intent to realise their presence again, and to watch as
that presence slowly leaves us.’1
It was in the centenary year of the Armistice that I began writing this book.
It seemed fitting that the starting point—and an important through-line—for
my exploration of the ancient Greek idea of nostos (homecoming) should be
1918, a period when returning soldiers, repatriated prisoners, and refugees
were adjusting to the ‘estranged world of peacetime complexity’,2 and when
2 Imagining Ithaca
Figs 0.1 and 0.2 Guy Denning, 112, La Feuillée, 2018. Photos © Guy Denning.
families and communities were confronting the tragedy of those who did
not return home. Moreover, in terms of the cultural imagination, the end of
the First World War marks a critical juncture in the history of homecoming.
In his preface to The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell spoke of
‘the way the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved cru-
cial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life. At the
same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new
myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives.’3 The Second World
War may have ushered in the Atomic Age, but it was the so-called ‘war to
end all wars’ that changed the modern world utterly and engendered a per-
vasive sense of irrevocability, of lost innocence. In its transformative wake,
elusive or impossible nostos became a major preoccupation of modernist
Fig 0.1 and 0.2 Continued
literature, epitomized by ‘the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock’, in Jay
Gatsby’s pursuit of a dream that was already behind him.4
In The Lancet of 13 February 1915, Cambridge psychologist Charles
Myers had coined the phrase ‘shell shock’5 for a new disorder that was
poorly understood. The term swiftly gained currency in the medical and lay
vocabulary and, in the aftermath of war, while its causes, symptoms, and treat-
ment were being studied and debated, shell shock was humanely fictionalized
in characters such as Rebecca West’s Chris Baldry, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Peter
Wimsey, Ford Madox Ford’s Christopher Tietjens, and Virginia Woolf ’s
Septimus Warren Smith. Whether or not these depictions of ‘war neurosis’
are accurate, they share an enlightened understanding that the men afflicted
in this way cannot fully return home, that they live in an internal state of
exile. In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf describes the suicidal Septimus, who is v isited
4 Imagining Ithaca
by frequent hallucinations of his dead comrade Evans, as ‘this last relic

straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited
regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.’6
Alienated from his once familiar surroundings, Septimus has become
‘embodied absence’.7 G. B. Stern would soon diagnose the crippling ennui of
the immediate post-war generation (of the sort featured in Noël Coward’s
1924 play The Vortex) as ‘the echo of shell shock’,8 or a kind of homelessness,
believing that young people’s failure to get started in life, in effect to find
their place in the world, issued from an insurmountable inheritance of sor-
row and waste. The theme of impossible nostos was equally quick to declare
itself in a prelapsarian vision of the golden summer of 1914, in what Vera
Brittain in her Testament of Youth elegized as ‘the lovely legacy of a vanished
world’. ‘Never again, for me and for my generation,’ she pronounced, ‘was
there to be any festival the joy of which no cloud would darken and no
remembrance invalidate.’9
Brittain wrote her famous memoir partly in protest against the epic ideal
that had led so many young men, among them her classically educated
brother and fiancé, to their deaths. As Isobel Hurst argues: ‘Testament of
Youth suggests that the masculine literary culture of the public school and
university, particularly the “forty-eight books of Homer” . . . bears a share of
the responsibility for the slaughter.’10 Certainly the Great War was an excep-
tionally literary war, a war of peculiarly modern horror and proportion
often consciously construed through imagery plundered from classical
mythology. Greek and Latin were staples of the public schoolboy’s diet, and
it is hardly surprising that the poetry of the First World War is permeated
with allusions to Greek epic and tragedy. Patrick Shaw-Stewart, for instance,
was a brilliant classical scholar at Eton and Balliol College, ‘perhaps the
finest Homerist to fight at Gallipoli’.11 Rupert Brooke had acted in the
Cambridge Greek Play of 1906, appearing as the Herald in Aeschylus’
Eumenides (Fig. 0.3). Robert Graves, who survived the war, went on to
produce an innovative prose adaptation of the Iliad. And, as the poetry of
the grammar schoolboy Wilfred Owen and the autodidact Isaac Rosenberg
proves, it was not only the public school and Oxbridge-educated poets who
borrowed freely and familiarly from the classics to formulate responses to
their own war experiences.
Geography as well as mythology played a crucial role. In the eyes of their
Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Ian Hamilton, the British and ANZAC
troops at Gallipoli in 1915 already formed ‘part of that great tradition of the
Dardanelles which began with Hector and Achilles’.12 The location of the
Fig. 0.3 Rupert Brooke as the Herald in Eumenides by Scott & Wilkinson, 1906.
Gallipoli peninsula just across the Hellespont from the traditional site of
Troy, the site excavated by Heinrich Schliemann a mere four decades earlier,
held such obvious, inescapable echoes of Homer who ‘evoked the most
powerful images in those brought up to see themselves as the new
Athenians’.13 On the voyage to Gallipoli, Rupert Brooke promised to recite
Sappho and Homer through the Cyclades and ‘the winds of history will fol-
low us all the way’.14 But in his best-known sonnet, ‘The Soldier’, his
6 Imagining Ithaca
thoughts turn away from the plains of Troy to the prospect of Ithaca, that is,
to a vivid image of Home:
If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.15
The poem is essentially an inverted nostos. As Elizabeth Vandiver elaborates:
Knowing that his body cannot return home, Brooke instead brings ‘home’
to his body . . . . [T]he offensive imperialist elements that so many critics
find in his ‘for ever England’ become less important than a soldier’s
attempt at self-consolation over the impossibility of nostos even for his
dead body; Brooke is less interested here in imperialism or conquest than
in finding some way to accept his eternal separation from the England
that was, for him, quite literally an image of heaven.16
On 23 April 1915, two days before the fateful Allied landings at Cape Helles
and Ari Burnu, Brooke died of sepsis (from an infected mosquito bite)
aboard a French hospital ship moored in the Aegean Sea. He was laid to rest
in a shaded olive grove on the island of Skyros. The burial party consisted of
Brooke’s close circle of brother officers, known as the Latin Club. Among
them was the Australian-born composer and Olympic rower, Frederick
Kelly, who recorded in his diary: ‘the scent of the wild sage gave a strong
classical tone which was so in harmony with the poet we were burying that
to some of us the Christian ceremony seemed out of keeping.’17 Also present
was Patrick Shaw-Stewart who composed one of the most haunting poems
of the war, ‘I Saw a Man This Morning’, while on leave on Imbros, waiting to
be sent to Gallipoli. There, in sight of ancient Troy and prophesying his

