Among the Intellectualoids/Homer and His Publishers
Queenan, Joe
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS HOMER AND HIS PUBLISHERS M ost people think that when Homer finished writing The Iliad, publishing houses were breaking down the door to get first crack at it. Nothing...
...But I don't, so I do...
...by Joe Queenan ventually, inevitably, Homer did find a publisher for The Iliad, with The Odyssey appearing shortly thereafter...
...One man's turgidity is another man's grubsteak," said the man who had worked as Chapter 23 for nine years, wandering all over the Hellenistic world rattling off his portion of The Iliad to any editor who cared to give him a listen...
...This was no piece of cake, given that the major publishing houses were located in downtown Athens, thousands of miles away from Homer's home in Asia Minor...
...Though the charges were never proved, everyone knew it was the three unemployed chapters who'd done it, and several years later, when Homer got a few obols ahead of the game, he hired a pack of renegade demigods to flay the responsible parties...
...Mars Bards Press Realizing that he was getting nowhere fast, Homer at last took the advice of his friends and went out looking for an agent...
...There was also the problem of lost manuscripts...
...Six months later, the man carrying Homer's manuscript inside his skull returned with a gag in his mouth and a graphite shard around his neck reading: UNSOLICITED ORAL HISTORIES WILL BE RETURNED UNLISTENED TO...
...Several went so far as to cut off their tongues...
...This meant that even before Homer could begin lining up buyers for his word-of-mouth epic, he first had to hire someone to sit down and memorize The Iliad as it was recited, and then go to Athens to repeat sample chapters to prospective publishers...
...At some point during the blowout, Chapter 18 (who was Chapter 6's ex-husband) had words with Chapter 6's current boyfriend (who didn't even work in Homer's fiction, but had a job in a shipyard) and a fight broke out, in which Chapter 14—an innocent bystander—was killed...
...Homer knew that this was true...
...In a society of goatherds, hoplites, seers, dramatists, petty tyrants, vineyard owners, philosophers, and slaves, it was pretty hard to break into the work force when all you could put on your résumé was: "Have spent the last nine years working as the twenty-third chapter of an unpublished word-of-mouth legend...
...or: No poetry...
...You cut me loose now, and I've had it...
...Still another fell in with satyrs...
...Believe me, you're only shortchanging yourself when you hire screwballs like this clown...
...Acclaim and prestige followed...
...One of the oral historians Homer sent out drowned in the Aegean...
...Nevertheless, money was tight, and Homer had no choice but to lay off the three chapters in question, promising to rehire them when things picked up—say around the fifth printing of The Iliad II...
...Infuriated by the suggestion that he should pay to have his work read, Homer began sending out sample chapters of The Iliad to small presses, employing one person to memorize each section...
...Yet many people down through the ages have wondered why the great poet didn't write more books, why he decided to throw in the towel after only his second masterpiece...
...After twenty-nine years, when he finally had all sixty-five chapters ready to go to Athens, he threw a huge party for the entire crew, many of whom had never met each other...
...A second had a concussion and forgot most of the important passages...
...A trilogy it was, consisting of The Hoi Ploy (a thriller about a Greek plot to bribe all the poor people in Troy to murder Hector), The Hoarse Thojan (the heart-rending tale of Paris's brother, Marseille, who came down with laryngitis the night the Trojan Horse entered the city—the night he was on guard duty) and Aunt Tigone, a musical...
...Dear Mister Homer: Just a little advice...
...I'll never find another job...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 39...
...When Homer was a bit slow dipping into his pocket for the bail money, the detainees flew off the handle, proclaiming that they'd had it up to there, and were pulling out of the literature racket for good...
...Or how about this: send me the first nine chapters of The Iliad and an outline of The Odyssey, and I'll quote you a combined price of 999 for the pair...
...The Iliad, it will be remembered, was essentially a performance piece, existing in no written form...
...But the results were uniformly discouraging: Dear Applicant: Due to an unusually tight epic market, we are not in a position to take on any new clients during this lunar phase...
...Good luck in the future...
...Whereupon Homer, now completely fed up with humanity, told the remaining chapters to forget about going to Athens, girded his loincloth more tightly about him (there is some dispute concerning this), and quietly retired...
...If I had more clients like you, I wouldn't have to charge a reading fee...
...Which he did...
...When submitting an oral version of your work, make sure that the person you hire to recite the poem is a sober citizen, and not the boozed-up wino who staggered in here yesterday, mumbled a few words about Aphrodite or some-such, and then passed out on the carpet just when it was starting to get interesting...
...Whatever suits you...
...The police came, rounded up suspects, and twelve chapters were detained...
...This led to hard feelings when he decided to rewrite the epic, cutting out Chapters 7, 9, and 23, all of which seemed turgid and flabby...
...Three nights later, coming home from a party, the writer was set upon by a pack of thugs and beaten so badly that he went deaf, too...
...Or if you want to send me either one of them in mime form, I could let you go for an even 500...
...Joe Queenan is a senior editor for Forbes...
...But what posed even more of a problem was the unwieldy nature of the work itself...
...And then there was the curious case of the messenger who disappeared for three years, then turned up at the local watering hole one afternoon with this message dangling from his soiled loincloth...
...The truth is that Homer did not stop writing, but spent the last thirty years of his life preparing what he viewed as his definitive statement on the human condition...
...Once again, he used the word-of-mouth technique (less paper), hiring one person to memorize the first chapter, another to memorize the second, and so on and so forth...
...or: Too negative...
...Nothing could be further from the truth: when Homer put the finishing touches on his opus magnum, he was just another blind Greek poet who had to go out and market his work like everybody else...
...But agents were hard to come by, and didn't come cheap: Dear Homer: Your work sounds fresh—refreshingly fresh—and I would be positively enthralled to read it...
...Well-organized and detail-oriented...
...Undeterred, Homer visited a local oracle to obtain a list of publishing houses which would accept submissions from unknown writers, then sent his representative out again...
...Let's say 879 drachmas for The Iliad, and another 500 for this second thing you've got in draft form...
...I'll level with you, pal: this is the only thing I'm qualified to do...
Vol. 22 • December 1989 • No. 12
