← In Our Time
In Our Time
Robert Graves
00:54:53
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the fine poet of love and war and author of I, Claudius.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
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Melvin Bragg
BBC Sounds Music.
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Paul Apray
Radio Podcasts this is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Robert Graves, 1895-1985, was one of the finest poets of the 20th century. He was to declare that from the age of 15 poetry had been his ruling passion and that he lived his life according to poetic principles, writing in prose only to pay the bills. Yet it's for his prose that he is most famous today, including I Claudius, his brilliant account of the debauchery of imperial Rome and Goodbye to all that, the unforgettable memoir of his early life in which he was so badly wounded at the Somme that the Times listed him as dead. We me to discuss Robert Graves are Paula Pray, Emeritus professor of Modern Literature at the University of Hampton, London Fran Brereton, professor of Modern Poetry at Queen's University Belfast and Bob Davis, professor of Religious and Cultural Education at the University of Glasgow. Bob Graves was born in Wimbledon in South West London. Can you tell us something about his life as a child?
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Fran Brereton
Well, Robert's born in 1895 into a family that instantly has a kind of wow factor when you cross over the threshold of that Wimbledon home. That's both the Gravese descent and the Von Ranks. His father, Alfred percival graves, is 49 when Robert is born, and Robert is a child of his second large family as he's a widower who has remarried. The Graves lineage is a distinguished pedigree of Anglo Irish bishops, clergy, medical people, lawyers, men and women of letters. And Alfred Percival himself is a significant member. Alfred is a strong advocate and supporter of the Gaelic revival in Ireland. He is a strong supporter of Celtic studies as it's emerging and a popularizer of these ideas in ways that his son would later come to question. A popularizer of these through popular song and tavern lyrics and recorded music. The other side of the family is Amy von Rank, who comes from the very distinguished lineage of the von Rank family in Germany, the chief representative of which is Leopold von Rank, the founder of the modern historical method and someone who bequeaths to this family a strong interest in the past in conducting historical studies with documentary history, accuracy, sources and so on. And I would say that both of these traditions, the Irish imaginative tradition and the Germanic scholarly tradition, feed into Robert's life immediately.
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Paul Apray
What do we know about his school days?
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Fran Brereton
His school days are in key respects typical of the upper middle classes of his time. He has, remember, come out of an environment that's very bookish and very literary. So he's apt for school academically, but he seems to find the assortment of prep schools that his family send him to a bit stop, start. And it's only really when there is the corridor towards Charterhouse that he starts to focus on his studies in a more concentrated way. While he's there, many of these factors do become very salient. He has registered as Robert von rankgraves at a time when tensions between Britain and Germany are sharpening in the run up to the First World War, obviously.
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Paul Apray
Also, what do we know what he did at school, what he was like as a schoolboy.
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Fran Brereton
He is a quick learner. He is attracted to the classics. He is growing physically. This becomes important later in his Charterhouse career. So he's up to sports and athleticism.
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Paul Apray
He became a good boxer, didn't he?
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Fran Brereton
Does become a good boxer. And this of course is one of the methods by which one deals with anti German bullying as well as other aspects that are renowned in the public school culture of the time.
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Paul Apray
Thank you very much. Paul. Paul Apray. He dedicated himself to poetry. What was his early poetry like?
- [05:58]
Bob Davis
I think he started writing really very young, you know, 12, 13. I think he started writing poems. And I think the thing to think about Robert, he's, you know, here's somebody who's half German, as we hear, half Irish. He lived most of his life in Spain, but I think he's a quintessentially British Poet. And I think that began right at the beginning. He was steeped in English and Welsh folk songs. He had a huge store of those, and he remembered those right through his life. He was deeply attached to English and Scottish ballads, the more magical and the mysterious ones, like Lightweight Dirge and Thoma Bedlam or Scurrilous ones. He liked those, and he was drawn very much into that. And that's what fed the early poems. They didn't teach English literature at Charterhouse, it was only classical literature. So poetry was home, not school. And his father had a great library, and he was free. He sort of delved around there and he came up with all sorts of interesting attachments during that time.
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Paul Apray
So the early.
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Bob Davis
Well, he must have been the only schoolboy poet who had a deep connection to John Skelton, the Tudor poet who wrote during the period of Henry VII and Henry viii. And he's imitating Skelton from the very beginning. Skelton has these incredible, very short lines, two stresses, bang, bang, each line, and a single rhyme that just goes on, tumbles down the page, rhyme, rhyme, rhyme, and then it breaks like a punchline of a joke. And. And you see Graves using that. In his very first collection, he has a poem called In Spite, which is pure Skill Tonics.
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Paul Apray
When. What age was he? What was his first collection?
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Bob Davis
It was over the Brazier, and that was published in 1916, and that was published by Harold Monroe at the Poetry Bookshop. So a great stamp of approval.
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Paul Apray
Was that to do with connections or to do with quality?
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Bob Davis
Both, I think, because he sent a single poem to Eddie Marsh, who was the editor of the Georgian poetry anthologies, which sold, I think, in the hundreds of thousands. They were very popular. Marsh very kindly wrote back, but didn't hold back. He told Graves that his technique was obsolete and that the poem was full of what he called Bugaboo, by which I think he means just nonsense. And Graves always had a love of nonsense in his poems and fun. And Graves wrote back saying that, blamed it on his father's love of Tennyson, and that he vowed he would root out all these obnoxious Victorianisms. And so the first collection is, I think, you would market for its energy and its sense of freedom. You can feel bits of Keats in there, early Keats, playful Keats, Christina Rossetti, The Goblin Market. That's where he's coming from.
