Pg. 314 of David Markson’s copy of The Complete Greek Drama: Volume Two by Various (Ed. Whitney J. Oates & Eugene O’Neill, Jr.):
On which Markson put an X in the margins next to the following line (which he also underlined) from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis:
“And so for Helen’s sake my girl is doomed?”
—
Once again, as always with Euripides, the blame Helen game…
“There is no description of Helen’s beauty anywhere in the Iliad.
Strangely like is she to some deathless goddess to look upon, being all that is said.
Though the Trojan elders do acknowledge that no one could be blamed for having endured a war because of her.”
– David Markson, This Is Not A Novel, pg. 29.
“Although what one doubts even more sincerely is that Helen would have been the cause of that war to begin with, of course.
After all, a single Spartan girl, as Walt Whitman once called her.
Even if in The Trojan Women Euripides does let everybody be furious at Helen.
In the Odyssey, where she has a splendid radiant dignity, nothing of that sort is hinted at at all.
And even in the Iliad, when the war is still going on, she is generally treated with respect.
So unquestionably it was only later that people decided it had been Helen’s fault.
Well, Euripides of course coming much later than Homer on his own part, for instance.
I do not remember how much later, but much later.”
– David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pgs. 194-195.
“You go wherever you like. I’m not about to get myself killed for that wife Helen of yours.
Says Agamemnon to Menelaus—essentially about commencing the Trojan War—in the little that remains of a lost play by Euripides.”
– David Markson, The Last Novel, pg. 132.
“And which furthermore now makes me realize that if Euripides had not blamed Helen for the war very possibly I would not remember Helen, either.
So that doubtless it was quite hasty of me, to criticize Rainer Maria Rilke or Euripides.”
– David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, pgs. 196.