. It appears to have been a forerunner of the tags he would later make to help him sort the symbols of Linear B.] …London, 1936
THE KNOSSOS TABLETS, SO LONG in the ground, were under glass now, on display in London at Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts. Curated by Sir Arthur Evans, the exhibition honored the fiftieth anniversary of the British School at Athens, the archaeological institute of which he was a founder. On this autumn day, Evans himself, at eighty-five the eminence grise of Old World archaeology, was passing through the gallery. There, he came face-to-face with a group of boys on a school trip. They were sixth-formers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds—plus one younger schoolmate who had tagged along to see the ancient artifacts.
Evans was fond of children, and he took it upon himself to give the boys an impromptu private tour. They soon found themselves before a glass case that held some of the tablets he had unearthed at Knossos. Despite all efforts, Evans told them, the mysterious writing on them still could not be read.
As was widely recounted afterward, a shy treble arose from the knot of schoolboys. “Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, Sir?” asked the group’s youngest member, a boy of fourteen, in polite excitement. The boy’s name was Michael Ventris.
Though the episode marked the start of Ventris’s obsession with this particular script, he had already been in thrall to ancient writing for half his young life. Endowed with a knife-edge logical mind and an almost unnatural facility for acquiring foreign languages, he was certainly the most natively brilliant of the three major players in the Linear B story. He was also very likely—though here the playing field was practically level—the most obsessed.
But the most remarkable thing about Ventris by far is that he was neither an archaeologist like Evans nor a classicist like Kober nor a scholar in any other field that might have made him a likely candidate to solve the riddle of the script. In fact, he had never even been to college. (In those years, British architectural training took place in professional schools, not in universities, and Ventris’s formal education in any subject that might be considered grist for a career in archaeological decipherment had ended in his late teens.)
Like many of the amateurs who tackled the script, Ventris spent years juggling unverifiable speculations, choosing a favorite candidate for the language of the tablets almost at the start. Unlike them, however, his acute rationality, superb gift for pattern recognition, and profound appreciation of mathematically elegant approaches to problem solving of every kind made him, once he finally read and digested Kober’s articles, spectacularly well equipped to use her methods to reach a solution.
Since that day at the Royal Academy, Ventris had lived with the script more intimately than anyone except Kober. At boarding school, he read about it under the covers by flashlight after lights-out. While still in his teens, he wrote fervent letters about it to Evans. At eighteen, he wrote a long analytical article on Linear B that was published in a scholarly journal. In the 1940s, he took it with him to war.
If Linear B exerted a greater hold on Ventris than it did on anyone else, there was ample cause. In his youth, it was a buffer against an unnaturally frigid upbringing. Soon afterward, it became a distraction from great loss: Both his parents had died, one by suicide, by the time he was eighteen. Later, when he was a young architect, it helped leaven his days in an uninspiring job. Ignoring his wife and children and, eventually, his profession, he worked feverishly on the script at every available moment. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, his obsession had cost him his relations with his family, his architectural career, and, in the view of some observers, his life.
THE ONLY CHILD of Edward Francis Vereker Ventris and the former Anna Dorothea Janasz, Michael George Francis Ventris was born in Wheathampstead, a village about twenty miles north of London, on July 12, 1922. (At the time, Kober was in high school and Evans ensconced in his third decade of excavating and restoring the palace at Knossos.) On his father’s side, Ventris was descended from an old English family inclined to produce straight-backed military men. His paternal grandfather was a highly regarded army officer who retired in 1920 as commander of the British forces in China. Michael’s father, Edward, was an officer in India, though he appears to have had a less lustrous career than his father before him. “Overshadowed by illness and perhaps his own father’s military reputation,” Andrew Robinson writes in The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, “he retired from the Army in his late thirties, as a lieutenant colonel, and was a semi-invalid for most of his remaining years.”
Ventris’s mother’s background was, by all appearances, something of a counterweight. Dorothea, or Dora, as she was known, was the beautiful dark-haired daughter of an English mother and a wealthy Polish landowner who had settled in England. She was passionately interested in the arts, the flourishing Modernist school in particular, and numbered among her friends many of the leading lights of Europe’s contemporary art scene. Among them were the designer Marcel Breuer, the architect Walter Gropius, the painter Ben Nicholson, and the sculptors Henry Moore and Naum Gabo.
Edward Ventris suffered from tuberculosis, and Michael spent most of his childhood in Switzerland, where his father had gone for treatment. He attended a boarding school in Gstaad, where he readily acquired French, German, and the local Swiss German dialect. (He had long since acquired Polish from his mother.) Very early on, he became fascinated with the means of writing languages down. At eight, in Switzerland, he bought and devoured Die Hieroglyphen, a German-language book on hieroglyphics by the renowned Egyptologist Adolf Erman.