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Paul Apray
Almost as soon as the war began, he signed up for it, even though he was 18, 19. He said that's what a gentleman had to do.
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Bob Davis
Well, he was lucky he was fortunate in the sense that he was given a commission because he went to a public school for no other reason. And so he had a different experience than, say, somebody like Isaac Rosenberg or Ivor Gurney. So he went out as a second lieutenant, and I think he was shocked by the coldness of the reception he received when he got to the front, because he joined a regular battalion, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and they had very strict procedures. And because he had this German middle name, he was Robert von Ranker Graves. And there was a spy at the time called Karl Ranke who was arrested. And, you know, Robert didn't go. You know, he wasn't Napoleon going to the war with a field marshal's baton in his knapsack. He had a copy of Nietzsche's poems in French. So that was suspicious. You know, what is he? You know, you speak a foreign language and you're reading poetry. His best friend was called Siegfried. So word was put around that he was a spy and people were very suspicious and hostile towards him.
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Paul Apray
He came through partly perhaps, because he was a good boxer, but why else?
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Bob Davis
The first night he got to the trenches as a young wart, as they would have called him, a second lieutenant, the first thing he did was be sent out for a night patrol of no Man's Land. And that was the test. And he did extremely well in that first test. And I think that sort of courage and resilience that he showed brought him an acceptance.
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Paul Apray
By all accounts, he was a good officer.
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Bob Davis
I think he was a good officer. He cared for his men. He was deeply attached to regimental tradition. And, you know, he writes home saying, curiously, I'm not scared, but at one point he was drinking a bottle of whiskey a day in the trenches to keep him going.
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Paul Apray
Thank you, Fran. Fran Breton, who says he was homoerotic at school, and then it carried on into the war. Can you just talk a bit about that?
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Melvin Bragg
Yeah, I think we can go back to something Bob mentioned about his upbringing, and I would probably add to that the very strong influence of his mother, Amy Graves was also very puritanical influence. So he's precipitated from that and from a deeply religious upbringing into the public school system, where a homoerotic politics is always at work, sometimes genuine, sometimes power play, quite a complicated thing in itself. Grace falls in love at Charterhouse. He falls in love with George Johnston, who is three years younger than him. It is a friendship that got him into trouble more than once. It was looked at askance by the authorities for very obvious reasons. But what Graves argued is that that friendship was. Retrospectively, he says it was both chaste and sentimental, that absolutely he loved him, was in love with him, I think it would be fair to say. But it was no more than that. It was a deeply moral friendship. And he made that argument very convincingly to his housemaster and to his headmaster. And he remained attached to Peter, as he's known, he features in Goodbye to All that as the character called Dick. He remained attached to him, but became disillusioned during the war when he began to hear rumors that he was not as chaste as Graves had thought him. So he's thinking of this as it is a homoerotic friendship, but it is actually quite deliberately, a very pure friendship. It is not a sexual one. Then, of course, he meets in the trenches, Siegfried, Sassoon, David Thomas. There is love there. Absolutely. I think Sassoon was certainly in love with Graves. Graves loved Sassoon, but again, it didn't go. Despite some of the phrasing of the poems, it's really clear from what Graves is writing that this is an ideal of male friendship and love that has its limits, that he won't be drawn beyond that into actually a homosexual relationship, and to my knowledge, never was. But then there is a sort of turn in about 1916 where disillusioned, in a sense, with what he hears about Peter's not being so innocent, falling in love with a pretty probationer nurse when he's on leave after being wounded at the Somme. His thoughts take, I suppose, a more clearly heterosexual turn. And you can see that in the poetry. So there are really beautiful war poems which are also love poems. Among them the one for David Thomas, where not dead. And he talks about him, as you know, that he is simple, happy, strong. And that poem is erotic. Caressingly, I stroke rough bark of the friendly oak. But it never goes beyond that kind of friendship and eroticism. And the same with the poem for Sassoon. The two fusiliers show me two as bound as we are by blood and suffering that. But then he begins to write love poetry, which is rather different. He meets Nancy Nicholson, very pretty, very tomboyish, very young. She is the age of the century. She's only 16 when he first meets her, and he marries her very quickly. He marries her when she's 18 years old and he's 22. He's clear that they were sexually both utterly innocent virgins on the wedding night, which was a little awkward. And he always talks about being raised with this kind of sexual embarrassment that he struggled to overcome and then really, with Nancy begins a stream of love poetry that is the hallmark, really, of his poetic career. That changes according to what is a very varied and complicated love life from 1918 thereafter.
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Paul Apray
Out of this came a lot of things, but out of this came the book Goodbye to All that. How did the publication of that book affect Graves?
