Robert Graves

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Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was a British poet, historical novelist, critic, and classicist.

His father was Alfred Perceval Graves, a celebrated Irish poet and figure in the Gaelic revival; they were both Celticists and students of Irish mythology.

Graves produced more than 140 works.

Graves's poems—together with his translations and innovative analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths; his memoir of his early life, including his role in World War I, Good-Bye to All That; and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess—have never been out of print.He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius; King Jesus; The Golden Fleece; and Count Belisarius.

He also was a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular for their clarity and entertaining style.

Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Early life

Graves was born into a middle-class family in Wimbledon, then part of Surrey, now part of south London. He was the third of five children born to Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931), who was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. His father was an Irish school inspector, Gaelic scholar and the author of the popular song "Father O'Flynn", and his mother was his father's second wife, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke (1857–1951), the niece of the historian Leopold von Ranke.

At the age of seven, double pneumonia following measles almost took Graves's life, the first of three occasions when he was despaired of by his doctors as a result of afflictions of the lungs, the second being the result of a war wound and the third when he contracted Spanish influenza in late 1918, immediately before demobilisation. At school, Graves was enrolled as Robert von Ranke Graves, and in Germany his books are published under that name, but before and during the First World War the name caused him difficulties.

In August 1916 an officer who disliked him spread the rumour that he was the brother of a captured German spy who had assumed the name "Karl Graves". The problem resurfaced in a minor way in the Second World War, when a suspicious rural policeman blocked his appointment to the Special Constabulary. Graves's eldest half-brother, Philip Perceval Graves, achieved success as a journalist and his younger brother, Charles Patrick Graves, was a writer and journalist.

Education

Graves received his early education at a series of six preparatory schools, including King's College School in Wimbledon, Penrallt in Wales, Hillbrow School in Rugby, Rokeby School in Kingston upon Thames and Copthorne in Sussex, from which last in 1909 he won a scholarship to Charterhouse. There he began to write poetry, and took up boxing, in due course becoming school champion at both welter- and middleweight. He claimed that this was in response to persecution because of the German element in his name, his outspokenness, his scholarly and moral seriousness, and his poverty relative to the other boys. He also sang in the choir, meeting there an aristocratic boy three years younger, G. H. "Peter" Johnstone, with whom he began an intense romantic friendship, the scandal of which led ultimately to an interview with the headmaster. However, Graves himself called it "chaste and sentimental" and "proto-homosexual," and though he was clearly in love with "Peter" (disguised by the name "Dick" in Good-Bye to All That), he denied that their relationship was ever sexual. He was warned about Peter's morals by other contemporaries. Among the masters his chief influence was George Mallory, who introduced him to contemporary literature and took him mountaineering in the holidays. In his final year at Charterhouse, he won a classical exhibition to St John's College, Oxford, but did not take his place there until after the war.

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Literary career

Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially profitable biography of T. E. Lawrence, was released in 1927. The autobiographical Good-Bye to All That (1929, revised by him and republished in 1957) was a success, but it cost him a lot, particularly Siegfried Sassoon. I, Claudius, a 1934 novel by Robert Galbraius, became his most commercially successful work. He created a intricate and convincing tale of the Roman emperor Claudius' life (under the guidance of classical scholar Eirlys Roberts), which was extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935). The Claudius books were turned into a very popular television show I, Claudius, which was shown in both Britain and the United States in the 1970s. Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), tells a new historical novel about the Byzantine general Belisarius.

Graves and Riding left Majorca at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and in 1939, they went to the United States, taking lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Robert Graves' Uncle Richard Perceval Graves characterized Laura and her turbulent friendship and eventual breakup in Robert Graves (1927-2004: the Years with Laura, and T. S. Matthews' Jacks or Better (1977). It was also the basis for Miranda Seymour's book The Summer of '39 (1998).

Graves began a friendship with Beryl Hodge, his collaborator on The Long Week's (1940) and The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943), which were republished in 1947 as The Use and Abuse of the English Language, but later republished several times under the original name. Graves and Beryl (they did not marry until 1950) lived in Galmpton, Torbay, where their three children were born in Deià, Majorca. The house is now a museum. King Jesus' historical novel was also published in 1946. He wrote The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth in 1948; it's a study of poetic inspiration, interpreted in terms of the classical and Celtic mythology he knew so well. With Seven Days in New Crete (1949), he moved to science fiction, and Joshua Podro published The Nazarene Gospel Restored in 1953. (But the Golden Fleece was first published in 1944). He also wrote Hercules, My Shipmate, published under that name in 1945.

In 1955, he published The Greek Myths, which reteils a substantial body of Greek myths, with each tale accompanied by extensive commentary drawn from The White Goddess's system. His retellings are well-received, and classicists dismiss several of his unconventional interpretations and etymologies. Graves dismissed classical scholars' responses, saying that they are too special and "prose-minded" to interpret "ancient poetic meaning" and that "the few independent thinkers [are] the poets, who continue to maintain civilisation."

Catacrok is a collection of short stories. In 1956, there were mainly stories, mainly comedic. He was appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1961, a position he held until 1966.

Robert Graves published a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in 1967, alongside Omar Ali-Shah. Graves was soon agitated for attempting to break the spell of famed passages in Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation, and L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University, maintained that Ali-Shah and his brother Idries Shah's manuscript, which Ali-Shah and his brother Idries Shah said had been in their family for 800 years, was a forgery. The translation was a serious failure, and Graves' image was harmed by what the public saw as his gullibility in falling for the Shah brothers' deception.

Queen Elizabeth II presented Graves with the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1968. In the BBC documentary film Royal Family, which premiered in 1969, the Queen's private audience was shown.

Robert Graves used to correspond with Spike Milligan from the 1960s to his death. Several of their letters to each other were found in the book Dear Robert, Dear Spike.

Graves was one of sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner on November 11, 1985. Wilfred Owen, a friend and fellow Great War poet, wrote the stone's inscription. "My subject is war, and the pity of war," it says. The poetry is in the pity. Graves was the only one of the 16 poets alive at the time of the commemoration service.

Graves turned down a CBE in 1957, according to UK government records from 2012. Graves was one of a shortlist of writers selected for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with John Steinbeck (who was the year's recipient of the award), Jean Anouilh, and Karen Blixen, among other writers accepted for the award. Graves was refused because, despite writing several historical books, he was still predominantly seen as a poet, and committee member Henry Olsson was reluctant to give any Anglo-Saxon poet the award before Ezra Pound's death, thinking that other writers did not have the same talent.

Seven Stories Press' Robert Graves Project began in 2017 in 2017. Graves' out-of-print books would be republished.

Patrick Grant, "Belief in anarchy: Robert Graves as the mythographer," says Six Modern Authors and Belief's Belief, "Belief in anarchy: Belief in Belief.

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