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Parrish Baker's avatar

Riveting read.

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Fernando Salazar's avatar

I expect you know this book, but if not, extremely relevant to your theme is Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory". https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199971951 Fussell writes about Graves at length, especially in the chapter "Theater of War" which explores the British trope of warfare as a scripted, dramatic work.

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Adam Roberts's avatar

Thanks, Fernando: yes, I do know Fussell's book, and cite it in my History of Fantasy. He does discuss Graves, but not Tolkien, although what he says about WW1 literature is certainly relevant to JRRT. In this old post (about Tolkien and the war) https://medium.com/p/72396664f4c0 I say: "One of the things Fussell argues in his Great War and Modern Memory book is that the war, and literary responses to the war, effected a change in the idiom of literature itself. He argues that ‘Literary Modernism’ was (make-it-new, fractured, ironised and so on) a response to the trauma of the war, just as it was also an attempt to get beyond the war. It’s not just the fact that Tolkien wrote his fantasy in a traditionalist idiom, but the fact that it has (manifestly) connected with so many people that reflects a reaction against that impulse. This in turn has to do by what we mean when we talk about ‘war literature’ as such."

https://medium.com/p/72396664f4c0

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w h's avatar

Nothing useful or Critical to say except that I loved this, thanks ARRRRRR.

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Adam Roberts's avatar

Thanks, Wax!

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ayjay's avatar

A wonderful post, Adam — and I needed a good one on Graves, whom I've always found alien and extremely alienating. I have a feeling that if I get sent to Purgatory I'll have to spend the time reading Graves and learning charity.

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Adam Roberts's avatar

That's interesting! "Extremely alienating" is strongly worded. What is it about him that so puts you off?

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ayjay's avatar

Well, primarily it's that he strikes me as a monomaniac: he's done a vast amount of reading, but only what supports, or can be turned in such a way as to seem to support, his White/Triple Goddess thesis ever makes its way to the reader. Nothing ever points in the other direction, nothing ever complicates his vision: everything is grist for his endlessly turning mill. It feels inhuman to me. And when you couple this with the intensity of his hatreds, he seems a pretty unpleasant character.

By the way, when Sayers was working on her PARADISO translation she read Graves's translation of Lucan's PHARSALIA, with its famously vitriolic introduction: Graves despised Lucan and sought to portray him in every possible negative light, and especially emphasized Lucan's astronomical ignorance. (E. V. Rieu thought the Introduction so hostile that he threatened to cancel the contract unless Graves toned it down, which he did, but only a bit.) DLS thought it was Graves who was ignorant, and sought to prove it, even enlisting as a temporary research assistant an exceedingly bright undergraduate named Brian Marsden, who later became a very distinguished astronomer at Harvard. He helped her to discover many points on which Graves was wrong and Lucan right. (Decades later he wrote an enjoyable essay about the experience.) Sayers also meticulously went through Lucan's Latin to show that Graves had deliberately mistranslated him to make him seem more stupid. For instance, in the translation Lucan mentions a lunar eclipse than was followed the very next day by a soar eclipse, and Graves adds a note about how stupid this is. But, DLS discovered, Lucan didn't write that it happened the next day; Graves had added that.

She spent most of the last year of her life on Graves's manifold intellectual wickednesses, which is the main reason she didn't finish her translation. when asked why she was doing it, she wrote,

"I'm ... doing it because I can't bear to see a man treated like that, even if he is two thousand years dead, and because I believe Lucan is substantially talking sense, and I want to get to the bottom of it. I don't care what it costs or how long it takes. I want justice. I want honest scholarship and accurate translation. The classical scholars won't take an interest; either they think astronomy is too remote and boring to bother with, or they say, "Oh, Graves! what does he matter?" But he is distributing his sneers to a quarter of a million Penguin readers, and I don't like it. (End of speech)"

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ayjay's avatar

I expanded this comment on my blog: https://blog.ayjay.org/sayers-and-graves/

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Adam Roberts's avatar

Monomaniac is right in one sense—Graves is, as Rebecca West might say, an idiot not a lunatic—but in another sense I think you’re underselling how varied his textual output actually was. A main strand of his poetry is ‘White Goddess’ stuff and love poems certainly, but he also writes all manner of whimsical, speculative, narrative and other kinds. And his prose is all sorts: the Claudius novels are historically detailed but manage to generate a compelling central character; “King Jesus” is bonkers and surprisingly immersive into 1st-century Jewish culture at the same time; and “Wife to Mr Milton” is a great historical novel by any metrics.

His other fiction is all over the place: “Seven Days in New Crete”, his one fictive engagement with his White Goddess obsession, is deeply odd, but “Antigua, Penny, Puce” is a good novel about stamps, “The Isles of Unwisdom” a marvelous oceanic quest, and his short fiction, especially ‘The Shout’ really very good. His “Lawrence and the Arabs” is better, because less indulgent and more to the point, than Lawrence’s own “Seven Pillars”.

His translations are variable: the Lucan is bad, as you say, and he made a bizarre, error-filled version of the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam that is just embarrassing: but his Apuleius is great and his Suetonius standard. On the question of scholarship, my colleague Nick Lowe wrote a long review of “The Greek Myths” flagging a number of stupid blunders in Graves’s Greek, and there’s a bit of “White Goddess” where he reports, ingenuously enough, checking some of his Old Welsh stuff with an actual expert in the area, being told he was all wrong, and deciding simply to ignore the expert advice because his ‘poetic instincts’ told him he was right. I think this is a crucial part of him as a writer: not that he was ignorant of Greek and Latin (as Pound was actually ignorant of the Chinese idiograms he quotes in the Cantos) but that he was careless and liable to prefer his own idiosyncratic intuition over actual scholarship. I find this strangely forgivable

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ayjay's avatar

"He was careless and liable to prefer his own idiosyncratic intuition over actual scholarship." My epitaph!

My fault for not being more clear: My animus is towards the Triple Goddess hypothesis and all the things he wrote to support it, not to Graves more generally. Even in the context of your post, I shouldn't have written "Graves" when I meant "Graves's Big Idea about Ancient Religion."

Though I will say that, having read a good bit of him if not nearly as much as you have, I don't rate him *highly*. For instance, I think WIFE TO MR MILTON is more enjoyable if you share his view of Milton as a person and Christianity as a religion, less enjoyable if you don't. I don't think Graves ever considered it a virtue to be fair to people you disagree with.

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Adam Roberts's avatar

The problem with "Graves's Big Idea about Ancient Religion" is that it simply isn't true. But really it's a category error thinking of "The White Goddess" as in any sense historical scholarship. On the other hand, I can understand Sayers' animadversion to him as a person: my sense is that he was a difficult, selfish, inconstant individual, more than a little mad, "an ass" as Tolkien said. Very badly damaged by the war (his account of PTSD in "Goodbye to All That" is very compelling and distressing). And you're right that "Wife to Mr Milton" is distorted by Graves's hostility to Christianity, and his dislike of Milton. But it's well done, as a novel: as "Count Belisarius" is well done. Though not as good as the Claudius duo.

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