GLR March-April 2021 Issue 150 Supplemental

T O BEGIN, let’s circle back to an earlier book by Daniel Mendel- sohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic , an engaging account of the semester he invited his 81- year-old father to attend his seminar on Homer’s epic poem. That book, which I highly recommend, is not only a brilliant reading of Homer but also the story of a contemporary father and son rediscovering each other. In the end, Mendelsohn, who had “vainly envisioned myself as some kind of pedagogical Odysseus,” learned as much from his fa- ther as his father learned from him. “You never know, really, where education will lead, who will be listening and, in certain cases, who will be doing the teaching.” Mendelsohn begins his new book with an account of the dif- ficulty he had in writing the previous one. As he was drafting An Odyssey , he labored under “narrative despair”: “I had no idea how to organize the story. ... There was a lot of incident but it wasn’t yet a story. ” The solution he hit upon was to adopt a nar- rative technique—so-called “ring composition”—that Homer himself employed. In ring composition, the writer “involutes” narrative digressions into the larger story line, eventually tying together these twists and turns into the overall action of the story. These detours, Mendelsohn says, “can enhance rather than detract from a given theme.” Indeed, “the way to avoid boring uniformity is to add more and more turns.” Mendelsohn’s new book is an over-the- top celebration of ring composition. He structures this hundred-page essay (origi- nally delivered at UVA’s Page-Barbour Lec- tures) around three literary exiles. He follows these wanderers along their battered journeys in search of a place of refuge. Like Odysseus and his son Telemachus, each of the three managed to find a home of sorts after fleeing cultural, political, and existential dangers. As he tells their stories, Mendelsohn takes us along ever more divergent paths. A biographical detail often triggers what at first seems like a random fact or far-off association, unrelated to the main thread. And off we go, spinning, wandering, mean- dering through a fascinating chain of other stories and pieces of information, until— presto! —he snaps everything into place, re- vealing the deep connections between seemingly disparate de- tails. The effect is ingenious and caused me to burst into delighted laughter on more than one occasion. The first of Mendelsohn’s wanderers is the cosmopolitan German literary scholar Erich Auerbach, who fled Nazi Ger- many in 1936. He relocated to Istanbul, where he wrote his magnum opus Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in West- ern Literature . Auerbach’s stunning book, which sought to trace “the common connectedness of all cultures,” amasses literary evidence to demonstrate, as Mendelsohn says, that “certain re- alities are, in the end, shared by all humans,” adding that, “al- though literature consists of a Babel of different tongues, meaning is universal, and a unity exists beyond all cultural di- versity ... the communal connectedness of cultures.” At least, this was the optimistic belief that Auerbach held until, in writ- ing Mimesis , he adopted a more pessimistic, “biblical,” view- point, holding that we are for the most part granted only a fragmentary understanding of things based upon our cultural perspective. The whole of civilization is not knowable. The second literary exile is the 17th-century French arch- bishop and theologian, François Fénelon, who penned a series An Epic Is Not a Straight Line the early 1970s) with whom he became close near the end of his life. Many people assumed Lori was a lesbian, though she did not speak about her sexual orientation. Outrageous Misfits is also the story of Toronto’s gay scene from the 1970s to the present day. Brian Bradley, a Canadian journalist and writer for The Toronto Star, carried out ex- tensive archival research, had access to jour- nals and other primary sources, and inter- viewed key family members, friends, and as- sociates. This leads to some repetition, but for the most part the narrative presses on relent- lessly, from the highest highs to the lowest lows. The book’s many evocative black-and- white photos are a bonus. Canadian lyricist Barbara Hoffert wrote and performed the last song in the Outra- geous! soundtrack, titled “It Ain’t Easy,” with the last lines: “It ain’t easy in this crazy world/ I could never make it without you/ We love each other in our crazy way./ Who knows when they’ll come and take us away?/ I hope not today/ Feeling so gay.” P HILIP G AMBONE THREE RINGS A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate by Daniel Mendelsohn Univ. of Virginia. 116 pages, $19.95 Philip Gambone, a regular contributor to these pages, is the author of the recently published As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II (Rattling Good Yarns Press). 2 The G&LR