An imaginary world in secession from the real one: Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Repeating themes in Graves are the weird, the eternally recurring, the nature of love, the whimsical, the proverb. When he sends a chill down the spine:
How slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?
— the thrill is to do with the lines not making sense, and his attempts to evoke a personal mythology while avoiding explaining anything are decisive in limiting his poetry. One feels a constant struggle between explaining (which would distend the poem and break down the notion of poeticism which he has adopted), and reducing the poem to something rather empty, with a few decorative effects. He always found the same solution to this question. What Boreal Crown? what is a 'true' king? how did they end up in jail? There is also a kind of poem where he puts someone down (for being unlike him). His world isn't really open for people to think about or question. His diction is strongly marked by the simplicity and folksiness of the Georgians; as if he is going back to a pre-Elizabethan plainness, exemplified by Skelton (admired by Graves and his friend Richard Hughes), and preserved in folk song and rhyme. This Georgian tendency, ofified with fear of introspection, should be compared to Cecil Sharp's collecting of folk-songs, the revival of less ornamented pre-Romantic music, and Edward Lutyens' treatment of cottage themes in architecture. His poetry is always clear, but lacks flexibility, resonance, and the sense of being carried away. Its lack of profundity, in failing to maximise the suggestive power of the individual word, in not making strong subjective use of metaphor, helps to keep him at the level of proverbs: he makes an observation about Life, of apparently universal validity, and then stops. The internal world of the poem never takes over. His world-view is relatively static, and this coincides with his choice of metres, which seems to forfeit personal choice, and simply take over something well-worn. Neatness restrains him throughout.
The combination of the weird, the supernatural, and of pronouncements on Love, would seem to link him to the Surrealists. He constantly wants to evoke the inexplicable, to find something outside Reason.
On the first fine day of January
I ran to my sweet heart Margery
And tossed her over the roof so far
That down she fell like a shooting star.
But when we two had frolicked and kissed
She clapped her fingers over my wrist
And tossed me over the chimney stack,
And danced on me till my bones did crack.
(‘The Two Witches’)
Unfortunately his technique holds him back. This poem could easily pass for one by Walter de la Mare. His attempts to fit love into a system of eternally recurring mythic situations are interesting, but fatally flawed at the level of truth; in the artistic sense, they don't quite come off. The gap between the descriptions of a love-affair between two real people, and the nutty professor glibly expounding a theology to make the events 'eternal' and 'fated', is too wide. The glibness tries to conceal a fatal reticence within the poems, which draw conclusions but don't tell you much about what happened. This ties in with the anti-Elizabethan protest; the new idea of the sonnet-sequence told a whole love story in verse, allowing great possibilities for differentiation of individual poems, and bringing in poetic autobiography; Graves goes back to early Tudor poets, where each poem is isolated, and there is no story linking them. Graves' personality and love affairs are not prominent in his verse; his lexicon and presentation strive for the objective and the general. (A pattern could only emerge if it was present in human nature itself, and indeed this uniformity was one of his preoccupations.) It's interesting that the Surrealists also made so much use of myth; the film L'éternel retour, scripted by the associate Surrealist Cocteau, equally tries to write about love through a fated and eternally recurring situation, and might show what Graves' poems would have been if they came off. His 'goddess' system is all too close to the witches poem quoted above. It further resembles a dusty vein of Victorian classicism:
So soon as ever your mazed spirit descends
From daylight into darkness, Man, remember
What you have suffered here in Samothrace,
What you have suffered.
(from ‘Instructions to the Orphic adept’)
His frequent mention of ghosts fits his ideas about recurring situations coming back from the dust, under a charm. It would be upsetting to think that they are merely due to classicizing poets recycling the same ancient tropes and comparisons. I do not find his poetry mythographically original. A belief in the eternal is hardly likely to encourage creativity. Graves may be remembered for copying Tennyson and Swinburne but translating them into a folk-song idiom:
All the wolves of the forest
Howl for Lyceia,
Crowding together
In a close circle,
Tongues a-loll.