In accounts of Ventris’s life, much has been made of his prodigious ability to pick up languages when he was just a boy. In fact, there is nothing remarkable about it: Acquiring languages in childhood is what each of us is biologically predisposed to do. What is genuinely noteworthy is that Ventris continued to do so, with equal facility, to the end of his life.
Children come into the world hardwired to acquire language, provided only that they are exposed to it. From birth through the age of about ten, a child can acquire a first language, as well as a second, third, fourth, and more, by drawing automatically on these inborn principles. Scientists call these years the “critical period” for language acquisition. But then, for neurological reasons that are not well understood, most people automatically exit the critical period near the start of adolescence. After that, new languages are accessible to them only through the arduous classroom instruction with which high school and college students are all too familiar.
But for a charmed few—for neurological reasons that are even less well understood—the critical period seems to continue undiminished through adulthood. They can inhale foreign languages at twenty or thirty as readily as they did at six, with minimal effort. Michael Ventris was beyond doubt such a person, possessing a rare, innate gift that would serve him singularly well in the years that followed.
“How do you come to be so expert in Swedish?” his collaborator John Chadwick wrote him in the 1950s, after Ventris sent him his own translations of accounts of the decipherment in the Swedish press. (The answer was simple: Ventris had mastered the language as an adult, in a matter of weeks, in preparation for a short-term architectural project in Sweden.)
In 1931, when Michael was about nine, his family returned to England, although the coming years would be punctuated by stays on the Continent for Edward’s health. In England, Michael was sent to Bickley Hall, a preparatory boarding school in Kent. On school holidays, he came home to a house of little warmth. As Robinson and others have remarked, the Ventrises displayed a coldness toward their only child that was remarkable even for their time, place, and class. There was a reason: In Switzerland, Edward and Dorothea had undergone psychoanalysis with Freud’s disciple Carl Jung, and their treatment of their son was per Jung’s instructions, intended to prevent Michael from forming an Oedipal attachment.
As Jean Overton Fuller, the daughter of a Ventris family friend, recounted in A Very English Genius, the 2002 BBC documentary about the decipherment: “Colonel Ventris said we must come and meet Michael. But Mother gave me a warning: I must on no account touch Michael. It had been explained to her that Michael was never to be touched by anybody. This was to avoid his having complexes.” She added: “What my mother was afraid of was that he would never be able to make a natural, warm relationship, never having had one.”
Fuller, who was nine at the time of the visit (Michael was two), later wrote of overhearing Edward Ventris confide in her mother, whom he had known in India:
I heard it all as Colonel Ventris poured it out to my mother, unembarrassed by my silent presence. Probably I was deemed too young to understand. But what I heard him say to my mother was that Jung said Dora’s father, a Polish count, was a tyrannical autocrat who bullied Dora, ordering her about, terrifying her … but that subconsciously Dora was in love with him and hoped to find him again in her husband, but he, poor husband, just hadn’t got it in him so to mistreat her. He couldn’t stop being patient and considerate and it irritated her, she felt he wasn’t her idea of a man.
Jung, Fuller wrote, “had complicated matters by falling in love with Dora, so that … it was improper he should entertain such feelings for her and continue to treat them both as his patients.” He discharged both Dorothea and Edward from his practice. “So then they were left stranded,” Fuller wrote. “My personal feeling is that whatever they were like before they met Jung, he made them not better but much worse, over engrossed in the analysis of their complexes, depressed.”
In 1935, at thirteen, Michael was sent to the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, about fifty miles northwest of London. A progressive secondary school, it emphasized culture and the classics over athletics, a time-honored staple of English boarding school education. In the BBC documentary, a classmate, Robin Richardson, recalled the young Ventris as “an aloof, slightly abused and detached member of our own community who didn’t make great friends with the rest of us. … He regarded all of us with a degree of puzzlement and amusement.” Ventris himself has written of his school days, “I think they rather thought me a black sheep while I was there and it’d be rather insincere to make out I had any deep tradition implanted in me!”
His teachers recalled him as a middling student who expended little effort on subjects that did not interest him. But it was at Stowe that Michael joined the fateful class trip to the Royal Academy in London. It was at Stowe, too, that night after night, after lights-out in the dormitory, he pored over the few available transcriptions of Linear B tablets, most likely from volume 4 of Evans’s The Palace of Minos, published in 1935.
