CHAPTER 5

A TASTE FOR TRAGEDY

BY MY MID-THIRTIES, I was deep into classical Greek. At The New Yorker, I had settled into my job on the copydesk and was training a series of copy editors, trying to move up to the next level, but reluctant to give up a night shift that allowed me to have days free for my extracurricular activities. The magazine was moving toward a takeover by the Newhouses, who owned Vogue, Vanity Fair, and a lot of other magazines, and speculation about who would succeed William Shawn as the editor-in-chief was ramping up. The New Yorker had been stable for decades—Shawn had been editor since the year I was born, 1952—and we were afraid that new owners would fiddle with our traditions. No. 1 pencils? Tuition reimbursement? Some of the older employees, like Ed Stringham, had settled into well-worn grooves, and it was hard to picture a new owner putting up with them. Shawn’s shop was home to many eccentrics, one of whom I was on the path to becoming.

I had registered for Elementary Greek at Barnard, choosing a section taught by a venerable classics professor named Helen Bacon. This was a historic opportunity: she was teaching beginners for the last time. But when Professor Bacon defined Hesperus, the evening star (Venus), with reference to the Latin Vespers, prayers at dusk, I could not take her point. It offended me that Greek should be taught through Latin when I was illiterate in that dead language but brimming with modern Greek. I crossed the street to Columbia and enrolled in a section taught by a professor new to Columbia, Laura Slatkin.

Professor Slatkin was a native New Yorker, educated at Brearley, Radcliffe, and Cambridge, who had come to Columbia on a Mellon Fellowship. She was an Athena type, witty, serious, and attractive, with great winged eyebrows. She would joke that students who came to class unprepared were responsible for the premature gray in her hair. I was closer in age to her than I was to the undergraduates, but that didn’t mean we could pal around. She gave the class an occasional glimpse into her private life. One day she told us that a friend had given birth the night before—she had attended—and the word “contractions,” which we had encountered in certain verbs in ancient Greek, had taken on new and urgent meaning. She laughingly described the efforts of three PhDs to follow the manufacturer’s instructions to assemble a crib.

Unlike the undergraduates, who were enrolled in organic chemistry and advanced Latin and statistics and the Great Books course that Columbia is famous for—along with rowing crew and making art and smoking dope and screwing around—I had only one class to prepare for, and no social life, with the result that I was able to devote myself completely to my studies, coming out of my Greek swoon for a few hours a day to go to the office and copy-edit for the purpose of paying the rent.

Traditionally, the first text that Greek students grapple with is Xenophon’s Anabasis, which records the long march upcountry (anabasis means “going up”) and the retreat of ten thousand (a myriad) Greek mercenary soldiers who fought in Persia from 401 to 399 BC. It is mostly about how many parasangs they cover every day—a parasang, according to Herodotus and Xenophon, is equal to 30 stadiums, or about five and a half kilometers—slogging along in the desert, up hills, over rocks, over more rocks, up more hills, until finally they see the sea and shout, “Thálassa! Thálassa!” (“The sea! The sea!”) At last they are as good as home. Professor Slatkin skipped the Anabasis and instead gave us Plato’s Apology of Socrates, which is about the trial and death of Socrates at the hands of the state. She knew how to make a person fall in love with ancient Greek. She also used a new textbook, Hansen and Quinn, which she said was an improvement on the textbook she had learned Greek from, in which the sample sentences were all about moving rocks from one side of the road to the other. The first day’s homework was to copy a list of Greek words printed in lowercase—λιος, ‘Όμηρος (sun, Homer)—in all capitals (ΗΛΙΟΣ, ΟΜΗΡΟΣ). It was surprisingly useful, and learning the words was an enticement to read outside the textbook.

After a year of Elementary Greek with Professor Slatkin, I registered for her course in Greek Tragedy. We met on the sixth floor of Hamilton Hall. I swear you needed an advanced degree just to find your classroom, because Columbia counted the basement (and the subbasement, if there was one) as a floor. The Hamilton for whom the building was named was Alexander, of course, a famous alumnus who had dropped out during the Revolutionary War, and it looked as if it might have been built in his day. The roof leaked, and chunks of the ceiling rained down. Professor Slatkin was pleased to be able to say, with some flair, “Après moi, le déluge.”

