The Man Who Deciphered Linear B Read online

  ‘It is the privilege of individual genius to follow no system beyond a creative intuition; but in group working some minimum of method is essential,’ he wrote. ‘Equally unsatisfactory is the lazy partner who cannot get anything down on paper beyond the 3B envelope doodle, and the keen one whose splendid sketches lie around to get filthy, are mutilated at every handling, and finally cannot be found. If some disciplining of the routine part of the design process is essential to producing a group scheme, it is equally valuable, in making one’s private work less of a headache. There are three golden rules:

  1 Put down conceitedly every requirement, argument, inspiration and mind’s eye picture that occurs during the design process, and put it down as concisely, enthusiastically and pictorially as possible.

  2 Phrase your conclusions, set out and colour your pictures, in such a way that they will mean the most to you (or to a colleague), at a second reading.

  3 File everything where you will still find it fresh and clean tomorrow or in a year’s time. Architecture needs paper in order to take form: enjoy and respect your material.’

  Maybe this does not sound revolutionary, but it was undoubtedly very unusual in architecture at a time when architects generally thought of themselves more as (‘long-haired’) artists than as analysts or scientists. Ventris’s method attempted to pinion the butterfly of the imagination, so that each part was clearly displayed and open to critique by colleagues and, if necessary, modification. The catch was, as Ventris himself admitted later in the article, that ‘logic alone’ is not enough to produce architecture. It would not be enough to decipher Linear B, either. But whereas in decipherment, Ventris’s imagination could take wing from its logical foundations, for some reason in architecture it would generally remain earthbound.

  His personal encounter with Le Corbusier illustrates the point nicely. In 1947, during the centenary of the Architectural Association, the student committee at the school (which included Cox and Ventris) invited ‘Corb’ to visit, and rather to their surprise he accepted. He arrived, and the students gathered round, and at some point Ventris explained to Le Corbusier the nuances of a simple machine he had been steadily refining since his work on the officer’s mess in Germany, called the Perspector or Perspectron, by means of which architects could get coordinate dimensions for drawing perspectives. When he had finished, Le Corbusier responded by simply dismissing the need for such calculations. To draw an interior perspective, ‘Corb’ said (according to a listening Cox), he put the vanishing point for the right walls over on the left and the vanishing point for the left walls on the right, ‘and then I get the impression that I’m in the place. I’ve got no time for these camera views of an interior.’ Regardless, an unfazed Ventris, with the help of Cox, took out a patent on the machine, which turned out to be a clever precursor of the current digital computerized perspective drawing systems.

  Ventris would have been right at home with these, had he lived longer. But one feels he would probably never have overcome his limitations as an artist. Oliver Cox, a skilled painter whose son is a professional artist and illustrator, knew that Ventris was frustrated even when a student at the AA. ‘I irritated him immensely, for I had a facility for freehand drawing and Michael desperately wanted to know how to free up. Being a great intellectual, the brain was dominating whatever he did. Yet as your hand draws, there must be a sensuous pleasure in doing that creative thing. He had the desire to create, to draw freely, but his intellectual powers held his hand in restraint. He was always wanting correct perspectives.… One of his philosophies was: never throw away a doodle. But, of course, it makes a difference if your doodles are immaculate and inhibited!’ (Ventris even had trouble designing a purely fantastic ‘mobile’ for his baby son, telling his wife, significantly: ‘I feel one does better starting from actual objects than getting an idea in vacuo.’)

