The Genius of Robert GravesAuthor(s): George SteinerReviewed work(s):Source: The Kenyon Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Summer, 1960), pp. 340-365Published by: Kenyon CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334042 .Accessed: 06/10/2012 15:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Kenyon Review.

http://www.jstor.org

George Steiner

THE GENIUS OF

ROBERT GRAVES

YOU WOULD RECOGNIZE HIM EVEN IN A CROWD. THE SCULPTURED,

bronzed profile of one of those Roman emperors about whom he writes so brilliantly; the massive grace of a soldier and moun- taineer who, at the age of sixty-five, moves nimbly down the rock-paths of his island to plunge into the dawn cold of the Mediterranean; the bearing of a man who has sired eight children and seventy books; who has lived by his pen and his wits in tenacious integrity and who, after years in comparative neglect, is beginning to loom over the horizon as the finest and most prolific man of letters now writing in English. His name is Robert Graves.

He has given me fair warning not to attempt this essay: "I doubt whether you will get me right on any but the intellectual side; the emotional side has to be sympathized with by a few pints of Irish blood which God has (perhaps mercifully) denied you." And he has written a deft, cruel poem to "The Reader Over My Shoulder":

What now, old enemy, shall you do But quote and underline, thrusting yourself Against me, as ambassador of myself, In damned confusion of myself and you?

Know nme, have done: I am a proud spirit And you forever clay. Have done.

True; we are forever clay and in few men is the quality of genius more elusive and fiercely guarded than in Graves. He is a proud spirit on his ancient rock-castled island of Majorca. He does not wish to be painted-perhaps lest something of his daemonic

341

vitality be filched by the portrait. More- over, what should one quote and under- line? His poems which, through some rare spell, are becom- ing more agile, more golden, more sensu- ous as Graves grows older? His historical novels, I, Claudius being demonstrably the finest piece of historical fiction in our century? His es-/ says, such as the Sur- /'

vey of Modernist Poetry (which re- mains the best gen- eral introduction that anyone has written to the problems of contemporary verse) ? Where should we "thrust ourselves" against Graves' myriad-sided achievement? By picking up, in one of a dozen paper-back editions, his brilliant translations from the Latin and the Spanish, the score of anthol- ogies which he has prefaced and edited or his eight-hundred page dictionary of Greek myths? Should we turn first to Graves' con- troversial labours on anthropology and religion, The White God- dess and The Nazarene Gospel Restored? Or to Goodbye to All That, an autobiography widely thought to be the greatest piece of English prose to have come out of the mire and anguish of the first World War?

There is too much here even for the bibliographer: some

342 ROBERT GRAVES

seventy ttles in the Library of Congress catalogue; countless scat- tered poems, essays, broadcasts, book-reviews; half a dozen works in progress or in publishers' hands. I once tried to keep abreast during spring and summer: poems in the New Yorker and the London Spectator, an essay on Caesar in the magazine section of the New York Times, a series of broadcasts on Roman life re- printed in the Listener of the B.B.C., two superb volumes of translations from Lucan and Suetonius (both with fine prefaces), humorous sketches in Punch, reviews of a monumental work on the anthropology of mushrooms in the Saturday Review of Litera- ture and the Atlantic, a spirited defense of The Whitc Goddess in the New Republic followed by three articles on the evils of aca- demic scholarship, a bitterly-attacked little book, Jesus in Rome, and a full-sized best-seller-They Hanged My Saintly Billy. All this (and no doubt a good deal more) within the compass of a few months.

How does Graves do it, particularly as he polishes and limns his verse with infinite care? Part of the answer is that, like Balzac, he can write prose at a fantastic pace: Goodbye to All That was written in 1929 in only three months and seventy thousand words of The White Goddess-a complex web of argument-were put on paper in a mere three weeks! Part of the answer lies in the singleness of Graves' endeavour. He is a writer's writer. The majority of modern poets and essayists earn a living in ways ulti- mately hostile to their art: in journalism, publishing or perhaps most perilously of all, in teaching. The fortunate few ride on the crest of charitable bounty, on a Guggenheim, or a "creative writ- ing" fellowship or a Prix de Rome. Not Graves. He has taught only once, during a rather comical year at the University of Cairo in 1926. He lectures rarely and asks for no grants. He has had thin times of it; once T. E. Lawrence gave him one of the precious early copies of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom marked "read and sell" and Graves pulled through on the proceeds. He has written and written and written in splendid disdain of charity or com-

GEORGE STEINER 343

promise. The prose is there to make money, for all things in this rich life have been "subordinated to an inveterate profession of poetry."

But behind the immense output there are also mental and physical powers of a rare order. When Graves steps into a room the sensation of energy and aliveness is palpable; when he sits at his work table in the house at Deya, looking down at a sea which he has aptly compared to "a cat with fur rubbed the wrong way," the broad shoulders, the fine hands and the massive head are all gathered in inviolate concentration. High energies are brought to bear on the task before him. The sight recalls Picasso bewitching clay into form.

And there is yet another clue to the bewildering scope of Graves' work. Behind the poems, the novels, the critical essays, the translations and the volumes of anthropology and myth, lies a central vision, a unified image of reality and poetic experience toward which the individual creations contribute as stones to a mosaic. There are guiding threads into the labyrinth.

