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Robert Graves (1895-1985) |
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English poet, classical
scholar, novelist, and critic who produced some 140 books. Robert Graves is
perhaps best known for the historical novel I, CLAUDIUS (1934), with its
sequel CLAUDIUS THE GOD (1943). In his controversial study THE WHITE GODDESS
(1948) Graves rejects the patriarchal gods as sources of inspiration in
favour of matriarchal powers of love and destructiveness. The Muse, or
Moon-goddess, inspires poetry of a magical quality, in contrast to rational,
classical verse. "Philosophy is
antipoetic. Phisosophize about mankind and you brush aside individual
uniqueness, which a poet cannot do without self-damage. Unless, for a start,
he has a strong personal rhythm to vary his metrics, he is nothing. Poets
mistrust philosophy. They know that once the heads are counted, each owner of
a head loses his personal identify and becomes a number in some government scheme:
if not as a slave or serf, at least as a party to the device of majority
voting, which smothers personal views." (from 'The Case for
Xanthippe', in The Crane Bag, 1969) Robert Graves was born in
Wimbledon, south London, into a middle-class family. His father, Alfred
Percival Graves, was a school inspector, a Gaelic scholar, and the author of
the popular song 'Father O'Flynn'. Amalie von Ranke, Graves's mother, was a
great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1866). Graves's
childhood was a happy one, although he hated his school. He was educated at
Charterhouse, where he started to write poetry. His first volume of poems,
OVER THE BRAZIER, appeared in 1916. Graves did not graduate
from Oxford University but joined in 1914 the British Army. During World War
I he served alongside Siegfried Sassoon in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The
regiment was involved in some of the heaviest fighting on the Western Front.
On the Somme Graves was severely wounded. A piece of shell went right through
his back and chest. Being listed by mistake in military casualties troubled
him a decade. In 1918 Graves married
the painter and feminist Nancy Nicholson, and took his B.Litt in 1926. In the
same years Graves moved to Egypt to work as a professor at the University of
Cairo. He was accompanied with his wife, children and the poet Laura Riding
(original surname Reichenthal), with whom he established the Seizin Press
and published the journal Epilogue (1925-38). Devoted to her, Graves
saw her as his muse, a great natural fact, like fire or trees or snow.
Virginia Woolf, who met Graves in 1927, described him as having "a crude
likeness to Shelley, save that his nose is a switchback & his lines
blurred. But the consciousness of genius is bad for people." Her
conclusion was that "No I don't think he'll write great poetry: but what
will you?" In 1929 Graves moved with
Riding to Deya, in Mallorca, where he lived the most of his life. The
outbreak of Spanish Civil war forced them leave the island, and after brief
periods in Lugano, Brittany and London, they sailed for America in 1939.
Graves and Riding settled with Schuyler B. Jackson on a farmhouse in
Pennsylvania. The controversial
autobiography GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT (1929), a chronicle of the disillusioned
postwar generation, became a huge bestseller but alienated several of
Graves's friends, notably Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. The book described the
author's unhappy time at school, the horrors of war and the end of his first
marriage. "And if condemned to relive those lost years I should probably
behave again in very the same way; a conditioning in the Protestant morality
of the English governing classes, though qualified by mixed blood, a
rebellious nature, and an overriding poetic obsession, is not easily
outgrown." (from Good-bye to All That, 1929) Another commercially
successful book was LAWRENCE AND THE ARABS (1927). Later Graves told that Goodbye
to All That "paid my debts and enabled me to set up on Majorca as a
writer". With Riding he collaborated on a number of literary projects,
but their personal relationship was undermined by infidelities. Riding's
polemical A SURVEY OF MODERNIST POETRY (1927), published by Seizin Press,
influenced the New Criticism. By the end of the 1930s their paths separated.
Riding declared that she had made a serious error by joining him in 1926, and
married in 1941 Schuyler Jackson (d. 1968). Graves fell in love with Beryl
Hodge, the daughter of a London solicitor and wife of his friend Alan Hodge,
with whom he returned to Mallorca in 1946 and married her in 1950. Graves considered himself
primarily a poet. His early lyrics were written in gloomy, late-Romantic
style. Later poems, often set within a mythological framework, dealt mainly
with love and marriage, birth and death. Classical literature and mythology
became Graves a constant source of inspiration. His views on intuition and
poetry Graves summarized in the essay 'The Case for Xanthippe' (1960).