At the time, I was living in Astoria, above two Italian-American brothers in the semidetached brick house they had grown up in, and I would sit at a table by my second-floor window early in the morning, like a monk at his devotions, looking up occasionally as a train rolled over the viaduct leading to the Hell Gate Bridge, with my Greek text and my spiral notebooks and my abridged Liddell and Scott, a gift from my little brother.

Professor Slatkin had suggested that, with my limited Greek, I elect something easier—Herodotus was on offer across the street, at Barnard—but I had developed a taste for tragedy. Maybe it was self-dramatization, maybe it was melodrama, but I had an intimation that whatever we read in Greek Tragedy would put my own troubles in perspective. Professor Slatkin had chosen the two plays that she believed no one should graduate from college without having read: Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus (which classicists refer to as the OT), both by Sophocles. Antigone took up most of the semester, and we squeezed Oedipus into a few weeks at the end, with Professor Slatkin handing out sheets of vocabulary notes to save us time delving in the lexicon.

I was the class nerd. I copied the Greek text painstakingly into my notebook, about ten lines at a time, observing every diacritical mark, and covered the facing page with vocabulary notes—verbs with their principal parts, nouns with their genders and genitives—and, after negotiating the twists and turns of syntax, penciled in a frail translation of Sophocles. It was thrilling to see the meaning emerge, to observe the subtle uses of tense and aspect and mood, and to feel the force of the untranslatable particles.

There are words in Antigone that are current in English today—miasma is one—and words that are the roots from which English words have sprung. For instance, hérpo means “to creep, glide,” and has given us herps, as in herpetology, the study of reptiles—snakes, salamanders, and other creeping things. The verb speíro means to sow or scatter, and, combined with the prefix dia (across, through), yields diaspora, a scattering across or throughout. History has given us the Jewish diaspora, the Greek diaspora, and the Diaspora Club, as a group of soon-to-be-former New Yorker editors would call themselves.

I also lapped up the specialized vocabulary of classicists. They had a name for everything! “Oh, that’s a hapax legomenon,” someone might say, meaning a word that occurred a single time in a given author. Hysteron proteron (“later before”) meant saying what should follow first. My favorite was lacuna, a gap in the text where a worm had eaten a hole in the papyrus. And we were all prone to the occasional haplography, a scribal error in which the copyist’s eye fell on the second use of a word, causing him to omit the lines between the first and second uses. Scholars also had a convention that encouraged them, when it was unclear which of two manuscript readings was authentic, to favor the more difficult or unusual option. I found this perverse, in a good way. There were also notes on poetic form and meter, and exercises in scansion. All this to love before even touching on plot or character!

The text we were using for Antigone was the work of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, of Cambridge University. For 47 pages of Greek, it had 186 pages of English commentary—abridged from a much larger work, published in 1900. Classicists call it, simply, Jebb. I carried Jebb around with me like a favorite doll, puzzling over it on the train when I went to visit friends in Boston and holding it open on my lap when we were playing bridge, hoping that while I wasn’t looking, some of the words would rearrange themselves into meaningful units, like letters in an anagram, and jump out at me.

Most people know the story of Antigone. The daughter of Oedipus buries her brother Polynices—or at least throws a handful of dust on his body to ensure safe passage to the Underworld—disobeying her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, and earning the death penalty. Antigone is a spitfire, defying Creon in the serene belief that she is obeying a higher law. If Antigone did not soar like a phoenix above this tragedy, it would be Creon’s play. He needs to be right, and by the time Tiresias enters (always bad news) and the chorus of Theban elders persuades Creon to admit he’s wrong, it is too late. His niece Antigone has hanged herself; his son Haemon, who was betrothed to Antigone (yes, they were cousins), kills himself, whereupon his wife, Eurydice, Haemon’s mother, also kills herself, leaving Creon broken and alone.