From the first slim collection of poems, Over the Brazicr (I9I6), to the translation of the Iliad, Graves' life has been primarily that of his books. To those who take much stock in heredity, Graves' ancestry will not be without interest. The relentlessly factual German historian Leopold von Ranke is his maternal great-uncle; his grandfather was Protestant Bishop of Limerick and unriddled the ancient Irish Ogham script; his paternal grandmother could trace her lineage to the medieval kings of Scotland. Graves senior was a minor poet best remem- bered for Father O'Flynn, and in the son the Irish element domi- nates. Poetry, historical research, antiquarian lore, a sense of an- cient tradition, the hoaxing, erudite wit of the Irish; add to them two things, an outstanding English school, Charterhouse (where the boy met the greatest of mountaineers, George Mallory) and the years in the trenches. This is the essential Graves-a strange brew, venom to scholars but capable of bringing the fairy-people to your book-shelf.

344 ROBERT GRAVES

The first World War hammered Graves' temper into its en- during shape. He served in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers-the very regiment in which his son was to be killed in Burma in I943- and with a battalion to which personal courage was the sole means of admission. Night after night he crawled out into the reeking carnage of no-man's land under the star-shells and the acrid scent of gas. Fighting near him was Siegfried Sassoon. On the night of the 20th to the 2ISt of July I9I6, in the Martinpuich sector, Graves was terribly wounded. His colonel took him to be dead and wrote the usual letter home. Through some miracle of stubbornness and arch-cunning, life prevailed in the seeming corpse. Soon Graves was to publish a courteous announcement in the London Times to inform all and sundry that he was not dead. But the experience became central to his entire work and phi- losophy; he speaks of it as a "low-grade vitality death" and has written:

To bring the dead to life Is no great magic. Few are wholly dead: Blow on a dead man's embers And a live flame will start.

Hence his belief that Jesus survived the crucifixion and that there runs between what we ordinarily call life and death a broad shadow-line.

In January 19I7 Graves went back to the trenches. But he collapsed with bronchitis, was brought to a hospital in Oxford and spent the rest of the war training fresh levies. Having fought magnificently, Graves developed a harsh, contemptuous gaiety toward those who merely write about battles from their fire-side arm-chairs-toward the T. S. Eliots and Ezra Pounds who re- mained in London while their fellow-poets died in the trenches. In the Gravesian code courage without bravado ranks high and wherever he writes of war-in the Claudius novels, in Count Belisarius and the saga of Sergeant Lamb-it is with the knowing toughness of a man who has gone armed through hell.

GEORGE STEINER 345

The post-war years brought the meeting with T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of the Arabs in 1927 was Graves' first commercial success), the brief attempt at academic respectability in Egypt, the publication of many outstanding poems and the decisive en- counter with Laura Riding with whom Graves wrote some of his best essays and who probably signifies to him, to this day, the incarnation of the Muse. In 1929 came Goodbye to All That. Resolved to earn his living entirely by his pen, Graves turned to historical fiction and moved to Spain. He has lived there for eighteen years, returning to England only in times of war and on occasional visits.

To get the full flavour of the man one must have had the privilege of seeing him in his home on the island of Majorca (a privilege of which a growing number of young poets, disciples and would-be biographers are availing themselves annually). The setting is incomparable: bastions of rock shading from copper to pastel gray with the passage of the sun; gnarled olive trees and orange orchards descending in escarpments to secluded coves; and all-surrounding the Mediterranean, here perhaps more time- haunted, more daemonic and legend-like than anywhere else. The villagers, who speak an ancient and difficult language, will point out "Sefior Graves' " house with reticent pleasure. He is one of them and that is something few foreigners have ever achieved in a Spanish community.

George Sand and Chopin passed a wretched winter in Valde- mosa, a few miles away on the road to Palma. Graves has not forgiven them for it and one of the funniest things he has ever published is an annotated edition of George Sand's memoirs of the island. The footnotes sustain a fusillade of derision on the unfortunate lady and her famous lover. But Majorca has meant more to Graves than a beauteous and inexpensive haven. It is the center of a world which he has made peculiarily his own.

On its eastern frontiers lie the Black Sea of Hercules, My Shipmate and The Golden Fleece, the Mesopotamia of Adam's

346 ROBERT GRAVES

Rib and the Palestine of King Jesus. Eastward also are the Byzan- tium of Count Belisarius, the isles of Greece and the mainland which Graves has brought to fantastic life in his Greek Myths. Moving ever with the sun we come to the Italy of the Claudius novels and the Sicily of Homer's Daughter. West from Gibral- tar-beyond the Pillars of Hercules, rolls the Atlantic with its legends of lost kingdoms, its Isles of Unn'sdom and, on the furthest horizon, the America of the Sergeant Lamb books. In the northern mists is England, the archaic, magic-ridden Eng- land of The White Goddess and later on the historical England of two of Graves' most successful novels, Wife to Mr. Milton and They Hanged My Saintly Billy.

Though Gravesian geography is far-flung, and though his works range from the thirteenth century B.C. to the future in- definite (in the fantasy novel Watch the North Wind Rise), the heart of Graves' world is the ancient Mediterranean, the sea around which most of western religion, literature and philosophy first came into being. And nowhere has time come more per- ceptibly to a halt than in Majorca. The tide upon which Graves looks from the high rocks is truly that on which Jason, Hercules, Odysseus, Aeneas and Caesar set sail. The laurel and the olive grow here as they did for Pindar and Ovid. The hot wind which blows from Africa scudding black clouds before it was familiar to mariners millenia ago.