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Melvin Bragg
Yeah, it's interesting because part of what I'm saying about his both sexual embarrassment, earlier experiences, desire to overcome them, marriage to Nancy, all of that is the first part of the book. You know, it's the very early history. So he was quite surprised when people called it a war book. He had written an autobiography of everything in a sense, up to that point. But it comes out of a change in the dynamic of the relationship with Nancy. So between 1918 and 1925, first of all, they have four children, which is very difficult to grapple with. Then in 1925, he starts writing to the American poet Laura Riding. She comes over and joins them in January 1926 and becomes part of that unit. The duo becomes a trio. And Graves is in love with Riding. She changes the way he writes, she changes the way he thinks. And in a very difficult and complicated social circle also involving the Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs, Laura Riding attempts suicide in London in 1929. Famously, she jumps out of the fourth floor window, is catastrophically injured. He talks about. The surgeon says it is rare to see the spine at right angles like this. And after that has happened, Nancy, his wife, and Geoffrey Phibbs don't quite go off into the sunset, but they form a couple, and Laura and Robert plan to leave England and eventually go to Majorca. Now, between Laura's fall and their departure from England is when he writes Goodbye to All that. It's written at enormous speed, under enormous pressure, with an absolutely desperate need for money. And it blazes with that kind of pressure and excitement. In a way, he tells that story largely leaving Laura out, with the exception of an epilogue, which is a very devoted love letter to Laura Riding. One of the worst things I think Graves does in his career actually is rewrite Goodbye to All that, because everybody knows the book, but everybody knows what he rewrote in 1957 much more than they know what he did in 1929. And in 1929, Love for Laura is the framing of the book, and it's the future possibility.
- [16:27]
Paul Apray
Thank you, Bob. Can we develop that about, you think he owed to his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, and then to Laura Riding?
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Fran Brereton
I think one of the things we would be recognizing is that the Graves who emerges out of the war and into that first marriage, is deeply traumatized by the experiences he's had. The word he uses is the First World War neurasthenia. And this plagues him for the decade after his discharge from the army. What Nancy brings, really, it seems to me, in that stage is healing, a kind of consolation. Although the poetry is marked by great swings of emotion from a kind of almost consolatory embrace of the natural landscape, it's still also plagued by memory. Ghosts of the dead. He can't answer a telephone. He can't go in a motor car. He walks through the landscape, and sometimes he's reconnoitering it to see how it would be taken as an object of military targeting. The war is constantly present. But somehow, in that relationship with Nancy, which in many respects, in my view, recapitulates the home life in Wimbledon, family, children, domesticity, he finds a kind of rest from those conflicts.
- [17:54]
Paul Apray
And what about Laura Riding, the much more dramatic? Well, she was a poet and writer herself.
- [17:59]
Fran Brereton
She is a poet. She's an American poet in the orbit of John Crow, Ransom, Alan Tate, the agrarian literary movement which did launch the careers of several women. If Nancy brings consolation, then Laura brings transformation. And it's not always a transformation that Graves finds any easier than any of his other traumas. At the level of literature, there's no doubt that their partnership mutually enriched the poetry each of them was producing. Graves finds ways in his language to make his love lyric much more erotic, much more physical and embodied. At the same time, he probes his own troubled masculinity in a much more candid and honest way. The price paid for this, of course, is the demands that Laura Riding makes as a woman of enormous charisma, presence, need, demand. She calls herself, to Graves, the finality. She is, in some sense the culmination of a literary, poetic and spiritual experience that any man who comes near her must serve. So it's both an inspiration to his verse and also a kind of punishment.
- [19:26]
Paul Apray
Thank you very much, Paul. He wrote over a thousand poems, and among them were a great number of poems about the war, some of them in recollection. What do you think his strengths were as a war poet?
- [19:38]
Bob Davis
Yeah, war and love, I guess, were the two subjects, and they often get intermingled because I think, you know, like Fran was saying, the best of his war poems written during the war, probably really love poems to people who were with him in the trenches, to his friend David and to Siegfried Sassoon. There were some early, early poems in the war where he Was sort of really quite. Well, Sassoon was very shocked by when he. When Graves showed him his poem, Sassoon wrote to Eddie Marsh, the editor of George Benjamin, saying, war shouldn't be written about so realistically. Of course, he changed his tune pretty quickly, but Graves started by writing these very realistic, rather gory poems. But he moved during the war to more love poems, and then after he was wounded at the Somme, he really didn't want to write about the war at all. So he wrote about other things. He wrote about childhood, the English countryside. I think probably his best war poem was the last one he wrote, which was in the early 1940s, was called Last Day of Leave. And that's pure Thomas Hardy. I mean, I think it's actually a rewriting of one of the Emma poems by Hardy, where the picnic was. He returns then to being in the war and being on leave and being together with a group of friends and five of them. Yeah, all five. Yes. And I think that is an extraordinary, moving poem. They go up on the hills above Harlech and they sit around the lily lake and they're all in love, Somebody with somebody else. And then he says, but when the sun rolled down level with us Four pairs of eyes sought mine as if appealing for a blind fate aversive afterward do you remember the lily lake? We were all there, all five of us in love, not one yet Killed, widowed or broken hearted.
- [21:24]
Paul Apray
Yes, that's very, like, hearty, isn't it? Especially finding the little lake up the mountain and so on. Fran, in 1934, he wrote I, Claudius, which is about the debauchery at the heart and every limb of the Roman Empire, which was a tremendous success. He sped through it. He wrote his prose at a speed that is unimaginable, really. And it became a tremendous hit, and it still is. People say it's one of the greatest historical novels ever written. What do you think of it?
