Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric

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Title Pages

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Title Pages
Jonathan L. Ready

(p.i) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics (p.ii)

(p.iii) Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics

(p.iv) Copyright Page

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,

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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

Page 1 of 2
Title Pages

Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Jonathan L. Ready 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First Edition published in 2019

Impression: 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

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Page 2 of 2
Dedication

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.v) Dedication
Jonathan L. Ready

For Ruthie

That ain’t no storm, Captain.

That’s just my hammer in the air, Lord, Lord.

That’s just my hammer in the air.

(Ballad of John Henry, traditional)

(p.vi)

Page 1 of 1
Preface

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.vii) Preface
Jonathan L. Ready

The heroic world depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey is one of constant
competition, and my first book, Character, Narrator, and Simile in the Iliad
(Ready 2011), places similes in that agonistic setting. The book engages
extensively with similes spoken by characters but also shows how similes
presented by the Iliad’s narrator evince competitive dynamics. On occasion, I
refer in that book to similes in modern oral traditions. My second book, The
Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives: Oral Traditions from Saudi Arabia
to Indonesia (Ready 2018a), takes up that challenge, investigating the Homeric
simile from neglected comparative perspectives. In the first part of that volume,
I consider similes in five modern oral poetries—Rajasthani epic, South Sumatran
epic, Kyrgyz epic, Bosniac epic, and Najdi lyric poems from Saudi Arabia—and I
review folkloristic scholarship on successful performances by other verbal
artists, such as Egyptian singers of epic and African American singers of blues.
By applying the results of those inquiries to the Homeric epics in the second
part, I put forward a new take on how our Homeric poets crafted their similes,
and I alter our understanding of how they displayed their competence as
performers of verbal art.

Reading all those textualized versions of oral traditional works led me to explore
what goes into making a written version of an oral performer’s presentation.
Deep down in the history of folklore collecting, it occurred to me that I could use
my findings to address the vexed matter of how the Iliad and the Odyssey came
to be, and I published “The Textualization of Homeric Epic by Means of
Dictation” in the journal TAPA (Ready 2015). This book’s Part II (Chapter 3) is a
revised, expanded, and more accessible version of that article. Looking into the
history of the textualization of oral traditional works and seeing the roles played
by scribes in those events prompted me to think more about scribal activity. I

Page 1 of 3
Preface

found illuminating work on scribal activity in the fields of medieval studies and
religious studies: those scholars speak of the scribe as a performer. Tasked with
learning about performance, I turned to linguistic anthropology. Parts I and III of
this book represent the outcome of that research. Part I (Chapters 1 and 2)
applies linguistic anthropology’s concepts of oral textuality and oral
intertextuality to the Homeric epics. Chapter 1 offers a revised and expanded
presentation of some of the issues I broach in “Performance, Oral Texts, and
Entextualization in Homeric Epic” (Ready 2018b), a chapter in a volume I co-
edited with Christos Tsagalis (Ready and Tsagalis 2018a). Part III (Chapters 4
and 5) argues for understanding as performers the scribes responsible for the
texts in the so-called wild papyri of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Early on in The Homeric Simile in Comparative Perspectives, I establish a

nomenclature that I adhere to in this book as well (Ready 2018a: 6–8). I do not
use the proper noun “Homer” except when quoting or paraphrasing scholars
who do use that name. Instead I refer to the Iliad poet or the Odyssey poet (or
the poet of the Iliad or the poet (p.viii) of the Odyssey). Both these poets are to
be labeled Homeric poets: I call them “our Homeric poets.” They represent the
tradition of the oral performance of Homeric poetry. Countless Homeric poets
perpetuated that tradition of Homeric poetry, performing the Iliad and the
Odyssey orally many, many times before the emergence of written texts of the
Iliad and the Odyssey and continuing to perform the Iliad and the Odyssey orally
afterward. I imagine that the Iliad poet dictated his version of the Iliad to a
scribe and that the Odyssey poet dictated his version of the Odyssey to a scribe.
Those dictated poems—that Iliad and that Odyssey—served as the archetypes for
the subsequent written textual tradition of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. The Iliad
and the Odyssey are “the Homeric epics (or poems).” The Iliad is not the Iliad;
the Odyssey is not the Odyssey. Rather, the roman font—the Iliad, the Odyssey—
signals that one is dealing with a tradition in which performers present what
they think of as the same story, not with specific written texts. When John D.
Smith speaks of “the epic of Pābūjī” (1991), or Lauri Honko of “the Siri
epic” (1998), or Aditya Malik of “the oral narrative of Devnārāyaṇ” (2005), or
Nienke van der Heide of “the Manas epic” (2015), none uses italics. Homerists
address this phenomenon in their own way. Andrew Ford refers to poets “who
handed over their Iliads and Odysseys to alphabets” (1992: 137). Jim Marks
speaks of the “‘Odyssey-tradition’” as “the notional, though irrecoverable,
sequence of compositions-in-performance through which the Homeric text
evolved” and “‘the Odyssey’” as “the text as we have it” (2008: 12–13). José
González speaks of “recognizable Iliadic and Odyssean traditions” (2013: 418).
Ultimately, the term “Homeric poetry” embraces the Iliad and the Odyssey
(which, to be precise, really means the ancient and medieval written copies of
the Iliad and the Odyssey) as well as all those performances of the Iliad and the
Odyssey (or sections thereof) that were not written down.

Page 2 of 3
Preface

In some ways, what follows in this book represents an attempt to continue this
project of definition. In this case I want to look into the various agents and
entities involved in and relevant to the oral performance of the Iliad and the
Odyssey, to the creation of written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey via a
process of dictation, and to the written textual transmission of the Iliad and the
Odyssey.

Page 3 of 3
Acknowledgments

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

(p.ix) Acknowledgments
Jonathan L. Ready

I am grateful to Richard Bauman and Raymond Person for reading a draft of this
book; to Karin Barber, Richard Martin, and Christos Tsagalis for reviewing early
attempts at some of the arguments presented in Part I; and to Francesca
Schironi for critiquing section 5.1. Audiences at conferences in Atlanta,
Bloomington, Chicago, and New Orleans helped with Part III, and the Orality and
Literacy group helped with Part I at the 2016 meeting in Lausanne. I thank
Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute and Harvard
University’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation for their support of this project in
its later stages. In a remarkable act of intellectual generosity, one of the
anonymous readers for Oxford University Press returned ten single-spaced
pages of comments, saving me from numerous errors and infelicities. The other
reader was more laconic but just as helpful. Once again it has been a privilege to
work with Charlotte Loveridge and Georgie Leighton at the Press. As always, I
owe my greatest debt to Margaret Foster for her encouragement and assistance.

I thank the University of Texas Press for permission to reuse in Chapter 1

material from the following book chapter:

Ready, J. L. 2018b. “Performance, Oral Texts, and Entextualization in Homeric

Epic,” in J. L. Ready and C. C. Tsagalis (eds), Homer in Performance: Rhapsodes,
Narrators, and Characters. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 320–50. ©
University of Texas Press, 2018. (p.x)

Page 1 of 1
Introduction

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Introduction
Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter first situates this project in the context of current discussions about
the definitions of the terms “orality” and “textuality,” both of which have medial
and conceptional senses. It then lays out three lessons from work on orality and
textuality from outside the field of classical studies—from linguistic
anthropology to folkloristics to medieval studies to religious studies—and
reviews how the subsequent chapters apply these lessons to the study of
Homeric poetry. It concludes by positioning this study in relation to previous
work in Homeric studies and by suggesting which parts of the book readers from
outside classical studies will find most valuable.

Keywords: orality, textuality, linguistic anthropology, folkloristics, medieval studies, religious studies,
Homeric studies

Scholars use the phrase “the Homeric text” all the time. Yet one could not find
this Homeric text (singular) in the library stacks or in digital form: rather one
would come upon several Homeric texts (plural) (cf. Gurd 2005: 9). Helmut van
Thiel’s text of the Iliad (2010) differs from, for instance, Martin L. West’s (1998a,
2000a). Thomas Allen’s text of the Odyssey (1917, 1919) differs from, for
instance, Peter von der Mühll’s (1946). I merely scratch the surface in citing
those four. Alex Lee surveys thirty-three printed Greek texts of poems attributed
to Homer (2013), from Demetrius Chalcondylas’s 1488 Ἡ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποίησις
ἅπασα to Eduard Schwartz’s 1923 edition of the Iliad and 1924 edition of the
Odyssey. Even if each edition aims to be definitive, the existence of competing
editions reveals the protean nature of the modern Homeric text. That the
Homeric text remains a dynamic entity finds a neat parallel in the renewed

Page 1 of 12
Introduction

production of distinct English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (McCrorie
2012; B. Powell 2014; P. Green 2015; E. Wilson 2018; cf. P. Young 2003: 84–158;
Moser 2013: 99–206).

