Robert Graves

From Philosopedia.org

Graves, Robert (24 July 1895 - 7 December 1985)

Graves, an English poet, novelist, Renaissance figure, critic, and son of an Irish bishop, is best known for his poetry and for novels on Roman history. For a time, he taught literature in Egypt. He spent the Second World War in England, then went to Majorca, settling there permanently. A prodigious writer, Graves wrote an autobiography, Goodbye To All That (1929), which described his unhappy schooldays, the horrors of the trenches during the First World War, and the breakdown of his first marriage. At first a homosexual and friend of Siegfried Sassoon, Graves married a feminist artist, Nancy Nicholson, then left her and her thyroid condition, and moved on to Laura Riding, daughter of one of the founders of the American Socialist Party. When Graves introduced Riding to his mother and told her she was “a Jewess,” he did so to taunt his mother, who, however, according to a Graves nephew, was not disapproving. When the two moved to Deyá, Majorca, in 1930, villagers assumed she was an eccentric spinster accompanied by her manservant, so commanding was she.

According to Miranda Seymour’s Robert Graves, Life on the Edge (1995), Laura could do no wrong, not even when she refused for years to have sex. At one point, she talked Graves into helping her win the husband of one of their married selves; but when the attempt failed, she had hysterics and jumped from a third-floor window, saying, “Goodbye, chaps.” He jumped to reach her, but from a window not so high. Riding, who broke her pelvis in three places and suffered a bent spinal cord and four broken vertebrae, claimed Graves ran after her down a fire escape. But Seymour disbelieves Riding’s story, finding there was no such fire escape. The incident only increased his matriarchal subservience, and to help pay the medical bills he wrote the war memoir, Goodbye to All That, finishing the first draft in two months. His works include I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934); The White Goddess, a 1948 work which argued that true poets derive their gifts from the primitive, matriarchal Moon Goddess; The Greek Myths (1955), and The Hebrew Myths (1963, with R. Patai). Graves always denied that he had invented the White Goddess, claiming in 5 Pens In Hand (1958) he had studied ancient beliefs and “the effects of such beliefs on worshippers.” Asked in 1951 by Warren Allen Smith about the several categories of humanism, Graves wrote:

• You give me credit for reading a number of philosophical books which I have never read and would not think of reading. I am a poet, and also a historian, and regard philosophy as a threat to my integrity in both fields. Humanism conveys nothing to me, unless a system of thinking based on the so-called humanities of mediaeval education; and these were based on Aristotle and forensic rhetoric, so what? “That bird’s dead,” as they say; and a neo-bird won’t fly. If you want to know my views on the practical question of what is to be the future of religion in the West, see an article which appeared in Tomorrow about a year ago. It is an extra chapter for my White Goddess. My views on Socrates and the philosophical revolution he started will appear in the Spring number of the Hudson Review among other White Goddess addenda.

• Sorry to seem intransigent, but I really have found philosophy so blind an alley and there are so many poems to be written and historical problems to solve—I have just finished a book on the principles of textual distortion in the Gospels, and until this problem is settled and Jesus’ sayings properly established, what the hell is the point of talking about Christianity?—that I lose my patience with the philosophs.

Critic Denis Donoghue in The New York Review of Books (4 April 1996) supplies another side of his life:

• “It is true that Graves’s worldly muses were not loyal to him and left him one after another. Riding consorted with Geoffrey Phibbs and Norman Cameron before turning to Jackson. The next Muse, Judith Bledsoe, distributed her favors among several men. Margot Callas left Graves for Alastair Reid and later for Mike Nichols. Cindy Lee left him for Howard Hart. Juli Simon preferred Robert Page to Graves. But Graves, for his part, treated Nancy badly and Beryl worse. Beryl survived by giving much of her attention to animals and plants. When Riding stopped sleeping with Graves—because, she said, ‘bodies have had their day’—he got Elfriede Faust pregnant, and colluded with both women to have the pregnancy terminated, Laura standing at the foot of Elfriede’s bed the while to witness the operation.

In 1972, he began to lose his short-term memory. He told Edwin Newman that male homosexuality was “partly due to heredity, partly to environment, but largely because men now drink too much milk.” Also in his later years he was instructed in Sufism by Idries Shah, then developed a sister for the White Goddess, a Goddess of Wisdom—”call her the Black Goddess”—who represents “miraculous certitude in love” and ordains “that the poet who seeks her must pass uncomplaining through all the passionate ordeals to which the White Goddess may subject him.”

Those around him recognized toward the end of his life that he mixed sense with nonsense. By 1980 it was obvious to them that his physical and mental health had greatly failed. At the end, an old, old Graves spent much time sleeping and, on 7 December 1985, died.

(See entry for Alastair Reid.)

{WAS, 1 March 1951}