Patroclean fate, he prayed: ‘Stand in the trench, Achilles, / Flame-capped,
and shout for me.’18 He was later killed by an artillery shell on the Western
Front near Cambrai and it was then that the poem was discovered; notably,
it was inscribed on the back flyleaf of his copy of A. E. Housman’s A
Shropshire Lad, an anthology of doomed youth, which has at its heart
impossible nostos. Housman’s Shropshire, whatever its topographical
authenticity, is a mythic space, a figurative Ithaca; his plangent pastoralism
articulates a universal longing for a ‘land of lost content’, for ‘blue remem-
bered hills’.19 Like Shaw-Stewart, many British soldiers took A Shropshire
Lad to the trenches—just as their German counterparts carried Rilke’s
Cornet—and in 1918, more than twenty years after it was first published,
16,000 copies of the poem were sold.
For Nowell Oxland, a young lieutenant in the 6th Battalion Border
Regiment, ‘blue remembered hills’ meant the Cumbrian fells of his child-
hood and especially Alston Moor for which he yearns in ‘Outward Bound’, a
poem he wrote on his way to the Dardanelles. In common with Brooke and
Shaw-Stewart, he anticipates his arrival at Gallipoli by referencing the
Greeks at Ilium and by contemplating the impossibility of nostos. But in
Oxland’s case the focus is on the Ithaca he has left behind and to which he
envisages a spiritual return. He does not petition ‘the winds of history’ to
propel him towards his Iliadic destiny, nor seek the posthumous protection
of a phantasmic Achilles. Rather, he calls upon the ‘self-same wind’ that
steered the nostoi of the Achaeans to guide his Cumbrian spirit home:
Though the high Gods smite and slay us,

Though we come not whence we go,
As the host of Menelaus
Came there many years ago;
Yet the self-same wind shall bear us
From the same departing place
Out across the Gulf of Saros
And the peaks of Samothrace:
We shall pass in summer weather,
We shall come at eventide,
When the fells stand up together
And all quiet things abide;
Mixed with cloud and wind and river,
Sun-distilled in dew and rain,
8 Imagining Ithaca
One with Cumberland for ever

We shall go not forth again.20
Oxland took part in the landings at Suvla Bay on 6 August 1915 and sur-
vived just three days in action. A fortnight later, his boyhood friend Noel
Hodgson, then stationed on the Western Front, received a letter from home
and inside it a hunk of moss from his favourite Cumbrian summit, Great
Gable. ‘In other circumstances’, writes Charlotte Zeepvat, ‘he would have
treasured it as a physical link to home. He used it now to make a symbolic
funeral pyre for his friend.’21 In October, while ‘on the March in France’,
Hodgson wrote an elegy for Oxland, celebrating a deep-rooted passion for
their shared Ithaca and conferring on the companion of his hill-climbs the
incorporeal nostos Oxland had foretold:
You were a lover of the hills, and had

From them some measure of their Roman strength;
You that are laid in hearing of the sad
Aegean waters, by a whole sea length
Severed from these: above your nameless bed
The pitiless forehead of an alien sky
For the cool peace and spaciousness that lie
Upon the slopes of your own valley-head.
So if in happier times I climb Black Sail
Over the Gable to Bowfell, and drop
By Sticks as evening comes, to Borrowdale
For tea at Rosthwaite, where the coaches stop
Often, my friend, shall I remember you
Taking your long rest on the distant shore.
And say I love my ancient hills the more
Because you wandered here & loved them too.22
Hodgson himself never returned to his ancient hills; he was killed on the
first day of the Battle of the Somme, one of nearly 20,000 British fatalities
that infamous day.
Nostalgia, Not What It Used to Be
In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens’s young protagonist and his business

partner Mark Tapley, returning to London from a false ‘Eden’ in the
United States, rediscover their true Eden, in all its smoky, bustling,
breathing majesty. Their joyous homecoming is portrayed as a mystical
reawakening:
Bright as the scene was; fresh, and full of motion; airy, free, and
sparkling; it was nothing to the life and exultation in the breasts of the
two travellers, at sight of the old churches, roofs, and darkened chimney
stacks of Home. The distant roar that swelled up hoarsely from the busy
streets, was music in their ears; the lines of people gazing from the
wharves, were friends held dear; the canopy of smoke that overhung the
town was brighter and more beautiful to them than if the richest silks of
Persia had been waving in the air. And though the water going on its
glistening track, turned, ever and again, aside to dance and sparkle
round great ships, and heave them up; and leaped from off the blades of
oars, a shower of diving diamonds; and wantoned with the idle boats,
and swiftly passed, in many a sportive chase, through obdurate old iron
rings, set deep into the stone-work of the quays; not even it was half so
buoyant, and so restless, as their fluttering hearts, when yearning to set
foot, once more, on native ground.
A year had passed since those same spires and roofs had faded from
their eyes. It seemed to them, a dozen years. Some trifling changes, here
and there, they called to mind; and wondered that they were so few and
slight. In health and fortune, prospect and resource, they came back
poorer men than they had gone away. But it was home. And though home
is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or
spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.23
Dickens knew from his own travels the power, the sacred aura of that
word. Writing from Montreal on 26 May 1842, towards the end of his first
North American trip, he confessed to his friend and biographer John
Forster, ‘As the time draws nearer, we get FEVERED with anxiety for
home’ and, as if to demonstrate his febrile nostalgia, he concluded with
the delirious incantation ‘Oh home—home—home—home—home—
home—HOME!!!!!!!!!!’24
The word nostos has a commensurate power and mystique. In recent
times it was the title of a mighty autobiography by Irish philosopher-poet
John Moriarty who said:
A teeming word it was . . . this little word, nostos. Meaning return to the
homeland, it teems with all the terrors and wonders natural and
10 Imagining Ithaca
supernatural, of the ancient Mediterranean. It’s a haunted word. It is