According to Graves, women and poets are natural allies. Abstract reasoning
is a predominantly male field of thought, and rational schooling discourages
intuitive thought. "Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical
human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse
for existence." Reason fails to prompt the writing of original poems,
and shows no spark of humour or religious feeling. Philosophy, under the name
of abstract reasoning, is antipoetic. "Though philosophers like to
define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous,
reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never
accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of
safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized,
insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality." In the 1940s Graves
became interested in myths and history. Studies of goddess lore led him also
reinterpret the genealogy of Jesus, and rewrite the Gospels. In the
historical novel KING JESUS (1946), which rejected the mystical Virgin Birth
doctrine, he presented Jesus as a sage and poet. Through the voice of Agabus
the Decapolitans, Graves stated: "Jehovah, it seems clear, was once
regarded as a devoted son the the Great Goddess, who obeyed her in all things
and by her favor swallowed up a number of variously named rival gods and
godlings - the Terebinth-god, the Thunder-god, the Pomegranate-god, the
Bull-god, the Goat-god, the Antelope-god, the Calf-god, the Porpoise-god, the
Ram-god, the Ass-god, the Barley-god, the god of Healing, the Moon-god, the
god of the Dog-star, the Sun-god. Later (if it is permitted to write in this
style) he did exactly what his Roman counterpart, Capitoline Jove, has done:
he formed a supernal Trinity in conjunction with two of the Goddess's three
persons, namely, Anatha of the Lions and Ashima of the Doves, the
counterparts of Juno and Minerva; the remaining person, a sort of Hecate
named Sheol, retiring to rule the infernal regions." Graves was
influenced by a number of the 19th-and early 20th-century scholars, such as
Sir James Frazer, J.J. Bachofen, Jane Harrison, and Margaret Murray. In the
1950s he published two volumes of THE GREEK MYTHS (1955) and THE NAZARENE
GOSPEL RESTORED (1953, with Joshua Podro). Graves's influence can be seen
among others in Joseph Campbell, who has examined the idea that
"mythology is a sublimation of the mother idea" (Campbell in The
Power of Myth, 1988). From 1961 to 1966 Graves
was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford - he was 66 when he delivered his first lecture in this office.
Graves wrote several autobiographical works, essays, and carried out Greek
and Latin translations. On his close friend of T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) Graves published in 1927 a biography. Lawrence had taken
him under his wing at Oxford, and when the director David Lean started to
work with Lawrence of Arabia, he contacted Graves. "He was one of
the most interesting people I met," Lean later said. "Graves was
sitting in a bed in the public ward of a London hospital, looking eccentric.
He had known Lawrence very well, and he used to laugh about him. He told me
all sorts of things, which were fairly useful, but he was slightly
malicious." Graves's later works
often challenged academic and popular conventions, emphasizing the value of
mythology and poetry over science and technology. His brother Charles, who
worked as a journalist, described him in 1961 in The London Evening
Standard as "immensely self-sufficient in his own craft, haunted
with a gouty complex about his private life induced by our very religious
early upbringing, completely charming when he feels you are with him, a
fantastically hard worker with all the courage in the world..." Robert Graves's
nephew Richard Perceval Graves later published a three-volume biography on
the great writer and scholar, one of the most colorful men of letters in the
twentieth century, who confessed in The White Goddess: "Since the
age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never
intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed
inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the
reputation of an eccentric." For further reading: Robert
Graves by J.M. Cohen (1960); Swifter than Reason by Douglas Day
(1963); Robert Graves by G. Stade (1967); The Great War and Modern
Memory by P. Fussell (1975); Tobert Graves by K. Snipes (1979);
Robert Graves by Martin Seymor-Smith (1982, rev. 1995); Conversations
with Robert Graves, ed. by Frank L. Kersnowski (1989); Robert Graves by
Richard Perceval Graves (1986&1990); Robert Graves by Miranda
Seymour (1995); Robert Graves and the White Goddess by Richard
Perceval Graves (1995) - SEE ALSO: Alan Sillitoe Selected works:
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