I leave it to others to critique the modern printed editions (Apthorp 1980: pp.
xviii–xix; Nagy 2004: 15–17; Graziosi and Haubold 2015: 5–6) but will continue
to take apart the phrase “the Homeric text.” This book’s five chapters query
from three different angles—hence the book’s division into three parts—what it
means to speak of Homeric poetry together with the word “text.” Scholarship
from outside the discipline of classical studies motivates and undergirds the
project. This research has deepened our understanding of the word “text”—
above all, of what the fashioning of a text can involve—by exploring the
relationship between orality and textuality. Let me first contemplate these two
words.

Investigators from various fields define or employ these words—orality and

textuality—in various ways. Egbert Bakker reminds the Homerist of two
meanings scholars give to the words “oral” and “orality.” One often uses them
“in a medial sense, meaning simply that something is spoken and as such is a
matter of sound and the voice of the speaker” (1997a: 7, emphasis in original).
Seeing a title like Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent
(Johnson et al. 1997), one thinks of oral performance, of oral in the medial sense.
The medievalist and expert in Turkic oral epic Karl Reichl has medial orality in
mind when he states flatly, “A poem is oral…simply because it is oral.…A poem is
oral because of the way it has been composed, transmitted and/or
performed” (2003: 255). In a book on the oral performance (p.2) in North India
of poetry attributed to Kabir, Linda Hess writes, “I use the term ‘oral’…only for
live, embodied performance”; “the orality I speak of requires the presence
together of physical bodies, and the production and communication of
sound” (2015: 78, 232; cf. 211; Niles 1999: 53; Finnegan 2015: 25, 81–2). For
the Africanist Harold Scheub, an oral poem “loses its identity”—it can no longer
be said to be oral—“when it is frozen in memory or writing” (2002: 83).

At the same time, these words “may also be a matter of conception” (Bakker
1997a: 8, emphasis in original). The linguist Wulf Oesterreicher defines orality
as a matter of “style” and of “conception,” not medium: he chooses “the term
language of immediacy (Sprache der Nähe) to designate the informal/oral type
of linguistic conception” (1997: 191, 193–4; cf. Bakker 1997b: 287). Additional
complexities emerge if one wishes to distinguish between the style evident in an
oral traditional work, be it an epic poem or a folktale, and the style evident in
everyday talk (DuBois 2012: 206; cf. Saussy 2016: 47). Once one stops thinking
in terms of medium one finds that “a discourse that is conceptionally oral (such
as a conversational narrative) is often medially oral as well, but it is also possible
for such a discourse to be written” (Bakker 1997a: 8, emphasis in original; cf.
Shuman 1986: 95–6, 112–13, 117, 176; Andersen 1991: 49–50; Assmann 2006:

Page 2 of 12
Introduction

111). Oesterreicher can offer “a typology of orality in written texts” (1997: 190),
and the folklorist Lauri Honko can state, “It is not the medium as such but the
oral style and written style which are at stake. Both media can accommodate
both styles,…” (2002a: 20; cf. Alexander 2006: 17; Schellenberg 2015: 293; S.
Miller 2017: 95). Another illustrative effort to get away from a focus on medium
comes from the comparatist Haun Saussy. He defines “oral tradition as a poetic
technology marked by collective composition, modularity, iterability, and
virtuality” (2016: 72). That it can be voiced is “incidental”: “indeed many of the
same features can be found in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary avant-
gardes” (73). This twofold understanding of orality goes some way toward
mitigating the desire to toss out the term tout court (e.g. Scollon and Scollon
1995; cf. Finnegan 2015: 81–3).

To this nuanced understanding of orality can be added a nuanced understanding

of textuality. Consider the titles of three collections of essays and their editors’
introductory comments. The editors of Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality,
Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion note, “The larger part of this volume will focus
on the ways in which oral and written transmission of these cultural elements
interact within a context in which written transmission is more or less readily
available” (Elman and Gershoni 2000b: 1). The editors of Listening up, Writing
down, and Looking beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual refer to
“the process of moving from embodied performance to a textual form, be it
manuscript, print…” and identify as “text” “what is produced when orature is
lifted out of the discursive environment where it lived” (Gingell with Roy 2012:
13–14).1 The editor of Orality and Textuality (p.3) in the Iranian World: Patterns
of Interaction across the Centuries speaks of “orality and its patterns of
intersection and interaction with the written word” and writes, “Each of the
contributions provides important evidence of textual culture’s intimate,
extensive, and ongoing interaction with the realm of orality” (Rubanovich 2015b:
3–4, 13). In these volumes, textuality refers to written texts and what goes on in
written texts.

Others use text and textuality differently. A text can be “a species of social
action” (Barber and Moraes Farias 1989: 3), and one can treat “social action as
text” (Becker and Mannheim 1995: 239; cf. Titon 2003: 80; Assmann 2006: 123)
or “any humanly constructed object” as text (Titon 2003: 76). I remain in the
realm of language use. Textuality can indicate the presence of attributes that
render an instance of language use a text irrespective of medium. One can speak
of, for instance, oral or written or inscribed or printed texts. The anthropologist
Karin Barber, who focuses on African praise poetry, stresses the continuities
between the textuality evident in oral and written texts: “writing is not what
confers textuality. Rather, what does [confer textuality] is the quality of being
joined together and given a recognisable existence as a form”; “text…is
utterance (oral or written) that is woven together in order to attract attention
and to outlast the moment” (2007: 1–2). Carol Pasternack, who studies Old
Page 3 of 12
Introduction

English poetry, distinguishes the textuality of texts in various media. The

textuality of the Old English texts preserved in manuscripts differs from the
textuality “of both oral and printed compositions” as well as “written” texts
(1995: 2). She uses the term “inscribed” to label the textuality of the poetry in
the corpus she investigates “since they inherit significant elements of vocality
from their oral forebears and yet address the reader from the pages of
manuscripts” (2). The folklorist Amy Shuman would distinguish between
“written and spoken texts” by looking to the “relationships between texts and
contexts” (1986: 184).

I toggle back and forth between these various positions over the course of this
book. So, with these distinctions in mind, I pick out three lessons from work on
orality and textuality from outside the field of classical studies. First, one learns
what goes into the production of oral texts, utterances capable of outlasting the
moment, and how oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. Second,
one learns what textualization entails—the creation of a written version of an
oral traditional work via a process that starts either with a scribe’s writing down
a performer’s words or a collector’s using a recording device to a capture a
performer’s words. Third, one learns what happens when scribes, living in a
world in which the oral performance of traditional works thrives, copy written
texts of those and/or related works. By applying these findings to the study of
Homeric poetry, this book brings out the complexities involved in speaking about
Homeric poetry and text in the same breath.

This interdisciplinary and comparative approach enables an investigation into

Homeric texts from the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods. Written texts of
the Iliad and the Odyssey achieved an unprecedented degree of standardization
after 150 BCE (Haslam 1997: 56, 63–4; Lamberton 1997: 44; Jensen 2011: 218;
Schironi 2018: 42–3). Although not identical, our medieval manuscripts of the
Homeric epics reflect that development. This book examines the Homeric
tradition before that process of (p.4) standardization. By looking at oral texts,
dictated texts, and wild texts, it illuminates the intricate history of Homeric texts
long before the emergence of standardized written texts.

Part I, made up of Chapters 1 and 2, explores the oral composition in

performance of Homeric poetry. To say that Homeric poets composed in oral
performance is to say that they worked with a toolkit of formulae, type-scenes,
middle-range structures, and plots to fashion their poem in the act of performing
before an audience (e.g. Edwards 1992; Louden 1999, 2006; Minchin 2001; M.
Clark 2004; W. Hansen 2011; Kahane 2018). Memorization might have played a
part when it came to certain segments of the poem, but the poets did not engage
in wholesale prior composition, as other oral poets do (Ready 2018a: 22), only
presenting the poem after they had memorized the whole thing. Similarly, some
Homeric poets might have made use of written texts before or even during a
performance, but the usual depiction of Homeric poets composing in

Page 4 of 12
Introduction

performance does not portray them as dependent upon written texts. As for a
timeframe, when talking about the oral composition in performance of Homeric
poetry, the majority of Homerists have in mind the Homeric poets of, at the very
least, the early Archaic period. I stand with those who have in mind the poets of
the entire Archaic period as well as the Classical and Hellenistic periods.
Whatever one’s stance on this matter, one looks especially to the Iliad and the
Odyssey themselves to reconstruct what those poets did in oral performance.

Part I argues that one should think about texts and textuality when considering
the oral composition in performance of Homeric poetry—that is, irrespective of
the presence of written texts. Linguistic anthropology teaches that oral
performers generate oral texts through processes of entextualization—the
“art” (Barber 2007: 93) of shaping utterances capable of outlasting the moment.
Moreover, oral texts engage intertextually with other oral texts. They look
backward and forward as they interact with past and future texts, and
performers negotiate an intertextual gap, meaning the relationship their own
text has to other texts. Starting from that research, Chapters 1 and 2 consider
how these two phenomena pertain to the Homeric epics.

