Mr Robert Graves I OBITUARY Mr Robert Graves, the poet, died aged 90 on December 7 in Majorca, which he had made his home since 1929. He had been for some 20 of his last years "arguably our most distinguished man of letters", as Anthony Powell put it. A controverial man, of somtirnes acrid and arrogant, though generous, nature, he was perhaps the last great romantic poet of the English language - it will nevcr be possible for anyone to write in his manner again. But he was also an autobiographer, a witty essayist, an unreliable but sometimes brilliant critic, a historical novelist and a translator from the classics. In his poetry, brilliantly epigmmmatic, always compre- hensible, he forged a unique and dignified style which owed as much to the mnetaphysical poets as it did to the great classical models. He was as much a master of irony as of passionate devotion, and he managed, like Yeats, to be at the same time completely "modern" and yet firmly within the great tradition of English poetry. In spite of his unusual and unconventional personality, Graves was a professional to his fingertips: a hardworking and efficient writer who frankly subsidized his poetry with novels designed to sell. Not the least remarkable feature of his work was the high quality of the books - such as I CIauidius - which he wrote in this way. Overall he wrote well over 100 individual volumes. Robert von Ranke Graves was born on July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon, London. His father, an Inspector of Schools, was the skilled Irish poet and folklorist, Alfred Perceval Graves. Through both him and through his mother, Alfred's second wife, Graves was de- scended from the German historian Leopold von Ranke; he had many other dis- tinguished ancestors, including Richard Graves, author of The Spirittual Quixote. Graves was sent to Charter- house; his later account, in his autobiography, of his unhappy years there - which did not lead to permanent cstrangement from the school - caused some to condemn him as a cad and apostate. No sooner had he left school than war broke out: he volun- teered and received an immedi- ate commission into the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was twice mentioned in despatches, and in 1916 was so severely wounded that he was left for dead, his death in action being reported in The Times. He returned to France for a short time after recovering, but spent the last part of his service on battalion duties. His first books of poetry were published while he was a serving soldier. Siegfried Sas- soon, whom he met at the front, left a memorable portrait of how unusual Graves seemed to his fellow officers ("says Hom- er's by a woman") in his own autobiography; later Graves was to play the leading role in preventing the temporarily pacifistic Sassoon from a needless court-martial. At the end of the war Graves married Nancy Nicholson, daughter of the artist William Nicholson. Demobilised, he immediately fell victim to the virulent Spanish influenza epi- demic; determined not to die, he clarlned to have kept himself alive by working on a particu- larly difficult poem. Graves's many drafts and continual revisions of his poems were to become a permanent feature of his poetic method. From the start he was devoted to the idca of personal salvation through poetry, and the leading of a particular kind of life dedicated to it. In this he resembled, more than anyone, the German poet Rilke, one of the few foreign poets whose work he admired; but where Rilke eschewed permanent tie's with women, Graves sought them. He went up to St John's College, Oxford, of which he was made an honorary Fellow in 1971, and was allowed to live on Boars Hill (in a cottage rented to him by John Mase- field) because of the state of his lungs. His wife Nancy was a pioneer feminist wvhom Mrs Masefield accurately perceived did not fully understand her husband; she became notorious for, giving the still war-shocked poet a.bad time in public and for driving a car with extraordi- nary recklessness. Graves, now well known as a ..war poet" who had survived, did most of the household chores, pronounced that no poet who broke the rules of conventional morality could hope to succeed, and with his wife opened a general store on Boars Hill. The marriage was much happier than it seemed to outsiders, and four children, two girls and two boys, were born. Nancy insisted that the girls be caDed by her name ard the boys by her husband's. Graves, who had become a close friend of T.E. Lawrence - lhe then seemed to Lawrence to represent exactly what a poet should be - and who had been greatlv helped by him financial- ly, left the university, on liealth grounds without taking his finals, but was permitted to gaduate with the degree of B.Litt, which he earned with one of his early criticall books, Poetic Unreason (1925). He was unable to support his by now large family by writing, and early in 1926 took the only salaried post he ever held in his life: as an English Lecturer at Cairo University. He returned in disgust after thiree months. At this time began his association with the eccentric American poet Laura Riding. She suddenly turned up in England on the eve of his and his family's departure for Egypt, accompanied them there, and was to be Graves's companion until 1939. But they were lovers for only three years. Nancy acquiesced in and even encouraged the partial break, although she and Graves did not actually part company until April 1929. The m6ntZage a trois maintained in a flat in St Peter's Square, Hammersmith, and on a houseboat moored near by, became the subject of gossip. Graves proclaimed to Law- rence and to all his other friends that through Laura Riding he had found the way to salvation; he supported her, and daily tried to find a public for her remarkable poetry and Steines- que prose, which never sold more than a few copies. Until 1939 he became Laura's ardent defender, and when they foun- ded the Seizin Press - they did the printing themselves - her name came first. The Press was founded on money which, although in- directly, he got through T. E. Lawrence, who unknown to Graves "arranged" for him to write the "official" biography. Lawrence and the Arabs (1927) sold well, and Graves at last became a viable professional writer. In April 1929 Laura Riding fell in love with another man, who eventually spumed her. She jumped from the window of the flat in St Peter's Square and almost died. It was Nancy who left with the other man. Graves, in a mood in which he did not care what anyone thought, rcsponded to this disaster with his autobiographv Goodbye To All That (1929), a brilliantly condensed account of his life until the events of April of that year, and containing one of the classic accounts of the Western Front. Its inaccuracies and exagger- ations angered many but he defended himself on the reason- able grounds that this was how the war felt to the participants. It was a runaway bestseller, and