One of the things that impressed me about Sophocles was the way this play is over even before it begins: at the protagonist’s entrance we are already looking at the consequences of what she is about to do, and everything from there on is drawn in unsparing detail, so that we know just how it feels to be Antigone. In one speech, which I was able to translate almost magically, as if I had written it myself (it is thought by some to be spurious), she enlarges on the value of a brother, making the point that if a husband or a child dies, one can remarry or have another child, but a brother engendered by parents who are no longer alive can never be replaced. I thought I understood, and I am not talking about my brother Patrick. I had two other brothers, one older and one younger, and I was particularly close to my younger brother. I felt as if I were losing him, though not to death. That year, my year of Antigone, my brother did the unthinkable: he got married. It brought to an end the years of our youth: both of us in New York, hanging out together, with a shared set of references and inside jokes. I admit that he filled in for the social life I didn’t have. He was funny and wise, and I preferred his company to anyone else’s. Once, we were introduced to a friend’s cousin, an interesting guy, who called the next day to make a date with me—I actually held the phone away from my ear and looked at it as if to say, “Are you sure? My brother is much better company.” I forgot that, to a heterosexual man, I, as a woman, might be more attractive than my brother.

Sometimes you read something at exactly the right time, whether it’s a classic you missed in childhood that would have been wasted on you as an eight-year-old (I read The Wind in the Willows and Charlotte’s Web in bed with my lover in college) or something that you were too snooty to read when it first came out—Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter—that speaks to you profoundly once you give up your pose of superiority. (Ford made me change my mind about discretionary commas.) A great book about the Donner Party (Desperate Passage) can make you resolve to never waste a scrap of food again. Who you are when you come to a book (Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters) can give you an intimate experience that you would not have had if that book was assigned in class, if you had to read it. I might have felt sorry for myself for not getting Latin early and for being in my thirties by the time I found Greek, but I knew that what I brought to it—in the case of Antigone, my history with my brother—was making it hit me in a way that it wouldn’t have when I was younger. What happened was not even happening to me—I just experienced the fallout of things that were happening to others—but the extreme experience of Antigone (remember, her brother was also her nephew) helped me cope with the feeling of being sidelined in my own family.

And here we have a riddle worthy of the Sphinx: What goes by the masculine pronoun in youth, the feminine pronoun in middle age, and the singular “they” in old age? My hermaphrodite. After playing Antigone at my brother’s wedding, I took on the role again when my brother, like Tiresias, changed gender, and began a new life as a female. I resisted the word “sister.” I had not had a sister when I needed one, and I didn’t want one now, especially when it was someone who was trying to take my brother’s place. It is not unusual, I learned, for a person to experience a family member’s change of gender as a death, which is very disturbing to the transitioner, who feels she is being reborn. “It’s not nice to hear you’re dead,” my brother said. For me, at first, his transformation seemed like a rejection of our shared past. I would learn to use the feminine pronoun in the present, but when I was talking about the past I felt entitled to revert to the masculine. But this was several years in the future. For now, I had lost access through marriage to my boon companion and it felt as good as death—or as bad. Things would never be the same.

In class, Professor Slatkin gave a different scholarly article to each student of Greek tragedy and asked us to write a response. Mine was about Antigone’s motive: Why did she do it? I was aghast to discover that there was an entire body of literature devoted to this question. To me it was perfectly obvious why Antigone did it: she loved her brother. She did what came naturally to her, and to be faulted for that can elicit no repentance because there was nothing to repent: she couldn’t have done it differently. She was blameless. The only other thing I had read in classical Greek at that point was Plato’s Apology, and I saw parallels between Antigone and Socrates: both were martyred by the state for being married to the truth.

THE PURSUIT OF GREEK TRAGEDY can actually have a happy ending. Or at least it can end in relief. It was around that time, while taking Elementary Greek, that I saw a notice on campus announcing auditions for a production of Euripides’ Electra in ancient Greek. Having never studied a dead language before, I missed the social aspects of language learning—eating ethnic food, writing skits, improvising dialogues—and this might be as close as I could get to conversational ancient Greek. So I tried out. A fair-haired graduate student listened to me read a passage from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and said, “I’d love to have you in the chorus.”