Chapter 1 delves into a range of material, from the speeches Zeus entrusts to
messengers to public laments over fallen warriors, from the narrator’s
catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own exegesis. I thereby
explore the ways in which the Homeric characters talk about and craft oral texts
and consider how the narrator text and the poem as a whole deploy mechanisms
of entextualization. I conclude that our Homeric poets fashioned an utterance
capable of outlasting the moment each time they performed, and that conclusion
prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about texts.

Chapter 2 returns to episodes involving messengers in the epics. I touch on the

anticipatory intertextuality evident in such episodes and then launch a detailed
exploration of the messenger’s performance. I focus on how, as mediators,
messengers negotiate the intertextual gap between the speech they are tasked
with relaying and their own speech. This investigation reveals still more about
the portrayal of oral texts in the world depicted in the epics, especially what can
happen to oral texts in that (p.5) world, and sheds light on the representation
of mediators in the poems. As I do in Chapter 1, I conclude with some inferences
about the Iliad poet and the Odyssey poet. The poet characterizes himself as a
mediator, but critically, as one who performs in his capacity as a mediator, and
the poet seeks to craft an oral text that engages in particular ways with past and
future presentations of the same story. By introducing the concept of oral
textuality to Homeric studies and by working with a more precise model of oral
intertextuality than Homerists have used heretofore, Part I illuminates both the
verbal and oratorical landscape our Homeric poets fashion in their epics and
what the poets were actually doing when they performed.

Page 5 of 12
Introduction

Part II comprises Chapter 3. Scholars argue over how written texts of the work
of Homeric poets, oral traditional poets, came into existence and, to be more
specific, they argue over how and when written texts emerged that provided
exemplars for the written textual traditions of the Iliad and the Odyssey that one
reads today. One theory, customarily termed the “dictation model,” envisions a
poet, customarily placed in the Archaic period, dictating to a scribe. Another
theory, Gregory Nagy’s evolutionary model, also involves poets dictating to
scribes, starting around 550 BCE. These two models—the dictation model and
the evolutionary model—differ from a third model, best articulated by M. L.
West: Archaic-era poets wrote the poems down themselves. Dictation plays a
part in two out of the three explanations, however much the two strive to
distinguish themselves from one another, for how written texts came into
existence.

One should query what it would have meant for a poet to dictate to a scribe. To
do so, I focus on the numerous modern instances of the textualization of an oral
traditional work. My investigation relies especially on the testimony of folklorists
and ethnographers who engage in and study textualization. It emerges that the
textualization of a modern oral traditional work by a collector results in a text
that is the co-creation of the performer, collector, and scribe (if a discrete third
party). I conclude that a written text resulting from a process that began when a
collector had a poet dictate his version of the Iliad or the Odyssey to a scribe
was likely such a co-creation (see the preface for the use of roman font). An
excursus on the collector of oral traditional works as depicted in Herodotus’s
Histories and on Herodotus’s own practices as a textualizer bolsters this
conclusion. Previous investigations of the creation of written versions of the Iliad
and the Odyssey by way of dictation have obscured the contributions of other
parties involved in the textualization event beside the poet.

Finally, the Iliad and the Odyssey emerged, be it through the collaborative
process of textualization by way of dictation or from the hand of a writing oral
poet. The question becomes, what did the people who made copies of those
written texts do when they copied? Part III (Chapters 4 and 5) considers some of
those copies as preserved in the so-called wild papyri of the Homeric epics from
the Ptolemaic period.

As an example of one of the texts I investigate, I quote from papyrus 5 (TM

61226), dating from between 299 and 200 BCE and preserving what we label Il.
11.788–848 and 12.1–9. In this selection, which corresponds to what we label Il.
11.794–808, Nestor urges Patroclus to enter the battle wearing Achilles’s armor
(S. West 1967: 108–9). (p.6) Stephanie West, whose edition of the papyrus
fragment I reproduce here, uses “the Oxford Classical Text” to supplement
lacunae (1967: 10), which I take to mean T. Allen’s 1931 edition.

[εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ἧισι θεοπροπίην] ἀλείνει

Page 6 of 12
Introduction

[καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸσ ἐπέφ]ρ̣α̣δε πότνια μήτηρ

[ἀργυρόπεζα Θέτισ θυγάτηρ ἁλί]ο̣ιο γέροντοσ
[ ἐν] ἀ̣γ̣ῶνι θοάω̣ν̣
[ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, λ]αὸν ἀνώχθω
[Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόωσ Δα]ν̣α̣[ο]ῖ̣σ̣ι γένηαι.
[ θ]ω̣ρ̣ηχθῆναι
[αἴ κέ σε τῶι εἴσκοντεσ ἀπόσχωντ]α̣ι̣ π̣ο̣λ̣έμοιο
[Τρῶεσ, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷεσ Ἀχ]α̣ιῶν
[τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσισ π]ο̣λέμοιο.
[ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτεσ κεκμηότασ ἄν]δρασ ἀϋτῆ[ι
[ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισ]ιάων.”
[ὣσ φάτο, τῶι δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθ]εσσιν ὄρινε·
[τεῖρε γὰρ αἰνὸν ἄχοσ κραδίην, ἀ]κ̣άχησε δὲ θυμ[ὸν·
[βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆασ ἐπ’ Αἰακίδη]ν̣ Ἀχιλῆια.
[ ]νο̣.τ̣αι̣αχ̣α̣[
[ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆασ Ὀδυσσῆ]οσ θείοιο
[ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλοσ, ἵνά σφ’ ἀ]γ̣[ο]ρ̣ή̣ τε θέμισ τε
[ προπάροιθε νεῶν ὀρθοκρ]αιράων
[ἤην, τῆι δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετ]εύχατο βωμοί,
But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle
and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus,
silver-footed Thetis, daughter of the old man of the sea,
…in the gathering place of the swift
but let him send you out,…and urge the host
of Myrmidons, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the
Danaans.
…to put on,
to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war
and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath
because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war.
And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied
with battle
back toward the city from the ships and the huts.”
So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast:
for a terrible pain wore at his heart, and he was vexed in his mind;
and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson, Achilles.
…
But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus
in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and
place of judgment
(p.7) …in front of the ships with tall sterns
was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,2

The verses followed by a letter, known as plus verses, do not appear in the
standard critical editions of the Iliad and provide the clearest evidence for how
the texts in the wild papyri come in and out of contact with those standard
editions. Compare van Thiel’s version of these lines:

εἰ δέ τινα φρεσὶν ᾗσι θεοπροπίην ἀλεείνει

Page 7 of 12
Introduction

καί τινά οἱ πὰρ Ζηνὸς ἐπέφραδε πότνια μήτηρ,

ἀλλὰ σέ περ προέτω, ἅμα δ’ ἄλλος λαὸς ἑπέσθω
Μυρμιδόνων, αἴ κέν τι φόως Δαναοῖσι γένηαι·
καί τοι τεύχεα καλὰ δότω πόλεμόνδε φέρεσθαι,
αἴ κέ σε τῷ ἴσκοντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο
Τρῶες, ἀναπνεύσωσι δ’ ἀρήιοι υἷες Ἀχαιῶν
τειρόμενοι· ὀλίγη δέ τ’ ἀνάπνευσις πολέμοιο.
ῥεῖα δέ κ’ ἀκμῆτες κεκμηότας ἄνδρας ἀυτῇ
ὤσαισθε προτὶ ἄστυ νεῶν ἄπο καὶ κλισιάων.”
ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ’ ἄρα θυμὸν ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν ὄρινε·
βῆ δὲ θέειν παρὰ νῆας ἐπ’ Αἰακίδην Ἀχιλῆα.
ἀλλ’ ὅτε δὴ κατὰ νῆας Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο
ἷξε θέων Πάτροκλος, ἵνά σφ’ ἀγορή τε θέμις τε
ἤην, τῇ δὴ καί σφι θεῶν ἐτετεύχατο βωμοί,
But if in his mind he is trying to avoid some oracle
and his queenly mother declared to him something from Zeus,
well, let him send you out, and with you let the rest of the army
of Myrmidons follow, to see if you prove a light of deliverance to the
Danaans;
and let him give you his fair armor to wear into the war,
to see if the Trojans take you for him and hold off from war
and the warlike sons of the Achaeans catch their breath
because they are worn out; for scant is the space to breathe in war.
And easily might you, being unwearied, drive men that are wearied
with battle
back toward the city from the ships and the huts.”
So he spoke and roused the heart in his breast;
(p.8) and he went running along the ships to Aeacus’s grandson,
Achilles.
But when to the ships of godlike Odysseus
in his running Patroclus came, where their place of assembly and
place of judgment
was, where also had been built their altars of the gods,3

Much previous scholarship uses these papyri to establish the putatively original
written texts of the Homeric epics. I encourage researchers to think about these
papyri in their own right because they reveal the sorts of written texts that many
people in the Classical and Hellenistic periods likely used. To think about these
papyri in their own right requires not mischaracterizing the copyists’ work or
unproductively disparaging it.