haunted by the foul-smelling droppings of Harpies. It is haunted by the
allurements of Sirens. It is haunted by the agonized roarings of Cyclops. It
is a word to conjure with.25
Moriarty is referring, of course, to the fact that nostos is haunted by, almost
inseparable from, the memory of that archetypal nostalgic, Homer’s
Odysseus, who spent ten years returning home after the fall of Troy.
Odysseus’ journey back involved many obstacles, temptations, and fantas
tical adventures and even a katabasis, a rare descent by the living into the
realm of the dead. All the while he was sustained and propelled by his
memories of Ithaca, ‘His native home deep imag’d in his soul’, to quote
Alexander Pope’s translation of δὴ γὰρ μενέαινε νέεσθαι (Odyssey 13.30).
Bernard O’Donoghue suggests the Odyssey ‘could quite rightly be
described as a poem of homesickness’.26 Milan Kundera, in his novel
Ignorance, calls it the ‘founding epic of nostalgia’.27 The word ‘nostalgia’ is
not itself Homeric. It is, in fact, a neo-Latin compound formed of two Greek
elements, νόστος (nostos, a return home) and ἄλγος (algos, pain or grief).
Basel medical student Johannes Hofer invented the term in his 1688
Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe, to classify a malady of the
imagination to which Swiss mercenaries serving in France and Italy were
particularly prone. These soldiers were apparently so susceptible to nostal-
gic frenzy when they heard a certain Swiss milking song, ‘Khue-Reyen’, that
its playing was punishable by death. Significantly, Hofer’s intention was to
translate the German Heimweh (literally ‘home ache’), a ‘familiar emotional
phenomenon . . . into a medical condition’.28 The symptoms Hofer ascribed
to nostalgia included ‘a continuing melancholy, incessant thinking of home,
disturbed sleep or insomnia, weakness, loss of appetite, anxiety, cardiac pal-
pitation, stupor, and fever’.29 ‘Leeches, warm hypnotic emulsions, opium
and a return to the Alps usually soothed the symptoms’, says Svetlana Boym.30
For the next two hundred years, nostalgia was treated (and mistreated) as
a disease. Physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries searched in
vain for a ‘pathological bone’ as the locus of nostalgia. Botanist Joseph
Banks, who sailed on Captain Cook’s first Pacific voyage, observed in his
journal, on 3 September 1770, that the crew of HMS Endeavour ‘were now
pretty far gone with the longing for home which the physicians have gone
so far as to esteem a disease under the name of nostalgia’.31 Half a century
later, the English clerical wit Sydney Smith exclaimed: ‘How . . . can any man
take upon himself to say that he is so indifferent to his country that he will
not begin to love it intensely, when he is 5,000 or 6,000 miles from it? And
what a dreadful disease Nostalgia must be on the banks of the Missouri!’32
Some believed the illness had its source in an infectious moral malaise. In
1782, Thomas Arnold, MD (not to be confused with Victorian educator,
Dr Arnold of Rugby) defined nostalgia as one of sixteen varieties of
‘pathetic insanity’: ‘This unreasonable fondness for the place of our birth,
and for whatever is connected with our native soil, is the offspring of an
unpolished state of society, and not uncommonly the inhabitant of dreary
and inhospitable climates, where the chief, and almost only blessings, are
ignorance and liberty.’33 During the American Civil War, in a paper titled
‘Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service’, Dr J. Theodore Calhoun cautioned:
‘And now, as our armies are recruited with unwilling men, either con-
scripted or bought up by enormous bounties, none of them animated by
the patriotism or manliness of our early volunteers, we have every cause
necessary to the production of nostalgia.’34 He urged, therefore, the fortify-
ing benefits of mockery by one’s peers and regular skirmishes with
the enemy:
Any influence that will tend to render the patient more manly, will exer-
cise a curative power. In boarding schools, as perhaps many of us will
remember, ridicule is wholly relied upon, and will often be found effective
in the camp. Unless the disease affects a number of the same organiza-
tion . . . the patient can often be laughed out of it by his comrades, or
reasoned out of it by appeals to his manhood; but of all potent agents, an
active campaign, with its attendant marches, and more particularly its
battles, is the beat curative.35
Calhoun’s prescription seems positively benign beside that of Jourdan Le

Cointe at the time of the French Revolution; in his book La Santé de Mars
(The Health of Mars), Le Cointe proposed that a nostalgic contagion among
fighting men could be prevented by ‘la crainte d’un remede très-douloureux
qu’on déclareroit immanquable, tel qu’un fer rouge appliqué sur le ventre’ (‘the
fear of a very painful remedy, which might be declared unavoidable, such as
a red iron applied on the belly’).36
What is interesting is that long before Hofer and others pathologized
nostalgia, the words nostos and algos37 occur in close proximity within a
description of homesickness entirely consistent with our modern under-
standing of nostalgia as a meaningful emotional state. When, in Book 5, we
first meet the hero of the Odyssey he is alone and weeping on the shore of
12 Imagining Ithaca
Ogygia, the enchanted island where for seven years he has been held captive
by the beautiful sea nymph Calypso:
οὐδέ ποτ᾽ ὄσσε

δακρυόφιν τέρσοντο, κατείβετο δὲ γλυκὺς αἰὼν
νόστον ὀδυρομένῳ, ἐπεὶ οὐκέτι ἥνδανε νύμφη.
...
ἤματα δ᾽ ἂμ πέτρῃσι καὶ ἠιόνεσσι καθίζων
δάκρυσι καὶ στοναχῇσι καὶ ἄλγεσι θυμὸν ἐρέχθων
πόντον ἐπ᾽ ἀτρύγετον δερκέσκετο δάκρυα λείβων. (151–8)
his eyes were never
without tears, and his sweet life drained away as he grieved
for a way home, since the nymph no longer pleased him.
...
All his days he passed sitting on rocks on the seashore,
tearing at his heart with tears and groans and anguish,
forever weeping and looking out over the restless sea.
For all the physical manifestations of Odysseus’ algos, throughout the poem
his ‘nostalgia’ is presented as more deeply existential. In Lost Time, a medi-
tation on the place of memory in Western culture, David Gross emphasizes
that for Odysseus Ithaca is ‘emblematic of his patrimony, his position as
king, and his status in the world, all of which are essential to his identity. In
a fundamental sense, in remembering Ithaca he remembers who he
is. . . . Odysseus cannot allow himself to forget Ithaca. He cannot because his
social and even his human essence is bound up with that and only that place
on earth.’38 For this reason, Odysseus rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality
and her warnings of the hardships ahead should he set sail for home. Just as
Achilles fulfilled his destiny in a young, glorious death at Troy, Odysseus,
ἱέμενος καὶ καπνὸν ἀποθρῴσκοντα νοῆσαι ἧς γαίης (‘yearning / only to catch
sight of the smoke curling up from his own land’, 1.58–9), fulfils his through
survival and return.
In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Immanuel Kant
notices that when sufferers of the mal du Suisse (i.e. nostalgia) return home
‘they are greatly disappointed in their expectations and thus also find their
homesickness cured. To be sure, they think that this is because everything
there has changed a great deal, but in fact it is because they cannot bring
back their youth there.’39 Kant is indicating the inherent impossibility of
nostos and foreshadowing a broader, less tangible definition of nostalgia. In

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nostalgia was effectively
demedicalized and reverted, we might say, to its Odyssean roots as an emo-
tional, even existential, condition with an Ithacan focus. At the same time,
Ithaca, as an abstraction, acquired a temporal aspect. In reaction to a period
of rapid industrialization and social change, the longing for lost time was as
intense as any for a specific place; and the search for it could be instantly
provoked by a petite madeleine soaked in tea, the golden bough that gave
Marcel Proust entry to a vast underworld of memory.
In late Victorian and Edwardian England, that ‘laureate of nostalgia’,40
A. E. Housman, and his contemporary Edward Elgar proved what pleasur
able pain nostalgic melancholy could be.41 Pleasurable, and immensely
popular, was the hopeful melancholy of which Ivor Novello, in the first half
of the twentieth century, was maestro. His wartime songs ‘Keep the Home
Fires Burning’ (1914, with lyrics by Lena Guilbert Ford) and ‘We’ll Gather
Lilacs’ (1945) poignantly anticipate homecoming and, as such, communi-
cate a nostalgia for an imagined future, for the possibility of ‘once more’—
just as Irving Berlin’s ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’ (1938), written in
response to the Munich Agreement, offered nostalgic hope. Most pleasur
able of all, perhaps, is nostalgia for the present moment, such as Henry
James, in The Portrait of a Lady, conveyed in his languorous evocation of
‘the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon’, that ‘little eternity’
between the day’s halcyon perfection and its imminent dying fall.42 Or such
as Neville Cardus voiced in his valediction to another cricket season:
Every summer I travel north, south, east, and west to watch cricket. I have
seen the game played far down in Kent, at Dover, near the cliffs trodden by
King Lear. There, one late August afternoon, I said good-bye to a cricket
season on a field which lay silent in the evening sunshine; the match, the
last of the year was over and the players gone. I stayed for a while in the
failing light and saw birds run over the grass as the mists began to spread.
That day we had watched Woolley in all his glory, batting his way through
a hundred felicitous runs. While he batted, the crowd sat with white tents
and banners all round—a blessed scene, wisps of clouds in the sky, green
grass for our feet to tread upon, ‘laughter of friends under an English
heaven’. It was all over and gone now, as I stood on the little field alone in
the glow of the declining day. ‘The passing of summer’, I thought. ‘There
can be no summer in this land without cricket.’43
14 Imagining Ithaca
Cardus, whom the Manchester Guardian once compared to Homer,44 was a

