by Alison Fell
THE MISTRESS OF LILLIPUT
‘Welcome, once again, to Alison Fell’s world of terror and wonder. But be forewarned: this highly original and innovative writer’s fictions are not for the faint hearted.’
Aamer Hussein, Literary Review
‘Witty, gorgeously written, stuffed with verbal trickeries, metaphor, conceits, sly allusions, sleights of hand and all the verbal feints and counterfeints at the disposal of the writer.’
Elizabeth Buchan, Metro
‘Alison Fell wields glittering 18th century pastiche prose like a deadly letter-opener in a lady’s purse.’
Helen Stevenson, Independent
‘Stylish and witty … generous in its response to Swift’s text and the liberties it takes.’
Tom Keymer, Times Literary Supplement
‘A polemic that puts the treat back in treatise.’
Donny O’Rourke, The Mix
‘The plot is bursting with eccentric, colourful characters and Swiftian landscapes.’
Sharon Barnes, Examiner
‘The story is beautifully narrated, its pitting of desire against chauvinism is enthralling.’
Stella Clarke, Weekend Australian
‘… holds up a mirror to the conundrum of women’s modern day relationships with men, while casting a long glance backward.’
Barbara Erskine, Express
THE PILLOW BOY OF THE LADY ONOGORO
‘It is rare to come across a book that offers quite so many pleasures, all very different … which in its own eloquence makes its point with wisdom, wit and a charming lightness of touch.’
Mary Scott, New Statesman
‘… a clever concubine who certainly isn’t going to take the men’s rules lying down.’
Gill Pyrah, Cosmopolitan
‘… a great pleasure to read, a postmodern take on a pre-modern culture in which past and present, verse and prose, fuse into a harmonious whole.’
Gregory Feeley, Philadelphia Inquirer
‘Alison Fell invests an age-old subject with both contemporary relevance and wit.’
Susannah Frankel
‘The book’s eroticism is re-enforced by its underlying humour.’
The Big Issue
‘Fell is a poet, and this novel is enriched by her feeling for resonant images.’
Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times
‘The Pillow Boy is a book for true romantics and the content is, of course, sexually explicit but written with impeccable good taste.’
June Campbell
‘A paean to the seeking and intertwining of textual and sexual pleasures.’
Aamer Hussein, Literary Review
‘Not for the coy.’
Lisa Clarke, The Punter
‘… sinuous grace, mixing feminism with unforgettable adult fairy tales.’
She
‘… lascivious, poetic prose …’
Everywoman
‘She has the touch of a butterfly.’
Anne Woolfe, Literary Review
TRICKS OF THE LIGHT
‘The descriptions of grief and trauma are real and beautifully expressed.’
Good Housekeeping
‘… a fantastic achievement – beautifully written, painful to read, but utterly convincing in its defiant portrait of love triumphing overdeath.’
Andy Croft, Morning Star
DREAMS, LIKE HERETICS
‘These are poems painted, as it were, with a brave palette. Their promise lies in that they are beyond description; gorgeous illuminations of private moments of love and fear.’
Kathleen Jamie, Scotsman
‘Remarkable for its unashamed passion and literary power.’
Michele Roberts, Independent on Sunday
MER DE GLACE
Three times now I’ve read this book, and each time I have found in it more and more that matters.’
Sheila Harrison, Alpine Journal
‘A brave, intelligent novel.’
Jenifer Shute, Boston Weekly
‘… elusively beautiful and haunting … about climbing mountains, writing and being in love.’
Zoë Fairbairns, Everywoman
‘… acute perception, a well-paced story rich in symbol, image and natural detail.’
Dermot Sommers, Climbers Club Journal
Alison Fell is a Scottish writer who lives in London. Her poetry collection Kisses for Mayakovsky was winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and her alpine novel Mer de Glace won the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award. Her novel The Mistress of Lilliput won unanimous acclaim, and with her picaresque novel The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro has been translated into many languages. She has been a Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia, and a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at University College, London and The Courtauld Institute. She is currently Senior Teaching Fellow on the MA Creative Writing Programme at Southampton University. The Element -inth in Greek is her eighth novel.
By the same author
FICTION
The Grey Dancer
Every Move You Make
The Bad Box
Mer de Glace
The Pillow Boy of the Lady Onogoro
The Mistress of Lilliput
Tricks of the Light
POETRY
Kisses for Mayakovsky
The Crystal Owl
Dreams, like heretics
Lightyear
ANTHOLOGIES
The Seven Deadly sins
The Seven Cardinal Virtues
Serious Hysterics
The Element -inth in Greek
Alison Fell
First published in Great Britain by
Sandstone Press Ltd
PO Box 5725
One High Street
Dingwall
Ross-shire
IV15 9WJ
Scotland.