In order to provide a new way to think about the scribal activity that produced
the texts one sees in the wild papyri, I seek guidance, as I do in Parts I and II,
from outside classical studies. After reviewing previous research in Homeric
studies on these texts, Chapter 4 introduces the model of the scribe as performer
put to work by students of several literatures, such as Anglo-Saxon and Israelite
texts. Per this model, the scribe performs in the act of copying, due in large part
to the fact that he operates in a time when performers orally perform the work
Page 8 of 12
Introduction

he copies, or orally perform using other related written texts, or orally perform
related oral traditional works. I demonstrate the model’s relevance to the study
of the wild Homeric papyri and consider at what point in time people capable of
generating the texts one finds in the papyri would most likely have been around
—much rests on the extent of the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the
Classical and Hellenistic periods—and who these capable people might have
been.

Deploying scholarship on performance, especially that of linguistic

anthropologists and folklorists, Chapter 5 fleshes out what it meant for the
scribe behind the text of a wild papyrus to perform as he copied. Offering close
readings of a number of the wild papyri, the chapter first applies the model of
entextualization, familiar from Part I, to the papyri and then applies work on how
oral performers show their competence by aiming for a maximalist presentation
and one that evinces “affecting power.” Next, it considers three other
components of the scribe’s performance: it touches on the scribe as an agent of
tradition, introduces and applies the concept of traditionalization—the linking of
one’s performance to other performances of the same tale—and goes back to the
phenomenon of the intertextual gap broached in Chapter 2. Switching gears, the
chapter then explores how the production of a bookroll becomes a performance.
The penultimate section rehearses the benefits of understanding the scribe as a
performer for students of scribal activity, and the concluding section juxtaposes
the model of (p.9) scribal performance with the alternative accounts surveyed
in Chapter 4 for the distinct features of the wild Homeric papyri.

In brief, the book’s three parts argue that considering together the phenomena
of orality and textuality clarifies the history of Homeric texts before the
standardization of the written textual tradition after 150 BCE and the
contributions of various agents to that history.

In summarizing my project design and the contours of my argument and

findings, I have pointed out some of the ways in which each part differs from
previous scholarship in Homeric studies. I hasten to add that Homerists have
investigated the interactions between orality and textuality before, although one
could think otherwise upon reading M. L. West’s admonishment “to shake the
oralists off our backs” (2003a: 14). For instance, as we will see in Chapter 2,
Homerists consider the phenomenon of oral intertextuality. By contrast, I set
aside at the outset two other queries common in Homeric studies.

To begin with, students of oral traditions continue to explore how oral

performers interact with written texts (Jensen 2011: 187–94, 2017; Fox 2016:
368; cf. Broude 2011), and Homerists often focus on that question when they
examine the interactions between orality and textuality. For example, Nagy
envisions written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey appearing after 550 BCE
(e.g. 2014). At first, they served as transcripts that could be used as aids for an

Page 9 of 12
Introduction

oral performance. Beginning in the later part of the fourth century BCE, written
texts began to function as scripts that were mandatory for a successful
performance. Investigating this shift from transcript to script, José González
argues that “the cultural pressures that brought about the growing dependence
of orators on the memorization of written speeches were also at work among
rhapsodes” (2013: 7). Minna Skafte Jensen wonders how oral performers of the
epics would have made use of written texts (2011: 216):

If we hypothesize that written texts were accessible to the rhapsodes and

gave rise to new versions when they integrated them into their oral
repertoires, this situation leads to the next question: How could these new
versions make their way back into written texts as they must have done if
their influence is found in the transmitted text of the two epics? Did the
rhapsodes own manuscripts that they revised whenever they had a new
good idea? That would have been a cumbersome and expensive process
demanding frequent erasure and rewriting. In the case of a papyrus
manuscript the relatively fragile material would allow for only a limited
amount of changes. If, instead, the rhapsodes preferred waxed tablets, any
number of changes would have been physically possible; but in that case
the piles of tablets necessary for containing the two poems would pose
other problems.

Jensen makes plain her doubts that performers of the Iliad and the Odyssey ever
memorized written texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey: “The Iliad and the Odyssey
had no further life in oral tradition, I submit. They were not memorised by their
two poets or by others and not reperformed in full or in part” (2011: 246; cf.
164–5; 2017). I will give my own thoughts on this matter when my presentation
requires it (introduction to Chapter 3 (pp. 103–4); section 4.3 (p. 202)), but I will
not mount a systematic inquiry.

(p.10) I also stay out of the following. Like students of Rabbinic literature
(Elman 1999: 58; Jaffee 1999: 12), Homerists ask, granted that Homeric poets
orally performed, do our poems exhibit features that only the use of writing can
explain? Do they reflect in whole or in part what linguists call conceptional
literacy (Oesterreicher 1997: 194–5; Schroeder 2016: 82–3)? Take the discussion
of ring composition among scholars of the Homeric epics. After an exhaustive
investigation of the structure of the Iliad, especially its use of ring composition,
Keith Stanley concludes that, although the Iliad was orally performed (1993:
265, 280), it cannot be attributed “to an oral poet dependent solely on oral
technique” (282). Rather, it evinces “recursive structures of a complexity foreign
to extemporized poetry,” and “a more relevant model for Homeric artistry can be
found in the conscious literary parataxis of archaic and classical lyric and in
fifth-century drama and historiography” (268). Others disagree and assert that
one need not attribute even the most elaborate ring structures in the Homeric
epics to conceptional literacy (cf. Arft 2017: 9–12). Starting from the premise

Page 10 of 12
Introduction

that the Homeric epics “reflect the compositional practices of oral poetry the
world over” and endorsing the view that ring composition can operate at “any
scale of narrative” (2014: 75, 81), Erwin Cook argues that the Odyssey is
constructed via a series of rings. The subtext of his article is that this
pronounced narrative pattern would have allowed a trained singer to learn the
story of the Odyssey quite easily.

Both these subjects merit continued study, but the story of the interactions
between orality and textuality in the case of Homeric poetry involves much more
than if or how rhapsodes used written texts and involves much more than if the
poems we have, be they the product of an oral performance or intended for oral
performance or both, contain features attributable solely to conceptional
literacy. This book tells three parts of that story.

At the same time, Homerists will find themselves on some recognizable terrain.
They will be comfortable with one of the book’s main topics: the nature of oral
performance. Richard Martin’s The Language of Heroes: Speech and
Performance in the Iliad (1989) and John Miles Foley’s The Singer of Tales in
Performance (1995a) showed the value of applying research on oral performance
to archaic Greek epic poetry. Parts I and III of this book renew that endeavor.
Above all, they apply to the Homeric tradition work in linguistic anthropology on
how oral performers display their skill through, for instance, entextualizing,
offering a maximalist presentation, moving their audiences, traditionalizing, and
negotiating an intertextual gap. The application of this research to the scribes
behind the wild Homeric papyri is a first, as is the application of research on
scribal activity in other traditions to the wild papyri. But in general this book’s
comparative and interdisciplinary orientation will feel familiar. In Part I, I join
those who adopt comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives to illuminate the
oral performances of the Homeric characters (e.g. Martin 1989; Lardinois 1997)
or the oral performances of the Homeric bards (e.g. Bakker 1997a; Minchin
2001; Scodel 2002; Ready 2018a). In Part II, I join Jensen (2011) in taking a
comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the question of the creation of
written versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey by way of dictation.

(p.11) I have written this book from my perch in classical studies and have
framed it so as to address issues of concern to Homerists and their fellow
travelers in classical studies. Researchers in other disciplines will find the book
useful too. Linguistic anthropologists will benefit from Part I’s discussions of
entextualization and oral intertextuality. Folklorists and other scholars of
modern oral traditions will benefit from Part II’s exploration of modern instances
of the textualization of oral traditional works. Finally, students of scribal activity
in other cultures will benefit from Part III’s systematic application of research in
performance to the work of scribes. (p.12)

Page 11 of 12
Introduction

Notes:
(1) The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines orature as follows (Baldick
2008): “a portmanteau term coined by the Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi
wa Thiong’o to denote imaginative works of the oral tradition usually referred to
as ‘oral literature’. The point of the coinage is to avoid suggesting that oral
compositions belong to a lesser or derivative category.”

(2) My translations of passages from the Homeric papyri look for the most part
to Lattimore 1951 and 1965, Wyatt 1999, M. L. West 2003b, and Most 2007b. I
aim to Latinize all proper nouns in all my translations.