disciple of Walter Pater’s aesthetic ideal ‘[to] burn always with this hard,
gemlike flame’45 and found in Pater’s exquisite prose ‘the articulation of
moment-by-moment experience fully relished’.46 His Paterian relish of a
memorable innings being played ‘to the strain of summer’s cadence’ reaches
a romantic crescendo in his invocation of Brooke’s ‘English heaven’, in his
invocation of Home. As a result, this vignette of the Kentish summer’s glori-
ous passing carries with it some premonition of the ‘crumpling flood’;47 it
serves as a tender requiem for a vanishing present and a privileged notion
of Englishness. It manifests a broader tendency in British writing of the late
1930s, something Patricia Rae discerns in the protagonist of George Orwell’s
Coming Up for Air, which was published on the eve of the Second World
War: ‘a longing for “pastoral oases” in advance of the moment when such
consolations are actually needed. The impulse is to store memories of those
precious moments in the countryside so that they can be called upon in
some future act of nostalgia.’48
Such nostalgic apprehension of the present underlies the mythic summer
of 1914, a moment that was disappearing even as it was being savoured.
Although it was not written until January 1915, Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’
is based on a railway journey he took between Oxford and Worcester on
24 June 1914 and reads as a proleptic elegy for that last pre-war summer in
all its charged bucolic stillness, ‘with country noises brushing the surface of
a deeper silence’.49
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.50
In truth, Thomas conflates impressions from different stops along the Great
Western Railway and his train did not, it seems, draw up ‘unwontedly’ at
Adlestrop. Yet he manages to arrest this point in time and space, to make
specific and epiphanic a vaguer, more general nostalgia for the present. He
paints a pastoral scene onto which subsequent generations of poets and
readers have projected their own nostalgia, a nostalgia intensified by
Thomas’s premature death at Arras in 1917 and by Adlestrop’s demise under

the Beeching Axe of the 1960s.51
Two summers before the war, from the heart of bohemian Berlin, Rupert
Brooke penned his pastoral paean ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, asking
‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?’52
It is a paean to a paradise in the process of being lost, or to one that probably
never wholly existed in any physical sense. As with ‘Adlestrop’, the poem has
retrospectively gained in nostalgic stature and it is well to remember that it
contains flights of whimsy and satire, crude cultural caricature, and mawk-
ish sentimentality. Nonetheless, at its most sincere and unaffectedly lyrical,
it presents an Ithacan conception of Home, in other words, a feeling that
Brooke’s ‘human essence is bound up with that and only that place on earth’.
Perhaps the most telling phrase, then, is εἴθε γενοίμην (from Plato’s ‘Aster’
epigram), which Brooke renders as ‘would I were / In Grantchester, in
Grantchester!’53 His use of the Greek tag to express concisely his nostalgic
longing for a little patch of Cambridgeshire is an example of how his
‘investment in Greek was more than “sad mechanic exercise.” It was also an
investment in England, that is, in a certain concept of the English gentleman
and the English poet that he saw slipping away.’54
These summer evocations of the English countryside, at once ‘mindful’
and elegiac, have an existential quality that aligns them with Odyssean
nostalgia. They speak not only to a sense of time and place but also to a
profound sense of self. But a nostalgia that rouses and nourishes a sense of
self can have its hazards too. John Van Druten, an expatriate writer who
forensically examined his own nostalgic impulses, was wary of the siren
call of the past even as he hastened to answer it. To mix mythological
metaphors, he viewed the siren past as a Pandora’s box that he struggled to
close. Doris Lessing often portrayed nostalgia as an irresistible living
entity, pleasurable and pernicious. In The Memoirs of a Survivor, she calls
it ‘the craving, the regret— . . . that poisoned itch’.55 In A Ripple from the
Storm, the third novel in her Children of Violence series, she remarks that
her alter ego Martha Quest’s ‘old enemy, the dishonesty of nostalgia, was
very close, and the ease with which she succumbed to it made her irritated
with herself ’.56 The twenty-first-century hero of Woody Allen’s Midnight
in Paris, who longs to know firsthand the moveable feast of Paris in les
Années folles, is admonished for ‘golden- age thinking—the erroneous
notion that a different time period is better than the one one’s living in. It’s
a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to
cope with the present.’
16 Imagining Ithaca
In the Brexit era, the charge of ‘golden-age thinking’ has been prevalent
and politically loaded. An article in The Atlantic, deploring the ‘toxic nostal-
gia’ fuelling the Brexit spirit, accused Brexiteers of wanting to return ‘to an
imagined, pure point of origin, a moment in history where Britain was a
homogenous mass’.57 Guardian columnist Matthew d’Ancona detected in
the hardline Brexiteer subconscious a fetish for the ‘Blitz spirit’, ‘a strange
but powerful yearning for the privations of Britain’s past’58—a psychological
amalgam, one assumes, of Mrs Miniver and Miniver Cheevy. In similar
vein, Sam Byers, author of the dystopian novel Perfidious Albion, delivered
an excoriating rebuke to his homeland in the New York Times (Fig. 0.4):
With nothing meaningful to say about our future, we’ve retreated into the
falsehoods of the past, painting over the absence of certainty at our core
with a whitewash of poisonous nostalgia. The result is that Britain has
entered a haunted dreamscape of collective dementia—a half-waking state
in which the previous day or hour is swiftly erased and the fantasies of the
previous century leap vividly to the fore. Turning on the television or
opening Twitter, we find people who have no memory of the Second
World War invoking a kind of blitz spirit, or succumbing to fits of
self-righteous fury because someone has dared to impugn the legacy of
Winston Churchill.59
Less graphically Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator on