I once saw Graves sitting in his garden with his youngest children, with his erudite collaborator, Joshua Podro, and a group of guests from far away. He was expounding, in his warm and persuasive voice, the troves of history buried in a nursery rhyme. It was sundown with the rocks seemingly ablaze and the cool darkness tiding in from the east. I experienced the sense of being in the presence of an aging magician, of seeing the high priest of some lost religion and mystery, or a legendary sea-god who would wind his horn and summon from the darkening waves his host of Tritons. There he sat,

GEORGE STEINER 347

Content in you, Andromeda serene, Mistress of air and ocean And every fiery dragon, Chained to no cliff, Asking no rescue of me.

But I hear Graves saying, with a touch of impatience, that this is supposed to be a discussion of his work and not an attempt at romantic portrayal. Doubtless, it is with the poetry that he would have us begin. On his tax returns (and as title to a collec- tion of essays) Graves puts Occupation: Writer. But it is the poetry on which he takes his stand and it is as a poet that he would want to be remembered in the history of English literature.

But here I find myself on difficult ground. It seems to me that Graves' verse is not the summit of his achievement and that it is markedly of a lesser power than that of other modern poets whom he has denounced as charlatans and false idols. Collected Poems appeared in 1926, I938, I947 and I955. But as Graves is a severe discarder of his own writings, readers should look also at individual volumes, at The Pier Glass (1921), Whipperginny (1923), the Twenty-Three Poems of 1925 and the verse printed at the end of The Crowning Privilege (I955) and Steps (i98).

Graves' special tone, the quality and idiom of his art, can be recognized very early. He has always been a master of the short lyric; his determining virtues are clarity, precision in the choice of language, tightness of structure, wit and a high finish. His poems resound and reflect like burnished copper; wherever you strike them they ring true. Take two poems, one from Graves' early work, the second from his latest:

Small gnats that fly In hot July And lodge in sleeping ears Can rouse therein A trumpet's din With Day of judgement fears.

348 ROBERT GRAVES

Small mice at night Can wake more fright Than lions at midday; A straw will crack The camel's back- There is no easier way.

One smile relieves A heart that grieves Though deadly sad it be, And one hard look Can close the book That lovers love to see.

(2)

When all is over and you march for home, The spoils of war are easily disposed of: Standards, weapons of combat, helmets, drums May decorate a staircase or a study, While lesser gleanings of the battlefield- Coins, watches, wedding rings, gold teeth and such- Are sold anonymously for solid cash.

The spoils of love present a different case, When all is over and you march for home: That lock of hair, those letters and the portrait May not be publicly displayed; nor sold; Nor burned; nor returned (the heart being obstinate) Yet never dare entrust them to a safe For fear they burn a hole through two-foot steel.

Plainly enough, the latter poem is the finer of the two. But both are distinguished examples of the Gravesian manner. The move- ment is simple and taut; the syntax is handled with unobtrusive grace. In contrast to much modern poetry literary allusions play only the slightest role (there are in the first poem an obvious Scriptural echo and a somewhat guarded and not terribly impor- tant reference to Dante's famous account of how Paolo and Fran- cesca discovered their mutual passion while reading together.) Both poems, and most of Graves' verse, belong to a tradition of English poetry which leads from the Tudor poet Skelton (whom

GEORGE STEINER 349

Graves has lovingly edited) to Herrick, Landor and such Ameri- can writers as John Crowe Ransom and Marianne Moore. It is the tradition of the short lyric, of the minor key and the voice kept clear and poised. It has metric affinities with the English and Scottish ballads-of which Graves has publislhed an anthology. At times, it is occasional poetry in the best sense. One of Graves' most effective poems was written in salute to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. It begins by recollccting the day of Queen Vic- toria's death:

I remember, Ma'am, a frosty inorning When I was five years old and brought ill news, Marching solemnly upstairs with the paper Like an angel of doom; knocked gently. 'Father, the Times has a black border. Look! The Queen is dead.'

Then I grew scared When big tears started, ran down both his cheeks To hang glistening in the red-grey beard- A sight I hiad never seen before.

The seeming casualness of treatment, the subtle but apparently natural rhythm, the achievement of poignancy through under- statement-all these exemplify a poet in mature control of his instrument. And with each year this control has been getting even more precise and inventive.

But what I query, in the final reckoning, is the range of the instrument itself. The highest intensities, the outermost splendors of language and emotion seem to lie beyond it. Graves has argued, with justice, that much of Dylan Thomas's poetry is obscure, pretentious and wildly out of control. But nothing he himself has written burns into one's memory quite as deeply as Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night." Moreover, Graves' poetry lacks the sheer comprehensiveness of, say, T. S. Eliot's; he cannot engender and discipline the language and sensibility of an entire generation as did The Waste Land. The work of Ezra Pound is full of spurious scholarship, political lunacy and gibberish; but the closing section of the LXXXIst Canto-

350 ROBERT GRAVES

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace-

will sing in men's memories as long as English literature endures. Can we say that with complete assurance of anything in Graves' Collected Poems? Finally, there is the challenge of Yeats-about whom Graves has made some of his least defensible pronounce- ments. Himself an Irishman and master of myth, Yeats is prob- ably the only modern poet of whom we can safely assert that future critics will include him among the great springs of life, with Donne and Keats and Wordsworth. Repeatedly Graves and Yeats meet on comparable ground. Graves'

That horror with which Leda quaked Under the spread wings of the swan

is good poetry. But Yeats'

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs

is among the proudest sonnets in world literature. Compare one of Graves' major poems, "To Juan at the

Winter Solstice" with two poems by Yeats in a similar key, "A Prayer for My Daughter" and "All Souls' Night." The sense of difference is inescapable. Graves' poetic achievement is of a very distinguished order indeed; but it is not, I think, absolutely of the first rank.

