Grevel Lindop: Remembering Robert Graves

The eleventh International Robert Graves Society Conference is being held this week in Oxford and, as the long-time publisher of Graves' work, we thought we'd jump on the bandwagon. So, in today's blogpost, Carcanet poet Grevel Lindop , editor of the Carcanet edition of The White Goddess, shares his early memories of Robert Graves' work. 

It was Robert Graves who first got me interested in poetry, and the book that did it was The White Goddess. I was a 16-year-old fascinated by myth and magic, and Graves’s book cast a glittering spell. Having read it, I rushed off to get his poems and went on from there to the rest of modern poetry, and then to write myself.

The Carcanet editions of Robert Graves

That was back around 1964. Thirty-odd years later, I heard that Carcanet was hoping to produce a new collected edition of Graves, and at once begged to be allowed to edit The White Goddess. It turned out to be an amazing experience. Williams Graves, the poet’s son, got in touch and invited me to go out to Mallorca, to work with Graves’s notes, his papers and his own copy of the book.

The Nazarene Gospel Restored

I flew out to Mallorca one autumn evening in 1996, arriving about 4 a.m. The taxi from the airport dropped me at the centre of the village of Deia, his former home, leaving me in flower-fragrant Mediterranean darkness. I had directions to William Graves’s house and took the winding path up through the hillside village under the stars. It was far too early to wake anyone, so I wandered along until I came to the wooden gateway into the hilltop churchyard where Robert Graves is buried. I turned the iron ring, opened the door and stepped through into a flickering, ankle-deep sea of red light. I had forgotten that it was All Hallows’, and the previous evening the villagers had placed hundreds of candles in red glass shades on the graves of their families and loved ones.

The whole churchyard floated in gentle red light. I paced through it to Robert’s grave, a simple stone slab covered, according to local practice, with cement in which the words ROBERT GRAVES 1895-1985 POETA had been scratched in careful, childlike handwriting. I had come to Graves’s resting-place on the Day of the Dead.

At dawn I went down to the house and was welcomed by William’s wife, Elena. After breakfast we walked over to Graves’s former home, Cannellun, where I was introduced to his widow, Beryl, a delightful, down-to-earth, plain-spoken, bespectacled Englishwoman who showed me around the Graves residence. I walked through the house wide-eyed, as if in a dream. Robert Graves’s coats were still on the coathooks, his hats still on the pegs. The walls were covered with paintings and batiks by his artist friends. His books were on the shelves. Nothing, it seemed, had been altered. Beryl was simply living just as she always had, with the things that were familiar in her house. There were two cats and an Aga in the kitchen. She made me a cup of English tea.

Goodbye to All Thatand other Great War Writings

Then she took me into the study, the study where Robert Graves had worked every day for forty years. There was a huge wooden chair with a rush seat. There was a sturdy wooden table covered with Graves’s possessions – ink-bottles, pens, pencils, pebbles, threepenny-bits, marbles, bits of beach-glass. Beside the desk stood a huge bookcase. It was full of reference books. At elbow-level was the full-size, thirteen-volume Oxford English Dictionary which Graves claimed to consult every day of his life. On the mantelpiece were the brass West African gold-weights Graves described in The White Goddess, including the little humpbacked flute-player sitting on the brass box with the spiral on the lid. ‘You’ll be all right working here, won’t you?’ asked Beryl.

And so I set work and in due course Carcanet published the book, in its revised edition, which is now also in print with Faber.  Now, William and Elena have just completed a new translation of The White Goddess into Spanish. In the process they have found yet more corrections that will need to be made one day. The work on this magical and challenging book goes on!

Grevel Lindop was born in Liverpool and now lives in Manchester, where he was formerly a Professor of English at the Victoria University.  His books include A Literary Guide to the Lake District; The Opium Eater: A Life of Thomas De Quincey; and editions of Chatterton, De Quincey and Robert Graves's The White Goddess.  He has published six volumes of poems, most recently Playing With Fire (Carcanet, 2006). Grevel's website can be found at www.grevel.co.uk/.

SPECIAL OFFER! 

20% off the following Robert Graves Carcanet hardbacks:

The Nazarene Gospel Restored

Robert Graves’s major work on the life of Jesus, written in collaboration with the distinguished Hebrew scholar Joshua Podro. The research and writing occupied them for over ten years, in a working relationship compounded, in John W. Presley’s phrase, ‘of argument, scholarship and mutual respect’, in which the imaginative writer and the Hebraist drew on their vast knowledge of the ancient world to reveal an extraordinary new, ‘true’ story of Jesus. The result is, as Graves wrote to T.S. Eliot, ‘a very long, very readable, very strange book’, and one that Presley argues is as central to Graves’s thought as The White Goddess. The Nazarene Gospel Restored was controversial when first published: the Church Times refused to advertise it, reviews were hostile, and Graves twice sued for libel. In the twenty-first century it is possible to read it in the context of a continuing engagement with the historical Jesus, both scholarly and popular.

Goodbye to All That
and other war writings
This volume brings together all three of Robert Graves's most significant prose writings on the meaning of the Great War: the original 1929 edition of Good-bye to All That, the essay 'A Postscript to Good-bye to All That' (1930), and the play But It Still Goes On (1930). These last two works, which have been long out of print, provide an invaluable context for Graves's classic autobiography. The 'Postscript', Graves's reflections on the nature of personal literature written about the Great War, is a fascinating complement to Good-bye to All That, illuminating Graves's own stance in his war memoir. But It Still Goes On, a play too controversial to be staged in the 1930s, explores the cultural and emotional wasteland of postwar England. Steven Trout's detailed introduction places all three works within their cultural and biographical context and, in particular, explores the complexities of the truth claims and dark humour in Graves's account of his experiences on the Western Front.