Performance of Greek drama in the original language (or some semblance of it) is a long-standing academic tradition. In 1881, students at Harvard University staged Oedipus Tyrannus in the original Greek, a production that was seen by six thousand people. The Barnard Columbia Greek Drama Group—now the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group—was founded in the 1976–77 academic year, with a production of Euripides’ Medea. A student named Matthew Alan Kramer, who was in the play, was killed in an accident that summer, and his family set up a memorial fund “for the promotion of these plays, which he loved.” I had seen their production of The Cyclops, a satyr play by Euripides, before my first trip to Greece. It opened with the title character lumbering onstage and sitting down at a harpsichord to play a winsome piece by Rameau titled “Les Cyclopes.” I was enchanted.

For the first read-through of Electra, in English, we met at the director’s apartment, on one of the long blocks of apartment buildings and fraternity houses just south of Columbia. Each of us brought a different translation. I got the impression that this was not one of Euripides’ greatest hits. Electra and Orestes sounded like brats hatching a juvenile plot to kill Mom. Our Electra, a graduate student named Lavinia, had a regal bearing and an impressive academic pedigree: her mother was a Dante scholar, and her father a mathematician. The student playing Orestes, who bore a slight resemblance to Gregory Peck, had played the part before, in the Eumenides, with Lavinia as Athena. The undergraduate who competed with Lavinia for the role of Electra had been cast as Clytemnestra and would get killed by her.

The chorus was made up of milk-fed Mycenaean girls who drop by to invite Electra to a procession at the temple of Hera. There were four of us: a classics major named Hilary, who, though somewhat stiff onstage, had read a lot of Greek and was asked to lead the chorus; a cherubic blonde who had devised her own major in Byzantine studies; a Greek-American who, despite her heritage, was unfamiliar with the House of Atreus and was horrified to learn what Electra and Orestes were up to; and me.

The director distributed sheet music and audiocassettes of the odes to help us learn the Greek. The chorus would rehearse separately from the rest of the cast, with a choreographer. No decision had been made about the musical accompaniment, but I gave the producer the number of my brother (as he was at the time), who played the harp.

The first hurdle for the chorus was memorizing the lines. We were using a scheme of restored pronunciation, which I was scornful of. I held the ignorant opinion that it would make more sense to follow the pronunciation of contemporary Greeks than that of scholars and linguists from Cambridge or Yale, though I liked the restored pronunciation of oi, as in “Oi moi,” a typical exclamation in tragedy, meaning something like “Woe is me” or the Yiddish “Oy vey.” Many vowels and vowel combinations from ancient Greek have been streamlined in the modern language and are all pronounced the same. Or, as James Merrill puts it, rather negatively, in his early novel The (Diblos) Notebook, “The modern Greek language can be said to have suffered a stroke. Vowels, the full oi’s & ei’s of classical days, have been eclipsed to a waning, whining ee.”

You don’t so much read ancient Greek as construe it, teasing out the different strands and seeing which parts of a sentence go together. English sentences tend to follow a predictable subject-verb-object pattern. In a Greek sentence, an adjective at the end can modify a noun at the beginning, and the words can pile up in between like a pyramid with the crucial verb at the top. We had five convoluted choral odes and a lament to master, and I spent hours thumbing through the Greek lexicon and comparing translations. The official translation for the production was Emily Townsend Vermeule’s, but I noticed that the director carried around a prose translation by Moses Hadas, who had taught at Columbia. It seemed that classicists preferred literal translations. A translator who tried to replicate the Greek meter produced unidiomatic—not to say tortured—English. Greek just does things differently from English. Enough exposure to Greek will do two things: it will make a snob out of you, because you see that no translation approaches the beauty and subtlety of the original, and it will provoke you to prove yourself wrong by attempting your own translation, which will not be universally admired.

The choreography for the odes had to be simple, because we were not dancers, and it had to communicate the meaning as literally as possible, because not everyone in the audience would be a Greekist. We were like backup singers, waving our arms around, acting out sphinxes and rowing invisible boats and bringing the axe down on Agamemnon’s neck in a retelling of his murder in the bath. The director implored us to get the lines down cold, so that if there was any kind of distraction during the performance—if the set collapsed or an ambulance wailed up Amsterdam Avenue—we could sail over it unperturbed.