A silver serpent
Coiled at her waist
And a quiver at knee,
She combs fine tresses
With a fine comb(.)
(from ‘Lyceia’)
His belief in archetypes makes him close to Edwin Muir and Kathleen Raine; David Jones and George Mackay Brown found very different solutions to the poetic problems of similar world-views. The use of myth in Ted Hughes and Iain Sinclair sheds a light on how tied-down Graves' technique always was. Hughes certainly took a lot from The White Goddess.
G. was a good poet; but his woodenness of manner and infernal purity of diction have exercised a baneful influence over a whole swathe of English poets in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Dick Davis, for example, considers his poetry to have "distinction" because it lacks emotion and internal motion. G. is a textbook case of someone who fails to develop, and fails to become a major poet, because of their rejection of modernism; I can see no theoretical grounds why this must be so, but I am bound to observe that it is in his case. His advocation of writing poetry in trance is baffling, given the conservatism and inflexibility and limited expressiveness of all of his poems; but we must take this exhortation, in context, to mean a rejection of thought. My comment about his "failure to develop" needs qualification, because he did reject all of his own poetry written before the age of 30; the problem arrives later than that, he was very interested in modernity and theory in about 1927 (at the time he wrote On Modern Poets) and in some sense became a disciple of (the modernist) Laura Riding instead of becoming a Modernist.
G identified himself as a socialist for some time after his war experiences had put him into contact with the errors of the imperialist system and with working class footsoldiers; but in 1926 he abandoned all politics. Paradoxically (since I am a socialist) I admire him for this; Graves was deeply empirical, and his distaste for generalization at the level of a whole society (or an Empire, as it was then) goes with an ability to concentrate on the task in hand which would have made him successful at any particular job contributing to the national wellbeing. This military quality of grip on detail (while avoiding thought) shines out in his prose, which (in The Long Week-End or I Claudius for example) is really first-rate. But what interests us is the dialectic between this refusal to look outside the present instant and the claims about eternity and four-thousand-year spans of history which fill TWG and The Greek Myths and so are certainly the underpinning of all his poetry from about 1929 on. I feel that something critical has gone wrong in this middle realm of time. When Graves’ autobiography came out in 1929, Robert Bridges was surprised at how far he had been written out of the story; Graves no longer wanted to be associated with the Poet Laureate. Bridges’ notions of the timeless and eternal could shed a light on Graves’.
G. was published in the Georgian Books of verse (nos. 3 to 5), and his great enthusiasm in modern poetry in his twenties was John Masefield; G's popularity 30 years later induced a whole new generation into the Georgian virtues, a reservoir of anti-modernism which has continued to nourish (or blight) puzzled English poets up till the present. Insofar as Andrew Motion has any virtues, they are Georgian virtues: quietness, decency, avoidance of thought, sheltered scenery, distaste for discussing personal affairs. Exactly the same holds for the young poets whom Michael Schmidt chose to promote at Carcanet; Robert Wells, Dick Davis, Clive Wilmer, Neil Powell. (It's only fair to say that not all Georgian poetry was bad, in the hands of Edward Thomas, Harold Monro, Masefield, or Graves.) It was quite abnormal, at that time, for a poet to lack a Christian underpinning (the 20s represent a break here); G. built his whole psychological-mythical-anthropological "system" as a compensation object to fill the gap left by Christianity as the cosmology and super-narrative within whose august protection the individual poet and poem lived out their "local time". G.'s system didn't come out of Freud or even a reaction to Freud; the psychologist turned anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, who treated G.'s war neurosis, is a more plausible source — but really everything was Graves' own. G. was by no means alone in this — chronologically, TWG was a theorization of the ideas which underlay New Romantic poetry, but was published too late (1948) to influence most of that poetry. Kathleen Raine, the other great example of a poet building a cosmological system to shelter inside, bolted down a good deal of TWG, but had already travelled a long way along that path by herself. I'm impressed that G. at 50 was so up with the Zeitgeist.
