Graves & Scholars

THE CROWNING PRIVILEGE (311 pp.)--Robert Graves--Doubleday ($5).

Ask a top prizefighter who his toughest opponents were, and he generally mentions a couple of obscure tankers. His peers he dismisses with an evasive shrug. The same weakness can apply to poets. At 60, Robert Graves has come to be recognized as one of the best English poets alive. In this collection of essays and lectures, he faintly praises some minor contemporaries, roundly damns the champs. Some dismissals:

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS: "Yeats's father once confided to my father: 'Willie has found a very profitable little bypath in poetry'; and this was fair enough."

EZRA POUND: "Remove the layers and layers of cloacinal ranting, snook-cocking, pseudo-professorial jargon and double-talk from Pound's verse, and what remains? Longfellow's plump, soft, ill-at-ease grandnephew remains!"

T. S. ELIOT: "What I like most about Eliot is that though one of his two hearts, the poetic one, has died and been given a separate funeral . . . he continues to visit the grave wistfully, and lay flowers on it."

W. H. AUDEN: "Auden's is now the prescribed period style of the fifties, compounded of all the personal styles available ; but he no longer borrows whole lines, as for his first volumes, or even half-lines. It is a word here, a rhythm there, a rhetorical trope, a simile, an ingenious rhyme, a classical reference, a metrical arrangement."

DYLAN THOMAS: "He himself never pretended to be anything more than a young dog--witty, naughty, charming, irresponsible and impenitent. But he did give his radio-audience what they wanted."

To an anticipated objection that the critics cannot all be mistaken about Yeats,

Pound & Co., Graves retorts: "Why can't all the critics be wrong? Who decides on this year's skirt-length? Not the women themselves, but one or two clever man-milliners in the Rue de la Paix. Similar man-milliners control the fashions in poetry. There will always be a skirt-length."

Snipping gleefully at skirt-lengths of the past, Graves maintains that "the whole period between, say, Marvell and Blake was poetically barren." The two greats of the period, Dryden and Pope, he mercilessly unwigs: "[Dryden] earned the doubtful glory of having found English poetry brick and left it marble--native brick, imported marble." And Pope was a "sedulous ape." The 19th century fares little better. Wordsworth, according to Graves, "disowned and betrayed his Muse. Tennyson never had one, except Arthur Hallam, and a Muse does not wear whiskers."

Graves's rules for deserving well of the Muse are many and various, but they boil down to three: be good, be honest, and be self-sufficient.

"I have never been able to understand the contention that a poet's life is irrelevant to his work ... If it means that a poet may be heartless or insincere or grasping in his personal relations and yet write true poems, I disagree wholeheartedly . . . Though it may be argued that no acceptable code of sexual morals can be laid down for the poet, I am convinced that deception, cruelty, meanness, or any violation of a woman's dignity are abhorrent to the Goddess.

"Poets have aimed at two kinds of poetic fame: the first, contemporary fame, is suspect because it is commonly acquired by writing for the public, or for the representatives of the public, rather than for the Muse--that is to say for poetic necessity. The second, posthumous fame, is irrelevant . . . Any money paid for a poem should, I believe, be regarded as . . . an unexpected legacy from a distant relative, whose favor one has not courted and whose death one has not anticipated."

What does Graves himself do for money? The answer is that he supports himself by writing historical novels and think pieces, such as the ones in this book. But if Graves's poems are too erudite and hard to appeal to a wide circle of readers, his think-pieces are too erudite and soft. Having a well-stocked mind, an even better-stocked library, and the habit of busy research, he serves up mountainous, cold hors d'oeuvres of odd information, often without acknowledgment to their source. Yet he can be stunningly original on occasion, producing theories that are often implausible, but always provocative. For instance, he describes King Arthur as "a counter-Christ, with twelve knights of the Round Table to suggest the Twelve Apostles, and with a Second Coming." As usual, Graves supports this notion with a scarcely more tenable one, couched in tones of utter assurance: "Jesus's grave warning that 'he who lives by the sword shall perish by the sword' was read as a joyful reassurance to the true knight that if he always observed the code of chivalry he would die gloriously in battle . . ."

But these are the crotchets of an intense and sometimes magnificent old penman. At his best, in novels, essays and poems alike, Graves can shake and bend the mind as a fresh wind bends the trees.

Unlike the poets he tilts at, Graves may never become a monument. That is all right with him. "To evoke posterity," he has written, "is to weep on your own grave . . ."

And the punishment is fixed:

To be found fully ancestral,

To be cast in bronze for a city square,

To dribble green in times of rain

And stain the pedestal,

*A close friend, engaged to the poet's sister, whose death at 22 inspired In Memoriam.

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