- [21:54]
Melvin Bragg
Well, it's wonderful. It's how I came to graves. It's how many people came to graves, I think, and some on the back of the wonderful dramatization they did of it, some because the novel was a bestseller really from the start. He wrote to make money from novels. That one really followed through. One of the best things about it, I think, is the voice. It's the distinctiveness of Claudius's voice. I love the stammer. Claudius is a little bit gravesian. He's kind of crooked. He's slightly limping slightly. And Graves talks about himself in Goodbye to All that as an Assemblage of things that don't quite fit together. One eyebrow is higher than the other and so forth. And he's got double jointed pelvis and very hairy as well. Graves had a lot of hair. And of course the opening of I, Claudius has that wonderful series of verses that tells the history of the Claudian family through basically how hairy they were or weren't. And Claudius is a hairy Claudian, obviously, like Robert himself. So the voice is perfect and it's pitch perfect. And he's mischievous in it too, because when he published Good by to all that, he was absolutely crucified for its inaccuracies, for not checking his facts and dates. And he was very defensive of that and said, well, you know, you have to have a high proportion of error if this is going to be in any way true to the experience of subjective recall. When it comes to I Claudius. One of the first things that novel is doing is Claudius is telling us why, you can trust me, you can absolutely trust me. But of course we can't as well. He's too much of a kind of Gravesian historian to be trustworthy. The other, I suppose, wonderful thing about it is that Graves sense of being in ancient Rome is as if he were walking the familiar streets of his own backyard. The Scottish poet Alasdair Reid once said that listening to Graves talk about the classics, he felt as if he were listening to somebody speaking from the Forum. That Graves was capable of saying, to get from A to B you would take the second right and then turn left and there was a shortcut. So he's so immersed in that world, he enacts it beautifully for us as well.
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Paul Apray
So we come to you, Bob, to develop it. In one way he wrote very. He said to have written every day, took a short break in the middle of the day for a swim or a lunch, and he wrote with all the Oxford dictionaries in front of him so he could check any word he wanted at any time and that he wrote at top speed. How did all these things, Mel?
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Fran Brereton
I think they come together in actually a very sophisticated philosophy of historical writing. It's no accident that many of the protagonists and narrators in these novels, especially Claudius, but not confined to Claudius, have this resemblance to Graves himself. There's that von Rankian sense of historical accuracy. One must go to the sources and not deviate from the sources. But how does one get there, especially in a fictional universe? I would describe it almost like a kind of martial art or a contemplative practice. He gathers all this Material that you've correctly referenced. He immerses himself in it. And then he uses a kind of psychological method, some of which I think was perfected from out of the war and the healing processes after the war with W.H.R. rivers, the psychologist, to resolve conflicts, to get back inside the minds of those who has a phrase, analytic mimesis. So it is an imitation of the past by almost, in some. Almost metaphysical sense, going back to the past. And interestingly, of course, one of the things that is deliberated in I, Claudius itself is which histories can we trust? Claudius knows he's writing for an audience that will read this long after he has gone. But he's also hoping that the actions he's performing as emperor will bring down the imperial system by having a succession of dysfunctional emperors that will lead to the recall of the Republic.
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Paul Apray
Paul. Paul Apres Graves was a poet of love as much as. Perhaps even more than anything else, often inspired by his second wife, Beryl Hodge. Can we have a few lines from one of those short poems?
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Bob Davis
I would say those poems to Beryl, written in the end of the 30s and 40s and 50s, they are the core of his work. And snow is a big thing. So he writes two poems quite close together. One at the end of his time with Laura, where he likened Laura to snow. And she's cold, but you can't really look at it. She's too dazzling. And it blankets the land in this sort of carpet of cold. Then he writes a poem about snow with Beryl. And you can see the gentleness, the peacefulness that is in the poems to Beryl that are so distinctive. So this is the poem she tells her love while half asleep. She tells her love while half asleep in the dark hours with half words whispered low as earth stirs in her winter sleep and puts out grass and flowers despite the snow. Despite the falling snow.
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Paul Apray
That is wonderful, isn't it?
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Bob Davis
Yeah, it's a pitch perfect lyric.
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Paul Apray
Yeah.
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Bob Davis
And time with Laura was quite an unhappy one. For all her brilliance as a poet, she was quite coercive and controlling, and it brought him to the edge of a breakdown. It was Beryl who picked up the pieces at the end of that.
- [27:42]
Paul Apray
Fran, can we stay on this working pattern for a while? Because it is fascinating for any writer, but can you just talk a little bit more about. I came across Graves on television. The first arts program I ever saw was Monitor the Monitor, which Graves it. And he wrote about the butterfly, the cabbage white. Honestly, do you see a flight? That's right.
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Melvin Bragg
Will never. Now it Is too late master the art of flying straight yet has, who knows so well as I, a just sense of how not to fly. It's very grave. Sin lurches here and here by guests and God and hope and hopelessness. It's one of my favorite poems because I think it says something about poetic method. Method in a kind of madness as well. Graves is so difficult to get to grips with because of the sheer scale we've talked about, the speed at which he writes, that he could draft 70,000 words in a matter of weeks, that he would incubate two or three books at once. So if you think about a writing career that spans over half a century and 140 plus books in that time. So sometimes he is bringing out two or three books a year. Poetry, prose fiction, eclectic kind of volumes that mix up essays, poems and so forth. He does a huge amount of collaborative work. He's doing translations all the time. And he revises and revises habitually as if nothing is ever finished. I said earlier it troubles me that he rewrote Goodbye to all that, but he does that to everything in a way. Poems can go through 30 or 40 drafts. Poems that were written, say 19, 18, 19 initially for Nancy will be reworked so that they appear to be about something else. He's always telling his own story over and over again. And he's always self mythologizing that story through the way he rewrites himself. And I found one of the ways to kind of get a handle on him is to see Graves life according to patterns that he himself starts to see. You know, there is his symbolic death on the psalm that you mentioned in 1916. There is the symbolic goodbye to all that in 1929. There's the break with Laura and what is really the new life with Beryl Graves that sustains him through to the end of his life. And I agree with Paul. The love lyrics written between 38 and 45 are flawless. They're some of the most beautiful poems we have in English.