Brexit, made much the same charge against Britain. In an interview with the
New York Review of Books, two months after the original deadline for Brexit,
he opined: ‘Looking at the causes of Brexit, we also find typically British
reasons: the hope for a return to a powerful global Britain, nostalgia for the
past—nostalgia serves no purpose in politics.’60
Such accusations of nostalgic nativism and solipsism are primarily a
response to a strident rhetoric of restoration and return (‘Take Back
Control’) and ignore the multiplicity of motivations behind a single vote.
Referendums make strange bedfellows and it is reductive to brand the broad
coalition of Leave voters, stretching from the radical left to the radical right,
as nostalgic imperialists with a masochistic penchant for rationing and gas
masks. It is nevertheless fascinating that the 2016 EU referendum and its
bitter fallout put nostalgia firmly under the microscope and pathologized it
once again. In the weeks preceding the referendum, the late A. A. Gill took
aim at the cri de cœur of a woman on BBC’s Question Time, ‘All I want is my
country back’, and what he saw as the national narcotic: ‘We all know what
Fig. 0.4 Illustration by Bill Bragg for the New York Times, ‘Britain is Drowning
Itself in Nostalgia’, 23 March 2019. © Bill Bragg.
“getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious
and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia.’61 In the years since the refer-
endum several commentators have cited the revitalized relevance of Paul
Gilroy’s 2004 study Postcolonial Melancholia, and a New York Times op-ed
has talked of Middle England’s ‘misguided craving’, depicting its suburbs as
‘sickened with nostalgia’.62
When eventually Britain left the European Union, on 31 January 2020,
the theme of nostalgia persisted. As the final countdown to Brexit
approached there were calls by some MPs for the familiar chimes of Big
Ben, silenced since 2017 for repairs, to ring out the moment of departure.
For many people this costly proposal seemed to confirm ‘their fear that
Brexit [was] motivated by nostalgia and a wish to bask in the afterglow of a
long-lost British Empire’.63 In the end, economic sense prevailed and the
bell did not toll for Brexit but, undeterred, partygoers in Parliament Square
were reported to be revelling ‘in a mix of nostalgia, patriotism and
18 Imagining Ithaca
defiance’.64 If, for more than three and a half years, the result of the referendum
had been represented as the consequence of a cancerous nostalgia metasta-
sizing in a cohort of frustrated imperialists, most visible on the day of
divorce was nostalgia within the grieving Remain camp. There were tears
as the last trains before Brexit pulled out of London St Pancras and Paris
Gare du Nord. Concurrent with the celebrations in London’s Parliament
Square was a ‘Missing EU Already’ rally outside the Scottish Parliament in
Edinburgh. Holyrood’s Brexit Secretary, picturing a kind of Ithacan beacon,
entreated the EU ‘to leave a light on for Scotland . . . . And we will leave a
light on here to guide us back into our European home.’65 Green MEP, Molly
Scott Cato, delivering a valedictory speech in the European Parliament, pre-
dicted Britain’s inevitable nostos: ‘one day I will be back in this chamber,
celebrating our return to the heart of Europe.’
The presumed outbreak of nostalgia in recent years is by no means con-
fined to the United Kingdom, nor to any one political issue. In his success-
ful bid for presidential election in 2016, Donald Trump ‘flipped’ the decisive
Rust Belt states and secured his base with the same rallying cry of reclam
ation that had proved so effective for Ronald Reagan in 1980: ‘Make
America Great Again.’ Less than halfway through his turbulent presidency,
the Washington Post posed the question: ‘How do we tame Trumpism’s viru-
lent nostalgia for an old status quo?’66 In 2019, the Post also criticized
Trump’s Democratic opponent, and now successor, Joe Biden, who was
appealing for a return to bipartisanship and civility, as ‘a nostalgia bro-
ker . . . for a time when politics felt predictable and stable’,67 for a dubious
normalcy that involved glad- handing segregationist senators from the
South. Meanwhile, much continues to be written about the darkly nostalgic
trajectories of Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, and Erdogan’s Turkey,
while the advance of authoritarianism has been blamed, paradoxically, on
liberal nostalgia. In an article for the New Statesman, headed ‘How we
entered the age of the strongman’, John Gray took liberals to task for trust-
ing too complacently in the resilience and inevitability of Western democ-
racy: ‘Liberals need to shake off their sickly nostalgia for an irrecoverable
past, whose flaws and contradictions created the world in which we find
ourselves.’68 Tolerance and individual freedom, he insisted, had to be
defended with unsparing realism and a readiness for new thinking.
In 2017, with the phenomena of Brexit and Trump in view, Cambridge
classicists Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill contributed separate reflections
to The Times Literary Supplement on the perils of nostalgia.69 Goldhill drew
a salutary lesson from the Greeks: ‘the heroic age provided examples to live
up to, not a lost world to hanker after.’ He pointed out that in Aristophanic
comedy, the hankering for a supposedly simpler, happier time invariably
comes ‘from the mouths of rather buffoonish older men’. In The Frogs, how-
ever, Aristophanes is not above exploiting and endorsing a wistfulness for
the ‘good old days’ when the empire was expanding and the noble tragedies
of Aeschylus were new. Two millennia later, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter
showed us that angry young men were prey to nostalgia, too, albeit vicari-
ously and with a sceptical eye:
The old Edwardian brigade do make their brief little world look pretty
tempting . . . . Always the same picture: high summer, the long days in the
sun, slim volumes of verse, crisp linen, the smell of starch. What a roman-
tic picture. Phoney too, of course. It must have rained sometimes. Still
even I regret it somehow, phoney or not. If you’ve no world of your own,
it’s rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else’s.70
Neither an angry young man nor, as popularly perceived, the embodiment

of cosiness, playwright Alan Bennett has spent a lifetime dramatizing the
same sort of ambivalent, self- aware nostalgia. Theatre critic Michael
Billington dubs it a ‘radical nostalgia’ and characterizes Bennett as ‘a writer
who believes in progress but who is irrevocably attached to his country’s
cultural inheritance; and it’s specifically England, rather than Britain, that
stirs his deepest sympathy’.71 This sympathy is nowhere more evident than
in Bennett’s first full-length stage play, Forty Years On, a kaleidoscopic por-
trait of England in the first half of the twentieth century, mounted as an
end- of-
term school revue. Wildean comedy, the Bloomsbury group,
Lawrence of Arabia, the abdication, Neville Chamberlain, and ‘that School
of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed
through twentieth-century literature’72 are all fair game in the ensuing she-
nanigans, but sophisticated schoolboy satire is interspersed with the redo-
lent strains of the ‘Eton Boating Song’ and the pure sound of the nightingales
in pre-war Kent. The play ends with an epitaph for a less e galitarian world
whose passing Bennett simultaneously approves and mourns: ‘We have
become a battery people, a people of under-privileged hearts fed on pap in
darkness, bred out of all taste and season to savour the shoddy splendours
of the new civility. The hedges come down from the silent fields.’73 Bennett’s
radical nostalgia is shared by at least two of his dramatic characters, both
traitors in exile, the Audenesque Hilary in The Old Country, who many
people assumed was based on Kim Philby, and Guy Burgess in An

