Who is robert graves

Luara Riding and Robert Graves" relationship was immensely influential upon both of their lives and careers. After Riding"s arrival in England , she began to exert an influence on more than just Graves " writing. Following a sequence of events so crazy that they seem more suitable to fiction than reality including, for example, Laura Riding leaping from a third floor window and breaking her pelvic bone in three places , Graves abandoned his family and moved with Riding from England to Spain.

The events of this period were so momentous that all three biographers, Martin Seymour-Smith, Richard Perceval Graves and Miranda Seymour , dedicate a significant proportion of their studies to them. Miranda Seymour has also written a novel, The Telling , that recounts the continuation of the sad story. Seymour "s novel fictionalises the events that occur after Graves and Riding"s arrival in Pennsylvania where they travelled, on Riding"s prompting, after Graves " friend, the editor of Time Magazine, Tom Matthews, secured a good review of Riding"s poetry.

The reviewer, Schuyler Jackson, his wife and four children invited Graves and Riding into their home. As Richard Perceval Graves in the third volume of his biography tells it:. Having decided that the handsome Schuyler must be hers, Laura had behaved with calculated ferocity.

Schuyler Jackson"s wife Kit, the good-natured mother of their four young children, was a serious obstacle; but within six weeks, through sheer force of will, Riding had reduced her to a demented and violent creature prepared to "confess" to witchcraft before being removed to an insane asylum. By then, the atmosphere of horror had become so pervasive that many of those present would come to believe that they had been in the presence of great spiritual evil. On Kit"s departure, Laura Riding had taken over the running of the Pennsylvania farmhouse in the hamlet of Brownsburg, just south of New Hope , Pennsylvania , which she and Robert and a few other members of her inner circle had been sharing with the Jacksons.

Soon afterwards, she had disappeared into a bedroom with Schuyler for two days, emerging to announce for the benefit of anyone who was uncertain about her present views on the subject that "Schuyler and I do". Robert Graves and The White Goddess, 5. Clearly this and Laura"s leap through a window is stuff for the silver screen. Even in a post-Fatal Attraction Hollywood context, it"s difficult to imagine these events in anything other than a Hollywood Schlock-buster. Yet, it seems as though R.

Graves" description of events is, and perhaps justifiably, biased. There seems little doubt that, at this time of her life, Riding exerted control over a number of individuals who idolised and idealised her. Catherine Dalton, Graves " daughter of the first marriage, perhaps best expresses the family"s feelings toward Riding.

Peter"s Square where Laura made her famous leap. Lucia describes the event, as though to Catherine but actually for the benefit of the camera. When she reaches the dramatic conclusion: Laura shouting "Goodbye chaps" and making her leap, Catherine adds: "I suppose she survived A mistake, I think. It"s easy to vilify Laura Riding. Graves was but one victim of her personality and her ambition. But then, Graves had his victims too.

What cannot be questioned is the value of some of the work that they did together. Much of it remains important to both literary history as well as to scholarship. A Survey, in fact, is the first published work that describes the poems being written by Eliot, Pound, cummings, Stein, and Sitwell amongst others of the period as "modernist".

It is also ironically, as some critics argue, not only the first work of criticism on the Modernists but also the first anti-Modernist criticism. It is safe to say, in the context of works such as A Survey and A Pamplet that neither Graves nor Riding would have evolved as they did had it not been for one another. They influenced each others" works throughout their years together Numerous biographers and scholars have argued, and quite correctly at that, that the relationship continued to influence their works long after they separated.

Before Riding, indeed, before Nancy , there were several other influential people, places and events in his life. Both of his parents, Alfred and Amy, proved an influence on Graves. Alfred because he, himself, was a poet and an educator and Amy because of her stern Victorian temper. There are several emphatic statements in Graves " autobiography, Goodbye To All That, that express Graves " attitude toward his parents" influence on his development beyond question.

Not the least of these is the moment when Graves, returned home as a disenchanted, embittered and wounded soldier is put on "parade" by his parents, proudly patriotic, completely Victorian and entirely ignorant of their son"s frustration and embarrassment , Penguin, Here, the circle from the first page of the autobiography is squared: Graves " "modern" attitudes are in conflict with his parent"s old-fashioned mores.

However, it also should not be forgotten that Graves and his friends relied on Alfred"s literary reputation and, most especially, on his literary connections to see their own work published and favourably reviewed. Alfred represented the poetry of both Robert and Siegfried Sassoon, for example, while they were serving the trenches. It is a sad fact that Robert did not participate in his father"s centenary celebrations. One could suppose that his absence suggested that he was afraid to admit his adolescent indulgence in denigrating his father now that he was a mature and established poet in his own right.