- [30:13]
Paul Apray
With this rewriting, did you always make it better?
- [30:17]
Melvin Bragg
No, I'm saying that very decidedly. In some cases, yes. There's rewriting and rewriting. Where he's written at speed, sometimes the prose can be a bit sloppy. So if he sees repeated words where he could make the style tighter. Absolutely. That's one kind of rewriting, which is really just editing. There is another kind of rewriting, which is to change a poem, which is to say its historical occasion. Whatever generates it can be reworked according to a different perspective. Probably. I incline to Think that when the poem is published, it belongs to its readers as well as to its author. And you cannot revisit that moment of composition. You've made it into a different poem. But I think it's very much tied up with Graves sense of himself as writing outside history, freed from the stream of time. And that is the consequence of trauma as well. So at the end of the.
- [31:13]
Paul Apray
What do you mean, the consequence of trauma?
- [31:14]
Melvin Bragg
So the First World War trauma, which Bob has talked about, that left him in a state of what we've now called Chronic PTSD through the 1920s, culminates in the events of 29. And one of the ways he copes with that, in a sense, is to say, I will no longer be part of that world in all its manifestations. I no longer want to be part of that industrial world. I don't want to be bound by clock time. I want to work according to natural cycles and rhythms. And by 1940, has basically said, I am not swimming against the stream of time anymore. I have lifted myself out of it. You can then rewrite your poems from any perspective. They are true to his spiritual moment at the time of changing them makes it very difficult for a reader.
- [32:02]
Paul Apray
The massive book the White Goddess, which she sped through talking about the muse, talking, when you tell everybody what it's talking about, it is enormous. It is very influential to other people, Particularly, say, to Ted Hughes, for instance.
- [32:15]
Fran Brereton
Absolutely, yes.
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Paul Apray
Way you go.
- [32:17]
Fran Brereton
Well, I think we see the elements that make up the White Goddess already in this conversation. First of all, it's deeply autobiographical. Secondly, it deals with and elevates this principle of the muse, this tradition in Western literature that goes back to the classics and reborn and courtly love and so on, where the muse is both poetic inspiration and a form of inspiration periodically embedded in certain individual women, basically. In women, yeah, in women, yes, yes, Almost exclusively in women. And of course, that raises doubts in our minds in the 21st century. But nevertheless, for Graves, when one adds to this mix, what I spoke of earlier, his devotion to the classics and that Celtic Irish inheritance about which he's a bit more ambivalent, but which has supplied his father's library with those ancient Celtic texts that mean so much in the White Goddess. Put these together and you have this book emerging as a kind of mythopoetic manifesto for poetry as a way of seeing the world. I would stress also the White Goddess, echoing Paul, is a moral book. It's a dissatisfaction with the way we live now and a call to live differently.
- [33:42]
Paul Apray
Fran, you undercommittee yes.
- [33:44]
Melvin Bragg
I'm interested in what you say is a mythopoetic method. There's a core kind of story to the White Goddess, which is one about sacrifice, and that probably relates back to what we were saying about war trauma. So that he sees an archetypal pattern wherein there is a struggle from the outgoing and incoming king, if you like, one of whom will be sacra sacrificed and the other will become the favored spouse of the goddess. And all of this, I think, is bound up with this idea of service in the First World War as well. And he talks about the idea of serving a goddess very much in the same terms that he talked about. The need to be a gentleman is redundant currency for Graves after 1929. He's very ironic about it, but he's still committed to an idea of sacrifice and service and I think remains so for the rest of his life. So it allows him to manifest some of that trauma. I think it allows him to cope with his son's death in the Second World War as well, because that is the added Graves lived through. He came back from the dead, David did not. And that's feeding into the point where the White Goddess is written. He started in 44 and it's finally published in 48. And he's very conscious of those kind of global events and the trauma of those events underlying the Celtic mythology.
- [34:59]
Paul Apray
Thank you. Paul Graves worked in Mallorca for much of his life. You worked for him in the 70s, I think it was. How did you find him?
- [35:06]
Bob Davis
A large and larger than life figure. If he walked into a room, he would be the center of attention, instant attention towards him. You would know he was around. It was a large personality because he'd gone to Deja in Mallorca in 1929 after Laura's suicide attempt. And they had to sort of get out of the country, really. He'd scandalized pretty much everybody he knew, broken up with friends and family, and because she was a foreigner, attempted suicide was a crime. So she left the country. They went to Paris and they asked Gertrude Stein where they should go. And she suggested Majorca. And she said, it's paradise if you can bear it. And it is paradise. It was paradise, unfortunately, brought their own hell with them. But you go to Baya, it's the mountains and the sea. Exactly the landscape that he had loved so much at Harlech. And it was still connected to the agrarian cycle, the olive harvest. And he developed a really deep affinity with the local people, built his own house there. Above all, it was cheap.