Some authority has assigned each papyrus a number (Bird 2010: 62). The
numbers used for the papyri discussed in this book are those recognized by
these authorities. For the most part, I can refer to a papyrus by its Allen-Sutton
or Allen-Sutton-West or West number. On the two occasions when such a number
does not exist, I use the Mertens-Pack3 number (MP3) (http://
cipl93.philo.ulg.ac.be/Cedopal/MP3/dbsearch%5Fen.aspx). I also give the
Trismegistos number (TM) in parentheses (cf. Depauw and Gheldof 2014): that
online database provides the papyrus’s location and its inventory number as well
as a link to the papyrus’s entry in the Leuven Database of Ancient Books that
lists scholarly work on the papyrus.

(3) Throughout this book I use van Thiel’s editions of the Iliad (2010) and the
Odyssey (1991), although I do not reproduce his lunate sigmas. For the most
part, translations of passages from the Iliad look to Wyatt 1999, with frequent
glances at Lattimore 1951, and translations of passages from the Odyssey look to
Lattimore 1965. When I do not make such specifications in regard to other texts,
the translations are my own.

Page 12 of 12
Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric Epics

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated
Texts, and Wild Texts
Jonathan L. Ready

Print publication date: 2019

Print ISBN-13: 9780198835066
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2019
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198835066.001.0001

Oral Texts and Entextualization in the Homeric

Epics
Jonathan L. Ready

DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198835066.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter introduces to Homeric studies the concepts of oral texts—
utterances capable of spiting the power of time—and entextualization—the
process of making an oral text. It delves into a range of material, from the
speeches Zeus entrusts to messengers to public laments over fallen warriors,
from the narrator’s catalogues to moments in which the text engages in its own
exegesis. It thereby explores the ways in which the Homeric characters talk
about and craft oral texts and considers how the narrator text and the poem as a
whole deploy mechanisms of entextualization. It concludes that our Homeric
poets fashioned an utterance capable of outlasting the moment each time they
performed, and that conclusion prompts revisions to how Homerists talk about
texts.

Keywords: oral texts, entextualization, speeches, character text, Homeric poets, text, oral performance

Introduction
Most discussions of writing in the Homeric epics point to two verses as the sole
reference to the phenomenon: Proteus sent Bellerephon to Lycia, “and he gave
him baneful signs, / having inscribed (sēmata lugra / grapsas) many life-
destroying things in a folded tablet” (Il. 6.168–9) (Scodel 1992: 58; Bassi 1997:
325; Aloni 1998: 78; Jensen 2011: 197 n. 49; B. Powell 2011). Haun Saussy casts
a wider net. In order to find writing in the Homeric epics, he “rework[s]” the
concept and applies it to, for example, moments of scratching—Polydamas’s
spear scratches (grapsen) Peneleos (Il. 17.599)—and incising—each Achaean

Page 1 of 69
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
I was fair game for them. There was hardly anybody in the church
who did not know how emotional and how excitable I was, and how
music affected me. Why, I used to be thrilled over the way I myself
played the violin, and have been known to hang entranced over a
tune of my own composition! Even before the services began I saw
that many of the Brothers and Sisters had spotted me and were only
waiting the proper moment to pounce upon me, and when the call for
converts came as many of them as could get near me pleaded and
begged and cajoled; they scrambled and almost fought in their
eagerness to ensnare such a prime morsel for the Lord. They could
have worked no more furiously if God had been keeping the score.
They screeched at me that now was the time to see Jesus, that God
was waiting impatiently for me to be converted.
Some of them even threatened. They painted horrible pictures of
Hell; they told me that unless I went down the aisle and confessed
my sins and asked God to forgive me I would sizzle and burn and
scorch forevermore. One old woman, her face working with fanatical
fury, screamed at me that I was holding up the salvation of my whole
family; that my father and my mother and my sisters and brothers
would not go to Heaven unless I professed religion; she shouted that
Satan was waiting outside the church to lead me into the depths of
Hell and light a fire under my immortal soul. The whole crew pushed
and tugged and hauled at me; one Brother got hold of my arm and
tried to drag me into the aisle, yelling “Come to Jesus! Jesus is
calling for you!”
And up on the platform Brother McConnell was rampaging to and fro,
working himself into a frenzy, shouting that “Jesus wants you!” and
above the roar of the Christian workers and the moans of the victims
rose the wailing whine of a violin played off key, the thunder of the
organ and the emotion-filled voices of the choir.
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee!”
By this time I was crying; I did not want to go to Hell, and I was
horribly afraid of the Devil, and I was not old enough to realize what
was being done to me. Yet something kept telling me that I should
not do this thing; that it was all a mockery and a fraud. I know now,
and I knew soon after that night, that the music was what was the
matter with me, not religion. I did not see Jesus, and I never have. It
was that slow music; that doleful, wailing chant of the hymns. I
couldn’t withstand it. I never could. In the army I used to go to all of
the funerals because I got such a terrific kick out of the funeral
march and the sliding tramp of troops marching at half-step.
But I was doomed. It was in the cards that my self-respect was to be
stripped from me and that I was to be emotionally butchered to make
a religious holiday. They dragged and hauled at me until I was in the
aisle, and then they got behind me and urged me forward. One old
woman leaped ahead of us and performed a war dance that would
have done credit to a frenzied worshiper of Voodoo. And as she
pranced and cavorted she screamed:
“A bad boy is coming to Jesus!”
Others were going down too, shepherded by the hard-working
Brothers and Sisters, and as they reached the bench Brother
McConnell reached forward and grabbed their hands. For each one
he shouted “Praise the Lord! Another sinner come to Jesus!” and
then he gave the sinner an expert shove that catapulted him into the
hands of a waiting Brother who immediately knelt with him and
prayed. The team work was magnificent. I tried to hang back, but the
band began playing again. The thunderous cadences of “Nearer, My
God, to Thee,” pealed from the organ, and I couldn’t stand it. I was
being torn to pieces emotionally, and I staggered and stumbled down
the aisle, sobbing, hardly able to stand. They thought it was religion,
and the Brothers and Sisters who were pushing and shoving me
shouted ecstatically that God had me; it was obvious that I was
suffering, and suffering has always been accepted as a true sign of
holiness.
But it was not God and it was not religion. It was the music. Behind
me came my brother, sedately, as he always did things. He went
calmly to join the godly; for him there was no pushing and no pulling;
when he saw me being dragged into the aisle he simply got to his
feet and followed. I have always suspected that he went along
merely to take care of me; frequently he did that. He was continually
fighting my battles, and if he did not like the nicknames that the other
boys fastened onto me, he protested so fiercely that the name was
transferred to his shoulders. They tried to call me “Cat” for some
obscure reason when I was a boy, and my brother did not like it; and
to this day he is “Cat” Asbury in Farmington.
Brother McConnell grabbed my hand and shook it clammily when I
reached the mourners’ bench, and I was shoved into a seat.
Immediately a Brother plopped down beside me, an old man whom I
had known all my life, and who I knew perfectly well was an old
skinflint and a hypocrite, a Sunday Christian. He put his arm around
my shoulders and began to pray, crying down my neck and shouting
that another soul had been saved, calling on the Lord to witness the
good work that he was doing. I half expected him to say: “Give me
credit, God; give me credit!” And all the time I was wishing to God
that the band would stop playing; my nerves were being shattered by
the constant and steady beat of the hymns, and the penetrating wail
of the violin and the thunder of the organ.
And at last it did stop. There was silence in the church, except that
here and there someone was writhing and moaning. But the shouting
had ceased. Brother McConnell had his benches full, all of his
workers had each a convert to work upon, and he decided to call it a
day and save whatever sinners remained in the congregation for
another night. So printed cards were passed around, which we were
to sign, indicating the church we would join. Then the evangelist said
for all of us who had been baptized to sit down. My brother and I sat
down.
With no music to upset me I began to think, and the more I thought,
the angrier I got. I was ashamed; I boiled with fury and I wanted to
smash the Brothers and Sisters in their smug faces. But I was just a
boy and I was afraid. It was at this point that my younger brother
came down the aisle and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey!” he said. “Mary said to stand up; you haven’t been baptized!”
“You tell her,” I said, “to go to hell!”
Luckily none of the Brothers and Sisters heard me, so I escaped
special prayers. I signed my card, agreeing to become a member of
the Southern Methodist church, and soon afterward I was released.
My sister and my two brothers went home, but I sneaked away and
went down to the Post Office, where I found another boy whose
influence with a bartender was sufficient to get us a drink. I went with
him to a saloon not far from the old Grand Leader building, and there
I had my first drink, a gin rickey, and when the bartender would not
sell me another I gave a Negro cart-driver a half-dollar and he
bought me a bottle of squirrel whisky which I consumed in the vacant
lot behind the Odd Fellows’ Hall. I got gloriously drunk, and about
three o’clock in the morning I staggered home and up the stairs to
the room which I shared with my brother. I awakened him, trying to
undress, and he asked:
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Hell’s fire, Emmett!” I replied. “I’ve got religion.”
I went to the preacher’s house the next day so Brother Jenkins could
sprinkle holy water upon my head and mumble a prayer, and later,
having thus been baptized, I joined the church, but I joined with my
tongue in my cheek and a sneer in my heart. I have never seen
anything in any church since that would impel me to remove either
my tongue or the sneer. And when I admitted publicly that I had been
converted and was now a good and faithful servant of the Methodist
God, I said to myself: “Over the left.” That was our way of saying: “I
am like hell!”
 NOTES ON A SAINTED RELATIVE
1
I went downtown the next morning after I had become a certified one
hundred per cent. convert, and was met by swarms of Brothers and
Sisters who overwhelmed me with congratulations, and regaled me
with tales of their own experiences when they saw God, and of the
temptations that the Devil would now prepare for me. It seemed that
I was not yet safe; I had, so far as they knew, accepted God and was
one of His chosen children, although not a Jew, but He would still
permit Satan to have his way with me upon occasion. I was
instructed to walk humbly and with downcast eyes, not daring to look
up lest I be led into sin. The Brothers, gloating the while, seemed
especially anxious that the handsome young virgins of the town
should not induce me to tread the scarlet paths of wickedness; the
Sisters were more concerned with the Drink Demon, and the evils of
playing cards and dancing. One Sister stopped me in front of Morris
Brothers’ store and, beating time with her hand, lifted her voice in
song:
“Yield not to temptation,
For yielding is sin.”
And so on.
Nearly all of them seemed to be obsessed by the conviction that at
last I had done something to justify my ancestry; that Bishop Asbury
had looked down from the Heavenly Mansions upon Brother
McConnell’s revival meeting and had approved the manner in which
my conversion had been brought about.
“The Bishop is proud of you to-day, Herbie,” said one devout Brother
who sold shoddy clothing at high prices. “Last night was a great night
for God and the Bishop.”
I did not ask him how he knew that Bishop Asbury was proud of me,
nor did I inquire into the source of his information that the
conversion, by force, of a fourteen-year-old boy was a great thing for
God. I merely said: “Yes, sir,” and went my way. But it went on day
after day; everybody in town, it seemed, had a word to say about the
pride that now swelled the heart of the Bishop as he went about
among the virgins of Heaven and lolled on a cloud strumming his
golden harp and producing platinum and diamond music. I got very
tired of it, and finally, to one old Sister who had apparently thought of
nothing else for a week, I said:
“Oh, to hell with the Bishop!”
What blasphemy! She gasped and hurried away, and long before I
reached home she had telephoned and told my mother that I had
blasphemed and cried out against God. Naturally, my mother was
worried; she thought from the tale told to her that I had gone up and
down the streets of the town shouting defiance of God and yelling
open praise of the Devil and all his works. But I told her the whole
story, and she listened without comment, and when I had finished all
she said was this:
“Well, don’t say ‘hell’ to them.”
I think that was the last I ever heard from my mother about religion,
and from my father I heard even less. Once my mother asked me to
read the Bible, and although of course I had already done so, I read
it again. I read it twice, from the first absurdity of Genesis to the final
fairy tale of Revelation. But I found nothing in it that caused me to
believe that it was an inspired work, and nothing that proved, to me,
the correctness of the pretensions so freely made by the Sisters and
Brothers and the Preachers that they, and they alone, were the
representatives and accredited agents of Jesus Christ on earth. And
the sermons that I heard thereafter—the Preachers selected single
verses from the Bible and constructed elaborate harangues around
them—struck me more forcibly than ever as the trashiest sort of
poppycock and balderdash. I was no longer afraid of the Hell that
they pictured with such avidity, and I no longer thrilled to their tales of
the magnificence of Heaven, although of course to a growing boy the
presence of so many virgin angels, all apparently willing and
available, was interesting. But none of them preached the religion of
Christ; they preached hatred and revenge. They held out slight hope
of reward; instead they were prophets of torture, promising eternal
punishment for petty crimes.

