The Artful Pursuit of Goddesses

By R.Z.Sheppard

ROBERT GRAVES by Martin Seymour-Smith Holt, Rinehart& Winston; 608 pages; $22.50

The 20th century was born in the trenches of World War I and Robert Graves attended, with bloody hands and a shell splinter whistling through his lung. He described the "goddawfulness" in Good-bye to All That (1929), an autobiography that survives rereading with its old pleasures and astonishments intact. There was, for example, the official report that Graves had died of wounds when, in fact, he was recovering. Remarked Siegfried Sassoon, a greatly relieved comrade-in-arms and fellow poet: "Silly old devil... he always manages to do things differently from other people."

Graves has built an immense reputation going against the grain. In an age of jangling modernists he wrote stately romantic poems. A major theme: absolute love cannot last between man and woman, but there is always hope for a miracle. Graves' body of critical opinion has puzzled academics, and his popular novels of antiquity (I, Claudius, King Jesus) have infuriated historians and theologians. He continues to differ from nearly all his literary contemporaries in perhaps the most basic way: he is alive. At 87, the old warrior-poet still sits atop his Olympus on Majorca, the nobly weathered head shielded from the sun by a broad black hat. He moved to the Spanish island on Gertrude Stein's recommendation ("It's paradise if you can stand it") and has spent most of the past 50 years in the cliff village of Deya being crusty, godlike and protean. Graves' bibliography lists 59 collections of poetry, 20 works of prose fiction, 43 books of essays, autobiography and criticism, four anthologies, ten translations and one play.

Biographer Martin Seymour-Smith handles much of the fiction as inspired entertainments and a good deal of the criticism as counterattacks in the literary wars. Graves' targets were not insignificant. Vachel Lindsay: "jazz Blake, St. Francis of Assisi playing the saxophone at the Firemen's Ball." Ezra Pound: bad rhythms and "a wet handshake." Dylan Thomas: "a Welsh demagogic masturbator who failed to pay his bills." T.S. Eliot: "a marvelous satirist with a true poetic sense who had sold out to institutionalized religion."

Graves himself practiced a highly personalized form of intellectual witchcraft. With a clash of symbols and his customary brass, he rejected the Judaeo-Christian patriarchy for his White Goddess:

All saints revile her, and all sober men

Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean

In scorn of which I sailed to find her

In distant regions likeliest to hold her

Whom I desired above all things to know,

Sister of the mirage and echo.

More metaphor than mythology, the Goddess is vital to Graves' poetry and much more. "The political and social confusion of the last 3,000 years," he once told a visitor, "has been entirely due to man's revolt against woman as a priestess of the natural magic, and his defeat of wisdom by the use of intellect."

Seymour-Smith spares readers another torturous slog through the Great Dionysus-Apollo Rift. Instead, he concentrates productively on Graves' leading partner in Goddess worship, Poet Laura Riding, who lived with him from 1926 to 1939. The couple never exchanged marriage vows and after a brief time even stopped sleeping together. The relationship began in London with the blessing of Graves' first wife, Nancy Nicholson, who bore the poet four children but refused to accept his name.

Riding's ideas of independence were more daring. Before shipping off to Majorca with Graves, she fell in love with an Irish journalist named Phibbs. The "strange Trinity" (Nancy, Laura and Robert) became a stranger quartet. Even the gallant and scrupulous biographer cannot prevent the arrangement from sounding like a send-up of The Edge of Night. When Phibbs rejected Riding, she swallowed Lysol and jumped from a fourth-story window. A horrified Robert leaped after her, but not before running down to the third floor. Laura sustained fractures of the spine and pelvis. Robert, with the luck of those pure souls who chase White Goddesses, was unharmed. Riding left Graves on the eve of World War H to live with Schuyler Jackson, an American farmer with a Princeton degree and literary leanings. They eventually went into the fruit business in Wabasso, Fla. Graves married Beryl Hodge, had four more children and continued to pursue younger goddesses from Majorca to Mexico.

It's a wonderful life, crowded with friends from T.E. Lawrence to Ava Gardner. Seymour-Smith embraces them all in garlands of Graves' verse, notably "The Devil's Advice to Storytellers":

Assemble, first, all casual bits and scraps scraps

That may shake down into a world perhaps . . .

Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)

Motive and end and moral in the air;

Nice contradiction between fact and fact

Will make the whole read human and exact.

- By R.Z.Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.