Graves absence suggests that he was afraid to admit that his father was an important reason for the early successes of his own career-and besides, it was highly unfashionable to be close to a father who was so clearly a relic of another era Robert Graves and the White Goddess, Robert Graves had various mentors throughout his career; however, he encountered three of the most significant during the war and in his Oxford days: W.

Rivers, T. Lawrence and Basanta Mallick. All three, at various stages, dominated Graves " thought and influenced his work but, unlike the ideas of many of the more "fashionable" theorists that Riding insisted that she and Graves subscribe to, all three remained, to a greater or lesser extent, influences on Graves " life and work.

After Graves " return from America , his relationship with Beryl Graves began in earnest. As the war began, England was in turmoil and Graves began trying to assemble a new life and begin a new family. Indeed, based in Devon as the rest of Europe was drawn into a vortex, he and Beryl briefly experienced something of a personal peace.

The terror of Laura Riding had faded and their life was beginning anew. However, anything like an "idyll" was impossible at this time and soon the events of the war began to overtake them in the most dramatic ways. In Robert Graves received the dreadful news that his son, David, was missing in action.

While he and Nancy held out hope that he would be found alive or that he might have been taken prisoner, later reports suggested otherwise. David, Robert and Nancy learned, had been shot while attempting to single-handedly take out a well-defended enemy position. The chances that he had survived were not good. By as England and Europe began to survey its post-War state, Graves managed to secure transport for his family back to Majorca. Once safely back there, then other than annual trips to England , occasional visits to the continent and even rarer trips to America , the Graves " made Deya their home for good.

The period began what should have remained a period of domestic harmony and literary productivity; however, after and the publication of The White Goddess, as Graves" fame and celebrity grew, Graves began a period of discovering muses who provided him with a flesh-and-blood manifestation of his poetic and mythic muse.

Some of these relationships were short, others seemed largely innocent and more flirtatious than serious or deeply poetic; however, four were, without doubt, significant to Graves " life and, subsequently, to his work. Graves found in her the physical embodiment of the White Goddess.

It seems that in the case of Judith, as in the muses that followed, who or what the person might actually have been seemed less important to Graves than what he believed the person to be. And so Judith who at first was clearly enamoured with the attention she was receiving began to buckle under the pressure and, as R. Graves reports, Beryl " To which Judith could only protest, quite honestly, that she loved Beryl and Robert more than her mother and father, and that she had no intention of doing anything to injure their marriage" The White Goddess, Again, this document is only intended to be a brief survey of the life and works of Graves and the biographers give a much fairer treatment of the complications and the intricacies of Robert"s fascinatingly convoluted life where I can only reduce and summarise.

Graves had three further muses in his life: Margot, Cindy and Juli. Of the three, Cindy was potentially the most destructive to Graves. Her story is painful to read and I refer the reader to any of the biographies for the account though I do think that Miranda Seymour"s might be the best.

Juli, the fourth and last muse, took on the role only toward the end of his life and then, it seems, was there as a salve to his battered mind and spirit and less a temptress and inspiration. Though, it is true, that his last good poems were written for and about her. Over his long career but most especially at the height of his fame, Graves had many celebrity friends including films stars like Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman, fellow writers like T.

Eliot and Gertrude Stein, and was courted to the annoyance of the general Deyan population by tens of hangers-on and aspiring poets. But the consciousness of genius is bad for people.

He stayed till 7. This was in , when Graves was a young war veteran, married to Nancy Nicholson whose feminism demanded she keep her own name. He was working devilishly hard, exhausting himself on both literary and personal fronts. By the time Alastair Reid met him in Mallorca in , Graves was a famous writer with several bestsellers, but his enthusiasms had not been dulled by success:. Suddenly, through the beaded fly-curtain, Robert erupted. He cut a formidable figure—tall, bearlike, with a large torso and head, a straw hat, a straw basket shouldered, and a look set on the edge of truculence.

He sat himself down and started asking me a series of questions, as though mapping me. Abruptly he got up, thanked me for the conversation, and left. After I came to know Robert well, I found that he often assessed people suddenly by some sign—a mannerism, a stray remark, a misplaced enthusiasm. It was over a woman the older man had decided was his latest muse.

She resented being put in the position. Reid saw her as a real person rather than a symbol, and they fell in love. Graves never forgave him. Yet it was bound up in something more profound—an irrational element he believed essential to poetry—and it fueled his most visionary writing. In addition to early collections of poetry arising from his battlefield experience, Graves wrote books of criticism, On English Poetry and Poetic Unreason and Other Studies , that helped lay the groundwork for the academic practice of close reading and influenced critics like William Empson.

But Graves was too unconventional to be caught up in an academic career. A brief period of teaching at the Royal Egyptian University confirmed his anti-academic personality without completely undermining his scholarly proclivities. He had to make a living as a writer. His first bestseller was a biography of his friend T.