2
It was about this time, also, that I began to investigate the glories of
Bishop Asbury, and to make such inquiries as I could into his saintly
virtues. We had in our library the Bishop’s Journals in three volumes,
and we had also two or three volumes of biography, all of which I
read. In later years I have read many others. Probably twenty or
thirty books, in one form or another, have been written about Bishop
Asbury, and I think that I have gone pretty thoroughly into most of
them. But most of them are senseless if not downright idiotic; they
were written by preachers and published by the Methodist Church,
and the whole slant is religious. They are based on the assumption
that a Preacher and a Bishop must of necessity be a holy man, and
that all the little idiosyncrasies and faults that give a clue to the real
character of the man, are but manifestations of the fight between
God and Satan.
From an ecclesiastical point of view there can be no question of
Bishop Asbury’s greatness, for there have been few men who have
left a more definite imprint on American religious culture. There were
fewer than 500 Methodists in America when he came here in 1771;
when he died there were 214,000, with good churches and great
influence. He had completed the church organization according to
his own ideas, ignoring to a large extent the plans of John Wesley as
set forth by Thomas Rankin and Thomas Coke, and he had
assumed as much power as a Pope of Rome. As a religious
organizer he has had few equals, and it is a great pity that he did so
much unnecessary organizing, and that his amazing genius should
have flowered in such a futile and preposterous creation as the
present-day Methodist Church; a great pity that he could not have
developed a more flexible creed, one that would have grown as the
world grew, instead of standing stock-still and viewing the universe
with intolerant suspicion, with constant bickerings about the wishes
of God and yelping appeals to the Almighty to damn somebody.
But statistically Bishop Asbury is even greater. He preached his first
sermon in America at Philadelphia on the day he set foot on this
continent, in October, 1771, and delivered his final pronouncement
against sin on his deathbed, when, propped upon his pillows, he
expounded the twenty-first chapter of Revelation. In these forty-five
years he preached some 17,000 sermons, and probably 20,000 in
his whole life, for he began preaching when he was about fifteen or
sixteen, some three years after his conversion. The number of words
that he uttered for the Lord is simply incalculable; there is no telling
how far they would reach if they could be laid end to end.
In their methods of preaching and in their intolerance the preachers
of my boyhood, of other sects as well as Methodists, were devout
and faithful followers of Bishop Asbury. The bellowing evangelist of
the Billy Sunday and Lincoln McConnell type is his lineal
ecclesiastical descendant. He preached always at the top of his
voice, for he had great faith in exhortation, and to him the good
sermon was the noisy sermon; even to-day the Preacher who rants
and raves is the one who is regarded by his flock as nearest to God.
When Bishop Asbury was not preaching he was praying; he rose
every morning at four o’clock and prayed and read the Bible until six,
when he breakfasted and set forth on his travels. He would not sleep
more than six hours a night because Wesley had decided that six
hours was enough. One day a week he fasted, and part of another
day, punishing his flesh for the greater glory of the Lord.
This love of self-inflicted punishment affected his whole life. As a boy
he was moody and sensitive; he appears to have been of the type
that complains constantly that he is being “picked on.” He was
introspective, finding his greatest joy in self-pity, and he was never
happy, as we used to say in Missouri, unless he was miserable. His
playmates in the little English school near Birmingham called him
“parson” because of his pious lugubriousness, and when the teacher
beat him or something happened to cross him he sought solace in
prayer.
References to his numerous physical ailments begin to appear in
Bishop Asbury’s Journals about 1772, when he was in his late
twenties. He had never been strong physically, and never after he
came to America was he in good health. He was apparently a
hypochondriac, with all the hypochondriac’s morbid delight in
recounting his symptoms; many pages of his Journals are filled with
them. He took enormous doses of medicine, performed slight
surgical operations upon himself, and raised great blisters on the
slightest provocation, frequently blistering his whole body from throat
to abdomen. Once he preached a whole afternoon with so many
blisters that he was not able either to stand or sit, for he had
blistered not only the soles of his feet but less refined portions of his
anatomy also; he had to be propped up in the pulpit, where he raved
and ranted for hour after hour, saving many sinners. He took no care
of himself whatever, riding horseback through snowstorms and
rainstorms with biting pains in his chest, and with his stomach and
throat filled with ulcers, feverish from pain and religion.
All of these things he notes in his Journals with great gusto, and
gives long lists of the medicines he took and the measures he
employed to combat his sickness. Tartar emetic was his favorite
remedy, and of this he swallowed enormous quantities. For an
ulcerated throat he used a gargle of “sage tea, honey, vinegar and
mustard, and after that another gargle of sage, tea, alum, rose
leaves and loaf sugar to strengthen the parts.” Another favorite
remedy was a diet, as he called it, made from this remarkable
formula: “one quart of hard cider, one hundred nails, a handful of
snake root, a handful of pennell seed, a handful of wormwood.” He
boiled this concoction from a quart to a pint, and drank a wineglass
of it each morning before breakfast for ten days, meanwhile using no
butter, milk or meat. He notes in his Journal that “it will make the
stomach very sick.” It will. I brewed the drink once, and I had as soon
drink dynamite; bootleg gin is nectar by comparison.
There can be little doubt that Bishop Asbury’s physical condition had
a great deal to do with his extraordinary piety, for it is true that most
of the religious leaders have had many things wrong with their
bodies, and that the sicker a man is, the more religious he is likely to
be. A man who is healthy and normal mentally and physically seldom
becomes fanatically religious. True, healthy men sometimes become
monks and preachers, but except in rare instances such men are
comparatively moderate in their views. And generally they do
themselves very well in a material way, especially if they become
monks.
It was once my journalistic duty to make a daily visit to a Franciscan
monastery in Quincy, Illinois, and the good brothers remain a high
light in a somewhat drab period. Jovial and pot-bellied, they were
veritable Friar Tucks in brown bathrobes, extraordinarily hearty
eaters and drinkers, and not even at pre-Volstead banquets have I
ever received as much free food and drink as from the good
Franciscans. It was easy to see why such men as these went in for
religion, but it is not so easy to understand the motive of the
Protestant minister. The earthly rewards are nothing to speak of, and
what with evolution and one thing and another, he can no longer be
certain that there is a Heaven to go to.
The Franciscans were fascinating spectacles as they padded on
their sandaled feet through the gardens of the monastery and along
the graveled paths that led to the church next door. I became
particularly fond of Brother John—I think they called him Brother
John, anyhow I did—who might have stepped from the pages of
Boccaccio. He was the press representative of the monastery; he
always answered my ring, and through the bars of the door I could
see him, waddling genially down the corridor, puffing and rattling his
keys. It always seemed to me that Brother John was miscast;
doubtless he lived a happy and carefree life, though perhaps overly
cluttered with prayer, but I thought it a great pity that he could not
have been an alderman. And what a bartender he would have made!
His paunch would have elected him a City Father, and his fund of
stories would have got him a job in any first-class barroom. But
possibly he has reformed and is now leading some such useful life.
Brother John made but one effort to convert me and induce me to
join the Catholic Church, and when I said “Bunk!” he stopped
immediately and said that inasmuch as I would undoubtedly go to
Hell he would still take advantage of my reportorial capacity to get a
little publicity for the Church before that unfortunate event occurred.
But there was no tolerance in the attitude of my reverend relative,
the Bishop. His outstanding characteristic was intolerance; it shows
in a hundred different acts of his career; he was arbitrary and
domineering. Anyone who was well dressed or who bore any
outward signs of prosperity was offensive in his sight; he preached
the gospel of poverty and self-denial, and believed that all pleasure
was wicked and that self-inflicted suffering was heavenly bliss. He
was imperious and scornful of restraint and opposition; what he said
was true he thought was true, and that was all there was to it. When
men differed with him they were wrong, and he had no disposition to
reopen any question which he had once settled in his mind. He
believed that he was appointed by God to rule the Methodists in
America, and that he was a legitimate successor of the Apostles. In
1801 he wrote:
“I will tell the world what I rest my authority on; first, divine authority;
second, seniority in America; third, the election of the General
Conference; fourth, my ordination by Thomas Coke, Philip William
Otterbein, Richard Whatcoat and Thomas Vasey; fifth, because the
signs of an Apostle have been seen in me.”
Divine authority and the signs of an Apostle!
Yet his steadfast belief that he was so appointed was one of the
secrets of his power and influence, which were greater than that of
any other churchman of his time. We are even yet feeling their
effects, and we shall continue to feel them. There seems to be no
hope, what with Boards of Temperance, Prohibition and Public
Morals and similar intolerant activities, that the Methodist Church will
ever become more worthy of respect than it was in his day. Indeed, it
grows worse and worse.
Another prime factor in Bishop Asbury’s extraordinary piety, as can
be seen by the entries in his Journals and by a study of the
biographies written by other clergymen, was his terrific mental
turmoil. Throughout his whole life his mind whirled like a pinwheel;
he was constantly in what, back in Missouri, we used to call a
“terrible state.” About the time he began to be ill he started referring
to himself as “Poor Francis,” and thereafter that was the dominant
note of his life. He pitied himself because of his physical ills, and
then dosed himself with horrid medicines, and with bleedings and
blisterings, making his ailments more painful and himself an object of
greater pity. He tortured himself thus physically, and flogged his mind
with constant thoughts of his unworthiness; he was continually
groveling before God, beseeching the Almighty to put temptation in
his path. These extracts taken at random from his Journals show the
