GUEST WRITER/LISA ZEIGER
HOUSEHOLD GODS: D’AULAIRES’ BOOK OF GREEK MYTHS
© Lisa Zeiger: portrait of the author
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
I was born in 1957 in Los Angeles, California, where exposure to art hinged upon my ahistorical hometown’s need to borrow works from earlier places and times. There were, of course, significant California artists in the ’60s and ‘70s, from Clyfford Still to Ed Ruscha; Philip Guston to David Park. But “Art” as a category, new or ancient, came primarily from elsewhere.
From earliest childhood I was pulled between written texts and works of visual art. The first book I learned to read was Alice in Wonderland, where Cruikshank’s illustrations depicted Lewis Carroll’s words and helped me understand them. I still love such overlaps.
From 1987 till 1994, I studied the history of the Decorative Arts between London and Glasgow, and set out to be a freelance writer about all art forms, including Germany’s contemporary art, as Cologne Correspondent for The Art Newspaper. For Apollo Magazine I wrote essays about older art and museums.
As Decorative Arts Editor (1997-2000), of Joseph Holtzman’s outlier magazine NEST, our— my— mission was to imprint literary language upon design writing, heretofore a species of fashion discourse.
Today I sway between literary nonfiction—memoir— and informal criticism of fine art, architecture and design. My blog, www.bookandroom.com, seeks to discern the often fugitive links between literature and art.
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths cover, found at: https://bookandroom.squarespace.com/?offset=1521024088219
*HOUSEHOLD GODS: D’AULAIRES’ BOOK OF GREEK MYTHS was originally published on Lisa Zeiger’s blog Book and Room, on March 05, 2018
“Seek those images.
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.
Find in middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognise the five
That make the Muses sing.”
–W.B. Yeats, Those Images
To open, at sixty, the pages of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a children’s book I first read at six, is to uncover my real childhood, the one lived in the house of books rather than the contemporary house I lived in, in terror, in a canyon of Los Angeles in the 1960s.
My father was Jewish, my mother, Unitarian. I suppose I had a vaguely Christian orientation, imposed by the private school I attended, but I knew the faith there was preached by hypocrite punishers. The ethos of the school was not only aggressively Christian, but politically right-wing, its discipline based on public shaming derived from the stocks and pillory of the Puritan fathers they revered.
To this day, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, published in 1955 and still in print, is my true catechism. I have never read Homer, or Pindar, or Aeschylus, but from the d’Aulaires–a married couple who met in 1929 in Munich while studying with the painter Hans Hoffman, and who later knew Robert Graves while traveling the Greek islands, sketching and writing– I know the names and deeds of every Olympian, every one of their offspring, every mortal, every monarch, every hero, every beast, and every monster.
The foibles, powers and beauties of the Greeks still make sense to me as the virtues and punishments of the Bible do not. Certainly, at six, they sheltered me from and explained to me the rage and laws of father and school. The displeasure of the gods was always emotionally logical, whereas I have never understood God’s rejection of Cain for offering his harvest, while rewarding Abel’s burnt cattle. An Episcopal priest blithely explained it to me this way: “Perhaps God wanted a ham sandwich that day.” But if God is all-knowing, he knew playing favorites would incite fratricide. I have always sided with Cain, the murderous sower; just as I love Hagar, the slave who bears Abraham a son, Ishmael–the outcasts–more than I do Sarah, Abraham’s barren wife, who chastises Hagar in jealousy, before, at ninety, giving birth to Abraham’s second son, Isaac. At six, I did not yet know I was illegitimate, but I sensed in myself a scapegoat, the proof of something not quite warded off.
Geneology of Gods, from D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Found on bookandroom.com
The magnificent illustrations of the d’Aulaires were my initiation into the unity of word and image that is possible, and which ought to be mandatory in our lives. (Alice in Wonderland was another such experience, and, indeed, another literary shelter, but it was d’Aulaires’ that first gave me an inkling of the divine connection between logos and eikon.)
At six, I was unnaturally curious about the gods’ methods of seducing mortals. When I remember the Greek myths, the first one I think of is one from the middle of the collection. Beautiful Danae is immured by her father, King Acrisius, in a sealed room with only an opening in the roof, because an oracle had foretold that his daughter’s son would kill him. “There no suitor could see her beauty and she would remain unwed and childless.” Wily Zeus, however, visits Danae in the form of a shower of gold pieces. Danae gives birth to Perseus. Upon discovering the infant and realizing he is the son of Zeus, Acrisius does not kill him, but locks Danae and Perseus in a chest which he casts out to sea. “If they drowned, Poseidon would be to blame.”
Zeus visits Danae as a shower of gold, from D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Found on bookandroom.com
It is Perseus who will ultimately decapitate Medusa, one of the three hideous Gorgon sisters who turn the mortals who see them to stone. In Athena’s protectively mirrored shield, Perseus survives the sight of them: “long yellow fangs hung from their grinning mouths, on their heads grew writhing snakes instead of hair, and their necks were covered with scales of bronze.” From Medusa’s neck springs Pegasus, a beautiful white winged horse.
Perseus and Andromeda, from D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Found on bookandroom.com
With the god Hermes’ winged sandals and a cloak of invisibility, Perseus escapes the surviving Gorgons and flies over the coast of Ethiopia, where he sees, “far below, a beautiful maiden chained to a rock by the sea. She was so pale that at first he thought she was a marble statue, but then he saw tears trickling from her eyes.” Andromeda is the daughter of King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia, whose vain boast that she was lovelier than Poseidon’s daughters, the Nereids, so inflames the god that he sends a sea monster to ravage the kingdom of Ethiopia. King Cepheus appeases Poseidon with the sacrifice of his only daughter, Andromeda, to the monster, whom she awaits in fright until he is slain by Perseus.
