Triads: Or the Notebooks of D.D. Hoffnung

By Donné Raffat

This book is a tribute to Abdul Kassem Ismael, the tenth-century grand vizier of Persia. It is said that wherever Ismael traveled, he took his 117,000-volume library strapped to his four hundred camels. To expedite his reading pleasure, the camels that made up his mile-long bookmobile caravan were trained to walk in alphabetical order, each flock carrying the titles beginning with one of the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984540218

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Donné Raffat.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018908094

ISBN:             Hardcover               978-1-9845-4023-2

                       Softcover                 978-1-9845-4022-5

                       eBook                      978-1-9845-4021-8

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 09/26/2018

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CONTENTS

Other Books By The Author

Helen   (Sunshine)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Mila   (Rain)

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

Dieter   (Fog)

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Postscript

OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

The Caspian Circle

The Prison Papers of Bozorg Alavi

The Folly of Speaking

The Temporary Wife

Maya Blue

Solitaire

Hedonism

Chimeras

In tribute to Abdul Kassem Ismael, the tenth-century grand vizier of Persia. It is said that wherever Ismael traveled, he took his 117,000-volume library, strapped to his four hundred camels. To expedite his reading pleasure, the camels that made up his mile-long bookmobile caravan were trained to walk in alphabetical order, each flock carrying the titles beginning with one of the thirty-two letters of the Persian alphabet.

HELEN

(Sunshine)

1

The lecture by Prof. James Redfield (Jamie to most present) was on Homer’s Iliad. The occasion was the Committee on Social Thought’s graduate seminar on Epics and Sagas, chaired by the polymath anthropologist Prof. Victor Turner, which met weekly on the second-floor seminar room in Wieboldt Hall, famous for its huge mahogany oval table—the largest in the university—around which sat the participants and enrolled graduate students. Accordingly, the speaker was not standing but seated among the group as a member addressing fellow scholars from a written text. Since DD (as he was commonly known by his initials) was attending the class only as an auditor, he sat on the periphery among the desk chairs, and instead of taking notes, he was drawing triangles and applying names to each of the corners.

At the apex of the first one, he wrote Helen and below on either side Menelaus, the husband, and then Paris, the lover and second husband, without the first one being discarded as she had eventually returned to him. Below that, he added the second triad of Helen’s three husbands: first (and last) Menelaus and then Paris (killed by Diomedes) and then Deiphobos, brother of Paris (later killed by Menelaus, according to Virgil). That, in turn, formed a third triad of wife and two husbands in killer and killed.

A pattern was now emerging. Wherever one looked in the whole Trojan story, it seemed to DD, there were triads; or perhaps that was how he was just now seeing them. Briseis, Achilles, and Agamemnon—that triad mirrored the earlier one of Helen, Menelaus, and Paris. Whereas the earlier one had started the Trojan War, the later one had touched off the conflict in the Greek camp, which marked the opening of Homer’s narrative. Paris, Oenone, and Helen—Paris had left his first wife Oenone in running off with and then marrying Helen. Oenone, Paris, and Diomedes—Paris, mortally wounded by Diomedes, was refused a cure by Oenone when he appealed to her (a decision she later so rued that she killed herself). Cressida, Troilus, and Diomedes—Cressida, lover of Troilus (who later killed Achilles), was seduced and abandoned by Diomedes, killer also of Troilus. And so on. There was even a trio of warriors named Adrestus (all killed) on the Trojan side. DD’s configuration of triads filled three pages of his notebook.

Then of course, there was the triad of mythic tradition related to the epic, generally known as the Judgment of Paris, the story of which went as follows. The Olympian gods were guests at the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis (mortal and immortal parents of Achilles) when Eris, goddess of discord (who was not invited), threw onto the table a golden apple inscribed with For the fairest. Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed the apple, and Zeus decided that the dispute should be settled by Paris. Led by Hermes, the three goddesses then appeared before Paris on Mount Ida. Paris (who was then already married to Oenone) chose Aphrodite, who offered him the fairest of women. Thus, the train of events that led to the Trojan War was set in motion.