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form without the express
written permission of the publisher.
© Alison Fell 2012
The moral right of Alison Fell to be recognised as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from
Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBN e: 978-1-908737-03-8
Cover design by River Design, Edinburgh.
Ebook by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore.
For the archivists
Acknowledgements
I’m very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research.Council for awarding me the three year Research Fellowship which funded all the research for this book, and most of the writing, and to Middlesex University for hosting the Fellowship. My thanks also go to the Royal Literary Fund for financial assistance.
I’d also like to express my gratitude to Tom Palaima, Professor of Classics at the University of Texas, Austin, for his generosity in sharing all the Kober materials in the PASP archive, and to Sue Trombley, for showing me Alice Kober’s ‘‘cigarette carton’’ files of Linear B signs. Thanks also to Sue Sherratt of the Department of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum, and to Patricia Graf, great-niece of Alice Kober, for doing everything she could to further my research. Sanna Aro-Valjus of Abo University, Finland, generously sent me the correspondence she’d unearthed between Kober and Johannes Sundwall, and also translated some of the Kober letters which were written in a rather archaic German.
I’d also like to acknowledge the assistance given by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ame
rican School of Classical Studies at Athens, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, the Linguistic Society of America, and the North East Region Federal Archive, NYC.
Tony Delamothe of the British Medical Journal supplied a fund of information about forensic matters, and geneticist Anoushka Dave was unfailingly patient in trying to convey the basics of her field. Thanks also go to Vicky Evdokias, for additional information about the Greek police force, and to Warrant Officer Evagelos Garganourakis of the Heraklion Tourist Police, who also assured me that no police officer by the name of Yiannis Stephanoudakis was currently serving in Crete.
Chart of eighty-seven Linear B signs, with numerical equivalents and phonetic values.
1
In Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum there is a portrait of Sir Arthur Evans, the discoverer – or, some cynics might say, the inventor – of the Minoan civilisation of ancient Crete. The portrait is dated 1906, and shows Evans tieless, in a floating white shirt and a baggy linen suit with an orchid in the buttonhole. Cupped in his hand is a small clay tablet, visibly scratched with the characters of the script he had discovered at the site of Knossos, and had named Linear Class B. Although his expression is modest, even inward-looking, the artist has posed Evans in front of a palace fresco, throned him, in effect, as though he were King Minos himself.
Evans had coined the term Linear B to distinguish the script – dated from about 1450 BCE – from similar-looking but distinct characters found on archaeologically older tablets which had been excavated at Phaestos in the south of the island. This Linear Class A script, dated from 1750 BCE, also appeared on devotional objects, such as libation vases and stone altar tables. To an even earlier, pictographic script, dated from 2100 BCE and chiefly engraved on seal-stones, Evans gave the name Cretan Hieroglyphic. He was to spend the next 35 years of his life trying to decipher the unknown inscriptions.
At his death in 1941, Evans left the drawings, sign-lists and photographs of the inscriptions in the care of his colleague Sir John Myres, Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, charging him with the task of organising and publishing the material in a comprehensive editio princeps. Of around 3000 inscriptions – many of which had been drawn from autopsy, often poorly, by Evans himself, and never checked by other trained eyes – only some 300 had been published. Sir John Myres was hardly an epigrapher; he was also a man in his 70s, of uncertain health. The task Evans had bequeathed to him was a gargantuan one.
The Myres archive is housed in a small study-room in the basement of the Department of Antiquities, tucked away behind the glass cases which contain the Minoan collections – the ceramic snake-goddesses and bull-vaulting acrobats uncovered by Evans in his excavations of the so-called Palace of Minos site at Knossos. Hidden among the shelves of files that line the walls of the archive, a single dusty box-file contains the letters Myres received from Alice Elizabeth Kober, lowly Classics lecturer at Brooklyn College, New York. Letters full of longing.
In 1906, the same year that the portrait of Sir Arthur Evans was painted, Alice Kober was born in Manhattan to poor Hungarian immigrants. She attended Hunter College High School, and graduated with honours from Hunter College in 1928. She took her PhD at Columbia while teaching at Hunter College, and in 1932 joined the Classics faculty of the newly-opened Brooklyn College. On graduating, her tutor recalled, Kober had announced confidently that the unsolved mystery of Minoan writing was to be her life’s work, and the publication in 1935 of some of the first Linear B texts – in Evans’ Palace of Minos Vol IV – must have further galvanised her energies, for thereafter she devoted her research time entirely to the enigmatic scripts.
