One late evening in December, 1985, I heard a radio talk-show host announce “a great loss: Robert Graves is dead.” It came as a shock, even though I had been hearing rumors for some time that the great author, based in Majorca, was beginning to slip into “that good night” that another bard, dismissed by Graves, raged against.
I discovered Graves in childhood when, fascinated by my mother’s battered hardback of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, I climbed on an armchair to get Graves’s The Greek Myths (1955) from a high shelf. This is one of Graves’s best-known books, never out of print, but there are several other equally important works, such as his Good-bye to All That (1929), aclassic among World War I memoirs, as well as I, Claudius (1934) and its sequel, Claudius the God (1935). Even more essential to anyone interested in Graves or poetry is his highly personal poetic handbook, The White Goddess (1948), rich in the Celtic lore that Graves, half Irish and devoted to Wales, saw as a source for his poetry. These are just a handful of Graves’s 140 published books. Other brilliant works include the two books cowritten with the historian Alan Hodge: The Long Weekend (1940), about the interwar years, and The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose (1943), which surely belongs on the same shelf as Fowler.
Despite being acclaimed for his prose, Graves was first and foremost a poet. “Since the age of fifteen, poetry has been my ruling passion,” he wrote at The White Goddess’s beginning, “and I have never undertaken any task . . . that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles.” A man of enormous learning, Graves is one of the finest love poets the English-speaking world has produced since John Donne. He was, however, largely ignored by the academy, whose laurels went to poets whom Graves generally disdained. He liked Eliot, a friend who praised The White Goddess with sincere enthusiasm. Graves admired Eliot’s pre–Waste Land work but thought less of Eliot’s later deviation into religious orthodoxy and could not understand why he allowed Pound to influence him. In 1922, T. E. Lawrence, a great friend of Graves and the subject of his bestseller Lawrence and the Arabs, introduced Graves to Pound, saying “you’ll dislike each other.” The judgement was prescient, as everything from Pound’s wet handshake to his ferocious anti-Semitism put him at odds with Graves. Auden was another bugbear, for his misplaced homoerotic sources of inspiration. “The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of man and woman rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian Classicists would have it,” Graves wrote in The White Goddess. Graves worshipped women; his life was devoted to the pursuit of the Muse, the goddess, and love. He was always on the woman’s side, to the point of allowing his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, and his inspiration, Laura Riding, to walk all over him.
In the 1920s, Nicholson was in the vanguard of the feminist movement, refusing to use her husband’s name and telling Graves, still mentally tormented by the trenches, that war was nothing in comparison to what women endure from men. Worse was to come when Graves took up with the wild poet Laura Riding, who declared that sexual intercourse was only for the mentally deficient and eventually renounced poetry altogether. But for Graves, women knew best. His “A Slice of Wedding Cake” asks “Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls/ Married impossible men?” before answering:
Has God’s supply of tolerable husbands
Fallen, in fact, so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
At the expense of man?
Do I?
It might be so.
He had his comeuppance when Riding ditched him for another man. Graves eventually married Beryl Pritchard, who tolerated the ageing poet’s pursuit of young muses to fuel his writings. These muses were not mistresses. Paul O’Prey, the editor of two volumes of Graves’s letters, writes that Graves, in his search of the goddess, was more Don Quixote than Don Juan.
Graves’s goddess is not a nice girl one takes home to introduce to one’s parents. Laura Riding, whom some people saw as a witch, fit the ideal better than the lovely Beryl Pritchard. Graves praised those who had “known the goddess,” such as Shakespeare, who portrayed her in the form of the Triple Goddess Hecate and her three witches, who inspire Macbeth to murder Duncan. Other true poets in Graves’s estimation included John Skelton, Donne, John Clare, Keats, and of course Riding, while Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Tennyson did not qualify. Graves had an especial dislike of Milton, the villain of his novel The Story of Marie Powell: Wife to Mr. Milton (1943). Milton’s strong religious opinions may have irked Graves the more because Graves never entirely escaped the Puritanism instilled in him by his parents during his childhood, which made him something of a prig at school and in the army. He believed that Puritanism was a reaction against the cult of the Virgin Mary, which was itself a remnant of the primordial matriarchy that was supplanted by the patriarchy already in Homer’s time.
Today, it is difficult to say whether Graves has had a greater impact as a prose author or as a poet. Laura Riding dismissed Graves’s prose books as “potboilers,” and he agreed with her. Beryl Pritchard disagreed. Perhaps only the goddess knows.
