Digging In The Old Garden

I've taken to sorting through the files that contain copies of every published speech, review, or essay that I wrote during my years of activity as a professor of classics, beginning with an interpretation of Euripides' Alcestis in 1959 and ending with an essay that began as an endowed lecture devoted to the Homeric representation of the character of Odysseus in 2012.  Some of them, well most of them I like a lot, and I am getting quite a narcissistic buzz on.  There seem to be thirty eight by my count, plus twenty five review essays published in the cyberjournal greekworks.com.  Then there are eleven books depending on the counting, which is to say, I could have counted translations into other languages as a separate book, but do not, sometimes do count a reprint with major editorial changes, and so on and so forth.  On the shelf and in the file cabinet it is a pitiful amount when you compare it to some of the guys--gals, too--I knew in graduate school.  Every book that I have written except for the first has been commissioned from me, so I am basically a passive scholar.  The funny thing is that the first book on Homer came about because I wrote out a specimen chapter of the sort of thing I had been saying about Homeric epic in a lecture class and sent it off out of the blue to Doubleday, just thinking to myself and very arrogantly, too, that this would make a nice Anchor Book, a new series just coming along at the time--this was sixty two or so--.  I sent it, as they say, "over the transom," that is, I had no agent, no request from the press, made no inquiry, just sent it, and lo and behold got a letter back and we went back and forth a bit about what I had in mind, and they sent me a contract.  This doesn't happen much anymore; I was extremely lucky.  Luck has shadowed me all the way, in fact.  The next two Doubleday books were commissioned when their original author, my friend Adam Parry, died in a motorcycle accident.  A friend took me to lunch with John Gardner who was editing a series at Southern Illinois and wanted a book on Apollonios.  I had just written a--if I do say so myself--super article on the Argonautica which my friend had read and wanted to get Gardner to read.  And so on and so forth.  For instance, my once upon a time student Robert Miller, became publisher of Hyperion and commissioned Odysseus A Life.  The grand coup was the last: Jonathan Galassi, the star dream publisher of the super publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux  personally asked me for my memoirs, edited them himself and FSG published them.  Now I sit in Sarasota Florida where no one I meet has ever heard of the details of Greek or Roman Literature, has only the dimmest understanding of that world of publishing beyond Danielle Steele and Dan Brown.  It keeps me honest, less the fatuous pompous ass of many former colleagues who just can't seem to leave the academic scene where the spotlights shown so bright for so long.  It's very cleaning, this odd understanding that that to which you have given your heart and soul, your aesthetic and philosophical propensities, ever since you were old enough to make serious choices, is utterly unknown and meaningless to almost every person in the country.