It is in the historical novel that he stands supreme. We lose sight of his stature precisely because he has been so much pilfered and imitated by lesser hands. Only recently, English and Ameri- can critics applauded the "originality" of a fictional autobiography of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Where the book was most im- pressive, it was in fact an imitation of what Graves had done in the

GEORGE STEINER 351

I930'S. Nor must we forget the level to which historical fiction had sunk when Graves kindled it back to life. The main traditions had been set by the post-card romanticism of The Last Days of Pompeii and the purple bathos of Quo Vadis. If we want to find a genuine ancestor to I, Claudius we must go as far back as Thack- eray's Henry Esmond.

There is genius in the very title of Graves' masterpiece. A personage, from nearly two thousand years ago, speaks to us in his own voice and brings his own world unforgettably to our minds and senses. With acute psychological insight, Graves pounced on the discrepancies between the known accomplish- ments of the Emperor Claudius and Tacitus's and Suetonius's account of him as a weakling and a capricious pedant. In two extraordinary novels (though that is not a very satisfactory word for them) Graves lets Claudius tell the story of his early life, of his brusque elevation to the throne, of his love for the corrupt Messalina, of his military campaign in England. We learn of Claudius's interest in philology, of his humane attitudes toward religion and absolute power. Brush stroke by brush stroke, the man emerges before us, with his gait, his cast of mind and his sly modesty. It is an obvious tribute to Graves' success that we tend to forget who it is that is actually writing the book and that Claudius is, in his own way, no less a fictional creation than Sir Walter Scott's King Richard or Tolstoy's Napoleon. Time and again, in reading I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, we say to ourselves, "This is how it must have been. This is what life in imperial Rome must have sounded and looked and smelt like. This is what dinner must have tasted like in the house of a patrician and this is what a Roman centurion must have ex- perienced in battle."

In varying measure, all of Graves' historical novels accom- plish this feat of re-creation. My own favourites are the boisterous sea-tale, Hercules, My Shipmate, Homer's Daughter which is a gay and fast-moving romance, the lucid picture of the otherwise

352 ROBERT GRAVES

rather obscure Vlth century A.D. in Count Belisarius, and Wife to Mr. Milton. (All of these are currently available in paper-backs and the name of Robert Graves figures prominently on railroad news-stalls all over the English-speaking world.) King Jesus strikes me as a failure because in it the controversial anthropolo- gist overwhelms the craftsman of fiction. But from the tapestry which Graves has unrolled across the ages, each reader will make his personal choice. One thing is certain: not since Tolstoy has any novelist come closer to justifying the paradoxical remark of the French critics, the Goncourts: "History is a novel that has been lived."

It is in his historical fiction that we see plainly revealed what is probably the dominant impulse and unifying principle in Graves' work. The title of The Real David Copperfield contains the essential password. Each of Graves' historical novels seeks to tell us what "really" took place, how things did in fact come to pass and what it is that historians have falsified or the passage of time has obscured. Hercules, My Shipmate and The Golden Fleece reveal to us wlhat route the Argonauts "really" took and the "real truth" about Jason and Medea. In Honmer's Daughter we learn that the Odyssey was in fact written by a young Sicilian princess, by the Nausicaa who figures briefly in the epic. Wife to Mr. Milton is a tightly-argued attempt to show that the traditional picture of Milton's hapless marriage is a pious fraud-that it was Milton who was at fault and that his wife, Marie Powell, was a spirited and enchanting young woman. In They Hanged My Saintly Billy, Graves uses the techniques of fiction to maintain that a notorious XlXth century murder trial was actually a mis- carriage of justice. The instinct is always identical: "Don't be taken in by official historians or the distortions of time-here is what really happened!" For when he points to his descent from that arch-historian, von Ranke, Graves is being nine-tenths serious.

At their truest, Graves' historical novels are works of art above their wealth of documentation and beyond their running

GEORGE STEINER 353

quarrel with one or another group of historians. Readers who care neither about Roman historiography nor about Milton's views on divorce and who have never heard of Butler's theories on Homer, have delighted in Graves' books for the gusto of their narrative and their uncanny power to conjure up before our eyes ancient times and remote scenes. The method has its obvious perils; where Graves' personal opinions are most passionately engaged (as in anything dealing with Jesus) or where the inclinations of the antiquarian become too blatant as, it seems to me, in the Sergeant Lamb series, the novels suffer. But take him for all in all, Graves towers above his many rivals and imitators in a literary field which extends from the rigorous scholarship of a Zoe Oldenburg to the trash of Forever Amber.