This tale of beauty, secrecy, imprisonment by a father, and discovery by a god was a myth I prematurely recognized and would unconsciously live by, and, on charmed occasion, live out. The association of beauty with gold pieces reminds me of my favorite passage from Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, the narrator’s description of another off-limits heroine, Charlotte Stant, as metaphorically envisaged by her lover and brother-in-law, the Prince:
“He knew above all the extraordinary fineness of her flexible waist, the stem of an expanded flower, which gave her a likeness also to some long loose silk purse, well filled with gold-pieces, but having been passed empty through a finger-ring that held it together.”
A second myth I love is the story of Io, a maiden seduced, then changed by Zeus into a beautiful white cow to deceive his jealous wife Hera, who cannily asks Zeus for the cow as a gift, one he cannot refuse. “Hera tied poor Io to a tree and sent her servant Argus to keep watch over her. Argus had a hundred bright eyes placed all over his body…He was Hera’s faithful servant and the best of watchmen, for he never closed more than half of his eyes in sleep at a time.”
To rescue Io, Zeus sends Hermes, disguised as a shepherd, to entertain Argus first with his lyre, then with a tale so dull the watchman’s hundred eyes close and he dies of boredom. Io runs home to her father, the river-god Inachos. “He did not recognize his daughter, and Io could not tell him what had happened, all she could say was, “Mooo!” But when she lifted up her little hoof and scratched her name, “I-O,” in the sand, her father at once understood what had happened, for he knew the ways of Zeus.” Zeus defends himself against Inachos’ revenge by hurling a thunderbolt, parching forever the river-bed Inachos in Arcadia.
Hera, Argus , and Io. From D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Found on bookandroom.com
Hera, in turn, furious that Argus is dead and Io the cow, free, sends a vicious gad-fly to sting her. “To be sure that her faithful servant Argus would never be forgotten, she took his hundred bright eyes and put them on the tail of the peacock, her favorite bird. The eyes could no longer see, but they looked gorgeous, and that went to the peacock’s little head, and made it the vainest of all animals.”
The gadfly chases Io “all the way to the land of Egypt,” where she is worshiped by the Egyptians and becomes an Egyptian goddess. Hera permits Zeus to change Io back into human shape if he promises never to look at her again. “Io lived long as the goddess-queen of Egypt, and the son she bore to Zeus became king after her. Her descendants returned to Greece as great kings and beautiful queens. Poor Io’s sufferings had not been in vain.”
Both these myths are starred with the themes of beauty, jealousy, rescue of a captive (usually through her physical transformation) and just deserts. I see also the recurrent Oedipal scenario of youth held in captivity by age, spurred by the elder’s fear of being murdered by his offspring, or betrayed by a younger spouse. Demeter’s daughter Persephone is confined to the underworld for half of each year by her husband, Hades, ruler of the dead. Aphrodite skips out on her old husband, Hephaestus, with the dashing war-god, Ares. Everywhere youth is the prey of parents and gods.
In my late twenties, a psychoanalyst told me that beauty was for me an “overdetermined” category. Beauty is too powerful ever to be overestimated, by definition overwhelming everyone, sick or well, with intensely individual associations, fantasies, and longings. Yet I learned from Athena, my favorite goddess, that wisdom also has power. When I read the myth of Paris, Prince of Troy, engaged by the gods to decide which goddess, Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite, should win the golden apple of Discord, Paris gives it to Aphrodite. Aphrodite promises Paris Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman on earth, overwhelming the youth–himself extraordinarily beautiful–into spurning Hera’s gift of worldly power and Athena’s pledge of supreme wisdom. I told my mother, “I would choose wisdom, because with wisdom you can learn how to have both beauty and power.”
Athena born from the head of Zeus. From D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Found on bookandroom.com
Athena springs full-grown from the head of her father, Zeus, as the goddess of wisdom, victory, and, oddly, handicrafts, At thirty I would begin to study this last discipline, as a subject subservient to art history. I identified also with Athena’s precocious maturity, at least in intellectual matters. I loved the gods partly because they were adult, rather than fairytale children led astray.
When I was thirty-four, my younger German lover’s mother told me Grimms’ fairy tale, Die Sterntaler (the star-coins), the story of the little match girl who gives away all her clothes, until, naked in a storm, she is showered from Heaven with gold coins. Silently I wept while washing her dishes, staring into the sink to hide my face. When I mentioned the little girl’s similarity to Danae, the mother replied, “Das war aber was anders.” “But that was something different.”
Reading D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths was an imagined escape that promised eventual, actual escape from childhood and its tyrannies, the reason, perhaps, that I return to it now as I do not return to Alice in Wonderland, the story of a child. We remain, to one extent or another, sealed in childhood our whole lives long, receiving gold through a hole in the roof, only to be thrown into a sea-chest and swept away: to survive; sometimes to subdue, then at last to love the mysteriously patterned commotions of our fate.
Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur in his labyrinth. From D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Found on bookandroom.com
Over the door of the d’Aulaires’ house in Vermont, still lived in by their son, Nils, are inscribed the words, “This is the House that Books built.” The d’Aulaires built for me a house of many mansions, a house with deep porticos, celestial views, looming towers, and hidden doorways.
I am tracing still its unending labyrinth.
More about Lisa Zeiger:
Book and Room, a blog on interiors and literature: https://www.bookandroom.com/
Instagram: @lisazeiger
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