Was surprised to learn there is a recently published biography of Milman Parry.
It’s title is “Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry”. Here is a link to the Amazon listing:
https://www.amazon.com/Hearing-Homers-Song-Brief-Milman/dp/0525520945
There is a review of it in the NY Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/books/review/hearing-homers-song-milman-parry-robert-kanigel.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Book%20Review
Actually, it was Meillet’s big idea.
Another interesting review of the book, this time from the New Republic.
I’ve finished this book. Apparently, I was wrong. Although Meillet had more or less the same idea as Parry – namely that the formulaic character of the Homeric diction revealed they are the product of a tradition of oral poetry – independently of Parry, before Parry went to Paris, Parry also had the idea before he came to Paris and had presented it in embryonic form in a master’s thesis at the University of California. And, of course, Parry worked out his idea with great rigor in his doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. It seems that it was Meillet who planted in Parry the idea of going to Yugoslavia to study a still living tradition of oral heroic poetry.
I thought this book did a good job of explaining the development of Parry’s ideas with only very slight recourse to Greek (which the author doesn’t seem to know), in Romanized form. I found the chapters on Parry’s experiences in Yugoslavia engrossing; somewhat less so his narrative of Parry’s youth and personal life, and, in particular, his apparently somewhat distant relationship with his wife. But in all, there doesn’t seem to be much to tell about Parry personally, and he remains somewhat distant and enigmatic.
Interesting to me personally was what the author had to say about Parry’s experiences at Harvard, and his wife’s very different experiences there: thirty years after Parry’s death in 1935, as an undergraduate I knew or took courses with some of the people associated with Parry in his age cohort of younger scholars, who in my day were eminences.
As for Parry’s untimely death by a gunshot wound under mysterious circumstances – officially listed as an accident – the author discounts rumors of suicide, but seriously entertains the possibility that he was shot by his wife in a fit of rage. Apparently, their daughter believed so, and maybe their son Adam, too. This is sure to provoke controversy.
The book concludes with a section on how Albert Lord, who was Parry’s assistant in Yugoslavia and took over after his death as the custodian of the materials collected there, promoted the study of oral traditions as an academic discipline. The author emphasizes, however, that Parry’s focus was always on Homer, and acknowledges that Parry’s work, while conclusively demonstrating that the Homeric poems are the product of a tradition of oral poetry composed in performance, doesn’t answer the unresolvable questions of how, where, why and by whose agency the poems came into existence and were reduced to writing. Tied up with these questions and also unresolved, is the question of “originality” – the extent to which a single individual might have shaped either or both of the Homeric poems.
Thanks for a very helpful and interesting post.
My main criticism of this book is that it is padded with details about Parry that neither provide insight into Parry the man nor illuminate his achievements.
Thanks much for posting this mini-review.
Thank you, a wonderful mini-review. I’d read the book myself but I don’t have the academic’s predilection for reading about academics. Very surprised to hear about the non-vulgate reading of his death, wow.
I don’t think this book will provide any new information about Parry’s theories to anyone who already has some familiarity with them.
What interested me most was the two trips to Yugoslavia. Also, frankly, the gossipy speculation about Parry’s death and the odium philologicum between Lord on the one hand and Parry’s son Adam and his wife Anne on the other.
Adam and Anne died young in a motorcycle accident, but their approach to the Homeric poems was very different from that of Lord, and in some ways from that of Milman himself: in what they published before they died, they approached the poems from a somewhat traditional literary perspective, more or less flouting Lord’s insistence (and that of his followers) that, to grossly simplify, the poems have to be read and interpreted strictly as oral, composed-in-performance works and are entirely the product of the tradition, not shaped by an individual poet. They apparently had nothing but scorn for Lord, and the feeling was mutual.
While the author does mention, perhaps too briefly, that not everyone agrees completrely with the oral approach in its starkest form and that Milman Parry’s work didn’t resolve the “originality” issue, I was surprised to see that M.L. West was mentioned nowhere in the book.
The death of Adam and Anne was a tremendous loss. I knew them only through others, in the mid seventies, but I twice attended lectures by Lord, and found him a bloviating self-satisfied bore. Without Milman he would have been nothing. Ancient Greek studies would be in much better shape today if Adam and Anne had lived and Lord had not.
The “hard Parryist” approach was pushed by Lord and others at Harvard and elsewhere. It’s not really an approach that Parry himself would necessarily have embraced, since he wasn’t able to refine and express his thinking about the material he collected in Yugoslavia before he died. Lord’s views and those of his followers are very dogmatic: Yugoslav traditional heroic song was exactly identical in every respect to the tradition the produced the Homeric poems, and the Homeric poems could not possibly have involved writing because writing always kills off oral poetry; so the Homeric poems were composed in performance without writing. And of course, the Homeric poems are exclusively the product of the tradition, with no room for individual “originality.”
Yet somehow, presumably with human agency, the Iliad and the Odyssey did get written down. That’s a point that ML West made forcefully in the acrimonious debates with Greg Nagy. And we see techniques of oral poetry at work in poems clearly composed in an era of writing, such as the Homeric hymns. And the long recorded composition of the Muslim singer Avdo Medjedovic, which Lord thought comparable to the Iliad and the Odyssey, apparently reflects a considerable level of originality in the organization and treatment of a traditional narrative.
Personally, I’m an agnostic on the question of how the Homeric poems came into existence, and I think it’s about time scholars stopped speculating about this on the basis of sparse, uncertain and contradictory evidence. About all we can say, I think, is that the poems are the end-product of an oral tradition, as Parry conclusively demonstrated, that they are in writing, and the texts as we have them underwent some sort of Hellenistic-era recension.
I’ve read Anne Amory Parry’s Blameless Aegisthus – the only book by a Parry that I’ve actually read in full(as opposed to summaries, which are readily available for Milman (and I’ve read a few articles by Adam, I think). Anyway, I read this book in the beginning of my journey to Homer, and I was surprised that the ideas expressed were quite different from hardcore Parryists, and, in my opinion, much more interesting and convincing. Definitely one of the better books on Homer I’ve read.
An illuminating review of Kanigel’s book in the London Review of Books for 7 Oct. 2021.
Isn’t that a marvelous photo of Milman flanked by two guslars(?) in the NYT piece linked by Ahab in the original post!
Another good review by Richard Janko here:
I would add to what I wrote earlier that as an undergraduate I had occasion to interact with John H. Finley on a personal level quite a bit – he presided over Eliot House, where I lived, and took a keen interest in undergraduates living there. He was very old-fashioned in a bow-tie and vest wearing sort of way, but being of Jewish background myself, I never felt he was antisemitic. His father, after all, was editor-in-chief of the New York Times, which was owned (and still is) by the Ochs-Dryfoos-Sulzberger dynasty. I was shocked to read of Marian Parry’s accusation of antisemitism against John Finley, and i suspect it was based more on her own imagination than on reality.