  One cannot help wondering about his artistic inhibition, given Ventris’s truly exceptional linguistic gifts. Why should someone who was able to express himself in words freely in ten or more languages be unable to liberate his lines on a page? Obviously it helped him greatly that he had learnt foreign languages as a child – whereas he came to drawing later. Also important, one feels from his work on Linear B, is that in languages Ventris could always be sure there were rules, limits, a right and a wrong way to say something, imposed by a particular language’s grammatical structure and the usage of native speakers – unlike in painting and sculpture. Then there was his liking for functionalism and his dislike of decoration and embellishment: a certain coolness about sensuous pleasure, even a touch of puritanism (but without even a trace of conventional religious belief). Finally – although this is speculation – he seems to have had a fear of art. Ventris personally knew major artists, such as Gabo and Nicholson, as a teenager, and must have realized he was not one of them. He knew what had happened to his art-loving mother. Choosing architecture as his field was perhaps partly his way of controlling art, making it subservient to function, and of mastering his fear of losing control over his mind.

  All his strengths and weaknesses came out on a group visit to Sweden (and Denmark) in the summer of 1947. Swedish architects had embraced modernism well before the second world war, and because of the country’s neutrality in the war, it had not been bombed and so Sweden was ahead of other European countries (even Denmark) in building techniques and the organization of the architectural profession. Cox, Shankland and Ventris were hoping to get work in a Swedish design office when they went to live in Stockholm in June, and to imbibe some of the new knowledge not available to them in London.

  Arriving in Sweden by boat, Cox and Shankland were startled to find Ventris speaking Swedish to the customs officers – he had given little previous sign of his language abilities. He had picked the language up from books in the couple of weeks before they departed. It quickly got him a job, though he told his wife (who joined them later) modestly: ‘I’ve laid myself open by starting off in Swedish, with the result that nobody addresses me in English and half the time I haven’t much of a clue. Everybody “du”s each other, which is a relief, and good mornings and goodbyes consist invariably of a shout of “hej!” or “hej hej!” or “hej på dig!”.’ He was amused to find the group’s room in Stockholm reserved in the name of Wennquist.

  A cartoon by Oliver Cox, showing Ventris, Shankland and Cox in Stockholm, 1947.

  His two friends were not so lucky, lacking any Swedish. They had to be content to be outsiders, touring Swedish buildings and workshops, while looking after the group’s domestic arrangements and, in Cox’s case, doing funny, slightly wry illustrations of their communal life to accompany Michael’s letters, for the benefit of Lois and young Nikki. (Cox also told Lois: ‘Graeme and I…have quite a job getting your news out of Michael.’) Mostly, Ventris is pictured as the leader of the group.

  Konsum shops, an architectural sketch by Ventris, Stockholm, 1947.

  (Architectural Association archives)

  One of the running jokes between them concerned ‘sharawaggi’. As in the following comment from Michael to Lois describing his temporary job: ‘At the moment I’m drawing out 1:50s of a remodelled Konsum shop.… The engineer comes along and suggests a little bit of “SKOJ” (fun, sharawaggi etc.) which I don’t feel very well qualified to achieve.’ Any request for ‘sharawaggi’, i.e. embellishment, would always bother him as an architect. Thus in his travels in and around Stockholm and in Copenhagen, among Ventris’s many pages of notes and drawings on the constructional details of walls, doors, windows, roofs, light fittings and so on, and on the properties of materials – there is even a long note on the chemistry of different kinds of concrete and cement renderings – one comes across comments critical of embellishment like: ‘Why, oh why, these boxed out windows in brick – pure drawingboardery!’ and ‘Hall is disappointing: bad woods on front doors. Appalling festoons up the side!’

  Still, Ventris fell for modern Scandinavian architecture and would later give hi
s own house in Hampstead a distinctly Scandinavian feel. His letters to his wife speak of the pleasures of life in Stockholm: sunny days and luminous northern nights, clean air, sea bathing, bicycling in and around the city looking at the buildings, lots of charming fair-haired children – and decent food (‘Reindeer is off the ration, and it makes excellent sandwiches’). Once, they took a lift by car out of the city to see a modern villa, stopped on a rocky peninsula for lunch and a bathe, and on the way found themselves in a vast area of whortleberries and wild strawberries; they promptly ‘got down on their hands and knees like small boys’. It sounds a bit like a scene out of an early Bergman film.

