Homer amid blackbirds

Press, 15 June 1979, Page 12

Homer amid blackbirds

By

HUGH HEBERT i

in the “Guardian,” London

At one minute to ten on a morning early this month, in the noble garden of Worcester College, Oxford, Gavin Smithers, a first year classics student, began reading in Greek, taking the first lap of a sponsored, 42-hour declamation of the complete workers of Homer that should raise SlOOO for Cancer Research. The audience by the lake was four students, one goose, and a “Guardian” reporter. Throughout the day relays of readers came and. helped along with tankards of orange squash, pronounced the ancient words of a poet who may have been one man or many.

Even Sir Kenneth Dover, Master of Corpus Christi, declined to pronounce on that: ‘ The Greeks had so many different versions of who Homer was and when he lived that they clearly hadn’t the faintest idea.” And even the Greeks, he reckons, might have jibbed at listening to Homer for 42 hours. David Willcock, who is organising the reading, says that as far as they know, this has never been done before in Britain in modem times — and there could be a very good reason for that — though it was done in Germany in 1962. The project started when Willcock mentioned he had organised a reading of all Shakespeare’s plays when he

was at school. Another Worcester man, Christopher Doe, said let’s do it with Homer. Willcock, a first year choral scholar at Worcester reading theology, had already set up at Oxford last autumn, a fast piano playing contest in aid of autistic children.

By breakfast time on the second day the Worcester students were embarking on Book XXIII of the Iliad — the bit where Achilles, sometimes a rather insensitive fellow, calls on his trusty band to shoot off to the funeral, weep their tears, and hurry back home to supper. After 24 hours, the readers moved on to the Odyssey. They were up to schedule, each reader taking one book of about 500 to 600 lines at roughly 10 lines a minute. Doe "says it’s the best literature ever written but no one is sure how it was done in Homer’s day' “and I don’t think we’ll prove very much. It’s showing, more than anything else, just how exhausting it is.”

With a chorus of very loud blackbirds, the clack of croquet balls from the lawn in the background, and unscheduled entrances by foraging squirrels, the goose, and a posse of brown clad nuns carrying suitcases, a lot of concentration was certainly needed. The goose has a reputation for attacking

people, but did not live up to

The organisation went pretty smoothly. The only hitch was that someone pinched the bike that was to have been used to tour the city of dreaming cyclists to remind readers when to make their entrance.