20 Imagining Ithaca
Englishman Abroad. These Soviet defectors are English to their core, pro-
foundly attached to the familiar, comfortable trappings of an established
order they sought to betray. Hilary listens to Elgar, laments the decline of
Lyons Corner Houses, and would choose the Book of Common Prayer as his
Desert Island Discs reading matter. Burgess, in his squalid Moscow bedsit,
plays over and over again his sweetly jaunty Jack Buchanan record and
misses the Reform Club, the streets of London, and gossip above all.
‘Nostalgia’, he affirms, ‘knows no frontiers’74 and can be full of such appar-
ent contradictions.
The former editor of Granta magazine, Ian Jack, asked in 2017—again
with Brexit in mind: ‘Has our experience of nostalgia changed? Perhaps it
can no longer be associated only with gentleness—a wistful dream of village
greens, sponge cake, and steam trailing from the 9.45 to Mow Cop and
Scholar Green. Out of this imaginary landscape, or at least from a sense of
things having once been better, have come harder emotions such as anger
and loss.’75 Questions about the nature, indeed the morality, of nostalgia
acquire a degree of urgency in an epoch of political homelessness in which
old tribalisms are fracturing. The emergence in early 2019 of Britain’s
Independent Group, comprising a handful of disaffected Labour and
Conservative MPs, provided, if not a home, at least a parliamentary perch to
the ideologically dispossessed. The group’s embryonic mission was to forge
a ‘new politics’ founded on shared progressive values. Its members com-
plained that they no longer recognized the venerable mainstream parties
they had joined, so that one suspects the novelty they aspired to was actu-
ally born of nostalgia for basic principles they believed Labour and the
Tories had forsaken. Their unifying objective, a second Brexit referendum,
exposed a wounded nostalgia for a time before the first had taken place.
Even their media soubriquet, the ‘Tiggers’, with its nod to A. A. Milne’s
Hundred Acre Wood, was steeped in nostalgia. The group subsequently
registered as a party in its own right, Change UK, but quickly became mired
in the challenges of creating, without substantive policies, a new home in
the political centre ground and of cohabiting with ‘expatriates’ from differ-
ent political traditions. After ten months and a general election, the party
completely evaporated. The Tiggers might have done better to embrace
their nostalgia boldly rather than under the self-conscious guise of change.
Earlier I quoted Michel Barnier who said ‘nostalgia serves no purpose in
politics’. However, to give thoughtful utterance to nostalgia, and build a
manifesto from it, could conceivably be a progressive and purposeful thing.
Philosopher Julian Baggini, acknowledging that nostalgia has received a

bad press lately, puts the case for an enlightened nostalgia that ‘can enable a
lament for the past to help us build a different future. This requires us to
distinguish what cannot be revived from what lies beaten but breath-
ing. . . . Used wisely, nostalgia doesn’t trap us in the past but helps point us to
a better tomorrow.’76 Or, as Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has expressed it,
‘nostalgia is a way of imagining the possibility of a world that is actually
purer, one less flawed than the one we know we must inhabit. . . . nostalgia is
the emotional equivalent and intellectual cousin of idealism. It’s something
that anchors us emotionally to a sense that things should and can be
repaired.’77 Such a nostalgia is fundamentally Odyssean—complex and haz-
ardous, but looking always ahead to an Ithacan shore.
‘What These Ithakas Mean’
This book, whose overarching theme is the contemplation of Home from a

distance, accepts Kundera’s claim that the Odyssey is the founding epic of
nostalgia. From Virgil’s Aeneid to James Joyce’s Ulysses, from MGM’s The
Wizard of Oz to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and from
Derek Walcott’s Omeros to Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, the Odyssean
paradigm of nostos and nostalgia has been continually summoned and
reimagined by writers and filmmakers. ‘To allude to the Odyssey’, Edith
Hall maintains, ‘is to invoke an authority of talismanic psychological
power. . . . Creative people inaugurating a new trend have repeatedly found
the Odyssey a suitable text on which to rest the burden of their manifestos.
The best example of this is Joyce’s Ulysses, a founding text of Modernist
fiction. Any aspiring novelist since Joyce has had to deal with the Odyssey
simply because of the magnitude of Ulysses in the emergence of contemporary
fiction.’78 That magnitude is foreseen by Joyce himself in Tom Stoppard’s
play Travesties, where, in defence of the artist’s enduring purpose, he proclaims:
What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist’s
touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants look-
ing for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we
who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse,
a face that launched a thousand ships—and above all, of Ulysses, the wan-
derer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes—husband, father,
22 Imagining Ithaca
son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer . . . .

It is a theme so overwhelming that I am almost afraid to treat it. And yet I
with my Dublin Odyssey will double that immortality, yes by God there’s a
corpse that will dance for some time yet . . . .79
Joyce’s dauntingly experimental, shockingly irreverent, and beguilingly