One night my brother showed up at rehearsal with his harp. The producer had called him, and he had met with the director. “He is exactly the kind of guy who is not cut out for this job,” my brother said, laughing. The director was visibly nervous: it emerged that his academic survival depended on his passing exams that spring, and instead of studying he was putting on a show. At the first musical rehearsal, he conducted with a Bic pen, making abrupt, exaggerated gestures, and watched helplessly as someone grabbed a page from his score, which had been taped together into one long document, and unspooled it across the floor. Outside of rehearsal, I helped my brother with the Greek, transliterating the words and defining them, so that even if he couldn’t construe a line, he knew what the words sounded like and which ones were important. He did every pragmatic thing he could to make sure that nothing he had control over would go wrong during the performance. He had his score reduced and glued it to cardboard so that it wouldn’t slip off the music stand. He made a tuning chart for the harp. He bought new black clothes, like a costume, to shore up his confidence.

We started rehearsing with the principals to learn our cues. Electra had an opening aria, which Lavinia sang in a reedy, affecting voice, and she and Orestes had a duet at the end, with the chorus joining in for the ritual lament, or kommos. “I want this to be really terrible,” the director said, meaning shocking and bloodthirsty, like a chainsaw massacre. After all, Clytemnestra was an axe murderer.

My brother and I usually left rehearsal together, stopping at a bar on the way home, where he would badger me to keep rehearsing when I just wanted to drink. One day he went off to practice with Lavinia instead, and I headed down Broadway alone. I was inwardly repeating the ode for a scene in which the chorus celebrates the return of Orestes, when Orestes himself rounded the corner with the director. I opened my mouth and Greek fell out: “’Έμολες ’έμολες,  . . .” They understood me perfectly—“You’ve come, you’ve come, O long-awaited day. You shine, you show forth, you appear in the city a torch!”—and invited me to join them for pizza.

Euripides was turning my life inside out: I was living in the text, going over my lines every spare moment, in the tub and on the subway and in bed at night. I neglected to pay my bills or water my plants or do the dishes. I reported, as usual, to my job on the copydesk, but I sometimes had the sensation that I was an alien from Argos plunked down in the hallway of a seedy midtown office. Our system of rolling up proofs and inserting them into a Plexiglas-and-leather canister and shooting it up a pneumatic tube to the production department, two floors above, for transmission by fax to the printer, in Chicago, seemed suddenly quaint, even to me. How much longer could this go on?

One night I dreamed that I was handling shards, pieces of ancient pottery with writing on them. The dream came back to me as I passed a church on the way to rehearsal, and I realized that ancient Greek is like the Bible (from βίβλоς): records of the past that preserve the things that humans most need to know.

FINALLY IT WAS opening night at the Teatro Piccolo, in Columbia’s Casa Italiana, a building furnished with massive fake antiques that were rumored to have been sent over by Mussolini in lieu of a cash donation. Over the stage was a quote from Virgil. The floor was strewn with hay, as for a children’s Nativity pageant. The chorus, wearing peploi—ankle-length tubes of crinkly fabric, in red, yellow, blue, and orange, pinned at the shoulders—sat in the back row, waiting for our entrance. When the harpist cued us with four repeated bars, we squeezed one another’s hands, willing our synapses to connect and feed us the lines, and surged up the aisle.

Because I was the only one who remembered the words, I had an impromptu solo during the reenactment of Agamemnon’s death cry: “Will you murder me?” Clytemnestra screamed, there was a tumult backstage, and Electra and Orestes entered red-handed. The bodies were hauled onstage, and the effect was as chilling and incongruous in the childlike Nativity-play setting as the director could have wished. The play ended with Castor and Polydeuces, twin brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen, appearing, not from above (there was no money in the budget for a crane) but from the wings, to denounce the matricide. Castor was played by a Greek Cypriot, Demetrios Ioannides, who rolled out his lines with the godlike authority of someone speaking his mother tongue.

The audience was disappointingly small for an event that had reached epic proportions in my brain. “Euripides’ Electra,” the flyers proclaimed: “Fun for the Whole Family!” We performed four times, Thursday to Saturday, with a matinee on Friday; no performance was perfect. My brother and I alternated in being elated or dejected after each show. I complained that I felt no magic. “That’s too bad, but nobody cares how you feel,” my brother said. “It doesn’t have to be magic for you but could still be magic for the audience.”