Manifestly, moreover, the Robert Graves who writes historical novels is the same Graves who seeks to get "at the real truth" in The White Goddess, The Nazarene Gospel Restored, The Greek Myths and Jesus in Rome. Between his fiction and his formidably controversial labours in anthropology and religion runs a single thread. In no man is the part of imagination harnessed more tightly to that of reason and argument. King Jesus hovers un- steadily between fiction and researches of bewildering erudition; the compendious learning in The White Goddess is shot through with poetic vision. Thus, to turn from one of the finer poets and the best historical novelist of our age to the most controversial of "scholars" is merely to consider the same mind and accomplish- ment from a slightly different perspective.

II

Graves has said of himself:

I am no mystic. I studiously avoid witchcraft, spiritualism, Yoga, for- tune-telling, automatic writing, and so on. I live a simple, normal, rustic life with my wife, my children, and a wide circle of sane and intelligent friends. I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no

354 ROBERT GRAVES

philosophical sect; but I do value my historical intuition, which I trust up to the point where it can be factually checked.

Most of his academic opponents would not accept this portrait. They see in Graves a dangerous amateur, possibly even a charlatan, who imposes upon reality a world of private fantasies. Each of his anthropological and exegetic works sallies forth firing broadsides at the bastions of official scholarship and being raked from every shore. Graves hits hard and has forced some of his more acri- monious critics to retract their allegations under threat of law. It is an exhilarating spectacle and gives The White Goddess, The Greek Myths and the works on Jesus something of their fierce vitality. But in the smoke and tumult a central fact is lost sight of. Behind Graves' theories, behind what he calls his analeptic method-"the intuitive recovery of forgotten events by a deliberate suspension of time"-lie the temper and personal experience of the poet. Graves marshals his archaeological evidence, his texts, his numberless sources and glossaries; but what counts most heavily in the final analysis is whether or not the given account of an historical event or the particular reading of a myth "feels right" to Graves' sensibility and to his image of human ex- perience. In the vast web of his writings, memory and the artistic gift are the unvarying skein. Thus we move from Graves' "death" on the western front to his belief that "every Muse-poet must, in a sense, die for the Goddess whom he adores" and, finally, to the theory that Jesus survived the cross. And at the heart of the design is the Gravesian figure of the "true poet."

To be a true poet a man must serve the White Goddess, the Triple Moon Goddess whose lore and worship were, according to Graves, driven underground by masculine religions in the second millenium B.C. but were preserved "by witches, travelling min- strels, remote country-folk, and a few secret heretics." Some poets have disguised their worship of the White Goddess by addressing her as one of the traditional Muses or by concealing her presence behind the name of a mortal woman. But only if the poet adheres

GEORGE STEINER 355

to the ancient cult, only if, like Graves himself, he "never fails to bow to the new moon," will he possess the faculty of creating verse "moon-magical enough to walk off the page." Fake poetry, on the contrary, results from "pretending to have undergone the profound mental disturbance that calls poetry into being," from pretending to have experienced the nearness of the White Goddess. In Graves' view, most of the poetry of Yeats, of Dylan Thomas, of Ezra Pound and of W. H. Auden is "fake" in just this way. These poets seek to convey revelations and ecstatic insights which are, in fact, artificially contrived. Graves' list of "real poets" in- cludes Laura Riding, Wilfred Owen, Alun Lewis and Norman Cameron. To most readers of modern verse these names will seem wilfully obscure. No matter, says Graves, contemporaries are notoriously bad prophets of what it is that will survive and be prized in the future.

The historical evidence for Graves' portrayal of the White Goddess is tenebrous and complex. Anthropologists tend to agree that matriarchal rites and the worship of a Great Goddess were wide-spread in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. They suppose that northern invaders into Bronze Age Crete and Greece gradually supplanted these ancient cults and put in their place the patriarchal pantheon of familiar Greek mythology. A good many scholars concur in finding traces of this process and of the archaic sub- stratum in such myths as Oedipus's overthrow of the Sphinx and in Jehovah's victory over the Sea-Serpent Rahab. Certain schools of comparative religion and psychology go further and see in the Virgin Mary merely one in a long chain of Mother Goddesses. They find that the worship of a feminine figure with lunar and magical attributes, symbolic of both fertility and death, is inherent in the origins of all major religions.

But it is on his excursions into historical times that Graves parts company from approved scholarship. He holds that the cult of the White Goddess continued in England and in Wales, where she was known as Caridwen, and that the struggle against the

356 ROBERT GRAVES

new religion of the masculine conquerors can be traced in the very alphabet. Graves believes that a great battle took place be- tween the two worlds and that it is recorded in a riddling and fragmentary poem-which he has triumphantly restored-about a battle of the trees. All these things are told of in The White Goddess, one of the most original books published in modern times. Linguists, paleographers and anthropologists have quarreled with nearly every aspect of it. In a letter to me Graves terms it "a book for poets; and was not therefore given footnotes." Surely this is the crucial point. It is a book for poets no less than Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy to which alone it compares in lore and magic and erudition. Composed at one great burst of vision, it records Graves' life-long encounter with the mystery of poetic inspiration, with the ancient riddle, "whence the great line of poetry, the incandescent image which seem to derive from outside the poet?" In a poem addressed to his son, Graves has said that there is for the true poet only one theme-the interplay of love and death, symbolized by the waxing and waning of the moon, by the death and re-birth of the year, by the double-axe emblem of the White Goddess. He means by this that in much of great poetry these primal cycles and rhythms are evoked and that it is the mark of a great poet that he can relate his individual language and experience to a central, universally shared sensation of mystery in life. Graves wears on his finger a carnelian seal (he takes it to be of the Argonaut period) showing a royal stag with the moon on its flank. Does he, then, believe in the White Goddess as an actual presence or being? His answer is equivocal: "Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued: let us like- wise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess."