Lawrence , his second the scathing and to some of his friends, offensive memoir, Good-Bye to All That This now-classic account of his schooldays includes a masked admission of his early homosexuality, followed by his experience in the trenches and the struggles of his first marriage.

In later life Graves the muse worshipper would pretty much erase Graves the war poet. Soldier and lover are the same contradictory man, the same face in the mirror. The new book by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, an expert on the poets of World War I, takes up the narrative established by Graves himself and deepens it with new material. Wilson writes sympathetically about young men in the trenches, their need to acknowledge their deep bonds, their bravery in openly expressing them to each other.

Who knows? Clearly his early friendships were intense and at times legally dangerous. These friends were also literary competitors. Owen was killed a week before the Armistice, and Graves maintained a mixed view of his poetry, which is now thought to be the finest to have come out of the war.

Like Sassoon and Owen, Graves befriended W. Rivers, the psychiatrist who pioneered treatment for shell shock. It was Rivers who introduced these young poets to a sort of depth psychology that valued their literary stirrings. Graves ran down one flight of steps and followed her, jumping from the second floor. Riding nearly died of her injuries, but Graves was unhurt. This catastrophe followed a period in which Robert and Nancy had invited Laura into their marriage.

Laura complicated the trio by adding a fourth lover, who eventually ran off with Nancy. You can see the difficulties of narration. Sergeant Eastmond being busy with a working-party. I went round by myself. The men of the working-party, whose job was to replace the traverses, or safety-buttresses, of the trench, looked curiously at me. They were filling sandbags with earth, piling them up bricklayer fashion, the headers and stretchers alternating, then patting them flat with spades.

The sentries stood on the fire-step at the comers of the traverses, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers. Every now and then they peered over the top for a few seconds. Two parties, each of an N. The German front line stretched some three hundred yards beyond.

From berths hollowed in the sides of the trench and curtained with sandbags came the grunt of sleeping me. I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raised my head, staring over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglements, and a dark patch or two of bushes beyond. The darkness seemed to move and shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling, singly at first, then both together.

The pickets did the same. I was glad of the sentry beside me; he gave his name as Beaumont. A German flare shot up, broke into bright flame, dropped slowly and went hissing into the grass just behind our trench, showing up the bushes and pickets.

Instinctively I moved. Not but what a flare is a bad thing to fall on you. I've seen them burn a hole in a man. Sampson lay groaning about twenty yards beyond the front trench. My first night Captain Thomas asked whether I would like to go out on patrol. It was the regimental custom to test new officers in this way, and none dared excuse himself. My orders for this patrol were to see whether a certain German sap-head was occupied by night or not.

We had pulled socks with the toes cut off, over our bare knees, to prevent them showing up in the dark and to make crawling easier. We went ten yards at a time, slowly, not on all fours, but wriggling flat along the ground. After each movement we lay and watched for about ten minutes. We crawled through our own wire entanglements and along a dry ditch; ripping our clothes on more barbed-wire, glaring into the darkness until it began turning round and round. Once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse.

We nudged each other with rapidly beating hearts at the slightest noise or suspicion: crawling, watching, crawling, shamming dead under the blinding light of enemy flares, and again crawling watching, crawling. We found the gap in the German wire and at last came within five yards of the sap-head. We waited quite twenty minutes, listening for any signs of its occupation.

Then I nudged Sergeant Townsend and, revolver in hand, we wriggled quickly forward and slid into it. It was about three feet deep and unoccupied.

On the floor were a few empty cartridges, and a wicker basket containing something large and smooth and round, twice the size of a football.

Very, very carefully I groped and felt all around it in the dark. I was afraid that it might be some sort of infernal machine. Eventually I dared lift it out and carry it back, suspecting that it might be one of the German gas-cylinders we had heard so much about.

After this I went on patrol fairly often, finding that the only thing respected in young officers was personal courage. Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, or grown accustomed to recognizing degrees of danger.

Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed.

At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless. Rivers told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands - I think the thyroid - caused this slow general decline in military usefulness, by failing at a certain point to pump its sedative chemical into the blood.

Without its continued assistance A man went about his tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance. It has taken some ten years for my blood to recover.

Officers had a less laborious but a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though a man's average expectancy of trench service before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer's.

Officers between me ages of twenty-three and thirty-three could count on a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over forty, though not suffering from want of sleep so much as those under twenty, had less resistance to sudden alarms and shocks.

The unfortunates were officers who had endured two years or more of continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs.

I knew three or four who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before being lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions is still alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions. Hill told me the story. The Colonel and Adjutant were sitting down to a meat pie when Hill arrived. Henry said: "Come to report, sir.

Ourselves and about ninety men of all companies. They looked up. I suppose Mr. Choate had better command what's left of 'A'. The bombing officer he had not gone over, but remained at headquarters will command what's left of 'B'. Henry goes to 'C' Company.