- [36:11]
Paul Apray
He was Quite outspoken, Fran, to use a polite word, about his contemporary poems, including some of people that you would regard, I presume, as great poets of their day. He slammed them quite ruthlessly.
- [36:24]
Melvin Bragg
He did. He did the Clark.
- [36:25]
Paul Apray
Can you give us one or two examples, just for the fun of it?
- [36:27]
Bob Davis
Yes.
- [36:28]
Melvin Bragg
He did the Clark Lectures in the early 50s, which mostly went fine. And then he gave one that was called these be your gods, O Israel, where he really turned on Yeats, Auden pound, Dylan Thomas, D.H. lawrence, Jared Manly, Hopkins. There were very few who escaped, let's put it that way.
- [36:50]
Paul Apray
What are you doing? Eliminating the opposition.
- [36:52]
Melvin Bragg
Well, that's very interesting because Graves always sort of proclaimed that I'm happy to be considered a minor poet. Well, that's all very well, but when you realize what his view of every major poet is, that's actually kind of rather more aggrandizing than it seems at the time. So he didn't make friends doing that. And the criticisms are not warranted. They're not fair. So I think that particularly was the lecture where he was seen to go, what's mischievous? What's actually just a little bit too malicious. But I like the fact that. Sorry, in a context where Yeats disliked so many of the war poets, you know, the boots on the other foot here, Graves could not stand him. He writes the whole of the White Goddess without referencing Yeats, who is the obvious precursor. And that tells you something about. I think it's too close to home as well, through his father, Alfred Percival Graves, because Graves himself is right out of that Anglo Irish stable. But nevertheless.
- [37:50]
Paul Apray
So was it anger?
- [37:51]
Melvin Bragg
Was it poetic judgment, mixture of the two? Laura Riding had also loathed someone like Yeats. I think they were unhappy about their misrepresentation. I think he was always unhappy that she wasn't sufficiently appreciated. He didn't necessarily feel his own work was fully understood.
- [38:10]
Paul Apray
That's a common thing with almost every writer who's walked the planet, isn't it?
- [38:14]
Melvin Bragg
So he blithely says, well, you know, I don't care. In a sense, you know, call me the fox who has lost his brush. I'm answerable to nobody. What I do is kind of service to the muse. That's my ruling passion. It has been since I was 15. And I'm not going to worry.
- [38:28]
Paul Apray
You want to come in, Bob?
- [38:30]
Fran Brereton
I would echo that down the other axis of building a canon of muse poets through history, and that involves the same kind of process of endorsement and rejection. So Hardy, yes. Keats, yes. Wordsworth, no. John Clare, yes.
- [38:50]
Paul Apray
Skelton how can you say Wordsworth?
- [38:51]
Fran Brereton
No, no, no, no. Wordsworth. Wordsworth is spurned by Graves. Back to John Skelton, who Paul was talking about. And Skelton is lined up against probably his darkest opponent, Milton. Graves has a lifelong antipathy to John Milton, and he writes a novel about this. He writes a lecture on it. And he actually sees Milton, along with Virgil, as the representative of precisely the same values of empire and patriarchy and domination that Claudius claims to be seeking to undermine as well.
- [39:32]
Melvin Bragg
The irony, I have to say, the irony in all this is that opposing a certain kind of patriarchy and proposing in the White Goddess an all powerful female goddess is how profoundly disempowering that is for any actual women. You know, woman is muse or she is nothing. He ends up saying, you know, she is the perpetual other women. And I think it's interesting that the life he chose to live in Dea, where Paul was saying the center of every room, is quite a patriarchal one too. You know, he is very much the generous head of the family figure who looked after everybody around him. And whatever else he may say about the all powerful feminine principles, in the end that mythology serves the male poet. And you mentioned its influence on Ted Hughes, who of course read it in the early 50s, never really recovered and wrote his own kind of Shakespeare and the goddess and complete being later. But I see the line of influence from that going down a distinctly male romantic line into people like Heaney as well.
- [40:38]
Paul Apray
Sorry, Heaney and Longley.
- [40:40]
Melvin Bragg
And on it went more so Heaney. John Montagu as well. Ted Hughes. Yeah.
- [40:44]
Paul Apray
You want to say something?
- [40:45]
Bob Davis
Yeah, but I think Fran's got a good point there. But I think that what people like Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney took from that book was this possibility of fusing the mythological and the historical with the personal to give us a greater depth of field. And I think that did spill out. That has now become quite a. Quite a way of writing. But it also spilled out just picking up a Franz about it. I think the poetry perhaps is a male line. But one of the people most influenced by that book was Leonora Carrington, the surrealist painter who did this extraordinary series of paintings called the White Goddess. And she appears again and again in her work and a fixation that really gives an enormous sort of sense of spirit in the paintings.
- [41:26]
Paul Apray
We're coming to the end now. What did he think of his work? What did he think of his chances of lasting a while?