  In a polemical article written for Plan, ‘Function and arabesque’, on his return to the AA, Ventris called Sweden and Denmark an architectural ‘paradise’, certainly in comparison to the ‘paradise lost’ of England. He tried to encapsulate what English architects could learn from the Swedes and Danes, without mere copying, as in the neoclassical architecture of his old school Stowe. ‘The enemy has always been the classical. At best, Roman motives have been but a light disguise masking a continuing native tradition. The columned building, antiquarian or monumental, insults its surroundings by its timeless irrelevance.’ His conclusion was even more hard-hitting: ‘As students now, the future looks black. There are too many of us, there are no jobs, travel is ended, reactionaries still top the profession, craftsmanship is dying, and the architect is unrespected. But if the visual order of England in the second half of the 20th century depends on anyone, it depends on you. If you can possibly afford it, don’t give up architecture. Don’t emigrate. Help regain that Paradise.’

  In the summer of 1948, the group took the AA’s final exams and they all passed out with honours. To celebrate the end of their training, they decided to make a last trip together. The Ventrises, being well off, acquired an old Ford army van. The idea was to take it across the Channel and drive through France to Switzerland and into Italy ending up in Rome, and then return via the south of France; to stop at interesting buildings wherever they could; and to camp as much as possible. Michael, who did not yet drive, was to act as navigator and interpreter: a role for which he was eminently suited. The two Ventris children were to be left in England with relatives.

  It was a memorable journey for many reasons, which Oliver Cox recalled with nostalgia several decades later. Ventris’s command of languages was at its most impressive in the Vatican City. They were keen to get into a part of it not open to the public, so Ventris went up to one of the Swiss Guards and talked to him for a quarter of an hour. When he came back, he said, ‘Yes, they’ll let us in here.’ Then one of the guards shouted some question, just as the group was going in. Oliver asked Michael what the guard had said. ‘He asked what part of Switzerland I came from.’ He had been talking to the guard in fluent Swiss German, which he had first learnt as a child at school in Switzerland.

  But the linguistic one-upmanship, however unboastful, could be a bit wearing too for the others; and it also had its funny side. Ventris’s Italian was good, but not as good as his French and German (and his Russian). In Italy, he and Cox went out one day in search of paraffin for their camping stove. Ventris did not know the Italian word for it. In the shop they were offered ‘petrolio’, but they both decided it sounded so inflammable they could not risk trying it and producing an explosion. So they went to a chemist’s shop and bought some very expensive liquid called ‘paraffina’. Although Cox told Ventris that it looked so thick it might be medical paraffin meant for clearing the bowels, Ventris insisted and poured it into the stove. But it was the wrong stuff – and it would take them many hours to clean out the stove. ‘It was one of the few incidents on any holiday when Michael was laughed at and humbled. He would always try to edge out of being in that position if he could. But he took it very well, because it was shared with me.… Most of us, especially the English, are quite good on holiday at being a bit of an ass. Poor old Michael didn’t like that and always wanted to be on the side of the natives speaking the lingo.’

  While in Italy, Ventris took the opportunity to do some research on the Etruscans – they drove through Tuscany – but of course he did not tell the rest of the group what he was up to. In fact, he was already mulling over in the privacy of his mind his next move in attacking Linear B, now that he was a qualified architect. Soon, Cox, Shankland and Lois discovered this in a somewhat unfortunate way, characteristic of Ventris. When they proposed driving to Marseilles to see Le Corbusier’s famous block of flats, the Unité d’Habitation, which was under construction, and then taking a slow route back to England, Michael put his foot down and became obstinate. He said he had to get back quickly to meet someone in connection with Linear B research, and would not tell anyone, including his wife, why his appointment was so important. Somewhat grudgingly, they cut short a rather pleasant holiday and headed home; and as soon as they reached London and had unloaded the van, Ventris dashed off. ‘He could just withdraw, go into his shell and be as happy as a sand-boy’, remembered Cox. ‘It was a marvellous castle, his brain. That is why he was happy and not at all affected if someone else was worried and upset for some reason.… He was not quite human, I sometimes think!’