trend of his thought:
“I do not sufficiently love God nor live by faith.
“I must lament that I am not perfectly crucified with God.
“I feel some conviction for sleeping too long.
“My heart is grieved and groaneth for want of more holiness.
“Unguarded and trivial conversation has brought a degree of spiritual
deadness.
“My conscience reproves me for the appearance of levity.
“A cloud rested on my mind, which was occasioned by talking and
jesting. I also feel at times tempted to impatience and pride of heart.
“My heart is still depressed for want of more religion.
“Were I to stand on my own merit, where should I go but to hell?
“Here I received a bitter pill from one of my greatest friends [referring
to his last letter from John Wesley]. Praise the Lord for my trials also!
May they be sanctified.”
Bishop Asbury preached the same doctrine of personal conversion
and sanctification that is preached by present-day Methodist
ministers, and he sought this blissful state for himself with frenzied
zealousness. At times he thought he had entered into what he called
the full fruition of a life with God; at other times he fancied himself
given up to Satan. The older he grew, the gloomier and more
introspective he became, and like most of the other great religionists
he had a pronounced streak of melancholia. He had alternating
periods of exaltation and depression; he was either soaring the
heights of religious ecstasy or floundering in the depths of sin and
despair. He did not seem able to find any middle ground in which he
could obtain a measure of peace and contentment; occasionally in
his Journals he noted that he was happy in God and at peace, but
the next entry showed him groaning in great vexation of spirit, crying
out a doubt of the value of his religious life. He yearned for a
constant religious thrill, and mourned because he could not satisfy
his yearning.
 DIVERSIONS OF AN ABANDONED
SINNER
1
Almost immediately after my conversion, or at least as soon as it had
become noised about that I had consigned my holy relative to what
some of our more finicky Sisters, unable to bring themselves to say
“Hell,” referred to coyly as “the bad place,” I abandoned myself to a
life of sin and became a total spiritual loss in the eyes of all
Farmington except members of my immediate family and certain of
my intimate friends who collaborated with me in various wicked but
pleasant enterprises. That is to say, I cast aside the taboos and the
inhibitions that religion had thrown about me, and became for the
first time in my life a normal boy. I existed simply to play and raise
hell generally, and for some curious reason the activity which gave
me the most pleasure was throwing rocks at the church or in some
manner interrupting the service.
It was not long before even the most hopeful had ceased their talk of
sending me to a theological school and fitting me to carry on the
family labors, for I began to smoke cigarettes, play cards, swear,
drink when I could find a bartender willing to ignore the law
forbidding the sale of liquor to a minor, and to cock an appreciative
and appraising eye at the girls. It was then agreed that it was too late
to do anything with me or for me, and on the Sunday morning that I
mounted my new bicycle and rode brazenly past the Southern
Methodist church as the Brothers and Sisters filed with bowed heads
into the edifice for worship, I was consigned body and soul to the
sizzling pits of Hell.
I suffered a great deal of physical agony before I learned to smoke
cigarettes, and it was some time before I learned to blow smoke
through my nose with the nonchalant ease affected by the group of
older boys and young men who loafed in Doss’s barber shop and
around the Post Office Building and McKinney’s peanut and popcorn
machine. My older brother had learned a year or so before, and he
frequently made himself very offensive to me by boasting that he
could smoke a whole package of Sweet Caporals or Drums without
becoming ill. I yearned to try, but he would not give me a cigarette,
and neither would any of the other boys, and my finances were in
such shape that I could not purchase any. And, of course, such
wicked things could not be purchased and charged to my father; I
could have charged a plug of chewing tobacco to him, but not
cigarettes.
But one day I was loafing hopefully in McKinney’s when my brother
came in and produced a dime that he had amassed by laborious
work chopping wood at home, and bought a package of Sweet
Caporal Little Cigars. These were really nothing but cigarettes
wrapped with tobacco instead of paper, but they resembled a cigar
and were thought to be infinitely more stylish and manly than the
ordinary cigarette. I asked him for one, and he said he would not
give one to John the Baptist himself. But I persisted, and followed
him home, aghast at his determination to hide behind the barn and
smoke the whole package one after the other.
“I’ll light one from the end of the other,” he boasted.
Finally as we came opposite Brother Nixon’s house just south of
Elmwood Seminary, he relented and very carefully opened the box
and handed me a Little Cigar. It was a great moment. The yard of
Elmwood Seminary fairly swarmed with girl students, including the
young lady who at the time represented everything that was
desirable in the female sex, and I visioned their cries of startled
admiration as I passed, puffing nonchalantly, blowing smoke from my
nose and perhaps from my ears.
I had no doubt of my ability to handle the innocent-looking Little
Cigar; indeed, at that time I considered no problem insurmountable.
My brother instructed me to fill my mouth with smoke and then take a
long, deep breath, and after that blow the smoke out gently and
slowly, holding the Little Cigar between the first and second finger
and crooking the little finger as we did when we drank tea or coffee,
that being a mark of gentility and refinement. As we came in front of
the old Clardy homestead less than half a block from the Seminary I
struck a match and applied it to the end of the Little Cigar, while my
brother watched anxiously and from time to time gave me advice. I
puffed as he directed.
“Got a mouthful?” he asked.
Unable to speak, my cheeks bulging, I nodded.
“Now take a long breath.”
But, alas, I did not breathe; I swallowed, and while the smoke
penetrated me and spread throughout my interior, it did not take the
correct route. I began to strangle, and my brother got excited.
“Blow it out, you damn fool!” he cried. “You’ll choke!”
I did choke. I did even worse; I became very ill, and the spectacle
which so intrigued the young ladies of the Seminary that day was not
that of a young gentleman going nonchalantly to Hell by the cigarette
route. Instead, they saw a very sick boy rolling on the sidewalk trying
desperately to stem a distressing internal upheaval.
It was several days later before I had enough courage to try again,
and I debated within myself whether or not God had caused me to
be so ill in order to show me that smoking was a sin. But I had
definitely committed myself to the Devil, so a few days later I begged
a dime from my father and bought a package of Drums and another
of Sweet Caporals, the two most popular brands of cigarettes. With
these, and a supply of matches, I went behind the barn. I made a
neat pile of sawdust to lie upon, and there I remained the whole
afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another. I was terribly ill at
first, but gradually improved until the last three or four gave me no
trouble. I did not have much appetite for dinner that night, but I had
conquered the cigarette and I felt a glow of pride at the fact that I had
got a very good start in the direction of the bad place.
The basis of my overwhelming desire to smoke cigarettes was the
fact that cigarette-smoking when I was a boy in Farmington was one
of the major sins. It ranked with adultery and just a little ahead of
murder and theft. The Preachers called them coffin nails and
delivered violent sermons against them, and every once in a while
an evangelist would come to town with medical charts showing the
effect of tobacco upon the interior human organs. But the fact that it
was bad physically for growing boys was seldom stressed at all; we
were impressed instead with the fact that God thought it a sin to
smoke cigarettes, although it did not appear that it was a sin for the
tobacconist to sell them. That was business.
Many efforts were made to reform me after I had begun to smoke.
My mother said she had hoped I wouldn’t, but that was all she said,
and my father said he did not give a hoot whether I smoked or not,
but that he hoped I would not be a fool and overdo it. He himself had
learned the art of chewing tobacco when he was a boy of seven in
Mississippi, and so far as I have ever been able to learn, God had
never called him to account. He died at the age of seventy-nine,
suddenly, and a slab of plug-cut was in his pocket. It is impossible for
me to believe that God refused him entrance into whatever Heaven
there may be on account of his habit, which he thoroughly enjoyed.
But the Preachers and the Brothers and Sisters did not agree with
my parents, nor would they admit that it was none of their business.
On the contrary, they said that it was the Lord’s business, and since
they were the duly accredited agents of the Lord, appointed by Him
to lead Farmington into the paths of righteousness, it was their
business also. When Brother Fontaine was our Methodist pastor he
did not look with disfavor upon chewing, because he himself was
seldom without a chew and presumably had an indulgence from
God, but he looked upon the cigarette as an invention of the Devil. In
this view he was upheld by the Ladies’ Aid Society and the
Farmington branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
And the W. C. T. U., with the possible exception of the Methodist
Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals, was and is the
world’s best example of an organization maintained for the sole
purpose of minding other people’s business.
The hullabaloo over my smoking only made me more determined to
smoke until my insides turned black and I was called home by Satan
and transformed into a tobacco demon. For that reason I probably
smoked too much. As a matter of principle I always lighted a
cigarette just in front of the Southern Methodist church, and in front
of the home of my uncle, who was an enemy of anything that
provided physical pleasure and contentment. I always smoked
another as I passed the Northern Methodist church, the scene of the
McConnell revival orgy, and still another in front of the Christian
church, in memory of Brother Nations. That was four in half a mile,
and of course was too many, but sometimes I was not permitted to
finish all of them. Frequently a Brother or a Sister, seeing me thus
flaunting my sin on the public highway, snatched the nasty thing from
my mouth and gave me a lecture that dripped religion and was
principally concerned with the fate of boys who defied God and
Jesus Christ by smoking cigarettes. One Sister asked me:
“Where did you get the vile things?”
I told her that I had bought them at her husband’s store, and she
shrieked:
“You saucy, blasphemous boy!”
But on that particular occasion I was not lectured, although she
telephoned my mother that I had been impudent to her. My mother
told her it was too bad.