Most of these names were mentioned in Professor Redfield’s lecture but not their triadic relationships. Rather, the main point made was that the Iliad, unlike the other works being studied in the seminar, told only a small part of the entire story. In that regard, its tale not only began but also ended in media res, covering only the turning point in the ten-year war. And how long was that? According to E. V. Rieu, in DD’s much-used 1950 Penguin translation, fifty-five days, from the time that Achilles fell out with Agamemnon over his consort Briseis and withdrew his support in the fighting to his return to action as a result of the death of his friend Patroclus at the hands of Hector and his revenge in killing Hector. Before then, the Trojans, despite their losses, had been in the ascendancy, but thereafter, with their leader gone, the tide had shifted. Thus, in the case of the Greek epic (and Professor Redfield was careful to point out that the collective term Greek was not in use until centuries later), a distinction had to be made between epic material and epic tale. Such was not the case, for example, in the Indian war epic the Mahabharata or the Persian Shahnameh, which were, essentially, encyclopedic or comprehensive in construction rather than selectively dramatic, serving a distinctly poetic purpose.

Those points were entirely valid and relevant to the whole purpose of the seminar, which was to examine the parallels and differences among ancient stories of warfare. But though that was what DD was listening to, that was not what he was gleaning and seeking to clarify in his notebook entries. What he saw instead was the grand design of the triads. Within the mythic triad of the Judgment of Paris (mentioned only once in the Iliad) was the triad of the casus belli of Helen and her first two husbands (only passingly referred to) and within that the triad of the main action involving Briseis, Achilles, and Agamemnon. Such was the case of the whole construct that it was impossible to separate each of the three triads without their context in the others.

What was he to make of this? And why had this insight become of such significance to him? Because willy-nilly—out of the blue—another beauty named Helen had just reentered DD’s own life, revitalizing the triad of his troubled past in Helen, Dieter (his first name), and Max. Yet that was not the one he set down to paper as its memory was still too painful. Instead, he drew up the projected one of Helen, Dieter, and Mila. And the ominous message there, as he had read years before in auditing a class on Jung and corroborated now by all he was seeing in the Iliad, was that triads led to conflict.

2

On his walk back to the bookstore, DD opted to take the long way around the quadrangle as he had much to think about. Besides, early October in Chicago was his favorite time of the year. The fall weather was at its best, with the trees turning color, and with the return of students, the campus was alive in a way that further heightened the season. It was the best time too for the sale of books, but he was in no hurry to return to work. Thus, what had been preying on his mind since the morning’s phone call was also mingled now with a sense of pleasure in being outdoors again.

The question was, why, after a decade of silence, had she gotten in touch with him? Helen was never one to do something so out of the ordinary without good reason, usually undeclared. All she had said in her low playful voice—for him the most seductive part of her whole allure—was that she was back in Winnetka and wished to come down to see him and that she had been pleasantly but not too surprised to learn that he was now the owner of the bookstore that he had once worked in. There was not a mention of his dissertation and whether he had finished it yet, the most stinging of her taunts when she had left him.

And why was it, he wondered, that adult voices never seemed to change? Was that because the voice, even more than the eyes, was the most fixed and telling part of one’s character, requiring breath, like a wind instrument? What could be more fundamental than that? In any case, when he had read—or rather reread—Helen’s speeches in the Iliad (in his old Rieu translation), the voice in his mind had been that of the other Helen, the one not of Troy but of Winnetka.

That one’s past never leaves one, of course, was a truism. In this case, however, it was more in that the past had been thrust into the present. One phone call from his Helen had been enough to do that and to make him see the war at Troy through the prism of his own life in Hyde Park—the so-called Golden Triangle, surrounded by the far different and strife-torn black ghetto, which was another confining siege of sorts. And that, in turn, had brought back to mind their whole life together. Who needed stage or opera now compared with such internal drama?

In early October 1962—thirteen years before, almost to the day—she had called the bookstore to inquire about a text being used in Prof. John Cawelti’s course on American popular culture.

Is there any other kind? he had responded, which had touched off a conversation.

That was the way it was in his heyday as a sophist, when any question had the potential to trigger a debate. But would he have made such a comment had he not been drawn to her voice? Then when she had come to collect the copy set aside for her, he had been stunned by her blonde presence. As for her, who was to say what she had been drawn to in him? Perhaps that he was an approachable part of the intellectual and largely male establishment that she had freshly come to as a new and bright-eyed graduate student in English.

At the time, in the postwar prefeminist era, she was in the first wave of female students being admitted in greater numbers into graduate programs. Money for education then was plentiful, and throughout the country, universities were expanding. Consequentially, as an undergraduate at Northwestern, she had done well enough in her field to be admitted into her master’s program at the University of Chicago.

As for him, ten years her senior, he was a doctoral student in philosophy (which, officially, he still was) working on a dissertation