By this time, Edward and Dorothea’s marriage, a strange match from the start, had taken an even stranger turn. From about 1932 on, as Jean Fuller recalled, the couple lived in East-bourne, on England’s south coast, occupying separate hotels along the seafront. They would meet each day on a bench in between the two. “If they were apart, they pined for each other’s society, but if they were together, they hurt each other,” she said. “They were like porcupines.” The couple formally divorced when Michael was about fourteen. Edward died two years later, in 1938.
After the divorce, Dorothea and Michael moved into a newly erected London apartment building known as High-point. A blocky tower of white concrete, Highpoint had been designed by the Russian émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin to be the apotheosis of Modernism. Inside, their flat gleamed with work by the modern artists Dorothea cherished, many of them her personal friends. There were two Picassos on the walls, as well as sculptures by Gabo and Moore. From Breuer, she commissioned much of the furniture, with its clean lines, light wood, glass, and chrome. The collection he designed for her included a small glass-topped sycamore-and-chrome desk, now in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, on which her son would one day decipher Linear B.
Dorothea and Michael loved the clean, modern aesthetic of their new home. “I count myself extraordinarily fortunate to have this little centre which you made … your interior with its shapes and colours and textures of which I never tire,” Dorothea wrote to Breuer. “Other people appreciate it too, but no one as much as Michael, who has such a firm affection for his room that I am sure he will never let me give up the flat.”
All the while, Michael continued his investigations into Linear B. He had already taken it upon himself to write to Evans with his theories on script, a correspondence he initiated not long after his life-changing class trip.
“Dear Sir,” begins one letter, of twenty-three pages, written in the spring of 1940, when Ventris was not quite eighteen: “I don’t know whether you remember my writing to you a few years ago about some theories I had on the elucidation of Minoan. Actually, I was only fifteen at the time, and I’m afraid my theories were nonsense; but you were very kind and answered my letters. I was convinced that the key would prove to be in Sumerian, but am glad to say I have given these ideas up long ago. However, I have continued to work at the problem off and on, and I am coming round more and more to the view that the language contained in the inscriptions is a dialect closely related to Etruscan.”
Ventris went on to flesh out his new theory in minute philological detail. He also posited sound-values for many Linear B characters, and meanings for entire words and phrases. In closing, he wrote:
I have been interested in the Minoan inscriptions for exactly four years now, not very long perhaps but long enough to make me tremendously intrigued and impatient to see what the eventual outcome will be, and, whatever the approach that may best prove to be the right one, I am convinced that now, more than ever before, is the time for a decisive and concerted effort to liquidate the problem.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Ventris
Around this time, Ventris began work on a scholarly article about Minoan, which he would mail to the American Journal of Archaeology. (He would discreetly neglect to tell the editors how old he was.) He and Dorothea were also planning his post-secondary schooling. Though it is seductive to imagine Ventris reading classics at Oxford or Cambridge, that scenario would never come to pass: There was no money for a university education. Since her divorce, Dorothea had depended crucially on income from her family’s holdings in Poland. After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Janasz lands were seized. Lacking tuition, she had already been forced to withdraw Michael from Stowe before he could graduate. University, too, was now out of the question.
But Dorothea’s love of aesthetics, which she had passed on to her son, would provide an alternative course: Michael could train for a career in architecture, bypassing a university stay altogether. He wrote to his mother’s friend Marcel Breuer for advice on where to apply. Breuer suggested the Architectural Association School of Architecture, known as the AA, then as now an independent professional training ground in London. Ventris enrolled there in January 1940, at seventeen.
As the war engulfed England, Dorothea, fragile at the best of times, grew increasingly depressed. “She had already lost her brother in the First World War and her husband was dead,” Andrew Robinson has written. “Now her father was a refugee in London and her only son … faced the prospect of military call-up.” On June 16, 1940, less than a month before Michael’s eighteenth birthday, Dorothea took an overdose of barbiturates while staying at a seaside hotel in Wales. “The coroner’s verdict,” Robinson reports, “was ‘suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.’ ” To the end of his life, Robinson added, Ventris would never speak of what happened. After his mother’s death, he stayed for a time with family friends, then returned to Highpoint alone.
IN THE MONTHS that followed, Ventris continued his studies at the AA. He also worked feverishly on his Minoan article, doubtless a welcome distraction. He tore up two drafts before he was satisfied. In December 1940, the eighteen-year-old Ventris sent it off to the American Journal of Archaeology with the following cover letter:
I am enclosing an article which I should be pleased if you would consider for publication in your Journal. It contains the results of five years’ research on the language and writing of the Minoan civilisation, and is intended as a prelude to a full decipherment of the inscriptions.