- [41:31]
Bob Davis
He used to be rather rude about people who worried about their poetic legacy. And there's a poem that says, to evoke posterity is to weep on your own grave. He also thought that if you worried about your legacy would be inherently boring. And the most any poet could hope for is 20 pages of poems that survive you. I think he probably meets that test. But I'm also struck by his fame and his reputation as waxed and waned. You know, during the end of the First World War, it was pretty high. He was in Georgian poetry then. After the war, it dipped quite a lot, and he really picked up in the 1950s and then reached its zenith in the 1960s. And when Collected Poems 1955 came out in America, the poet critic Randall Jarrell, he did a review and he said, if you want to know what your great, great grandchildren will be reading, here it is.
- [42:20]
Fran Brereton
I would add, he undoubtedly did see himself as the heir of these writers that we've been mentioning who got his seal of approval, as it were. The single poetic theme of life and death, as he calls it, the tradition of muse poets must go on because it's something fundamentally human and it has something to tell us about everything. And think of his later work where he is quite prescient about the ecological crisis, about the reaction of young people against patriarchy and against what he calls scientific pluto democracy. And I think that's speaking to the future.
- [43:00]
Paul Apray
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Fran Brereton, Bob Davis and Paula Pray. Next week, it's the Road to Serfdom, Frederick Hayek's warning of state tyranny over the individual, written during the Second World War. Thank you for listening.
- [43:17]
Melvin Bragg
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:24]
Paul Apray
What didn't you say that you wish you. That you wish you had a chance to say, Starting with you, Fran.
- [43:28]
Melvin Bragg
Oh, goodness, that probably quite a long list because it's a very long life. I would. Partly because it was one of my favorite books. I'd have liked a little bit more time on Goodbye to All that itself. What he does in terms of the storytelling, the way he depicts the war scenes, where he says afterwards about that book, really the most painful bits have to be the jokeiest. How he makes that work as a war memoir and where it comes from might have been interesting to think about as well. And how much the ironic sensibility in it, which I think is coming partly from Samuel Butler, has shaped some of the ways we think about the First World War as well. A lot of those memoirs were very famous, so Graves in passing, will tell a story of the corporal who's standing there with a grenade, saying, you have to be really careful with these because it can go terribly wrong. Look. And immediately kills himself and the man standing next to him. He'll talk about the rotting corpse where a hand is sticking out the side of the trench, and they all shake it as they go by. So there is a gruesome black humor to the telling of it. And then you see its moments of occasional silence where he's wounded and in a stretcher coming back after the Somme, the point where they think he's died. He can't write it. It's too painful almost to be said. So there's a kind of armor to the irony and humor and the defense. And he bitterly upset people he cared about, not least his own family. His father, I think, was devastated by that book. He was writing his own autobiography, and he ended up calling it To Return to all that, which I think was probably a mistake, and said the war must be responsible for his hasty or bitter criticism of people who never wished him harmless. He lost most of his friends. He fell out with Sassoon. They never, ever recovered that friendship, which is very difficult to see. So it was a defining moment for lots of reasons. Laura riding among them, and the relief one feels when he settles with Beryl Graves, and she remains that kind of steadfast presence through all his thinking about Muses and all the kind of activity and excitement of the 50s and 60s. Yeah, one feels the relief almost.
- [45:50]
Bob Davis
So Paul Dewar, after the war, he did change the way he wrote about the war. And I think the moment of change was actually the publication of Thomas Hardy's collected poems in 1919. I think that changed how Graves thought he was going to write about everything about love, loss, grief, anger, all of those things, those strong emotions that were sort of churning around inside him. I think he saw a way, the way Hardy, for example, had dealt with the death of his wife Emma, that had a profound influence on the way he wrote. And you can see the way he deals with poetry becomes much more Hardy esque. The way he deals, talks about the war. And then as he gets further and further away from the war, he writes about it rather more distantly. So in the 1930s, you know, war starts to come into frame again. He got caught up in the Spanish Civil War when he was living in Spain, he started to think about war itself. So Recalling War is one of the poems he wrote in the early 30s. And it's. It's much more about war. Rather than being in the war, he talks about how he was wounded and the opening lines are entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean. The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one legged man forgets his leg of wood, the one armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees his ears and hands as much or more than once with both his eyes. Their war was fought these 20 years ago and now assumes the nature look of time. But then he goes on in that poem to say, what then was war? He said it wasn't just a discord of flags, it wasn't just nations quarreling. It was an infection of the common sky that sagged ominously upon the earth Even when the season was the airiest May down pressed the sky, and we oppressed thrust out boastful tongue clenched fist and valiant yard.
- [47:50]
Paul Apray
So he's recollecting, but he's dug into it very deeply, as he is with most of his poems.
- [47:56]
Fran Brereton
I would single out the short stories and particularly one short story, the most famous grave short story, the Shout, partly because it was adapted into an award winning film starring Alan Bates, John Hurt, Susanna York and a young Tim Curry playing Graves himself. Into the lives of a seemingly loving young artistic couple comes this strange, menacing, shamanistic man who claims to have been trained in the art of the death shout by Aboriginal witch doctors. This death shout clearly, once again has echoes of the noise of the battlefield. And also the story captures beautifully this preoccupation Graves has with which psychoanalysis can tell us about the divided personality and the personality that has been divided by the trauma of violence and how one might conceivably put a broken humanity, a broken personality, back together in defiance of the wishes and intentions of this menacing figure.
- [49:11]
Paul Apray
Paul, want to add anything we talked about.
- [49:13]
Bob Davis
You talked about, you know, Nancy and Laura and Beryl as being the primary muses. And I just want to sort of pick up on that a bit, I think, because.