domestic appropriation of Homer’s epic details the peregrinations of
Leopold Bloom (Odysseus) and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus) which
occur in one day, 16 June 1904. Its eighteen chapters are named after
episodes of the Odyssey (e.g. ‘Nestor’, ‘Cyclops’, ‘Ithaca’), the last three chap-
ters composing the book’s Nostos. Each classical antecedent finds its, often
bathetic, modern equivalent among the material minutiae of everyday
Dublin existence. In making Homer anew in the aftermath of the Great
War, Joyce found, in T. S. Eliot’s estimation, ‘a way of controlling, of ordering,
of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility
and anarchy which is contemporary history’.80
But the Odyssey’s influence extends beyond the spawning of other foun-
dational texts. This great poem of homesickness, with its Ithacan momen-
tum, is embedded in the cultural bloodstream and its traces are found in
original creations that are classic and canonical, popular and personal. In
the chapters that follow, ‘Ithaca’ is shown to be an evocative and versatile
abstraction. It is as much about possibility as it is about the past; it is a vision
of Arcadia or a haunting, an object of longing, a repository of memory, ‘a
sleep and a forgetting’.81 In essence it is about seeking what is absent.
As Kant had implied, homesickness cannot necessarily be assuaged by
returning home. Tennyson’s Ulysses, having reached his longed-for destin
ation, spurns the idleness of his restored kingship and is restless to begin a
new voyage. His raison d’être, his Ithaca, it turns out, is to be endlessly
‘yearning in desire’.
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
Constantine Cavafy urges in his poem ‘Ithaka’, first published in 1911, that
keeping Ithaca always in mind, imagining it, is what really matters.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years . . .
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.82
Daniel Mendelsohn’s elderly father Jay put it another way: ‘The poem actu-
ally is more real than the place!’83
The texts I have chosen for analysis include works that allude to, directly
reference, or ‘rewrite’ Homer’s Odyssey, but the book is not concerned
merely with modern receptions of the Odyssean paradigm of nostos and
nostalgia. Importantly, it considers in detail the act, and more often the
impossibility, of ‘returning’ from the perspectives of Penelope, the wife who
awaits the hero’s return; of Telemachus, the son in search of his father; and
of Laertes, the aged father reunited with his long-lost son. And, alongside
Telemachus’ odyssey, it highlights the filial quest of pius Aeneas, his pivotal
encounter in the underworld with his deceased father Anchises, in Book 6
of Virgil’s Aeneid. While the book’s focus is not, therefore, exclusively
Odyssean, it is always Ithacan. The six thematic Parts embrace a deliberately
eclectic choice of works from the last hundred years: novels, poetry, mem-
oir, essay, short story, theatre, film, and television documentary. What
unites this diverse and sometimes surprising selection is a way of defining
and imagining Home, of viewing ‘Ithaca’ from a distance, whether that dis-
tance is created by the upheaval of war, by the anguish of mental illness, by
self-imposed exile, by growing up, or by being born too late.
The opening Part of the book introduces what is to be a recurring theme,
impossible nostos. Rebecca West’s novel The Return of the Soldier (1918) and
William Wyler’s Academy Award-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946) examine the dual plight of the returning soldier (in two World Wars)
and the Penelope figure to whom he returns, and their joint estrangement
from a pre-war world. As a German veteran of the Great War, Erich Maria
Remarque knew firsthand the soldier’s detachment from civilian life and
from any life external to the trenches. Part I takes its heading from
24 Imagining Ithaca
Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, from a passage in which the
doomed narrator, Paul Bäumer, reflects that the sheer cacophony and fer
ocious omnipresence of the war have permanently altered the landscape
of memory and implanted in his generation a nostalgia of despair. Home
is something ‘we love without hope. It is strong, and our desire is strong;
but it is unattainable, and we know it. . . . And even if someone were to give
us it back, that landscape of our youth, we wouldn’t have much idea of
how to handle it. The tender, secret forces that bound it to us cannot come
back to life.’84 War has rendered Paul and his comrades internally and per-
petually homeless: ‘We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to
conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From
our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the
world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it.’85 The chapters on
West and Remarque’s novels begin an enquiry (which will be pursued in
later chapters) into why the Odyssey was such a key text for the lost gen-
erations on both sides of the war. A discussion of David Malouf ’s novella
Fly Away Peter, which was later adapted as an opera, concludes Part I. The
story traces the journey of a young Australian, Jim Saddler, from an Edenic
bird sanctuary on the Queensland coast to the perverted pastoral of the
Western Front where he realizes he has hitherto been living ‘in a state of
dangerous innocence’.86 The principal motif Malouf employs is the miracle
of bird migration, which is tragically contrasted with Jim’s impossible
homecoming.
In Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel Contempt (Il Disprezzo), screenwriter
Molteni and director Rheingold debate the correct approach to their forth-
coming film adaptation of the Odyssey. Rheingold asks his colleague: ‘Now,
what ought we moderns to do in order to resuscitate such ancient and
obscure myths? First of all to discover the significance which they can have
for us of the modern world, and then to fathom that significance as deeply
as we can, to interpret it, to illustrate it . . . but in a live, independent way.’87
Part II implicitly poses the same question, by looking at three very different
works, spanning seven decades, that may be regarded as rewritings of the
Odyssey. Only two of these works, Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of
Winnie Mandela and Tamar Yellin’s short story ‘Return to Zion’, are con-
scious rewritings of Homer; the other, John Ford’s film The Long Voyage
Home, was in its day critically received as a modern Odyssey. None is as well
known, nor as epic in scale, as Joyce’s Ulysses, but each in their modern con-
text interprets the significance of Homeric themes ‘in a live, independent
way’. Ndebele, who gives a compelling and impassioned voice to five South
African ‘descendants’ of Penelope, and to Penelope herself, at one point
defines nostalgia as ‘a deep yearning for a return to the source’.88 This Part
ponders the meaning, and possibility, of returning to the source, that is to
say, returning to an idea of Home and of Homer.
The New Zealand author Janet Frame, whose writing frequently evinced
an imaginative sympathy for the outsider and for the marginalized, once
said: ‘All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong
journey towards the lost land.’89 Part III probes the complex nostalgia of
two literary exiles, Vladimir Nabokov and Doris Lessing, who internalized
and, in different ways, interrogated their Ithacas. Nabokov spent his entire
adult life in exile—in England, Europe, the United States, and finally in
Switzerland. His need to recall patches of the past, and to reclaim his lost
childhood, found expression in the autobiographical essays collected in
Speak, Memory, the original title of which was to have been Speak,
Mnemosyne (calling to mind the opening words of the Odyssey, ‘Tell me,
Muse’). Ironically it is the very condition of exile that provides Nabokov
with an identity and in which, as an artist, he revels and luxuriates. For him
nostalgia is a higher form of consciousness and nostalgic writing an act of
ecstatic devotion. Part III also evaluates the complex nostalgia of Alan
Bennett’s outcast spies whose exile kept strangely alive and intact their
visions of Ithaca. To paraphrase Nabokov, they were always, and only, at
home in their pasts.
‘Some will always be found’, wrote John Addington Symonds in the nine-
teenth century, ‘to whom Greece is a lost fatherland, and who, passing
through youth with the mal du pays of that irrecoverable land upon them,
may be compared to visionaries, spending the night in golden dreams and
the days in common duties.’90 One such visionary was Richard Wagner who
‘felt more truly at home in ancient Athens than in any condition that the
modern world has to offer’.91 In his essay ‘German Art and German Poetry’,
Wagner salutes two towering figures of the German Enlightenment, Johann
Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, for recognizing
‘the German’s ur-kinsmen in the divine Hellenes’.92 Winckelmann had cat
egorized himself as ‘one of those whom the Greeks call ὀψιμαθεῖς. I have
come into the world and into Italy too late.’93 His sensation of belatedness
was diagnosed by Walter Pater as ‘a strange, inverted home-sickness’.94 In
the following century, Somerset Maugham identified this phenomenon of
inverted homesickness in his novel The Moon and Sixpence, based on the
26 Imagining Ithaca
nomadic life of artist Paul Gauguin and published soon after the Great War.
Late in the novel, his narrator puts forward the hypothesis:
that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them
amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home
they know not. . . . Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteri-
ously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle
amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never
known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth.95
What is being articulated here, an intense feeling of separation from an