I have elaborated and tried to confirm the theory that the pre-hellenic language of the Aegean is a dialect closely related to Etruscan, and I am confident that along these lines a full solution of this outstanding problem will be possible.
I had intended to make the article somewhat shorter, but, when finished, I found I was unable to cut it down below its present length, of about 15.000 words, without leaving out essential material. …
The journal accepted the paper at once, publishing it in its last issue of 1940 as “Introducing the Minoan Language,” by M. G. F. Ventris. Rife with speculation, it was, as the classicist Thomas Palaima points out, “close to worthless … both in its unsound methods and in what Ventris’ own decipherment would demonstrate was its erroneous guesswork.” Except for positing an Etruscan-like tongue as the language of the tablets—a reasonable surmise given geographic and historical realities—Ventris’s article is not all that different from the writings of some of Kober’s more outlandish amateur correspondents.
It is striking, Palaima notes, that in the large bibliography of articles about Linear B that accompanies Kober’s 1948 paper, “The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory,” she chose to omit Ventris’s 1940 article entirely. Perhaps she did so out of contempt for the paper, so clearly the work of an amateur. Or perhaps, as Palaima suggests, she did so as an act of mercy, to spare the adult Ventris a reminder of his juvenile effort.
WHILE STUDYING AT the AA, Ventris became romantically involved with a classmate a few years older than he, Lois Elizabeth Knox-Niven, known to her friends as Betty, or Betts. A letter he wrote to a family friend, the sculptor Naum Gabo, in early 1942, when he was nineteen and his personal circumstances were about to change dramatically, displays his characteristic mixture of reserve, candor, and dry, detached wit:
It looks as if, in the ordinary way, we’ll have a baby some time round next November—at least Betts has changed her mind, and she wants to have it, and I don’t think either that it would be quite right to stop new life when this world needs it so, quite apart from the risk. But the social politics of it is all rather involved, and we’re in the process of working that out. So we might get clandestinely married—but all this in confidential in the extreme!
Ventris and Lois married in London in April 1942; their son, Nikki (“the nicest present St. Nicholas ever brought,” Ventris wrote), was born in early December.
By the time his son was born, Ventris was at war: Called up in the summer of 1942, he had joined the Royal Air Force. His letters home to Lois from his training camps, first in England and later in Canada, betray his formal, almost Holmesian, rationalist mien; insatiable curiosity; ardent youthful romanticism; impassioned liberal humanism; fundamental discomfort around other people; and, beneath all this, a deep wellspring of tenderness. In a letter from his camp in Yorkshire composed shortly after Nikki’s birth, the nineteen-year-old Ventris writes:
… My latest job is making lots of little labels with numbers on for a board in the orderly room on which they indicate who’s here, in hospital, on leave, etc. [Here Ventris has sketched a picture of one such label: . It appears to have been a forerunner of the tags he would later make to help him sort the symbols of Linear B.] …
In between, & in the evenings, I’ve been doing a lot of self-education, but find myself getting more and more irritated by little mannerisms of other people. They bring up food into the reading room, & their prolonged heavy breathing, clopping & wind annoys me, & there are others who will jog the table all the time & leave the doors open and tap out rhythms with their feet. …
But all the same I make for myself as far as I can a mental oasis, because I feel in the mood for some thinking just now. I think Nikki is the chief cause. I’ve purposely left my convictions vague during the last few years—but being a father makes one want to make one’s ideas more definite. I can only do that by gradually finding what facts & concepts fall into a progressive pattern for me, and to do this I feel I have to skim through lots of different books on lots of different subjects, and I feel I’m wasting time if I read fiction and things which don’t mirror life documentarily. … One feels one owes it to one’s children to at least have full knowledge oneself, and so to be able to start them right. That’s why I want to know the essentials about all these subjects:
What matter is ultimately made of, and elementary physics & chemistry; the development of the earth; how plants & animals work, and how they have developed from the old single cell; how man’s developed, by evolution, and by being able to make tools and organise himself socially; the present outline of the world, what different countries look like, and produce; the way different countries live, the way our civilisation developed & is now; the existing mechanism of our tools & inventions, and how they’re made & work—and the same with all our man-made things; the way our bodies function; the way our minds work; and finally, the organic conditions for future evolution.