On the last night, Ed Stringham brought some people from the office—I was his protégée, after all—so there was a New Yorker contingent in the audience. Who knew how much lon ger the magazine would support an employee’s avocation as a Greek chorus girl? I had persuaded the people in Goings On About Town to run a little blurb for us. Both my Greek teachers, Dorothy Gregory and Laura Slatkin, were there, along with a contingent of classics scholars, who, the director had said, would be able to construe the odes as we were singing them. I was nervous. That night, we the chorus stumbled at our entrance, two of us counting wrong and the other two stubbornly setting it right. But it was OK. As when a brand-new Plymouth Fury incurs a fender bender on its first outing, the pressure of perfection was off. We were freer after that, more forgiving. Between the odes, I concentrated on listening to the dialogue. Even if I couldn’t understand what Electra and Orestes and Clytemnestra were saying, I could listen to the sound of the Greek. At every performance, I understood more—isolated words, genitive endings, a vocative inflection (Clytemnestra’s “ παȋ”—“O child”). Toward the end, just before Clytemnestra walked into the trap set by her darlings, Orestes and Electra came downstage and argued, and I distinctly heard Orestes whine to his sister, “But I don’t want to kill Mom.” I also heard Electra’s answer, and what she said didn’t make sense, but it didn’t make sense in Greek. It was not supposed to make sense. She was telling him why he had to kill his mother, compelling him to go through with it, defying a law that was older and holier than her need for retribution: Thou shalt not kill—especially thy mother.

Still, I had some sympathy for Electra. The way I saw it, she had no choice. She hated her mother and could not rest until Clytemnestra was dead. But once she had killed her, everything would be worse instead of better. It was as if you had something in your eye that drove you crazy, and instead of trying to distract yourself from it or somehow live with it, you gouged it out, only to realize that having something in your eye was nowhere near as bad as not having the eye at all.

I told Professor Slatkin about my epiphany after our next class, and she said it was a good example of anagnorisis: a term from Aristotle that means a turning point in the action of a play when a character recognizes some truth about himself. Orestes rejects Electra’s scheme—he knows it’s wrong—but she bullies him into it anyway. In a very small way, I saw our family in this scene: my attempts as a child to bend my brother to my will, to enlist his sympathy against our mother. Fortunately, he resisted. And no blood was shed in the House of Norris.

MY CAREER AS A TRAGEDIENNE peaked the following year, when I was plucked from the chorus of Electra and given the lead in The Trojan Women. It was Euripides again, and the part was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy. I had been hoping to play Cassandra—a walk-on as a madwoman would have suited me perfectly—but, as a thirty-three-year-old “postgraduate special student,” I was cast in the role of the hag while the part of the ingénue went to a slinky undergraduate. The shrewd student-director told me that if I didn’t play Hecuba the role would go to Hilary, of last year’s chorus. I couldn’t let that happen.

Hecuba carries the play. It opens with her lying on the ground after the defeat of Troy. She has lost her son Hector and her husband, King Priam. This is the end, the tragic aftermath of the Trojan War as seen by the women of Troy. Again, the plot is linear: Cassandra and Andromache, Hector’s wife, sweep in and out; Helen, Hecuba’s archenemy, makes an appearance, reunited with her husband, Menelaus; the body of young Astyanax, Hector’s heir, who was flung from the towers of Troy by the Greeks lest he survive to reclaim the kingdom, is handed over to his grandmother. Talthybius, Agamemnon’s herald, played by my Greek Cypriot friend Demetrios, grows in sympathy for Hecuba. The play is an exercise in comparative and superlative: Hecuba starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder and sadder until she is the saddest woman who ever lived.

The role was a feat of memorization. Each scene came with a long speech—forty or more lines of Greek. I started with the last speech, the one over the body of Astyanax, because I knew that if I learned the speeches in order the last one would suffer, and it was both the climax and the low point of Hecuba’s misfortunes. I had been able to identify with Electra, because I was a daughter and a sister, but what was Hecuba to me? She was a wife and mother, and a queen. One of my father’s nicknames for my mother was Queen.