The theorem that TWG is based on "real experience" is tautologous and wrong, because the delusions of the two people most involved (Graves and Riding) were so central to what happened, and because they were acting according to a sexual-literary theory (perhaps several) all the time. If one judges TWG in a decent, English, empirical, way, it must be nonsense: because the liaison which it theorizes was a disaster which didn't stop short at psychosis. I can't accept anyone who tells so many lies. The whole episode proves to me how the apparatus of scholarship, critical reviewing, intellectual sharing, demands for proof, are ways of protecting us against prepotent guru figures, just as the Church of England is a protection against religious enthusiasm of the type that gave rise to the Jonesville and Waco massacres. The mysticism of the 60s gave rise to new micro-structures of brainwashing and petty tyranny which are clearly more oppressive than the "rational" regimes of the university and the corporation; surrender of critical method has always so far meant surrender to a dominant figure whose intuition is "more powerful" than those in his immediate vicinity. The essence of a balanced political system is in the control of attractive and persuasive figures by the unfakeable methods of measurement, accountancy, analysis, and formal debate. The reason for studying the Past as it was is not some ancestral piety, but to expose the strategies of priest-conmen who set up "liberated" or "alternative" histories; of which TWG is one.
The appeal of TWG seems to me very much like that of Nigel Kneale's television plays (and film works), with their invocation of archaic scenarios, linking of disparate and riddling information as proofs, and dramatic arrivals of supernatural forces. Perhaps Kneale was influenced by TWG. At any rate, it belongs with Kneale, Arthur Machen, and works of that order, rather than with books which address the past with fidelity or with care for truth. Probably the source is ghost tales of the sort in which the protagonist is found in an eery old building and finds ancient dead things (reported in hoary legends) come to life.
This idea of static, universal, eternal, archetypes, accessible only to an initiated and privileged band of guardians, who stride forth from the Sacred Grove to announce solemn truths: it's Falangism, it's like Franco's lyric journalists proclaiming the unfitness of the Spanish people to embody the Real Spain, which only a few pure Generals and Poets were allowed to interpret. The wishes of the living are cancelled out by the divinized forces of feudalism, dwelling in mighty tombs. Archaic situations rebuild themselves using the living, because society has not freed itself from feudal and hierarchical notions of authority. The eternal re-formation narrates the birth of the heir to a noble family, who grows up to become the new Count, the new ruler, fulfilling the ancient pattern; conserving the landholdings which have been passed down in his family since their sacred and bloody acquisition at the Reconquista. No wonder one recognizes situations from the past.
The White Goddess as an example of patriarchal ideology.
The key to G's character is found in a story told by Daniel Farson (in Fabulous Monsters) of Graves subjecting the very young and naïve Farson to a very protracted and elaborate practical joke, or several jokes, instead of being hospitable to him; in the course of the joke the young man is progressively humiliated and made uncertain and ridiculous, while the older man, although cruel and hurtful, gradually displays more and more of that intelligence which gives the ability to deceive, even as his cruelty and truthlessness become more and more apparent. This sums up The White Goddess, a book in which G's total indifference to the evidence reveals itself more and more unmistakably as his capacity to exercise personal fascination over other people emerges as the only principle of the book and the only "grammar of poetic myth" it explains; one realizes that truth is unimportant because humans are so vulnerable to dominant people, in politics as in art.