  Unknown, and perhaps incomprehensible to his architect circle (even if Michael had wanted to explain it), Sir John Myres and an important visitor from the United States, the formidable Linear B analyst, Alice Kober, were waiting for Ventris in Oxford in August 1948. Once again, the Linear B obsession was luring him away from architecture and conventional obligations.

  4

  Architect and Decipherer

  ‘I have good hopes that a sufficient number of people working on these lines will before long enable a satisfactory solution to be found. To them I offer my best wishes, being forced by pressure of other work to make this my last small contribution to the problem.’

  Michael Ventris, Mid-Century Report: The Languages of the Minoan and Mycenaean Civilisations, 1950

  Sir John Myres and Ventris had been in touch ever since late 1942, when Ventris had just joined the RAF. The eminent old scholar perceived that this young architect, despite being an amateur in classics and archaeology, had an original mind and was deeply interested in the problem of Linear B – though he would never quite make Ventris out. Throughout, their relationship would be one of mutual but wary respect. In 1946, in Oxford, Myres had shown Ventris Evans’s collection of tablets, tablet photographs and drawings, and notes from Knossos, and invited his help in publishing the collection. At that time Ventris was too busy with architecture, but by the first half of 1948, while he continued to beaver away on architectural projects at the AA, the two men were in constant communication about Linear B. Myres was full of praise for Ventris’s sample-page drawings of some inscriptions; and the American scholar helping Myres, Alice Kober, observed aptly: ‘Mr Ventris would have no trouble getting a job as scribe for King Minos’. By June, it was settled that Ventris – without payment, merely for the love of Linear B – would spend much of August and the early autumn with Myres in Oxford, transcribing all the Knossos tablets for the Oxford University Press. ‘I won’t let you down,’ he assured Sir John.

  But he did. Having cut short his European trip, upsetting his wife and architect friends, and dashed to Oxford in late August to meet Myres and Kober, the next thing we know is that Ventris has pulled right out of the collaboration. ‘Dear Sir John,’ he wrote in a brief, hurried and exceptionally revealing letter headed ‘Oxford Station, Monday night’, ‘You will probably think me quite mad if I try and account for the reasons why I’ll be absent on Tuesday morning, and why I should like to ask either Miss Kober, or the other girl that you mentioned, to complete the transcription.’ He continued: ‘One would have thought that years in the Forces would have cured one of irrational and 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 and 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, and that I am an idiot not to stick to my own last. Perhaps it’s rather weakmindedness to throw up 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.’

  What had gone wrong? It would be simple to say that Ventris and Myres (and Kober) did not hit it off – and this appears to have been the impression Ventris chose to give to his wife on return to Highpoint, which she passed on to Oliver Cox when he enquired what had happened at Michael’s super-urgent Linear B meeting: ‘he had a terrible row’ (a highly unlikely scenario for a man as restrained as Ventris). No doubt there was a personality clash, but there was more to the incident than that. By ‘stick to my own last’, Ventris apparently meant ‘stick to what I know professionally’, i.e. architecture. ‘Weakmindedness’ is a further hint at the growing tension between his two passions. Strong words of self-criticism like ‘mad’, ‘irrational’, ‘swine’, ‘glib’, ‘conceited’, ‘idiot’ and ‘ashamed’ – strong at least by Ventris’s unemotional standards – suggest a mind in turmoil. He would write in this fevered tone only once again in his life, just before his death.

  Yet of course there was a genuine scholarly disagreement. Three years after the incident, Ventris told a fellow decipherer, Emmett Bennett Jr, that he had backed out of Myres’s publication ‘largely because I felt the whole project was a bit out of hand and I didn’t have enough knowledge or “personality” to get it improved.’