Granted. But let us realize also that it is the White Goddess who is the clue to Graves' re-interpretation of Greek and near eastern mythology. The Greek Myths is a fascinating book, idio- syncratic and frequently exasperating, but full of verve. The root

GEORGE STEINER 357

thesis is that "Early Greek mythology is concerned, above all else, with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly, or twice-yearly, sacrifices; and end, at the time when the Iliad was composed . . . with her eclipse by an unlimited male monarchy." The patriarchal Hellenes, says Graves, invaded Greece early in the second millenium B.C. and challenged the rule of the Goddess. Thius, for example, Apollo's destruction of the Python at Delphi "seems to record" the capture of the Cretan Earth-goddess's shrine by the invading Achaeans. Starting out from this theory, Graves proceeds to re-tell and inter- pret the myths familiar to readers of Bulfinch and other standard mythologies. The incredible energy and recondite learning that went into the work can best be shown if we consider one or two of the stories with which most of us are familiar from childhood.

Take that of Orpheus. First Graves gives a traditional account of it and cites as his sources Pindar, Euripides, Aeschylus, Apol- lonius Rhodius, Diodorus Siculus, Hyginus, Athenaeus, Pausanias, Aristophanes, Ovid, Erastothenes, Plutarch, Lucian and Philo- stratus. Then begins the Gravesian gloss on the true "meaning" of the legend:

Orpheus's singing head recalls that of the decapitated Alder-god Bran which, according to the Mabinogion, sang sweetly on the rock at Harlech in North Wales; a fable, perhaps, of funerary pipes made from alder-bark. Thus the name Orpheus, if it stands for ophruoeis, 'on the river bank,' may be a title of Bran's Greek counterpart, Phoroneus or Cronus, and refer to the alders 'growing on the banks of' the Peneius and other rivers. The name of Orpheus's father, Oeagrus ('of the wild sorb-apple'), points to the same cult, since the sorb-apple (French=alisier) and the alder (Spanish=aliso) both bear the name of the pre-Hellenic River-goddess Halys, or Alys, or Elis, queen of the Elysian Islands, where Phoroneus, Cronus, and Orpheus went after death. Aornum is Avernus, an Italic variant of the Celtic Avalon ('apple-tree island').

In turn, Graves "elucidates" each incident and gesture in the traditional myth. When reaching sunlight on his ascent from the

358 ROBERT GRAVES

underworld, Orpheus turns around and fatally loses Eurydice. Graves comments: "The novel worship of the Sun as All-father seems to have been brought to the Northern Aegean by the fugi- tive priesthood of the monotheistic Akhenaton in the fourteenth century B.C." The Orpheus legend tells that the severed head of the poet continued to utter prophecies; promptly Graves informs us that the Iban Dayaks of modern Sarawak use shrunken heads in prophetic rituals.

When it comes to the central action of the story, Graves dis- sents categorically from the version commonly adopted. The be- lief that Eurydice was bitten by a snake and that Orpheus nearly succeeded in bringing her back from the dead is, according to Graves, a misreading of ancient pictures or "icons" on which Orpheus is shown being received by the Snake-goddess Hecatc. This appeal to icons is Graves' essential tool. Where a myth has to be re-interpreted it is because its true significance has been distorted by a mis-reading of an ancient icon or pictorial emblem. This mis-reading is the consequence either of wilful distortion by later religions or of the sheer passage of time.

All of us have been brought up thinking that Paris gave the apple to the fairest of three goddesses and thus brought about the Trojan war. Not at all, says Graves. The three goddesses are actually a triple representation of the Great Goddess and it is she who is giving the apple to Paris in symbol of her love and his death. We protest, but Graves invokes Irish and Welsh mythology, Eve and Adam, the fact that "Paradise" means orchard and that all Neolithic and Bronze Age paradises were orchards. How has the "wrong" interpretation arisen? It is "mistakenly deduced from the icon which showed Heracles being given an apple-bough by the Hesperides-the naked Nymph-goddess in triad-Adanus of Hebron being immortalized by the Canaanite Mother of All Living, or the victor of the foot-race at Olympia receiving his prize; as is proved by the presence of Hermes, Conductor of Souls, his [Paris's] guide to the Elysian fields."

GEORGE STEINER 359

Again one protests; what icon? What does the presence of Hermes prove? Is the theme of an award to the fairest (i.e. Cin- derella) not immemorially present in the mythologies of a dozen races and cultures?

But I have neither the qualifications nor the wish to intrude on the controversies raging between Robert Graves, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and his opponents among pro- fessional archaeologists and scholars of Greek history. Many of the assumptions behind The Greek Myths are implicit in such classic works at Frazer's Golden Bough and in Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (to which Graves owes much despite his description of Nietzsche as "a mad German ox"). Where he supposes that there are definite links between the Bronze Age cultures of the Mediterranean and of western Europe-between Crete and Stone- henge-or where he argues that Achilles, Samson, Llew Llaw and Cuchulain are splinters from the same heroic archetype, Graves seems to me obviously right. Where he tells us that the Odyssey was written by a young woman or that the Homer of the Iliad was "a secret worshipper of the Great Goddess of Asia" whose sympathies lay with the Trojans though he had to glorify his Greek patrons, Graves strikes me as playing with psychological hunches of considerable interest. But where he declares flatly that during the XIVth century B.C. Egypt and Phoenicia "suffered from frequent raid by the Keftiu "or people of the sea" in which "the Trojans seem to have taken a leading part" or when he cites "ancient sets of ritual icons" in evidence for some of his oddest assertions, Graves appears to be on very shaky ground indeed.