I did not have to look far for a model of grief over a lost child. I could still hear my mother’s stories: how, after Patrick’s funeral, bewildered, I had toddled over to my father’s knee, perhaps to say, “I’m still here—what about me?” and he had said, “You’re a good kid, Mary.” And I had my own searing memory of my baby brother greeting me at the door one day, worried, to say, “Mom got out Patrick’s funeral things and cried.” He and I had been trying all our lives to account for the ways we were shaped by our brother’s death.

I devoted a day to construing the speech over Astyanax and storing it in my memory, adding a line at a time, until by evening I had a huge undigested wad of Greek in my system. I felt like a snake that had swallowed a piglet. I photocopied all the speeches and glued them to index cards, so that Hecuba was always in my pocket. When I swam laps at the pool, I added a line per lap. The last chunk I memorized was the furious speech to Helen, which scared the cat off my lap: she couldn’t understand why I was so angry. Euripides used to be relegated to third place, behind Aeschylus and Sophocles, in the hierarchy of the Greek tragic playwrights, but he knew what he was doing. As long as I didn’t panic, all I had to do if I forgot a line was think of what would logically come next, and there it was.

I worried about how to pace the sadness so that there would still be somewhere to go by the time I got to Astyanax. Katharine Hepburn had played Hecuba in a 1971 movie version of The Trojan Women. I was a fan of Hepburn, making a point of going to revivals of her films at the Thalia, but I had missed The Trojan Women, and I didn’t dare watch it now, when I had to play the role myself, in a dead language, without her cheekbones. I decided to write her a letter. I knew she lived in Turtle Bay, in the East Forties, where E. B. White once lived, but a young editor who had recently come to The New Yorker from Knopf, which was publishing Hepburn’s memoir about the making of The African Queen, told me that Hepburn would be alarmed to think that a stranger knew where she lived, and that it would be better to approach her obliquely, through her publisher. “Dear Katharine Hepburn,” I wrote, and told her my problem—that I had to play Hecuba in Greek—and made a lofty reference to Bartók and a Hungarian folk song that was piercingly sad and beautiful, something about a tree. I asked Ms. Hepburn how she had varied her performance. I had had a little experience in musical comedy, but was it possible, in tragedy, to play it for laughs?

Not long afterward, I got an answer. It was a typewritten note on letterhead stationery, dated January 15, 1985, with the name Katharine Houghton Hepburn engraved in red. “Dear Mary Jane Norris,” it began. (I had insisted on using my Catholic-school name on this occasion to distinguish myself from my grandmother, Mary B. Norris, although she had not been known as an actress.) “I’m sorry that you missed the movie of The Trojan Women,” Hepburn wrote, and I could picture her chin quivering and hear her intonation. “Of course, we played it for laughs. It’s the only way – Especially Hecuba –” She signed off, “Good luck and you are certain to be a big hit.” It was liberating to know that Hecuba could be outrageous.

Again, Ed Stringham drew on his friends and colleagues to swell the audience. He persuaded Beata to come; a woman who had worked for him back in the sixties—they had studied Greek popular music together—drove down from Rhode Island with her husband. Someone from the managing editor’s office came, and even a guy from the makeup department. The office was now in the throes of the takeover by Condé Nast, and this state of emergency may have contributed to the sudden interest in the fall of Troy.

The chorus in this production numbered two; between them, they encompassed all manner of feminine extremes. They were Italy and France, the moon and the evening star, Artemis and Aphrodite. Offstage, they referred to our costumes, flimsy peach-colored shifts, as Burger King uniforms. Hector’s shield was molded plastic. So was the prop rock that stood for all Troy: when I leaned on it, the earth moved. My brother, as usual, gave commonsense advice: “Don’t waste your time worrying about anything that’s not under your control.”

The undergraduate who played Helen, an international student from Germany, had long red-gold hair, which she chopped off the week before the performance, so that our Helen looked like a punk rocker. Hecuba loathes Helen. She hurls at her a polysyllabic insult— κατάπτυστον κάρα—best translated monosyl labically as “You slut!” Refuting the rumor that Paris/Alexandros abducted Helen against her will, Hecuba says, “Who among Spartans heard you scream?” A woman in the audience laughed! (Hepburn would have been proud.) Menelaus told me afterward that he almost went off script and handed Helen over to me—“You were so angry!” During that speech, I felt the last drop of bile leave my liver. I had used up all the hate and bitterness in my system.

