Legacy of a Cranky Colossus

By Paul Gray

Within days of his 21st birthday, the Times of London printed a notice of his death. Fortunately, the whole thing was a mistake. The eight wounds that Robert Graves suffered in July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme in France were serious but not fatal. When the time finally came, last week, for obituaries in earnest, Graves had lived for an additional 69 years. The man who might have been remembered, along with Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, as a bright young British poet snuffed out by war instead hammered himself into a cranky colossus of 20th century literature. His legacy, dispersed through some 140 books and decades of arguments and controversy, should take years to evaluate. The impression that several eras died along with Graves is immediate and probably true.

He was the last of the World War I poets, and the title poem of Over the Brazier (1916), his first book of verse, foresaw the Lost Generation: "What life to lead and where to go/ After the War, after the War?" Critics in the early 1920s classed and anthologized Graves as a Georgian poet. In the late 1920s, his close analysis of a Shakespeare sonnet impressed Critic William Empson and led, indirectly, to the textual scrutinies of the New Criticism of the 1940s and '50s.

Graves' vigor and longevity made a shambles of all convenient categories, just as his flamboyant personality came to seem almost mythic. His favorite form of conversation was the extended monologue. Savagely contemptuous when crossed, he could be surprisingly meek and gentle with friends. He also worked tirelessly. "Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion," he wrote in 1948, but he never expected this love to pay his bills. They were often considerable. Graves married twice and had eight children. He also spent more than a decade, between wives, with the American poet Laura Riding, who was first his lover and later his literary collaborator. He kept the wolf from his many doors by writing for money. In six weeks he churned out Lawrence and the Arabs (1927), a biography of his friend T.E. Lawrence that was frankly designed to sell. It did. His own autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929), was more than a parting shot at an England he could no longer abide. Graves intended the book to stir outrage and sales, and he succeeded. Settled in splendid self-exile on the Spanish island of Majorca, he countered mounting debts by writing the historical novel I, Claudius (1934).

Graves dismissed such work as the price he had to pay to write poetry: "Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat." Ironically, he was a livelier and in some ways more interesting writer when he catered to public tastes. Goodbye to All That still crackles with malice and the vivid absurdities of trench warfare. I, Claudius, the imaginary memoir of a Roman emperor whom historians had largely derided or ignored, manages to be both intelligent and spellbinding.

Graves' poetry was more austere and subdued. He took no part in the stylistic revolution launched by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His poems stubbornly scanned and usually rhymed. In The White Goddess (1948), he built a huge edifice of eccentric scholarship to prove a personal point: poetry arose in the worship of the Ur-Female and could only be brought back to life by returning to this adoration. That was his lifelong mission, and his love poems praised both joy and sorrow: "Take your delight in momentariness,/ Walk between dark and dark--a shining space/ With the grave's narrowness, though not its peace." Robert Graves was the last Romantic.