Myths, Muses & Mushrooms

Myths, Muses & Mushroom

FOR CENTAURS (382 pp.)--Robert Graves--Doubleday ($4.95).

Robert Graves's mother used to warn him against becoming "like people who feed birds in public gardens, and usually have two or three perched on their heads." But Mother scarcely foresaw the strange-feathered notions that would roost inside Graves's head. Out of this intellectual aviary fly de-crested myths, twice-tweaked Bible tales, a poetic cockatoo called the White Goddess, and great whooping cranes of scholarly controversy. As a man who travels "full-speed in the wilder regions of my own, some say crazy, head," Graves ranges airily from poetry to poltergeists, from mushrooms to Majorca (his expatriate home). Though the form changes--essay, lecture, story, poem--the wryly cantankerous wit and charm remain the same.

The Little Foxes. Graves is one of the few men of letters who can talk shop, for example, without putting up the shutters of boredom or obscurity. What does a good poet do? He captures the sound of his own voice talking, says Graves, a natural voice and "not the one in which we try to curry favour with children at a party, or with an election crowd, or with a traffic cop.'' To show what happens when a poet merely apes passing fashions. Graves does a parody of a Japanese haiku called "The Loving Parents":

Forgiven come direct

Unspare expense

Cable soonest collect!

In his more eccentric vein. Graves maintains that neither Benedict Arnold nor Judas were traitors. Sample argument: "A dishonest treasurer, as Judas is represented as being, would not have sold out at that petty price." The title piece of Food for Centaurs is a superlative action shot of Graves in the fine, frenzied throes of a theory. By some recondite detective work, he reaches the conclusion that the centaurs' food was mushrooms. It was a very special scarlet-capped European mushroom, known as the fly-amanite. According to Graves, this mushroom is fiery to the taste, imparts extraordinary muscular strength and creates overpowering sexual desire.

In antiquity, says Graves, some mushrooms went by the nickname of "little foxes." This sets the stage for one of his brazenly assured and highly speculative exegeses of Biblical texts. It is highly unlikely, argues Graves, that Samson caught 300 real foxes, set their tails afire and turned them loose to burn the cornfields of the Philistines. What he probably did was to arm 300 soldiers with flaming torches and inflame the men with the mushroom wonder drug. When the lovely Shulamite in The Song of Solomon cries "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes!", she is asking for the fiery aphrodisiac, according to Graves, to be washed down with flagons of wine.

Love Is the Object. For a man who can read a lot into a mushroom, Graves remains singularly incurious about the ancient sites that have spurred so much of his writing. At 62, the author of I, Claudius finally did go to Rome for the first time. In Centaurs he candidly admits that he has yet to see Athens, Corinth, Mycenae, Constantinople and Jerusalem. "The truth is, I dislike sight-seeing," says Graves. Most modern cities fill him with despair and still another theory: "I believe that closer research into human fatigue-reactions would show that perfectly straight lines and perfectly flat surfaces, perfect circles, and exact right angles, induce between them much of the mental illness for which functionally-built modern cities are notorious."

As for the afterworld, all suggested versions strike Graves as equally and disastrously dull, be it "the Moslem Heaven of sherbet, tiled baths and complaisant houris" or "the Norse Valhalla with its endless battles and mead-orgies" or "the Judaeo-Christian Heaven of golden temples, where only a chaste sodality reigns." They all lack love, says Graves (two marriages, seven living children), and he adds of himself: "I have never not been in love since boyhood." Again and again he makes plain his feeling that love is a poet's major subject and his only object. Recently, for a friend named Ava Gardner, Graves copied out one of his poems, some lines of which he thought described her well. With a change of pronoun, they are as aptly suited to him:

She speaks always in her own voice

Even to strangers . . .

And

She is wild and innocent, pledged to love

Through all disaster . . .

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