Robert Graves:
Life on the Edge
By Miranda Seymour
Holt, 524 pages, $37.50
The view that writers are likely to be lunatics, less stable than their unimaginative fellows, has been kicking around a long time. It is far more probable that every profession has its share of madmen but that only writers notice and record the peaks and troughs of their emotions. Or so I would have thought before reading Miranda Seymour’s “Robert Graves,” an account, astringently written and scrupulously fair, of a life spent in the headlong pursuit of an obsession as necessary to the poet as pen and ink.
Graves won fame for his poetry, made money by his novels, among them “I, Claudius” and “Claudius the God,” and won a cult following with “The White Goddess,” an intricate exploration of the notion of ancient matriarchial deities, cryptically discernible in the myths of Celtic and Mediterranean cultures. Graves once said that he couldn’t remember a day when he hadn’t written at least 500 words. But the personal circumstances that allowed him to be productive were as specialized as any mingling of soil, light and temperature that combine to make a vintage wine.
In some respects Graves’ life was simple to the point of crudity. He hated towns and travel, living by choice on the island of Majorca in a rustic house with a view of the shore. He walked prodigiously, dressed like an unmade bed, tended a garden with compost heaps named for literary acquaintances and did most of his family’s cooking. A visitor once observed that as he went about such tasks, however, there was something remote and concentrated in his demeanor, indicating that he never stopped thinking of his work.
But Graves’ outwardly simple life rested on an emotional turmoil that he needed as a wine needs ferment. A series of “muses”–women usually lovely and capricious–generated the tension he found necessary for his verse. The price–in inconvenience, pain and humiliation–was as often paid by his family as himself.
Graves, who served with bravery and was wounded in the trenches in World War I, was first known as a wartime poet, as was his friend Sigfried Sassoon. He offers an account of that time in a brash but powerful autobiography, “Good-bye to All That.” Injuries prevented him from returning to the front, but the horrors that he saw there and his guilt, thinking of those who died while he convalesced in safety, left him with shell shock. He wept easily and could not bear noise or train travel.
His marriage at the age of 23 to a bright, strong-willed young woman named Nancy Nicolson began happily, with jokes, pleasure in sex, a plan that Graves should write a play and Nancy design the sets. A wealthy friend lent them a 14th Century stone manor house. And yet the young couple’s lack of money, their essential dissimilarity and the four children who arrived in rapid succession took their toll. Nancy fell ill; Graves cooked, cared for the children and kept a pad and pencil above the sink to write.
When they became desperately hard up, he took a teaching post in Egypt, arranged for him by his friend T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). But the isolation of Cairo seemed daunting, and the couple asked a young American poet named Laura Riding, whose verse Graves admired, to go with them. They thus introduced into their marriage perhaps the most difficult, willful, vain, cruel and unbalanced figure in modern letters. Hart Crane, although he liked Riding, nicknamed her “Riding Rough-
shod”; her need to be deferred to and recognized as unique dovetailed immediately with Graves’ wish to submit himself to a woman’s will.
Riding is the kind of person who generates gossip in acquaintances and nervous breakdowns in friends. To read about her is to feel an electric resentment. You find yourself thinking, “Nobody could behave that way!” But Laura Riding routinely did the unthinkable. She drives Seymour’s biography like a piston and did the same thing for Graves’ work, adding an edge of danger, unreliability, madness that pushed him toward a deeper truth.
Here are a few highlights of the swath she cut through Graves’ life. She tried to tempt his 7-year-old daughter to “walk on air” out an upper window to gather candies “growing in the trees.” She professed a love of violence and mocked Graves, traumatized by the war, for shrinking from the sight of blood. In a search for disciples, she drew a young writer named Geoffrey Taylor into her orbit. Having no use for Taylor’s wife, Norah, Riding dumped her at a hotel, put a bottle of brandy into her hand and said, “Drink this, and forget your tears.” Geoffrey was forced to turn over his possessions, burn his clothes, make love to Riding and vow his credence even in her claim to be able to stop a clock by will power. When Geoffrey tried to break away. Riding responded by jumping out a third story window, fracturing her pelvis and crushing four vertebrae.
Graves nursed her back to health, submitted to her cruelties, indebted himself to provide her with jewels and acknowledged that she was a far greater poet than himself–something no publisher could ever be convinced of. And yet as Miranda Seymour points out, Graves knew, at some level, that control rested with himself. Riding dominated him because he chose to acquiesce. Something of this emerges in “I, Claudius,” in which a stammering emperor, supposedly a near idiot hoodwinked by his wife, is in fact possessed of a subtle intelligence and exercises power without her knowledge. Riding also influenced the portrait of Augustus’ monstrous wife, Livia, described by Graves as “unique in setting no limit to her ambitions,” which included deification. Riding hated the book.
Late in the 1930s, Riding formed a new attachment to a young American writer (and pressuring his wife into madness, had her removed from the house in a straitjacket). Graves, too, found a new companion to serve as his muse, the first in a long series of Riding’s successors. These women he treated as the incarnation of his “white goddess” who in the triple form of maiden, mother, crone, held men in thrall. None had the insane vitality of Riding, and none quite inspired the same caliber of verse, classically simple, technically accomplished, unsentimental but heartfelt. Out of rage and struggle came poetry. These are the words Graves dreamt his terrible muse would speak:
“Lovely I am, merciful I shall prove;/ Woman I am, constant as various,/ Not marble-hearted but your own true love./ Give me an equal kiss as I kiss you.”
As another poet called mad, William Blake, once wrote, “The fool who persists in his folly becomes wise.”
