Many years ago I read an interesting, if somewhat complicated, book by Robert Graves called The White Goddess. I was just putzing around on a couple book websites recently and decided to look this one up - I was surprised to find that several people have slammed this book in particular and Mr. Graves in general, calling his credibility and research into question. I’m no student of mythology or Celtic history myself so I have no basis here; does anyone know if he’s generally considered to be credible in the field? I also have a book of Greek translations by him, so I’m not sure what his forte is.
That book really blew my teenaged mind. I treasure it, and shall hear no bad thing about it.
Robert Graves is charming and erudite and can be a distinct pleasure to read, but not to take too seriously. I say this based on my own experience reading his English and Scottish Ballads, in which he presents something of a howler claiming that the fairy ballad tradition is really a secret encoding of stories of a suppressed culture of witchcraft. I found this puzzling at first, and so did my professor when I brought it to him and he noted that there was no ‘academic aparatus’ – by which he meant sources, foot notes or anything to show that Graves wasn’t just pulling this shit out of his ass. A friend of mine who was active in the study of Celtic myth, and who herself claimed to practice witchcraft, would get angry at the fact that The White Goddess continues to be taken seriously. Recently, I read a very charming essay of his called “Harp, Anvil and Oar” in which he finds the origin of English poetry in the sound of beached whale bones tinkling in the wind, the beat of the smith’s hammer and the stroke of the longship’s oar. Then he goes on to sneer at mimesis as a poetical technique, seeming to have forgotten that he just claimed that all poetry was mimesis.
Graves (who was a goddess worshipper* and general neo-pagan) was first and foremost and above all a poet, not a researcher. I love his fiction and even much of his non-fiction, but he was very much overly romantic in his “research”. He placed the goddess myth wherever he wanted it to be and was not terribly respected as a historian or serious scholar of myth, though he was a great writer. (He was certainly well read, but had a huge confirmation bias.)
Two good quotes on Graves:
and
*Graves was not a good husband- he used his worship of the goddess as an excuse for constant womanizing, even as an old man (one of his many lovers was his neighbor in Majorca, Ava Gardner) and his second wife finally had enough of it and left him for a while due to his shagging of literary groupies he “found the goddess” in. (He was in his 70s at the time.)
The historical Claudius, of course, has very little relationship to Graves’s (the real man was much more cunning and coldblooded), but this is in no way diminishes the brilliance and beauty of the novel. The characterization of Livia, of course, reflected his goddess worship, as did the far more pure Calpurnia (“her heart was purer and by far, Roman matrons, than your’s are”).
I thought as much. I enjoyed Graves’ *Claudius * novels. They were so elegantly written. But I always assumed that they were almost entirely fictional.
Two cool links:
A slideshow of Graves’s lovely home
The movie in production about Graves’s love affair with Laura Riding.
Graves boffed AVA GARDNER???
'Scuse me while my brain explodes.
Graves is wonderful to read, but yes, he is more of a poet than a factchecker. Even in his “Good-bye to All That,” (one of the best memoirs to come out of the Great War), he repeats a couple of urban legendy-type incidents.
About 10 years ago, I stumbled across an old book called “Old Soldier Sahib,” apparently the memoir of a (surprisingly thoughtful, well-writing, somewhat atheist) British private soldier who served in India. Great read–he pulled no punches about Army life, drinking, womanising, abusing the natives, etc. A while later, I found out that this was, in fact, Graves’ work, under a nom de plume.
Still a great read, but now I have a much higher skeptical threshold about what is ture in the book (Graves likely used some real-life anecdotes) and what is made up from whole cloth.
Still love the “Claudius” novels, though.
The plot thickens.
I just googled “Frank Richards,” the supposed author of “Old Soldier Sahib,” and found out that he really did exist, and in fact, was a decorated Great War veteran, who served in Robert Graves’ battalion!
http://www.frank-richards.com/
It appears that the book has been reprinted. So it may contain a lot more truth than I at first assumed; Graves likely polished up some of the content, I suspect.
Even in the neo-Pagan community, where shoddy scholarship frequently passes for history (and I’m speaking as a neo-Pagan myself), Graves does not have a very good reputation.