- [49:23]
Paul Apray
Please do.
- [49:23]
Bob Davis
I think there's. There's quite a difference between the types of poems that he wrote to them. There's a difference in his writing between love poems and poems about love. And I think the poem.
- [49:34]
Paul Apray
What's the distinction?
- [49:35]
Bob Davis
Well, it's the same as when he writes war poems and poems about war. One is he's sort of a more of a more reflective thinking about things. And the love poems, I think they're deeply personal, deeply connected and I think that's what comes out in those Beryl poems for me. There's not one single poem in that collection that Fran mentioned in 38 to 45, there's nothing about love as an idea that he might have had. They're all deeply affecting love poems. And I think the difference with Beryl was that both Nancy and Laura were strong characters, and so was Beryl, but they. They saw Graves as a project. They wanted to change him, and they. He was deeply unsatisfactory in both their eyes. And Beryl, not uncommon, really, not uncommon. But with Beryl, she just accepted him. And I think what is different about those love poems is that he knows he's loved back and that there is no doubt it's unconditional. And I think that's what comes through. And, you know, of course, like any couple, they had some difficult moments. And there's a little poem, a short bit of poem I'll read where he's obviously done something wrong. And Beryl was annoyed, and he writes to her, saying, haven't you read my poems? Don't you know how I really feel? And the interesting thing about this, this is written in the 40s, but here we've got. It's still John Skelton, that short rhymes, the short lines, the rhymes. And it's called despite and Still. This is the opening. Have you not read the words in my head? And I made part of your own heart. We have been such as draw the losing straw, you of your gentleness, I of my rashness, both of despair, yet still might share this happy will to love, despite and still.
- [51:42]
Melvin Bragg
Can I add something about love? I was just thinking about what Paul said there. Poems about love, love poems, which my favorite would easily be Midwinter, Waking. For Beryl be witness that on waking this midwinter I found her hand in mine laid closely. Who shall watch out the spring with me? We stared in silence all around us, but found no winter anywhere to see. I think that's more for all. Graves had a profound influence on people's thinking about goddesses and muses. And everyone got terribly excited by this and they 60s and afterwards. I see his legacy in some of the great love poems that have followed him. Auden learns a great deal from Graves, obviously, but Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, it's in the poems. It's not the mythology, it's actually the style, the quietude of some of these poems as well.
- [52:35]
Fran Brereton
We'd want to let go, though, of, I think, the coexistence alongside that kind of benediction register of what the White Goddess says. You know, no one can be a poet who hasn't watched the Naked King Crucified with onlookers shouting, blood, blood, blood. Kill, kill, kill. You know, he's most Fryserian, he's most sacrificial, as you said, just to recognize that whatever benediction comes, it's at the end of suffering.
- [53:07]
Melvin Bragg
It's at a price. You need one side to create the other. And I suppose the only thing I think the people think most immediately poets are influenced by the White Goddess. I suspect it's not going to be seen like that much further down the line, that it's going to be about form and syntax and rhyming and diction. It's going to be at that level more than, say, the naked kings crucified to lop doaks.
- [53:32]
Paul Apray
Paul. Sorry, Paul.
- [53:33]
Bob Davis
I think one of the big takeaways about Graves is poetry, as I said a bit earlier, that it's this fusion of the mythological and the historical and the personal. They all come together. But he also does something else which he manages to combine this sort of inner emotional turmoil. And he said that his poems came in a sort of semi trance out of deeply buried emotions of love and anger and grief and longing. But he could present those with great intellectual clarity. And I think that's that his great. That's his great gift, is that those two things, this fusion of the mythological and the personal and this balance of emotion and clarity. We haven't talked about Coleridge. He was another influence, those conversation poems. And I think there's a line in Biographia Literaria which I think. I think Graves has probably. He hasn't written about it, but Coleridge says it's the great role of the poet to keep the heart alive in the head. And I think that's what Graves is really trying to do, especially as he gets older and older, he gets very anxious about losing the gift of poetry. And he thinks to himself, how do I keep alive the heart in the head? And he thinks back to Hardy when he writes about Hardy. He went to see Hardy in 1920, and the thing that struck him most was that Hardy had the gift of being perpetually in love. And I think he saw that that's why Hardy could be a poet into his later years. And that's how Graves wants to be a poet, into his later years.
- [55:04]
Paul Apray
Graves, alas, develops former dementia. Is that true?
- [55:09]
Bob Davis
He does in his. In his 80s. And he starts to forget things and stops writing, really, about 1975.
- [55:18]
Paul Apray
Well, I think you've given everybody a treat.
- [55:20]
Bob Davis
Thank you.
- [55:21]
Fran Brereton
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is.
- [55:23]
Bob Davis
Produced by Simon Tillotson. And it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [55:29]
Melvin Bragg
Cafe Hope on BBC Radio 4. By the time I'd finished these 100.
- [55:33]
Bob Davis
Meetings, I'd raised £50,000.
- [55:36]
Melvin Bragg
I'm Rachel Burdon, welcoming you into a virtual coffee shop where I chat to people looking to improve the lives of those around them. It's about tackling isolation and loneliness, engaging.
- [55:48]
Fran Brereton
In conversation with people you know can make a massive difference.
- [55:51]
Melvin Bragg
Amazing individuals trying to make the world a better place. It's a real gift. Cafe Hope from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.