Robert Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, novelist and critic. His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology.
Robert Graves produced more than 140 works in his lifetime. His poems, his translations and innovative analysis of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life—including his role in World War I—Good-Bye to All That, and his speculative study of poetic inspiration The White Goddess have never been out of print. He was also a renowned short story writer, with stories such as "The Tenement" still popular.
He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius; King Jesus; The Golden Fleece; and Count Belisarius. He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.
Graves's eldest half-brother Philip achieved success as a journalist and his younger brother Charles was a writer and journalist.
Early life
Graves was born into an upper-middle-class family in Wimbledon, then part of Surrey, now part of south London. He was the eighth of ten children born to Alfred Perceval Graves, who was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. His father was an Irish school inspector, Gaelic scholar and the author of the popular song "Father O'Flynn", and his mother was his father's second wife, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke, grandniece of the historian Leopold von Ranke. His uncle was the admiral commanding the Nore during World War I, Sir Richard Poore, 4th Baronet.At the age of seven, double pneumonia following measles almost took Graves's life, the first of three occasions when he was despaired of by his doctors as a result of afflictions of the lungs, the second being the result of a war wound and the third when he contracted Spanish influenza in late 1918, immediately before demobilisation.
At school, Graves was enrolled as Robert von Ranke Graves, and in Germany, his books are published under that name, but before and during the First World War the name caused him difficulties.
Education
Graves received his early education at a series of six preparatory schools, including King's College School in Wimbledon, Penrallt in Wales, Hillbrow School in Rugby, Rokeby School in Wimbledon and Copthorne in Sussex, from which last in 1909 he won a scholarship to Charterhouse. There he began to write poetry and took up boxing, in due course becoming school champion at both welter- and middleweight. He claimed that this was in response to persecution because of the German element in his name, his outspokenness, his scholarly and moral seriousness, and his poverty relative to the other boys.He also sang in the choir, meeting there an aristocratic boy three years younger, G. H. "Peter" Johnstone, with whom he began an intense romantic friendship, the scandal of which led ultimately to an interview with the headmaster. However, Graves himself called it "chaste and sentimental" and "proto-homosexual", and though he was clearly in love with Peter, he denied that their relationship was ever sexual. He was warned about Peter's "proclivities" by other contemporaries.
Among the masters, his chief influence was George Mallory, who later died trying to scale Mount Everest, and who introduced him to contemporary literature and took him mountaineering in the holidays. In his final year at Charterhouse, he won a classical exhibition to St John's College, Oxford, but did not take his place there until after the war.
First World War
At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant on 12 August. He was confirmed in his rank on 10 March 1915, and received rapid promotion, to lieutenant on 5 May 1915 and to captain on 26 October. In August 1916 an officer who disliked him spread the rumour that he was the brother of a captured German spy who had assumed the name "Karl Graves". The problem resurfaced in a minor way in the Second World War, when a suspicious rural policeman blocked his appointment to the Special Constabulary.He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about the experience of frontline conflict. In later years, he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom", though the early "In the Wilderness" was retained. On 20 July at High Wood during the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell fragment through the lung that he was expected to die and was officially reported as having died of wounds. He gradually recovered and, apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England.
One of Graves's friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in his regiment. They both convalesced at Somerville College, Oxford, which was used as a hospital for officers. "How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies' College at Oxford," Sassoon wrote to him in 1917. At Somerville College, Graves met and fell in love with Marjorie, a nurse and professional pianist, but stopped writing to her once he learned she was engaged. About his time at Somerville, he wrote: "I enjoyed my stay at Somerville. The sun shone, and the discipline was easy." In 1917, Sassoon rebelled against the conduct of the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves feared Sassoon could face a court martial and intervened with the military authorities, persuading them that Sassoon was experiencing shell shock and that they should treat him accordingly. Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Edinburgh, where he was treated by W. H. R. Rivers and met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves was treated here as well. Graves also had shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was then called, but he was never hospitalised for it,
The friendship between Graves and Sassoon is documented in Graves's letters and biographies. The intensity of their early relationship is demonstrated in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers, which contains many poems celebrating their friendship. Sassoon remarked upon a "heavy sexual element" within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men. Through Sassoon, Graves became a friend of Wilfred Owen, "who often used to send me poems from France".