The kernel of TWG is this: "when Ben Jonson laid down the laws of poetry for his young contemporaries, he knew the risk run by Apollonians who try to be wholly independent of women: they fall into sentimental homosexuality." Please note that G. is saying here: rationality makes you homosexual, homosexuals are suffering from an excess of rationality. "Once poetic fashions begin to be set by the homosexual, and 'Platonic love' - homosexual idealism - is introduced, the Goddess takes vengeance. Socrates, remember, would have banished poets from his dreary Republic. The alternative evasion of women-love is monastic asceticism, the results of which are tragic rather than comic. However, woman is not a poet: she is a Muse or she is nothing. This is not to say that she should refrain from writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, not as if she were an honorary man... Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral and religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse" (the Muses were the handmaidens of Apollo, presumably the source of Apollonian poetry; Graves is trying to tell us that moral and religious poetry is written by homosexuals) ", or the ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification of the Muse. It is the imitation of male poetry that causes the false ring in the work of almost all women poets. A woman who concerns herself with poetry should either, I believe, be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence, as Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Derby did," - womanly presence? I suppose money had nothing to do with it? "or she should be the Muse in a complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with antique authority." Since no woman has ever written like this (and Graves cites no examples), this is as good as complete exclusion of women from the holy precincts he has traced out. Have any women ever written under the persona of "the old sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow"? Upon my word, I think not. Yet G. would disqualify women poets who do not do so. I take it that the imposition of an unattainable norm is a devaluation of anyone's real attainments; a punitive idealization. A punitive idealization is just as likely to make you suffer as simple contempt.
G. is here claiming that every poet follows a pre-ordained path, and that he, Graves, knows what this path is; anyone who follows a different path is not a true poet and not part of the club. This could be envy and self-regard in the guise of arcane knowledge. Someone who knows just what your emotional development ought to be, and who humiliates you and treats you as a failure when you behave in any other way, is your enemy. No-one has that knowledge. And anyway, what uniformity is there between poets? is there any common trait except eloquence between Homer, Hesiod, Propertius, the authors of the Psalms, Ephraim the Syrian, the shamans of Siberia recorded by Radloff, Taliesin, the skalds, the authors of the Scottish Ballads, Dafydd son of Gwilym, Bertran de Born, Ariosto, Robert Herrick, Milton, the anonymous authors of folk songs like "Belly and sides go bare" "John Barleycorn" "Derwentwater's Farewell" "Adieu to all judges and juries" "I drew my ship" and "Lord Franklin", Leopardi, Mickiewicz, Ungaretti, Claudel, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstamm, Tudur Arghezi, Pablo Neruda, Gunnar Ekelöf, David Jones, Ferenc Juhasz? What Graves says cannot possibly be true. I'm afraid that this is one of those cases where "organized knowledge" means "erroneous laws conjured out of thin air in order to give a boss the right to punish and pontificate". Non-sequiturs from the dark segment. I find it offensive that anyone should be so dishonest. It makes me uneasy to have a book so full of lies in my home.
One of the indispensable functions of any patriarchal ideology is to disqualify the love of young men in favour of that of old men; this follows inevitably from the biological interest of older men in keeping the women for themselves. Controlling the sexuality of the young is one of the basic difficult functions which gives rise to social structures of repression, including religion; it is to some extent inevitable that a senior man, in his function as maker of laws and ideology, will invent rules which disqualify the love of young men. This is one of the underlying realities of law and ideology. But one expects a modern person to have seen through and given up these tactics; it's disappointing to find someone in the 1940s writing a whole book whose purpose is to invalidate other people's love poetry (and indeed their ability to love) and pour limelight on his own.
Graves explains that the initiatory power is "magic", i.e. there is no real evidence for it (i.e. it does not exist). It appears to exist solely in order to de-legitimize those who are outside its charmed circle, without admitting the relativity of all artistic judgements. G.'s transhistorical theory of poetry appears to be: a, I make the rules, b, the rule I make is that I make the rules, c, the rules clearly show that you are not proper poets. Who does he disqualify a priori? women and homosexuals. And so the "true poetic gift" turns out to be the ability to desire women: but in practice one should say "the ability to own women", since this claim to poetic power is so obviously part of an integrated power structure.