But whatever one's view of method and detail in The Greek Myths, the sheer gusto and magnitude of the book are undeniable. Every page in these packed volumes bristles with the kind of material which sets the mind to dreaming and meditation. There are brilliant sparks of insight: reflecting on the etymology of Oedipus ("swollen foot"), Graves wonders whether there is a link to Oedipais ("son of the swelling sea") "which is the mean-

360 ROBERT GRAVES

ing of the name given to the corresponding Welsh hero, Dylan." There are glorious asides such as the shot as Freud: "while Plutarch records (On Isis and Osiris 32) that the hippopotamus 'murdered his sire and forced his dam,' he would never have suggested that every man has a hippopotamus complex." Perhaps this should not be a man's first dictionary of mythology, but it should certainly be his second.

My own objection to Graves' re-interpretations has nothing to do with their scholarlv soundness. It seems to me that the ancient world which emerges from the Gravesian perspective is savage, monotonous and curiously unpoetic. Pindar and Ovid may have "mis-read" the legend of Orpheus; but their mis-reading has been the inspiration of music, poetry and art from Gluck to Cocteau, from Dante to T. S. Eliot, from Raphael to Picasso. In the end, the Gravesian cycle of orgiastic cults, ritual murders and seasonal rites deadens the very myths which it is supposed to have inspired. Neither Leda and the Swan, nor the Wooden Horse which conquered Troy, nor the faithful Penelope survive the "analeptic method." One begins wondering just what kind of poetry could spring from a body of Gravesian mythology; possibly that of O'Neill and Robinson Jeffers, but not, I think, that of Shakespeare or Keats. As long as men weigh love against death and know the tragedy of near-success, Orpheus's attempt to lead Eurydice back to the light will strike its rich echoes. When Graves assures us that it was actually Eurydice who destroyed men in some ancient serpent-rite, our sense of the poetic mutinies even before our reason.

But this is a point which cannot be satisfactorily argued. There may come a poet or dramatist who will make of his Greek Myths what the Renaissance made of its Ovid. And as Graves delight- fully says:

1, an ambassador of Otherwhere To the confederated states of Here and There Enjoy (as the phrase is) Extra-territorial privileges.

GEORGE STEINER 361

What a good many critics have been reluctant to admit is that these "extra-territorial privileges" extend equally to Graves' work on Jesus and to his "re-storations" of the Gospel. And yet here Graves has been scrupulously fair. Throughout King Jesus, The Nazarene Gospel Restored (which T. S. Eliot declined to publish on the rather curious ground that it was not "dry" enough), and lesus in Rome, Graves emphasizes that he seeks no quarrel with believing Catholics or with that dwindling number of Protestants who accept the miraculous aspects of the New Testament. Rather, he addresses himself to the millions of Christians who feel that the origins of Christianity should be understood in a rational and historical light and who postulate no contradiction between faith and reason. As Graves sees it, his work could legitimately borrow Dr. Schweitzer's title, The Quest for the Historical Jesus. What seems to infuriate his opponents, is the fact that Graves carries over into his writings on Scripture the tone and the methods which he applies to profane mythologies. The results are, at times, bewildering:

The pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was turned is presumably represented in the icon by a white obelisk, the familiar altar of Astarte; and Lot's daughter who was abused by the mob is presumably a sacred prostitute of the sort that made Josiah forbid the bringing into the house of the Lord of 'the hire of a whore.' 'The price of a dog,' which goes with this prohibition in the same text (Deuteronomy, xxiii, i8), evidently means the hire of a Dog-priest or Sodomite: both fees were devoted to temple funds in related Syrian cults.

Yet here too, Graves is following in a tradition of comparative anthropology and iconography which dates back to the mid-nine- teenth century. Yes, counter his detractors, but Graves is an amateur riding rough-shod in fields of study which demand life-long training and extreme precision.

In actual fact, the image of Jesus which emerges from Graves' re-valuations is not as startling as might be expected. Essentially, Graves is seeking to make sense of the manifold contradictions

362 ROBERT GRAVES

between the four Gospels, of demonstrably obscure and distorted texts and of gaps in the Jesus narratives which scholars have been aware of and have sought to fill since Renan's celebrated Life of Jesus in I863. According to Graves, the difficulties arose because the Greek-speaking evangelists had only a limited knowledge of Jewish institutions and lore (in which Christ Himself and Christ's vocabulary are steeped) and because the Gentile Christians of the mid-second century "wanted, for political as well as doctrinal reasons, to dissociate themselves from the Jews." The villain in the Gravesian piece is Paul (and it is worth noting that Graves' detestation of the Apostle appears in his very first volume of poems in I9I6). To satisfy his own rancorous ambitions and to break away from Mosaic Judaism, St. Paul-according to Graves- twisted and falsified the teachings of the Master. This view of Pauline doctrine is, in fact, an extreme version of an hypothesis advanced by many distinguished scholars. It is very difficult to find anything in Jesus's sayings which would justify the creation of a new religion or the extension of the Law to non-Jews. Start- ing from this point, it has frequently been maintained that the true founder of modern Christianity and the man who sought to fuse Hebraic with Greek elements was Paul.