Two young boys alternated in the role of the dead Astyanax. One was a Puerto Rican child, a wisp of a boy, who was easy to take into my arms, and he lay limp and sweet on the stage. The other was a solid lad, the eight-year-old son of a classics professor. When I laid him on the stage to deliver my last speech over his lifeless body, he crossed his feet. He did this at every rehearsal. We begged him not to—the director asked him, his father commanded him—but he could not help it. He was afraid I was going to castrate him. The audience tittered. At the last performance, after I laid the boy down, I crossed his feet deliberately, as though this arrangement of limbs were a funeral rite of the Trojans.

In the last scene, Hecuba bids farewell to Troy, a “bastion against barbarians.” She utters the lament to end all laments: “ότοτοτοȋ!” She tries to throw herself on the burning city, but Talthybius objects and the chorus blocks her. My motivation here had been a puzzle. What in my experience could possibly measure up to that of a queen being banished from her fabled city? My grandmother, in her eighties, had had to leave Cleveland for Clemson, South Carolina, to live with her widowed daughter. That was sad but not tragic.

And then I got it. As The New Yorker was being taken over by Condé Nast, I had seen how hard it was for my friend Peter Fleischmann to lose control of the company that his family had built. His father, Raoul Fleischmann, was the original backer of The New Yorker, beginning in the 1920s. Peter was proud of the magazine, and of the traditional separation between business and editorial that he had inherited and fostered, and of his relationship with William Shawn. He loved the writers. Peter, like J. D. Salinger, had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, an experience so demoralizing that few of the veterans ever talked about it. After the Liberation he drank champagne in Paris with A. J. Liebling. I loved listening to Peter’s stories. He had had throat cancer (he was a heavy smoker), and the surgeons had saved his life but could not save his voice. After that, he was mute unless he used a speaking tube. This gadget was a medical marvel. It looked like an ordinary microphone, but when he pressed it to his throat its vibrations allowed him to say anything he wanted to, albeit in a voice that sounded like a robot’s. He called it his tooter. Peter was terse anyway, and could curse with the best of them, so it was especially funny when he picked up his tooter, nestled it against his throat, and uttered one of his favorite phrases: “YOU’RE FUCKING WELL TOLD.”

Peter got angry once when I referred to the “sale” of The New Yorker. “I did not sell the magazine,” he said. “It was taken over.” Someone on the board had sold a significant number of shares to the Newhouse family, who had bought still other shares, and suddenly Peter and his loyalists no longer held a majority. He chose to accept the takeover as gracefully as possible. People assumed that, as a businessman, Fleischmann “the yeast magnate” was happy to cash in. But Peter was a principled businessman with a gift for friendship, and he saw it as his duty to make a profit for the shareholders. For Peter the takeover of The New Yorker was a profound loss. So that was my farewell to Troy and Peter’s to The New Yorker, a bastion against barbarians.

At “the last and final terminal end,” as Hecuba puts it, in a typical Greek pileup of synonyms, the Trojan women are led to the ships (or, as the program put it, “the chips”; I was not the proofreader for the production), and Hecuba tells the chorus that the only thing they have left is the knowledge that someday their losses will make good stories. “What a bitter speech!” one member of my chorus said when I translated it for her. I thought it was beautiful, a moment of acceptance for Hecuba, a small, cold consolation. But I think I was wrong. Hecuba is like her great enemy Achilles in that she would rather have lived a long, uneventful life and died in obscurity than be immortal in plays and poetry.

When I went back to work the following week, someone at the office asked, “How was the play?” I said, “It was great,” and he responded, archly, “If you do say so yourself?” I didn’t bother to explain that I didn’t mean I was great but that the play had been a great experience for me, the best possible therapy. For days afterward, I felt clean and empty. A rival at the office, someone I had formerly wanted to hang by her ankles from the window of the nineteenth floor the way Zeus hung Hera from Olympus (it was her I raged at when I yelled at Helen), was a harmless colleague with pixie ears and a jaunty wardrobe. I had put myself at the service of Euripides, and of Apollo and Dionysus, the gods of theater, and they had accepted my tribute.