In September 1917, Graves was seconded for duty with a garrison battalion. Graves's army career ended dramatically with an incident which could have led to a charge of desertion. Having been posted to Limerick in late 1918, he "woke up with a sudden chill, which I recognized as the first symptoms of Spanish influenza." "I decided to make a run for it," he wrote, "I should at least have my influenza in an English, and not an Irish, hospital." Arriving at London Waterloo Station with a high fever but without the official papers that would secure his release from the army, he chanced to share a taxi with a demobilisation officer also returning from Ireland, who completed his papers for him with the necessary secret codes.
Post-war life
Immediately after the war, Graves with his wife, Nancy Nicholson had a growing family, but he was financially insecure and weakened physically and mentally:In October 1919, he took up his place at the University of Oxford, soon changing course to English Language and Literature, though managing to retain his Classics exhibition. In consideration of his health, he was permitted to live a little outside Oxford, on Boars Hill, where the residents included Robert Bridges, John Masefield, Edmund Blunden, Gilbert Murray and Robert Nichols. Later, the family moved to Worlds End Cottage on Collice Street, Islip, Oxfordshire.
His most notable Oxford companion was T. E. Lawrence, then a Fellow of All Souls, with whom he discussed contemporary poetry and shared in the planning of elaborate pranks. By this time, he had become an atheist. His work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.
While still an undergraduate he established a grocers shop on the outskirts of Oxford but the business soon failed. He also failed his BA degree but was exceptionally permitted to take in 1925 a Bachelor of Letters by dissertation instead, allowing him to pursue a teaching career.
In 1926, he took up a post as a professor of English Literature at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding, with whom he was having an affair. Graves was later told that one of his pupils at the university had been a young Gamal Abdel Nasser, but this is obviously untrue as Nasser was only eight years old at the time.
He returned to London briefly, where he separated from his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Mallorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal, Epilogue and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies ; both had great influence on modern literary criticism, particularly New Criticism.
Literary career
In 1927, Graves published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. The autobiographical Good-Bye to All That proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Siegfried Sassoon. In 1934, he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in the sequel Claudius the God. I, Claudius received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1934. Later, in the 1970s, the Claudius books were turned into the very popular television series I, Claudius, with Sir Derek Jacobi shown in both Britain and United States. Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius, recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.Graves and Riding left Mallorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and in 1939, they moved to the United States, taking lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Their volatile relationship and eventual breakup were described by Robert's nephew Richard Perceval Graves in Robert Graves: 1927–1940: the Years with Laura, and T. S. Matthews's Jacks or Better. It was also the basis for Miranda Seymour's novel The Summer of '39.
After returning to Britain, Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge, the wife of Alan Hodge, his collaborator on The Long Week-End and The Reader Over Your Shoulder. Graves and Beryl lived in Galmpton, Torbay until 1946, when they re-established a home with their three children, in Deià, Mallorca. The house is now a museum. The year 1946 also saw the publication of his historical novel King Jesus. He published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth in 1948; it is a study of the nature of poetic inspiration, interpreted in terms of the classical and Celtic mythology he knew so well. He turned to science fiction with Seven Days in New Crete and in 1953 he published The Nazarene Gospel Restored with Joshua Podro. He also wrote Hercules, My Shipmate, published under that name in 1945.
In 1955, he published The Greek Myths, which retells a large body of Greek myths, each tale followed by extensive commentary drawn from the system of The White Goddess. His retellings are well respected; many of his unconventional interpretations and etymologies are dismissed by classicists. Graves, in turn, dismissed the reactions of classical scholars, arguing that they are too specialised and "prose-minded" to interpret "ancient poetic meaning," and that "the few independent thinkers ... the poets, who try to keep civilisation alive."
He published a volume of short stories, ¡Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny, in 1956. In 1961, he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post he held until 1966.
In 1967, Robert Graves published, together with Omar Ali-Shah, a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The translation quickly became controversial; Graves was attacked for trying to break the spell of famed passages in Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation, and L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University, maintained that the manuscript used by Ali-Shah and Graves, which Ali-Shah and his brother Idries Shah claimed had been in their family for 800 years, was a forgery. The translation was a critical disaster and Graves's reputation suffered severely due to what the public perceived as his gullibility in falling for the Shah brothers' deception. It was in 1967 that the first full-length assessment of Graves' work was published. Swifter Than Reason by Douglas Day concentrated on Grave's development as a poet from his earliest work in 1916 to the most recent collection, using Graves' critical writings as commentary.
In 1968, Graves was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II. His private audience with the Queen was shown in the BBC documentary film Royal Family, which aired in 1969.
From the 1960s until his death, Robert Graves frequently exchanged letters with Spike Milligan. Many of their letters to each other are collected in the book Dear Robert, Dear Spike.