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Nearly 20 years ago, I interviewed local author Steve
Frazee, who died in 1992, for the Post's book section. In
the 1950s and 60s, Frazee wrote novels, from juveniles
(some Zorro adventures) to contemporary humor (More Damn
Tourists
is a sidesplitter about the peculiar sociology
of little mountain towns), but mostly he wrote
westerns.
At the time of that interview, some purification lobby
was whining about violence in entertainment -- and violence
is the heart of the western. Steve laughed. It's always
been in our stories. Look at the Iliad. Homer spilled more
blood in a chapter than I did in my whole career.
Homer came up again. Steve could bring characters to
life in just a paragraph or two; eager to learn some
secrets of the writing trade, I asked how he did it. I
stole it from Dickens,
he said.
I pressed for an explanation.
You could call it 'being influenced by,
' he said.
Your writing is influenced by what you read. Consciously
or unconsciously, you'll imitate. So you should always read
the best -- Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dickens, Homer. That's
the best way to write better.
That's as good a piece of writing advice as I ever got,
and it inspired me to read the Iliad, which has currently
returned to popular culture as the 2700-year-old book
behind the movie Troy.
In theory, I had read it in a
1969 college humanities class; in practice, I had faked my
way through with Classic Comics and Cliff's Notes.
How best to read the Iliad? Doubtless in the original ancient Greek, but most of us will need a translation. The original is poetry, but dactylic hexameter and English aren't a good fit. So find a prose translation. After trying several, I settled on the old Penguin Classic translation by E.V. Rieu.
Don't try to read it in one sitting. This epic was made for many nightly installments from a bard at a campfire. At the time, my daughters still wanted a bedtime story, so I read them a piece of the Iliad every night over several months.
Going slowly, we had time to look up everything we
didn't understand, from greaves (baseball catchers wear
them, though they're usually called shin guards
now)
to Grecian goddesses. I also had time to devise
child-friendly ways to handle certain scenes, such as
Hera's seduction of Zeus so that after their romp, he would
roll over and fall asleep. She did that because he favored
the Trojans, and she wanted to help the Argives while he
snored.
The kids loved the Iliad -- a tale of violence and magic and human passions from the sordid to the sublime. And as Steve Frazee had predicted, I learned much about literature from Homer.
This may be the greatest war story ever (Shelby Foote based his Civil War trilogy on the Iliad), and Homer was on the Greek side. Yet he never dehumanizes the enemy; the noblest warrior, Hector, is a Trojan.
Most of Homer's characters are soldiers, but almost always, he makes them more than just swords and shields. When they die, they're someone's son or husband. There's a vineyard back home which will never be tended again. Even though they delight in battle, Homer tells the cost.
The cost gets clear in an unforgettable scene with Hector, his wife Andromache and son Astyanax on the wall of Troy. The child doesn't recognize his father and is frightened, until Hector removes his crested helmet. And then Hector must choose between duty to family and duty to country.
Homer isn't afraid to address the moral complexity of life, and it adds immeasurably to what appears, at first, to be just a tale about a bunch of guys fighting a long time ago in a place far away.
Whether you see the movie or not, you ought to read the book. Although it should be required in every American school, as one of the foundations our literature, the pecksniffs of both the left (violence and the objectification of women) and right (it's totally pagan, and there's the homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclos) will insure that it's never on a public-school curriculum in this country.
So read it yourself, or even better, read it to your kids. It's about blood and guts and fate and valor and treachery -- the unsanitized stuff of life and death. And it's a great story.
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