The Gravesian Jesus is a human being, perhaps the son of Antipater and thus heir to the Herodian throne. As "collated" and glossed in The Nazarene Gospel Restored, His views are close to those of the apocalyptic Pharisees who believed that the day of the Messiah was near. On certain crucial sayings, such as the puzzling injunction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, Graves' analysis casts fresh and challenging light. Principally, Graves believes that it is blasphemous nonsense to make it appear as if Jesus considered Himself a God or was so regarded by His early disciples. "His title 'Son of God' was an ancient religious one, acquired at the Coronation." This Coronation-a fierce Kenite ritual-is depicted in King Jesus.

In Graves' opinion, the crucifixion was caused by Roman

GEORGE STEINER 363

fears of Messianic nationalism and by Herod the Great's enmity toward a wandering teacher who had uttered dangerous doctrine in Transjordania. Graves and his collaborator, Joshua Podro, marshal a mass of evidence to show that the New Testament's account of Jesus's condemnation by the Jews is a tissue of contra- dictions and makes no sense whatever in the light of Judaic law and practice. On many of these points Graves has not yet been satisfactorily refuted and as eminent an authority as Reinhold Niebulhr has described The Nazarene Gospel Restored as "a work of careful scholarship."

Where Graves does become rather more hair-raising is in his account of Christ's "life" after the crucifixion. Founding his case on a passage in the Roman historian Suetonius, on a letter written by St. Ignatius to the Smyrnaeans, and on those texts in the Acts and Epistles which could be construed to mean that Jesus re-appeared in the flesh, Graves argues that He survived the cross, spent some time in Rome and finally died perhaps at Srinagar in Kashmir where ancient tradition points to His tomb. Jesus in Rome impresses one through its lucid and modest tone. Once again, the scholarship has an unmistakable Gravesian flair. What can one do but delight in a writer who refers to a Greek text which "is a late translation from the still extant Syriac, itself apparently a very free treatment of a lost Greek original, which we know from a reliable Byzantine document, Nicephorus's Stichometry, to have been a good deal shorter"? The medical evidence" for Jesus's survival derives from a learned study by a

British surgeon and from the fact a comparable survival was recorded by the historian Josephus. But above all it reflects Graves' memories of his own "death" and resurrection on the western front. Moreover, when Graves concludes that "'The knowledge is with God'" he has stolen a long march on his reviewers!

As one looks back over the complex, profoundly original and ever-besieged citadel of Gravesian scholarship-in literature, anthropology, myth and religion-an irreverent thought steals

364 ROBERT GRAVES

into one's mind. Does Graves take it all quite as seriously as he would have us suppose? He has said of himself that he is "more Irish than the Irish themselves." Surely there is in all his learned work something of the Irish genius for elaborate, immensely erudite and laboured wit, for the tall tale spun out at great length and with all the devices of pedantic seriousness. Take the follow- ing paragraph from the appendix to King Jesus:

The mystical meanings here given to the Golden Calf and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom are deduced largely from the remnants of Gnostic, ultimately Essene, secret lore preserved in Calder's Hearings of the Scholars and other miscellanies of ancient Irish poetic doctrine, and in the thirteenth-century Welsh Llyfr Coch o Hergest; and they yield their full sense only in the light of Babylonian astrology, Talmudic speculation, the liturgy of the Ethiopian Church, the homilies of Clement of Alexandria, the religious essays of Plutarch and recent studies in Bronze Age archaeology.

I know of only two other men-two Irishmen of genius-who could have written that-Swift and Joyce. Neither was above pull- ing academics and pedants, leg-first, into some vastly serious hoax. I do not suggest that Graves is not persuaded of the truth of the main ideas put forward in The Greek Myths and the books on Christ. I do suggest that there is cunning laughter in the way in which he presents his learning and that he shares a profoundly Irish joy in championing the implausible. As he sends his re- viewers and readers from a lost Gnostic gospel, The Descent of Mary, to the onager-cult of Set-Typhon and the mythographers Hyginus, Origen and Philo Byblius, the ripple of amusement that passes through his style is unmistakable. Majorca may be Graves' kingdom, but it does seem to be haunted by the Bishop of Limerick.

This has been a cursory and obviously inadequate preface to aspects of the seemingly scattered, and yet essentially united, genius of Robert Graves. It was written in the fear that Mr. Graves would find things in it that he will eloquently deny or correct (he

GEORGE STEINER 365

has since done so with vehement protest); and in the hope that more and more readers shall turn to one of the most enthralling writers of our age. What is certain is that by the time this essay appears half a dozen new titles will have been added to the Grave- sian shelf, for with him creation incessantly outstrips the critic. It is true that Graves' achievement has yet to receive it full measure of international recognition (the Nobel Prize has been awarded to a dozen writers with less claims to it). But I dare say this does not trouble him. The pleasure Graves has taken in the multitudinous vitality of his craft does not lie in other men's bestowal. As he tells us in one of the most accomplished short poems written in Eng- lish since Landor:

You learned Lear's Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote; You learned Pope's Iliad by rote, not heart. These terms should be distinguished if you quote My verses, children-keep them poles apart And call that man a liar who says I wrote All that I wrote in love for love of art.