Graves's intellectual practice is vividly reminiscent of his ex-girlfriend's, Laura (Riding) Jackson. She announced, over 30 years, that she was compiling a dictionary which would reveal "the real meanings of words". That is: everyone else who was using the English language was misusing it, and what they said didn't mean what they thought it meant. This is laughable: the speech chain is not subject to central authority. People know what words mean by definition, as soon as they commit an act of signifying. Words don't have constant meanings, all speech acts are just fragments of a total emotional or intellectual dialogue, which is unique, not centrally controlled (!), and constantly changing. There are no wrong meanings. There is no possibility of a speaker being wrong, and a portentous, aggressive, authority somewhere being right. This is simply an authoritarian fantasy in the guise of a theory. And how close to Graves' claim that he knew the rules of love, that HE could predict what happened when YOU fall in love, whether it was real, what kind of love poetry you could and could not write.
Organized knowledge is an attempt to invalidate your feelings. The only function of a "law of love", separate from the phenomena of love as they exist on the ground, is to invalidate people's emotions: if there is a preset "law" of how to be in love or how to write love poetry, it follows (does it not) that MY "provincial and pretentious" feelings of love and poetry can be wrong; out of court. This is a punitive idealization.
I'm not resisting the idea that poetry often reaches the poet in the form of a female voice, heard inside the head, whispering the words; this is a normal experience. I can recall a specific incident when I heard the voice of a girl I was at nursery school with, whom I hadn't seen for twenty years; I heard the voice with absolute clarity, word by word, every phonetic feature, etc. The act of composing poetry is like having a hallucination anyway, a dialogue with someone who's not there. Because I didn't invent language, the language I know was learnt from other people, and so my "linguistic identity" is composed from thousands of fragments of other people's speech acts, including their feelings; because some of these speakers were girls or women, my "linguistic identity" is partly female. It's impossible to have a completely male store of experience; you only achieve this by drawing a "personality boundary", and excluding a lot of what you perceive or identify with from your personality. Here is the line of division. The repressed always returns, and it can return as an organized "female voice", which (if you're of a religious bent) you might call a Goddess. (I think this "personality boundary" has a strong bearing on rigid forms in art, on art with strict rules on what must be suppressed, and the dread of art which flows uncontrollably; which leads to the vain longing for "eternal rules of art".)
The whole point of a mystic authority structure is that it allows you to assert untrue things. For this reason, mysticism leads to authoritarianism, both in personal relations and in political and economic relations. Only logic stands between us and the abyss. History reveals that the transition from mystic and sanctified authority to rational, contractual, relations is the source of individual freedom.
Normally, I feel twinges of doubt about the scientific accuracy of the feminist attack on male writers. I think that poets deserve, on an ethical and intellectual level, the (minute) authority and prestige which they (after their deaths) enjoy. I think radicals should attack the distribution of property, the hierarchical structure of organizations, the roots of economic decline, the dishonesty of newspapers, rather than the frail figures of poetic language. But the example of The White Goddess gives me pause. First, it is apparent that the tendency of initiatory mystic authority, such as Graves claims, is to intimidate and exclude ordinary people, who are not part of the club. Second, there is no doubt that The White Goddess is in part an attempt to exclude women and homosexual men a priori from writing great poetry, a territorial claim. Third, the only surviving function in a work which is not creative and which still completely suppresses evidence and logic, is that of authority: once you cut through the mumbo-jumbo, the core of the book is utterly repellent. When I hear the accusation that Western culture exists to provide obeisance to a few crazed and pompous Sages, I feel a twinge of guilt because of Graves, because of the Nordischer Ring, because of the monks, because of the Communist Party, because of so many others. It occurs to me that, when women create an imaginary country, they do not fight over its boundaries; they do not act like barking dogs when some unfortunate plebeian walks over "hallowed ground".
There is only one argument against culture: and that is, the people who organize and control it; this argument cannot be resisted.