The White Goddess, by Robert Graves, ed. Grevel Lindop, Carcanet Press, 520pp, £35 in UK
As a poet Robert Graves was immensely sure of his own poetic vocation, and equally sure that most of his poet-contemporaries were frauds or mere poetasters. In his book The Crowning Privilege he dismissed most of them uncritically (or, as he himself thought, critically), from Eliot and Pound to Dylan Thomas, and long before that he had warned the short-lived poet Alun Lewis against the dangerous influence of Yeats. He was consciously a vates, a seer, yet much of his own verse has an 18thcentury dryness as well as an odd Modernist angularity and verbal constriction - typical faults of the poetry of his period, which was consciously and puritanically anti-Romantic.
On the face of it, Graves did not seem a likely figure to hymn the Muse or preach gynaeolatry and matriarchy, except for one strange chapter in his life - his long, almost masochistic association with the American poet Laura Riding, whom he regarded as a kind of incarnation of the Goddess-Muse. His one-time companion in arms and fellow-poet, Siegfried Sassoon, described Riding as "a woman who wrote unreadable blank verse and thought she knew better than God", yet Graves always thought very highly of her work and frequently fought with influential editors and critics who did not see it as he did. Today, it is these hostile or indifferent critics who seem to be in the right
Graves's relations with women were generally off-centre; his first marriage was to a dogmatic feminist and tomboy, Nancy Nicholson, who insisted that their children should bear her name, not his, and they led a cat-and-dog life until they parted. His second marriage, made much later in life, appears to have been reasonably happy though the long-drawn relationship with Laura Riding came in between, involving at one stage a menage a trois with her and the Irish poet Geoffrey Taylor (Phipps). In his old age in Mallorca, when he became a celebrity and a cult figure, Graves often had a maenadic chorus of young women sitting at his feet or hanging on his words, and for most of his life he fell in and out of love with the ease of a Venetian courtesan.
Whatever its ultimate merits may be, either as a subjective and mythopoeic fantasy or as a quasi-factual venture into the territories of Jung and Frazer combined, The White Goddess has scarcely ever gone out of print since Faber & Faber published the original edition in 1948. As Greval Lindop says in his introduction, it "remains, after Goodbye to All That and the Claudius novels, his most renowned and influential book, and also one which eludes all simple judgments". He also sees it as a kind of mental therapy, Graves's way of coming to terms with his final, traumatic break with Riding in 1939: "he had been accustomed for the past dozen years to accepting Riding's (often ferocious) critical judgments on his work, and her (frequently megalomaniac) views on poetry and politics, as carrying a virtually divine sanction." The following year he married Beryl Hodge, the ex-wife of his friend and collaborator Alan Hodge.
When he wrote it, Graves and his new wife were living in the village of Galmpton in Devon. In 1941 he corresponded with Alun Lewis as mentioned (Graves had close links with Wales) and among the subjects they discussed was the Welsh poet Taliesin; then he thought of writing or co-writing "a book about poetry"; then again a friend sent him a book dealing in part with ancient Celtic religions and bardic lore. These cross-influences set his mind working, although he had other matters on hand. He had just completed a historical novel about the quest for the Golden Fleece, and the publishers asked him to draw a map of the Argo's voyage.
In his own words, "a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me . . . I stopped marking across my big Admiralty chart of the Black Sea the course which (according to the mythographers) the Argo had taken from the Bosphorus to Baku and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious `Battle of the Trees', allegedly fought in prehistoric Britain, and my mind worked at such a furious rate all night, as well as in the next day, that my pen found it difficult to keep pace with the flow of thought." In a matter of weeks he wrote a full-length work which at first was called The Roebuck in the Thicket, part of which was serialised in the magazine Wales, and was eventually expanded and developed into The White Goddess. Apparently Graves kept revising it until 1960, and this new edition gives the final text as he left it in that year.
Scholars have never rated the book highly and in retrospect it seems clear enough that Graves, though a man of wide reading and depth of culture, lacked the discipline of a scholarly training and made the facts suit his thesis. Glyn Daniel, an authority on prehistory, savaged the work while reviewing it for the Spectator, though Graves made a spirited reply (reprinted at the end of this edition). The people who praised it at the time were mostly poets, but what is remarkable is the public response, especially since The White Goddess is such a dense thicket of mythology, prehistory, folklore, archaeology, bardic lore, classical learning and sometimes far-fetched theorising. Yet it quickly sold out, another edition was printed and it was reprinted again in 1952.
To some extent Graves built on Frazer's The Golden Bough, especially in his theme of the priest-king who is sacrificed on Midsummer Eve, tied to an oak-tree, and whose successor is doomed in turn. This, of course, is linked with fertility and the round of the seasons, and Graves also made great play with the ancient Irish "tree alphabet", the Welsh Battle of the Trees, and with the prophecies of Taliesin. Above all, however, the book is an exaltation of matriarchy, which he believed had been supplanted in late prehistory by patriarchal cultures.
His White Goddess is both Muse and Magna Mater (perhaps she is also the Jungian Anima), symbolised by the Moon and worshipped under many names, including the Celtic name of Ceridwen; she can also be seen as the other face of the Moon, the cruel hag or Nightmare who brings death. Predictably, she is set against the deadening effects of modern rationality and scientism and social regimentation, which Graves sees as mainly the legacy of patriarchy.
In essence it is a book for poets and poetry-lovers, which may explain much of its success and why it seemed to supply a psychic need at the time - apart, that is, from providing feminists and quasi-feminists with a kind of poetico-mythic charter. Perhaps its nearest parallel is Yeats's A Vision, a book which has embarrassed many of his admirers and commentators, who tend to regard it as an aberration or a kind of self-indulgent, private thesis.
Yet in both cases the aim is basically the same: to give back to poetry its own arcane lore and its closely guarded body of traditional knowledge and ritual, which it had lost in recent centuries. Yeats relied mainly on Gnostic, neo-Platonic and Eastern philosophic traditions, while Graves's personal mythology is as odd and cranky as most of his other beliefs. His Irish Protestant clerical ancestry seems to have surfaced here; in Victorian times he would probably have been involved in scholarly but rabid arguments about the historical truth of the Bible, or the language and customs of the Hittites.
Yet the result remains oddly compelling and hypnotic for those who are prepared to cut their way through the dense undergrowth of his arguments and follow his magpie, sometimes arbitrary pickings from widely differing ages, milieus and cultures. If the book is a literary curiosity, it is one on a relatively high plane. At times, you may think Graves is following some inspired insights while at others you may feel that he is chancing his arm or merely fantasizing with unbridled subjectivity. He himself wrote in 1959 to a female friend: "The White Goddess is about how poets think: it's not a scientific book or I'd have given it notes and an immense bibliography of works I hadn't read . . . Some day a scholar will sort out the White Goddess wheat from the chaff. It's a crazy book and I didn't mean to write it."
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times