Charles Rowan Beye

This is an interesting book, fascinating in recounting a lifestyle I know nothing about, but I am not sure that I end up liking the author very much. Sexual fidelity is obviously an unknown concept to him; one sometimes wonders where he finds the strength. He also comes across as somewhat irresponsible, especially in his second marriage.

Beye starts off with the traumas, sometimes close to horrific, of being a young, gay male, although he often recounts them lightly enough. Surprisingly, he didn't marry his wives to conceal that he was gay, he was genuinely in love with them. He did keep up a very active homosexual life at the same time, which he primarily identifies with. His first wife, who didn't believe in letting diabetes cramp her lifestyle, died quite young. He remarried another woman who wanted a career, but ended up taking care of the four closely-spaced children that they apparently didn't want. She was supposed to be taking care of the birth control (she was using it wrong), and Beye felt that it was her problem. You kind of wonder about people who manage to accidentally have four children without grasping that they need to make changes. Their doctor finally told them they needed to do something for his wife's sake. It all ends pretty well. After their divorce, the wife happily takes up a career, and the children are very much loved.

The cover on the edition I read, where the four spouses are portrayed as figures on a Greek vase is wonderful!

Beye finally married another gay man. I am somewhat disappointed in that he tells us very little about that union. It's almost not worth putting it into the title, except that it makes it so catchy. Perhaps he decided that discretion is the better part of valor, when dealing with the living. His two wives both died before he wrote the book, so he doesn't need to worry about what they think. One hopes his kids are o.k. with all this.… (mere)

9. The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic Tradition by Charles Rowan Beye
published: 1966
format: Hardcover
acquired: borrowed from my library
read: Feb 13-18
Rating: 4 stars

A prologue: I read this almost at random. It was one of several books that I requested from the library about Homer, and I no longer remember why I selected any specific ones. I brought four home Saturday* and, surprisingly, found them all of interest. So, I was in quite a mood. Was? still am. This appealed to me simply because if you search for Beye's name on google, you find a lot of acknowledgements of his personal influence. So, he sounded like maybe a nice guy. Who knows. But I chose to read this one simply because it was the oldest of those four, published in 1966. (This kind of cool cover didn't affect me because the copy I read doesn't have a dust jacket.)

actual review: These are literary essays on the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid, but really focusing on Homer. Virgil is only discussed as he is was influenced by Homer. Beye talks a lot about oral poetry and how it is of a different nature from written poetry. Homer, of course, came out of the oral tradition. There are within it elements to help the memory of the singer. About 1/3 of the Iliad and the Odyssey is repetition of some kind. And there is heavy use of epithets for characters and things ("wine dark sea" etc). These both simplify the poem for memory, and give the author flexibility in construction as different epithets can be chosen based on the metrical needs of the line. The composer can then learn to have a bag of tools and perhaps make things up on the fly. There are also many elements that play on the fleeting memory, or at least fleeting immediate awareness of the listener. A reader can look things up again, and listener can't. Virgil was writing, composing in prose and then later in verse and reworking and reworking. Homer's works, probably composed by a cultural tradition of singers, repeats profusely, contradicts itself, follows illogical or unlikely timelines - but likely worked fine for a listener (having read the Iliad, I missed all the contradictions until they were pointed out in notes...)

There is a lot more here. What I mainly liked was that Beye just seemed to like talking about these works. He is interesting and he had me thinking about the works in different ways, and that is where I wanted to be.

There are plenty of books on Homer. I can give you no reason why you should read this one over another, other than I have happened to have read and enjoyed it.

*The other three books were:
[Homer] (Past Masters) by [[Jasper Griffin]] (1980)
[Homer's readers : a historical introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey] by [[Howard W. Clarke]] (1981)
[The Iliad : structure, myth, and meaning] by [[Bruce Louden]] (2006)

2016
https://www.librarything.com/topic/209547#5480224… (mere)

Good intro to the poems - Iliad, Odyssey, Argonautica and Aeneid. There's a bit too much plot summary but it's clearly written and makes sense most of the time. He's also very even-handed and discusses critics with whom he disagrees quite fairly. This is the second edition, brought out in the nineties; there's a third edition with an added chapter on Gilgamesh. I expect that the first edition, from 1966, had less drivel of the following sort than this edition: men seek for immortality because, while women are hooked into eternity by virtue of giving birth, men have only a pitifully evanescent ejaculation to look forward to. I wonder if the dodgy first year Freud and Lacan have been removed in the third edition? I'd like to think so.… (mere)