Previous attempts at decipherment Kober dismissed – often scathingly – as unscientific in method and fantastical in result. Logic, simplicity, and the demonstration of proof – those were the signposts Kober believed would lead the way to a secure decipherment.
‘Even a tentative phonetic pattern,’ she wrote to Myres, ‘based on internal evidence – not on guesswork, or the supposition that I was a Minoan in another incarnation, or have a spirit-guide who speaks Minoan – will help.’
And so – systematically, and with a single-mindedness that the 21st century reader may find hard to credit – Kober set about the studies she believed would best equip her for the task. The list is exhaustive, not to say exhausting. Although she was already teaching a back-breaking timetable of Classics courses at Brooklyn College, Kober knuckled down to the study of Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, for their scientific method, and Mathematics for its use in statistics. She tackled Field Archaeology in New Mexico in 1936, and in 1939 at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She studied advanced Sanskrit at Yale, travelling weekly to New Haven for the purpose; meanwhile, at the Linguistic Institute, she was taking courses in Hittite, Old Persian, Tocharian, Old Irish, Semitic grammar, Sumerian, Chinese and Basque. Her object in doing so was to familiarise herself with the structure of as many unrelated languages as possible, in the hope that light might thereby be thrown on the interpretation of Minoan.
In December 1946, in a clear sloping hand, on super-thin post-war paper, Kober wrote to Sir John Myres:
‘I must confess, strong as the statement sounds, that I would gladly go to the ends of the earth if there were a chance of seeing a new Linear Class B inscription when I got there.’
The irony is, however, that there was material closer at hand. In 1939 Carl Blegen had uncovered the first Linear B tablets to be found outside Crete, at Pylos on the Greek mainland. Once documented, the tablets were hidden in a bank vault in Athens to wait out the war. In the summer of 1940 Alison Frantz’s photographs of the inscriptions were smuggled out of Greece on the last American ship to leave the Mediterranean, and were deposited at the University of Cincinatti, where Blegen was a Professor. In 1946, on hearing that she had received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Alice Kober had written immediately to Carl Blegen, asking to be allowed to study the unpublished scripts. Professor Blegen, however, replied that ‘It would be impossible to grant such permission.’
One might be forgiven for wanting to know why. The excavator of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos was an archaeological superstar; by comparison, Kober was a mere upstart. Blegen’s response is perhaps a measure of the rivalry and protectionism that prevailed among scholars in the epigraphy field at the time.
If American generosity had failed Kober on this occasion, British generosity did not. By return of post Myres assured her that he would be glad to help in any way, and invited her to come to Oxford at the earliest opportunity to see the inscriptions for herself. After Blegen’s curt refusal, it was an offer she had not allowed herself to expect, and one that she could not refuse.
Clearly the concept of leisure did not rank too highly in Alice Kober’s scheme of things. In March 1947, about to embark at last on the longed-for trip to England, she wrote excitedly to Myres that the seven day voyage ‘should give me just about enough time to grasp the basics of Egyptian’.
No deck quoits for Kober, then – no poolside tanning or cocktails at the Captain’s table. Her remark was apparently made in all earnestness, and while one has to admire such selfless dedication to the task at hand, with hindsight what is poignant is the glimpse it affords us of a young woman who was to sacrifice everything – marriage, children, personal life, even, in the end, her health and strength – to the pursuit of an intellectual goal.
2
The cool hours before the sun strikes her bedroom window are usually the most productive. Around 10.00am, bleary-eyed from the laptop screen, reading-glasses still dangling from the cord around her neck, Ingrid smokes on the balcony, watching the slow stirring of the village below.
Beyond a patch of waste-ground where chickens scratch among melon-flowers, a scattering of stark white houses follows the shoreline. The sea is morning-perfect, smooth as cut butter. In its supple newness, millenia melt away.
She remembers a classroom, dust in the air, chalked symbols on the blackboard. Miss MacMillan,
her skirt nipped at the waist by an elastic belt with a snake clasp, her hair held back from her forehead by two tortoiseshell combs. Her back was straight, her neck long, her shoulders hieratic.
C. A. T.
The symbols frightened her, because they were mysterious, and she wasn’t the sort of child who liked mysteries. Up till then she’d been a good girl, a clever girl, always the first to provide the right answer. Miss MacMillan was her goddess; she ached with the need to please her.
Miss MacMillan stood by the blackboard, tapping the signs with her pointer. Sounds came from her pretty mouth. Separate sounds that meant nothing, with chasms in between.
Kuh, which was as threatening as a kick.
Aah, which was what her father made her do when he shone a light down her throat.
Tuh, like the tsk sound at the start of a scolding.
Miss MacMillan tapped the letters again, more quickly now, so that the three sounds got closer together, the darkness between them decreasing.