authentic spiritual home, is close in essence to the Welsh concept hiraeth.
One commonly accepted translation of this defiantly untranslatable word is
‘a longing to be where your spirit lives’. The book’s fourth Part features three
examples of this atavistic longing, beginning with a short, stimulating essay
by Carson McCullers on what she perceived in 1940 as America’s national
trait of being ‘homesick most for the places we have never known’96 and
ending with Woody Allen’s time-travelling fantasy Midnight in Paris. In
between is Doris Pilkington Garimara’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the
true story of an extraordinary nostos undertaken by three Australian
Aboriginal girls who were part of the Stolen Generations of Indigenous
children forcibly removed from their families in accordance with govern-
ment policy. For these girls the rabbit-proof fence stood out ‘like a beacon
that would lead them out of the rugged wilderness, across a strange country
to their homeland’.97
In John Logan’s play Peter and Alice, Lewis Carroll warns his young muse:
‘In the place called Adulthood, there’s precious few golden after-
noons. . . . There are no mad hatters and there are no Cheshire Cats, for they
can’t endure the suffering of the place.’98 If some of us are predisposed to an
inverted nostalgia, all of us, at some stage, experience a proleptic nostalgia,
that is, a nostalgia fed by uniquely human intimations of impending adult-
hood. The penultimate Part studies three works whose central point of view
is that of the grown-up trying to return to the place called Childhood, to a
time of supposed innocence and security, or to some formative inkling of
oneself and one’s place in the world. The first of these is Orwell’s novel
Coming Up for Air, which is set in the crisis year of 1938, between Orwell’s
service in the Spanish Civil War and the start of a fresh world conflict. Its
hero, George Bowling, is a veteran of the Great War and now an oppressed
suburban everyman wanting a week’s respite from the gathering storm. He
embarks on an Ithacan quest to revisit the scenes of his Edwardian child-

hood in Lower Binfield, Oxfordshire and thus replenish his memories of
peaceful summer days with which to meet the coming cataclysm. Unhappily
he discovers that the remembered idyll has been despoiled by time, indus-
try, and commercialism. In this parable of failed nostos, Orwell does not
deny the magnetism of prelapsarian pastoral visions but he questions their
worth and sustainability in a necessarily brave new world. In the case of
John Van Druten, his Odyssean pilgrimages back to the scenes of his child-
hood in Edwardian West Hampstead are spurred by ‘a longing to know
what I am truly composed of ’99 and are an attempt to piece together an aeti-
ology of the self.
In his very personal exploration of the Odyssey, Daniel Mendelsohn
makes the point that the structure of Homer’s poem underscores the
importance of the characters of Telemachus and Laertes: ‘As much as it is a
tale of husbands and wives, this story is just as much—perhaps even more—
about fathers and sons.’100 And, in an interview with the Canadian maga-
zine Maclean’s, he said: ‘One reason the Odyssey is so great is because all
sons are Telemachus figures (Fig. 0.5). If you have any kind of imagination,
you want to understand who your parents are—you get to a certain point in
life and you’re finally in a position to figure out what motivated them.’101 My
investigation of nostos and nostalgia culminates where the Odyssey begins
and ends, with a son looking for his father. The last three chapters form the
book’s Telemachy but encompass also Aeneas’ ‘nostalgic’ descent to the
underworld to meet the shade of his father.
The story of Luis Gabriel Portillo, lovingly told by his son Michael, inter-
weaves the perspectives of Telemachus, Odysseus, and Laertes. It is one of
the most resonant stories in terms of the current global situation and
inspired the longest chapter in the book. 2019 marked the eightieth anni-
versary of the end of the Spanish Civil War, which displaced millions of
Spaniards (Fig. 0.6), among them artists and intellectuals like Luis Portillo
who had been declared an ‘enemy of the state’ by General Franco. Luis was
one of the lucky ones, granted asylum in Britain, but he suffered always
from a sense of impossible nostos, from ‘a tremendous nostalgia for what
had been and what might have continued to be’.102 His lyric poems, pub-
lished near the end of his life under the title Ruiseñor del destierro
(Nightingale of Exile), have been described as ‘[s]ad, proud verses laced with
the dignified bitterness of a man who had been pulled up by the roots’.103
They are an extended love letter to a lost Spain and especially to Salamanca,
his cherished alma mater, which was every bit as integral to his memory of
28 Imagining Ithaca
Fig. 0.5 Ulysses and Telemachus. Wood engraving by Charles Baude,

nineteenth century. Granger/Bridgeman Images.
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Imagining Ithaca Nostos and Nostalgia Since The Great War Kathleen Riley Full Chapter PDF

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Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia

Since the Great War Kathleen Riley

Monarchies and the Great War 1st ed. Edition Matthew

The Last Great War of Antiquity James Howard-Johnston

The Day the Great War Ended, 24 July 1923: The

Non-Aligned Psychiatry in the Cold War : revolution,

Museums, Modernity and Conflict: Museums and

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The Belgian Army and Society from Independence to the

The Traitor's Wife Kathleen Kent

For my beloved parents

Jean and Frank Riley

I owe a special debt to Michael Portillo whose voyage—or railway ­journey—

1. Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) 33

5. John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940) 79

8. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory (1951) 107

11. Carson McCullers’s ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ (1940) 145

14. George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) 183

17. Michael Portillo’s Great Railway Journeys: Granada to

0.1–2 Guy Denning, 112, La Feuillée, 2018. 2, 3

5.2 John Ford, c.1946, beside Georges Schreiber’s portrait of him,

xii List of Illustrations

8.1 Vladimir Nabokov as a child with his father, 1906. 108

List of Illustrations xiii

Nescio qua natale solum dulcedine cunctos

By some sweetness or other our native land leads us all

Πάντα στὸ νοῦ σου νά ’χεις τὴν Ἰθάκη.

In the centre of the small Breton village of La Feuillée in northern France, a

Introduction: Home from Homer 3

Fig 0.1 and 0.2 Continued

by frequent hallucinations of his dead comrade Evans, as ‘this last relic

Introduction: Home from Homer 5

If I should die, think only this of me:

The poem is essentially an inverted nostos. As Elizabeth Vandiver elaborates:

Introduction: Home from Homer 7

be sent to Gallipoli. There, in sight of ancient Troy and prophesying his

Though the high Gods smite and slay us,

One with Cumberland for ever

You were a lover of the hills, and had

Nostalgia, Not What It Used to Be

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens’s young protagonist and his business

Introduction: Home from Homer 9

supernatural, of the ancient Mediterranean. It’s a haunted word. It is

Introduction: Home from Homer 11

Calhoun’s prescription seems positively benign beside that of Jourdan Le

οὐδέ ποτ᾽ ὄσσε

Introduction: Home from Homer 13

nostos and foreshadowing a broader, less tangible definition of nostalgia. In

Cardus, whom the Manchester Guardian once compared to Homer,44 was a

And willows, willow-­herb, and grass,

Introduction: Home from Homer 15

Thomas’s premature death at Arras in 1917 and by Adlestrop’s demise under

Less graphically Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator on

Introduction: Home from Homer 17

Introduction: Home from Homer 19

Neither an angry young man nor, as popularly perceived, the embodiment

Introduction: Home from Homer 21

Philosopher Julian Baggini, acknowledging that nostalgia has received a

‘What These Ithakas Mean’

This book, whose overarching theme is the contemplation of Home from a

son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer . . . .

Joyce’s dauntingly experimental, shockingly irreverent, and beguilingly

Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades

I owe a special debt to Michael Portillo whose voyage—or railway journey—

1. Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) 33

0.1–2 Guy Denning, 112, La Feuillée, 2018. 2, 3

8.1 Vladimir Nabokov as a child with his father, 1906. 108

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,