The Goddess & the Poet

In the Beginning was the Woman. Goddess of All Things," she rose naked out of Chaos, danced so wildly that great wind sprang up. The goddess caressed the wind and it became a great serpent which coiled itself lustfully around her. The goddess became pregnant, assumed a dove's form laid "the Universal Egg." Out of the Egg tumbled all things that exist sun, moon, planets, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs and living creatures." Swollen with pride the serpent declared himself "the author ot tne universe," which made the goddess so angry that she kicked out his teeth and banished him to the dark caves below the earth.

According to Scholar-Poet Robert Graves, the Pelasgians, who inhabited Greece as early as 3500 B.C., thought up this version of genesis. Graves, who makes it the kickoff point of his grandiose two-volume The Greek Myths (Penguin; 95-c- a vol.), takes the Egg with a pinch of salt insofar as it pretends to historical accuracy. But he considers it a sound Egg in the mythical sense, in that it expresses the true and natural order of things. For like the Pelasgians and James Thurber, Poet Graves has no doubt that "woman [is] the dominant sex and man her frightened victim." If the world is in a mess today he says, it is because egoistical man dethroned the Eggoistical goddess and replaced her with grim-faced deities named Zeus, Jupiter, Jehovah.

Riches inFaith. Theologians laugh at Grave's notions, and archaeologists and anthropologists denounce his methods of research and his reasoning processes. Literary men stuff their fingers in their ears when Graves starts harping on his goddess. But nearly all would agree that the world would be demonstrably poorer in poetry if Robert Graves had lost faith in his goddess. Without her as Muse, he would never have written poems which rank with the greatest of the century.

Graves has done nothing to change the face of poetry, has never been hailed either as a revolutionary or a representative poet of his generation. He is of no party, no clique, no decade of time. The impression made by his poems is not of a blaze of fireworks but of a white-hot center. At his least impressive, he is spare and dry; at his peak, his closest neighbors are the lyricists of ancient Greece. Where lesser poets exalt or complain lustily, Graves writes like one who is in perpetual mourning but is also far too proud to take refuge in disillusioned reading or drinking. This combination of subject doom and kingly dignity gives his works the special quality that distinguishes him from all other poets of the day.

Horns of Orthodoxy. Like many men whose creeds and professions strike others as romantic and even fantastic, Robert Graves is in most ways a down-to-earth type of man. Son of an Irish songwriter he was born at Wimbledon (a London suburb) in 1895, describes himself as "a true-born Englishman." His education was orthodox British (at Charterhouse and Oxford); so, for his generation, was his service with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in World War I, when he was so badly wounded that he was listed as "killed in action."

In the postwar years, Graves did other things that were then orthodox, e.g., wrote his notable autobiography, Goodbye to All That, at the age of 33, tried to make both ends meet by running a small store out Oxford took a job as Professor of English literature at Egyptian University in Cairo. "Too weak to dig, too proud to beg, he found himself on the horns of a dilemma that afflicts most poets--"There's no money in poetry, but then, there's no poetry in money, either."

Down the Line. Graves got around the problem by becoming a prose writer. His friend Lawrence of Arabia gave him permission to write the first "official" Lawrence biography; on the proceeds of this and of his own Goodbye, Graves was able to settle down on five stony acres in the Spanish island of Majorca. Except when driven home by war, Graves has lived there ever since, enjoying the "best &weather in Europe " and "the only sea, the Mediterranean," without abandoning the Greenwich meridian (which passes through London but misses Majorca by about 130 miles). "Those who stay out of England develop a much better sense of the English language," says Graves, but I could never live far off from the Greenwich meridian."

No less than 60 books have appeared over Graves's signature, but the bulk of them have been scholarlike works, such as The Nazarene Gospel Restored (TIME July 26) and The White Goddess, or novels written purely as potboilers. Some of the novels, e.g., I, Claudius; Claudius the God; Sergeant Lamb's America, are far better than most good-novelists' novels, but they matter little to Author Graves. What does matter is his poems, which year by year have so grown in number that now, in the latest volume, Collected Poems 1955 (Doubleday; $4.50) the hand-weeded best of them take up nearly 300 pages.