has remained in print ever since. In it the veteran survivors recognized their own war. With the considerable pro- ceeds from this book Graves and Laura Riding went to Majorca - "it is paradise if you can stand it", Gertrude Stein told them - where they built a house, Canellun, in the coastal village of Deya. It was his home ever after. They took the Scizin Press with them, published a numlber of books by themselves and some others, and devoted themselves tS the creation of a very theoretical and rather lonely poetic empire of which Laura was the acknowledged queen. But Graves, though famouslv dedicated to her ideals, which included the establishment of a "real university" in Deya, as well as the ending of physicality between man and women, was unhappy and frustrated. He expressed his unhappiness in his semi-retrospective poem "Certain Mercies", a character- istically bitter yet optimistic expression of the rewards of endurance. In 1933 Laura's extrava- gances found Graves once more in deep debt. Resorting to an idea which had come to him in 1930, Graves quickly vrote I, C,atrdius (1934), about the Emeror Claudius, and its sequel Claudius the God (1934). Asked later, if he knew that it would be a bestseller, he replied: "I nesw it had bloody well got to be". Yet it is far from being a potboiler, and the view that it is the greatest historical novel in English of this century is an eminently irguable one. The books got him out of debt. He had not enjoyed writing them, and always resisted the temp- tation to do for Nero what he had done for the historically more enigmatic Claudius, in whom he had reluctantly seen certain eccentric aspects of himself In 1936 the outbreak of the Spanish Civil WVar drove Graves from his home for a period of ten years. He and Laura left Majorca at tluee hours' notice on the last destroyer to pick up- British subjects. Afler living in Lon- don, Switzerland and Surrey for short periods, they rented a chateau at Rennes (1938-9). While in England, Graves had.managed to write another historila reconstruction, Counit helisarius (1938), and many of his fost fraught poems, but, though outwardly sdilh loyal and devoted to LAur, he began to sense the break-up of their relationship. which had for many years been only of intellectual importanc to him. The break-up occurrred in the United States. Graves returned tc England, was rejected for amy wervie when war broke out and, with characteristic toughness and realism, began an entirely new life. Fortunately for him and perhaps for his sanity, he had met and fallen in love wvith the woman who u%as to become his second wife, Beryl Hodge, n6e Pritchard. She had been for a short time married to the poet and writer Alan Hodge, but the separation was amicable, and Hodge went on to collaborate with Graves on two books, The Long WVeek-end (1940), a social history of the inter-war period, and The Reader Over Your Shotulder (1943), an aggressive and influential guide to lucid writing. Graves settled down in 1940 with Beryl in a farmhouse in South Devon. Three children were born, two sons and a daughter, in the war years; another son was bom in Palma in 1953. Besides the collabora- tions with Hodge, Graves produced a stream of new historical novels: the two Sergeant Lamb novels (1940-1), set at the time of the American War of Independence Wife of Afr Milton (1943), a typically acrid portrait of a poet over- valued in Graves's idiosyncratic view, and Thle Golden Fleece (1944), his gripping version of the Argonaut legend. He also wrote King Jesus (1946), then considered by some to be a blasphemous account of its subject; it was certainly controversial, but it sold well. It was engendered in part by the early drafts of "the historical grammar of poetic myth", The WVlhite Goddess (1948). This book, one of his most celebrated and influential works, is both a concealed account of his own experience of a remarkable woman, Laura Riding, and a kind of history of poets' responses to the female Muse. Anthropologically and mythologically it is, partially, unsound; as a declaration of personal poetic faith in a pastoral, and demechanized, life dedicated to the Muse it is unmatched - and it has inspired poets both good and imitative. In 1946 Graves and his family returned to Majorca. The war had left him unscarred except for the loss of his eldest son, David, who was killed, in Burma, serving in his father's old regiment. Once settled into Caneilufn he finished off The White Goddess, a book which had given him more difficulty than any other, and then settled again to writing novels- but only one of these, the Utopian Selten Days int ANe Crete, was quite up to his old standards. In 1961 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford, by which time he had, some- what suddenly, become famous as a poet - both in Great Britain and in America, which-had paid little heed to him earlier. He wrote little more prose, but travelled on many occasions to America as a lecturer, and continued to pour out love poetry of enormous skill but pelhaps less depth than in the years of real stress (folowed by gratitude, so memorably re- corded in the wartime love poems, to his second wife for providing him with a safe haven in life at last). At the age of 80 he ceased all literar activity. Graves will go down in literary history as one of the great English eccentrics, As a man he was couragcous, honourable, over-credulous (most famouslv, he was duped inta believing that the original of . his translation of the RubaiYat was a unique docu- ment) and warm-hearted. He coutd be ferocious and obstinate in controversy, some- timcs very funny but at times too contemptuous of others: he did not like close competition in his own field, but gave those poets who could stand up to him priceless insights into poetry - and he always recog- nized the "the real right thing" as T. S. Eliot once called true poetry. He had too many friends, of both sexes, into whose true nature he did not at first wish to peer too closely; consequently he had many fierce and unseemly public quarrels. He sometimes seemed compelled to live out his private life in public, which made: it hard for his friends of long standing. But those who cared for more than his fame or money came, over a long period, to know a different Graves: a rnan ruefully aware of his not unflamboyant faults, one very self-critical and repentant - and one who was loval and unfailingly generous. His record as; an old- fashioned humane liberal in the best sense was meticulous: often takien in by individuals, he never was by lies or political rhetoric. He will be rcmem- bered for his achievements as a prosc stylist, historical novelist, and memoirist, but above Ell as the paradigm of the dedicated poet, "the greatest love poet in English sinoc Donne", is his biographer describedn him He published many success- ive Collected Poems, the most recent in 1973. : MR ROBERT GRAVES A great romantic poet and I English eccentici