Issue 47, Summer 1969
Dressed in corduroys, mariner’s sweater, black horsehide jacket, and with a blanket wrapped around his middle, Robert Graves rolled his own cigarettes and chain-smoked throughout the interview. Reading glasses hung from his neck on a ribbon, which frequently became tangled in his hair. Tall, loosely built, Graves has always been physically powerful, but owing to a climbing accident during his school years he cannot swivel his head and so uses a reading stand, fidgeting it into strategic positions on the desk in front of him while he talks. Tins of small Dutch cigars, jars of tobacco, marbles, pencils, and porcelain clown heads are on the desk. There is a carton brimming with press clippings on the floor. Over the fireplace is a shelf with the works of T. E. Lawrence; on the mantel, Greek, Roman, Oriental, and African figurines. “This dial of wood? From a tree hewn in Shakespeare’s yard.” He fingered it, spoke of continuity. He knew Hardy, and Hardy knew—
Gertrude Stein first told Robert Graves about Majorca. He and Laura Riding moved there in 1929; they built the stone house in Deyá he now occupies and lived there together until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He returned ten years later and has lived there ever since. There is an orchard with fifteen kinds of fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, and an English-style lawn of Bermuda grass.
Robert Graves is the author of over one hundred books, besides a number of anonymous rewrite jobs for friends. His most important prose work is The White Goddess, a history of poetic myth—“the language of poetic myth … was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon goddess, or Muse … [and] this remains the language of true poetry—‘true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of the ‘unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute’.” The true poet worships the White Goddess, or goddess of creation; unswerving and absolute devotion to her is the poet’s only path. He “falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse.” The present Muse is fifty-two years younger than Graves—“but we are the same age” … “I am at the top of my manic cycle because good things are happening to her just now.” She is a classical dancer performing in a far-off city.
At various times during the following interview, he was setting the table, correcting a manuscript, checking references, cutting his nails with an enormous pair of scissors, picking carrots, singing folk songs, and slicing beans. He was not an easy man to keep up with.
ROBERT GRAVES
Do you notice anything strange about this room?
INTERVIEWER
No.
GRAVES
Well, everything is made by hand—with one exception: this nasty plastic triple file which was given me as a present. I’ve put it here out of politeness for two or three weeks, then it will disappear. Almost everything else is made by hand. Oh yes, the books have been printed, but many have been printed by hand—in fact some I printed myself. Apart from the electric light fixtures, everything else is handmade; nowadays very few people live in houses where anything at all is made by hand.
INTERVIEWER
Does this bear directly on your creative work?
GRAVES
Yes: one secret of being able to think is to have as little as possible around you that is not made by hand.
INTERVIEWER
In The White Goddess, you identified the Muse-poet with the Sacred King, who was sacrificed to the Moon-goddess as a divine victim, and expressed your belief that the true poet must also, in a sense, die for her. In spite of all you’ve survived, do you still hold to this?
GRAVES
Yes. What nearly always happens is that the Muse finds it impossible to sustain the love of a poet and allies herself with a pretended poet who she knows is not a real one. Someone she can mother. I have given a picture of it in a poem called “Lack.” The process starts again each time that there’s a death of love, which is as painful as a real death. There’s always a murderer about, always a “Lack” character. The King or poet represents growth, and the rival or tanist represents drought.
INTERVIEWER
Surely long years of service to the Muse are rewarded.
GRAVES
The reward is becoming eventually attached to somebody who’s not a murderess. I don’t want to talk about it because I don’t want to tempt my luck.
INTERVIEWER
By definition, your pursuit of the Muse cannot bring satisfaction. What has it given you?
GRAVES
It has brought me nearer and nearer to the center of the fire, so to speak.
INTERVIEWER
Your poems, especially your love poems, get more intense as you go on. Is that a function of age or experience?
GRAVES
One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
INTERVIEWER
In other words, you don’t learn anything new, but you get a deeper understanding.
GRAVES
That’s about it. An understanding of what the poet’s ordeals are. Love poems must be bounced back off a moon. Moons vary. Love a different Muse-woman and you get a different poem.
INTERVIEWER
What about that simple appetite, lust, which you have attacked?
GRAVES
Lust involves a loss of virtue, in the sense of psychic power. Lust is giving away something that belongs to somebody else. I mean the act of love is a metaphor of spiritual togetherness, and if you perform the act of love with someone who means little to you, you’re giving away something that belongs to the person you do love or might love. The act of love belongs to two people, in the way that secrets are shared. Hugs and kisses are permissible, but as soon as you start with what’s called the mandalot—I invented the word, from the Greek; it comes from mándalos (which is the bolt you put in the socket) and means the tongue-kiss or by dictionary definition “a lecherous and erotic kiss”—these familiarities you should reserve for those whom you really love. I’m on simple hugs-and-kisses terms with several friends. That’s all right. But promiscuity seems forbidden to poets, though I do not grudge it to any nonpoet.
INTERVIEWER
Can the experience of the Muse give felicity?
GRAVES
Not really. But what does? Felicity and pain always alternate. She serves as a focus and challenge. She gives happiness. Here I use the English language precisely—hap: happening. She gives hap; provides happening. Tranquility is of no poetic use. (The first to use Muse in the sense of White Goddess was Ben Jonson—then it dropped down into weakly meaning self-inspiration of young men.)
After experience of the untranquil Muse one may move on to the Black Goddess—for black is positive in the East and stands for wisdom. Can a white Muse become a black one, or must it be another Muse? That is difficult …