2
I learned to play pinochle when I was about fifteen, only a few
months after I had become an accomplished cigarette fiend and was
generally considered a fine prospect for Satan, and thereafter was a
regular participant in the game that went on every night in the back
room of Karl Schliesser’s cigar factory. This was a notable den of
evil, and while religion had me in its clutches I thought black magic
was practiced there, and that its habitués had communion with the
Devil; among us it was believed that God had doubtless never heard
of the place or He would have destroyed it with a withering blast of
lightning. It was frequented by Germans and other low forms of life,
and they were principally Catholics and Lutherans, with a sprinkling
of renegade Protestants like myself. The Brothers and Sisters held
the opinion that if this crowd had a God at all he must have been a
very queer being, for bursts of ribald laughter came from Schliesser’s
back room, and there was card-playing, and I do not doubt that
occasionally someone gambled.
Schliesser was the Town Socialist, and was looked upon with grave
suspicion by the better element, as in those days it was generally
recognized that a Socialist was an emissary of the Devil. But the
Brothers and Sisters and the Preachers looked with even more
suspicion upon Victor Quesnel. In this attitude they had the support
of the Catholics. Victor Quesnel was born in France, but he had lived
in Farmington for many years. He frequently quoted Voltaire, and
appeared to believe that a man’s religion and his belief or disbelief in
God was a matter of his own personal taste, and he was therefore
regarded as an atheist. As a matter of fact he was probably more
truly religious than most of the pious Brothers and Sisters; the
principal difference was that he did not try to compel everyone he
met to embrace his creed.
Frequently, and without particular regard as to who heard him,
Quesnel discussed the advantages of sleeping naked, or, as we say
in present-day journalism, undraped. That was his hobby. He said he
thought it was a healthful practice, that he slept better without
clothing, and that come what might he was going to continue to
sleep that way. This was considered heathenish doctrine; some of
our finest church members owned stores in which they sold
nightgowns and pajamas, and it was felt that Quesnel’s attitude was
not only a direct affront to God but was also injurious to business.
Moreover, the Brothers and Sisters did not consider such a practice
modest; there were scores, perhaps hundreds of people in
Farmington who had never in their lives removed all of their clothing.
Once at a meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society I heard an old Sister
say that she had reached the age of sixty and had never been
entirely undressed; and that when she bathed she kept her eyes
closed as she applied the sponge to her body. A great deal of juicy
conversation could be overheard at these Ladies’ Aid meetings by a
bright young lad who knew where the best keyholes were located.
 3
Sunday was much more enjoyable after I had become a sinner and
had left Sunday school and the Church to whatever fate the Lord had
in store for them. I arose a little later, had a leisurely breakfast and a
refreshing quarrel or fight with my brothers and sister, and then went
leisurely to my room and as leisurely put on my Sunday suit, with no
intention of removing it until I retired for the night. Curiously enough,
as soon as I quit going regularly to church and Sunday school I
began to wear my Sunday suit all day, and the little voice that I had
in the selection of this garment I raised in hopeful pleas for loud
checks and glaring colors. No longer did I wish to clothe myself in
the sombre blacks suitable for church wear and religious activity; I
desired to blossom and bloom in the more violent and pleasant
colors of Hell.
Once arrayed in my Sunday suit, I left the house, a cigarette
dangling from my lower lip, and my hat, carefully telescoped in the
prevailing mode, sitting just so on the side of my head. I tried to time
my march downtown so that I would reach Elmwood Seminary just
as the young lady students resident there marched across the street,
after Sunday school, from the Presbyterian church; they were not
permitted to remain at the church during the fifteen or twenty-minute
interval because they attracted such hordes of feverish boys intent
upon everything but religion. Usually I reached the scene in time,
and leaned nonchalantly against the Seminary fence, puffing
vigorously and ostentatiously on a cigarette and winking at various
and sundry of the girls as they passed in their caps and gowns.
For these smart-aleck activities I was presently placed upon the
school’s black list and was not permitted to call upon the one night
each month allotted to such social intercourse, but as I soon learned
to climb a rope ladder this did not annoy me greatly. Anyhow, calling
night at Elmwood Seminary was not very exciting. The procedure
was to place a dozen or so chairs about a big room, in pairs but with
at least twelve inches between them, in which sat the girls and their
callers. In the center sat a gimlet-eyed teacher, constantly ready with
Biblical and other uplifting quotations and seeing to it that nothing