It’s a big program, and not all of it immediately puttable across to a child. But I feel that a responsible person who doesn’t have a clear general picture of all this, the outside world as it was & is, [together with several basic languages, to be able to understand other people] is fundamentally ignorant, and can’t help being biassed more than necessarily in his outlook to the world. …
That’s my attitude anyway, just now. I’m sorry it sounds like preaching, but a letter’s inevitably a rather one-sided discussion. And, as a mental picture, you and Nikki are sitting in a very nice glow, right in the foreground, where I love you most.
Ventris’s “self-education” program also included learning as many new languages as he could. One was Russian, which he was teaching himself in order to write to Gabo in his native tongue. “My knowledge is gradually getting on,” Ventris reported to Lois, “though I can only give a couple of hours a week to it. Still, soon I’ll be able to read most simple stuff straight off. When I know Spanish as well [& that’s the easiest to learn of them all] that’ll be the 5 European ones spoken by the most people in the world.”
Nor was he neglecting Linear B. Ventris was serving in the RAF as a navigator, and the job suited him: All about maps and mathematics, geometry, logic and reason, it interested him far more than actual flying did. “It’s a desk job, really, in the middle of the plane,” an AA classmate, Oliver Cox, recalled his having said. Returning to England after his Canadian training, Ventris took part in bombing runs over Germany. Navigation came so easily to him that, as the British journalist Leonard Cottrell has written, “on one occasion he horrified his captain by navigating his way back from Germany with maps he had drawn himself. On other raids he would set course and then, clearing a space on the navigator’s table, happily set to work on his Linear B documents, while the aircraft groaned its way home, searchlights stretched up their probing fingers, and bursts of flak shook the bomber.”
At war’s end, Ventris hoped to meet with Myres in Oxford and see Evans’s transcriptions firsthand. But because of his foreign-language prowess, he was kept on for another year to help interrogate German prisoners. Finally discharged in the summer of 1946, he returned home to his wife and children (a daughter, Tessa, had been born that spring) and resumed his studies at the Architectural Association. He also met with Myres and began copying inscriptions for publication.
IN THE SUMMER of 1948, Ventris and Lois graduated with honors from the AA and were now qualified architects. To celebrate, they parked the children with her family and, with their classmate Oliver Cox, set out on a grand tour of the European continent. But when they reached the south of France, Ventris abruptly insisted on returning to England, much to his companions’ surprise. A letter from Myres had caught up with him, summoning him to Oxford for six weeks’ intensive work preparing Scripta Minoa II for the printer. Ventris went there at once, joining Myres and Kober, then in the middle of her second visit.
But after just a day or two, Ventris fled. His real reasons for backing out of the project were known only to him, but it seems fair to assume that alongside the eminent archaeologist Myres and the brilliant philologist Kober, Ventris was painfully conscious of his status as an amateur.
What is known is that soon after arriving in Oxford, Ventris returned to London, mailing a brutally self-lacerating letter to Myres from the train station on his way out of town. It anticipates a letter he would write eight years later, in 1956, shortly before his death—again involving a retreat from an important project, and again shot through with doubt, pain, and shame.
Ventris’s 1948 letter, dated only “Monday night,” begins, “Dear Sir John”:
You will probably think me quite mad if I try & account for the reasons why I’ll be absent on Tuesday morning, & why I should like to ask either Miss Kober, or the other girl that you mentioned, to complete the transcription.
One would have thought that years in the forces would have cured one of irrational & irresistible impulses of dread or homesickness. But however much I tell myself that I am a swine to let you down after all my glib promises & conceited preparations,—I am hit at last by the overwhelming realization that I shall not be able to stand 6 weeks work alone in Oxford, & that I am an idiot not to stick to my own last. Perhaps it’s greater weakmindedness to throw in the sponge, than to grind on with something one’s liable to make a botch job of—I don’t know. In any case, I shall await Scripta Minoa with great interest—and be too ashamed to look inside. …
I hope this letter will arrive soon enough to relieve you of any unnecessary anxiety, & that in time my precipitate retreat be not too harshly judged.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Ventris
Myres’s reply has not been preserved, but it is clear that Ventris was forgiven: At Myres’s request, he would continue copying batches of Linear B inscriptions from his home in London for several years to come.
As Myres made plain throughout his correspondence, he was immensely pleased with Ventris’s copying. But his regard for his young colleague’s abilities evidently went deeper still— despite Ventris’s own recurrent self-doubt. In 1950, the journalist Leonard Cottrell, who wrote often about archaeology, visited Myres at his home. The talk turned to the script, still undeciphered after half a century.
“The man who may decipher Linear B,” Myres told Cottrell soberly, “is a young architect named Ventris.”