Meaningless Fizzles. Graves's poems are always short, always severely compressed. They are often difficult to understand because few people know the key to their secret--Graves's tireless interest in the nature of his goddess. Once this involved premise is grasped (if not accepted) a Graves poem can be seen immediately as a model of disciplined lucidity. There are no "unconscious" ravings to perplex the reader, because Graves despises all "socalled surrealists, impressionists, expressionists and neo-romantics." Such "affections of madness" are, Graves believes, the reason why almost all modern forms of art seem meaningless to the beholder; the creative fire of the Western world is still alight, but it fizzles up in willful smoke:

Sulkily the sticks burn, and though

they crackle

With scorn under the bubbling pot,

or spout

Magnanimous jets of flame against the

smoke,

At each heel end a dirty sap breaks out.

Why have the arts taken such a dismal turn? Graves has no doubt of the answer: vainglorious man is paying the penalty for having scorned the Goddess of All Things. All poetry worthy of the name, he believes, is in essence a variation on "the single grand theme"--man's birth through woman, and his love and death in the arms of woman. Modern poets have forgotten this, Graves argues, because the male revolt against female supremacy is long since an accomplished fact. The Greeks started the rot by taking the myths of their predecessors, the Pelasgians and others, and changing them from female to male. They gave the manly sun priority over the womanly moon. They made a hero out of a man like Hercules, changing him from a mere lover-victim of the goddess into a lusty seducer of hapless nymphs and a symbol of strength. Socrates and Plato, Graves insists, went so far as to reject the female element completely, injected into Western veins a strong shot of romantic homosexuality that persists to this day.

Sardonic "gusts of laughter" shake the goddess' sides, says Graves, when she sees the havoc that has prevailed ever since "the restless and arbitrary male will" usurped "the female sense of orderliness" and loosed upon civilization the sort of ruthless character typified by "Alexander, Pompey and Napoleon."

Swordsmen of the narrow lips,

Narrow hips and murderous mind . . .

Great Grizzly. Ironically, Graves is a living symbol of masculine energy and patriarchal virility. Twice married, he is the father of seven children, ranging in age from 36 to 2. At 59, he is still husky, cleaves the air with a great Roman nose which he once broke playing Rugby. He looks and moves like a grizzly bear, is an authority on army obscenity, can boom out many a bawdy, masculine song to his own guitar accompaniment. In Majorca he rises early, scorns the Spaniards' late meal hours, tucks away hearty platters of nononsense, British-type roast lamb, cabbage and potatoes.

His energy is such that even though he rewrites even the simplest potboiler five times and a new poem as many as 35, he still finds time to tutor his children, spar with a host of enemy pundits, work for twelve hours at a stretch if he has to. At the moment, Graves has on hand three projects, any one of which would be enough to tax the average writer: a novel about George Sand's love affair with Chopin; a translation of Lucan's History of the Civil War (between Caesar and Pompey): a translation of Roman Historian Suetonius' Twelve Caesars.

Graves has always distinguished between what he calls "left-handed" poetry (satire) and "creative or curative" poetry, which is always dedicated to the goddess. A good performer with the left hand, Graves is in a class by himself when he writes what most people would call simply "love poems." By now, this "creative" poetry of his has become akin to gospel to his contemporaries--a classic canon so unalterably "fixed" that the changing of a single phrase by Graves himself (which he has just done in the last stanza of the greatest poem of them all, To Juan at the Winter Solstice) is likely to arouse as much indignation among his admirers as his rewriting of the Greek myths will arouse among his enemies. No living poet could ask a greater tribute than this--to be denied the right to tamper with his own work, to be ejected by angry idolaters from the precincts of his own temple.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.