His apologists usually say that his works were intentionally mythopoetic and not meant to be taken literally. They were simply universals, as Graves understood them, put down in mythic form. I haven’t read enough Graves yet to judge for myself.
I’ve also heard from one prominent figure in Montreal’s neo-Pagan community that Graves was a homophobe who wanted a female diety because he thought having a male diety encouraged male homosexuality. I’ve never found anything to confirm or refute this claim, though.
Not proven, but he was definitely in love with her (he dedicated several poems to her) and she admitted to being in love with him in her autobiography. It’s accepted by his biographers that they were lovers, though how physical (or enjoyable) it was at his age is speculation. Cite
Dude. It’s Ava Gardner.
–Cliffy
Huh. In one of Tolkien’s letters, he mentions Graves introducing Gardner to him. (Tolkien, no film buff, had no idea who she was.) I thought it was surprising enough that she was a fan of Graves, but lovers…wow…
I worked my way through The White Goddess while researching my own book, and it was a hard slog. Graves had a vast knowledge of Greek mythology and ancient history (I don’t have to tell Dopers about his I, Claudius and Claudius the God. He wrote other historical novels as well, and quite a bit of poetry). His The Greek Myths is a good sourcebook – as long as you take his personal interpretations with much miore than a grain of salt.
By his own admission, Graves thought that when he looked at things “slantwise” he was somehow getting the Real Interpretation from the past. He describes looking at a medal filled with Latin abbreviations and being able to confidently say precisely what it originally meant. He didn’t think he was a good guesser – he thought he was keyed in to some tappable well of knowledge from the past.
He was also enamored of his iconotropic interpretation of the past – he thought a lot of myths were misinterpretations of early artwork that really represented something else. There are certainly cases where this sort of this has happened in the past. The problem is that Graves saw them everywhere. Reading The White Goddess and The Greek Myths you see him constantly saying – not as a hypothesis but with his full slantwise assuredness – that , for instance, the myth of Perseus ansd Medusa is “really” an iconotropic misinterpretation of pictures that are really about Hermes getting the Secret of the Alphabet from the Muses, and Medusa’s head was placed atop the bag as a warning for the uninitiated not to pry. As is usually the case with graves’ suppositions, the supposed image representing this “real” myth has never been found (as they have in other caases where a myth has been misinterpreted), although the drawing on the cover of my paperback copy of TWG obviously represents what he thought it was supposed to look like. Those ain’t Gorgons – they’re three Muses. Since i went to a lot of trouble to construct a coherent theory about the origin and meaning of this particular myth, I think Graves’ nterpretation is a lot of hooey. Nobody else UI know of believes it, and there’s no corroboration for it.
Graves talks a lot about the development of alphabets and writing in his book, but I’ve never seen anything else like it anywhere. I’m definitely not an expert on languages or alphabets, but in the absence of any corroboration, I think Graves was making most of this up, too. And being convinced he was uncovering ancient Truths.
I’ve talked to quite a few classicists – nobody’s ever said anything that makes me think they take this stuff seriously.
Thanks for all of the insight, I’m kind of bummed I was reading fiction when I thought I was reading history! Now that I have a better idea of the source I think I can enjoy it for what it is, a good story.
I was under the impression that they were based on “The 12 Caesars” by Suetonius, who I gather was big on gossip and rumor in his histories. Were Graves’ departures from fact entirely his own, or were some of them Suetonius’?
Graves was constantly said to have gotten it all from Suetonius, so he ended up writing a brief note appended to his books about his opther sources. Suetonius wasn’t the only writer on emperors. Or Roman history.
Graves certanly interpreted things himself, and made up things to “flesh out” his work. A novel isn’t supposed to be just a recasting of history, anyway – novelists generally have something they want to say. One big thing that Graves made his own was to have Claudius being a pretty intelligent guy with a stutter. The general picture has been that Claudius was weak-minded.
Is it too big a hijack to ask if you can share the theory? (Sounds interesting)
Not only is it a hijack, it might be construed as advertising. I gotta book out on this.
Part of the explanation is astronomical. Here’s one paper I wrote on it:
http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1996JAVSO..24..129W