The White Goddess, and Apollo's Golden Mean

 

Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:47:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: ......@westerncanon.com
Subject: Lecture Hall Message 18

Dated : April 25, 1999 at 13:47:09
Subject: Re: The White Goddess

>I am a junior at Malone College in Canton, OH and I am taking
>Modern British Writers. For our final project, the professor has
>asked us to analyze a poet and his works. My friend and I are going
>to do a type of interview situation, where he is Graves and I am
>the interviewer. We want to focus specifically on "The White Goddess"
>and "Succubus." If anybody has any information or comments on either
>of these poems, please share them with me. Also, share what types of
>questions you might ask Graves about these particular poems.

Nicole,

You have given yourselves a very tall order by focussing on two important poems by Graves, the first of which is of central importance to the second part of his life. I can however give you a number of pointers about "The White Goddess" which might help you to narrow down your target.

Another of Graves important poems, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice", begins with the lines:

There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling

From the mid-forties onwards, much of Graves' prose and poetry was shaped by this belief. Interestingly there is a passage in "The Shout", a short story written in 1924, which prefigures this approach:

"My story is true", he said, "every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is 'true'", I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and therefore true".

Graves' stated opinions about the White Goddess, which resulted in the poem and the book of the same name, should be looked at the same way. Both Graves' prose and poetry attempt to retell his understanding of a truth by recasting detail and character. The specific reference is (according to Graves) always the same, but the incidentals change and the details blur and intertwine. The poem "The Clipped Stater" for example, can be read in terms of its references to Alexander, which are explicit, or to the phenomenon of the Incarnation of Christ, or even to the transformation of T. E. Lawrence into "Aircraftsman Shaw". In fact it should be read in terms of (at least) all three: if there is "one story and one story only", the real focus of Graves' interest is beyond the incidental details of the poem, and the blurring and braiding of detail allows us to look at the real subject, as it were, slantwise.

The first two lines of "The White Goddess" [the version in "Selected Poems", ed. Paul O'Prey, 1986] express Graves' view that his subject is one uncomfortable to the reasoning mind: and thus a subject which the dominant forces in European civilization over at least the past two and a half thousand years have tried to reject ("All Saints revile her"). Very quickly however (line 3) the poem is about a voyage in search of the Goddess: this is particularly interesting as Graves' views on ancient matriarchy surfaced first in "The Golden Fleece" [pub 1944] (US: "Hercules, My Shipmate" [pub 1945]), and Graves' was working on his translation of the story of the voyage of the Argo immediately before writing his monumental study: "The White Goddess" (to which a version of the poem is prefaced "in dedication"). The sailors sail to find her "in scorn" of those "ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean". This might be read as a re-interpretation of the real mission of the Argo, or a metaphor of Graves' own studies, or more broadly as a characterization of any attempt to escape from (as Graves believed) the rigid, plodding patterns of Cartesian thought sanctioned as "valid" by our civilization (the version prefaced to "The White Goddess" speaks in the first person).

The second stanza continues the speaker's identification with the crew of the ship:

It was a virtue not to stay/To go our headstrong and heroic way

The following three lines describe the extremes to which they are prepared to go to find the elusive Goddess. Paradoxically she is then given a precise physical description, clear enough to pick her out of a crowd. That it might not be wholly healthy to actually encounter her is suggested by the striking description of her brow as: "white as any leper's".

In the third stanza it is clear that there have been (and will be) good times for the Goddess, when all recognise her and the universality of her significance:

The green sap of spring in the young wood astir/Will celebrate the Mountain Mother

However the crew of the ship are gifted to recognise, "even in November", her "nakedly worn magnificence". Thus the ability to discern the Goddess in her elusiveness is given more importance by Graves than her mere celebration. Here Graves alludes to the different qualities required of devotees of the Goddess in secular (i.e., modern) times, to those qualities required in times when her reality is taken for granted.

The penultimate line reveals that the sailors have undertaken the voyage, not in ignorance, but in full knowledge of the dangers: since they have experienced "cruelty and past betrayal". They have met her before, in one form or another. They are also, like those in love:

Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

"Bolts" are of course more commonly associated in Greek Mythology with Zeus, king of the gods. But Graves regarded Zeus as a usurper, and believed that real power belonged to the Goddess (See for example "The Greek Myths" 9.7: Zeus and Metis, where Graves quotes Jane Harrison who described the story of Athene's birth from Zeus's head as 'a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions').

Graves more and more came to regard the White Goddess as the real source of inspiration for poets, so that he began to view poetry written for any other reason as fakery. In his study "The White Goddess" he describes her in similar terms to those used in the poem:

...a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid or loathsome hag. Her names and titles are innumerable. ... I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her. The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess... The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living... [TWG: Ch. One, "Poets and Gleemen"]

Hence it is that Graves' concept of the White Goddess is entwined with the craft of poetry: poetry is an invocation of the Goddess, and to write "true poetry" the poet has to love someone in whom the Goddess temporarily manifests. Graves' book on the White Goddess has to be read therefore as a braid, made up of a historical reconstruction of poetic grammar, as well as his personal experience of the Goddess in his association with Laura Riding, and possibly also his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves.

The Graves Interview:

You are going to have to do a lot of research to do this properly! You can find most of what you need in three books: Robert Graves "The White Goddess" for Graves own account of his ideas; Richard Perceval Graves: "Robert Graves and the White Goddess 1940-1985" [pub 1995]; and "Robert Graves: The Years with Laura Riding 1926-1940" [pub 1990]: these last two volumes give the relevant details about Graves' collaboration with Laura Riding, and his later muse poetry. Other information about Graves' picture of ancient matriarchy can be found in his novel "King Jesus" [pub 1946] and "Seven Days in New Crete" [pub 1949] (US "Watch the North Wind Rise"). Some useful critical remarks about the thesis of "The White Goddess" can be found in Martin Seymour-Smith's "Robert Graves: His Life and Work" [1982; expanded edition pub 1995]

It might be worth asking "Graves" to expand on the method of thinking he associates with the Goddess, which he opposes to "the God Apollo's golden mean": Graves says quite a bit about this (that poetic thought is not really viable in a scientific and rational civilization) in various parts of "The White Goddess". He also wrote an interesting preface in 1976 to John Biram's book "Teknosis", in which he seriously criticises modern industrial civilization (may be hard to find this book). And/or you might ask "Graves" to describe the background to the writing of the poem "The White Goddess", showing the different elements in both his writing and his personal life which he weaves together to make a successful artistic whole. You might also ask "Graves" to compare and contrast some related poetry (such as"Juan at the Winter Solstice"; "The White Goddess" and "The Succubus").

 

'The Shout' and Other Stories

 

>Date: Sun, 20 Jun 1999 17:21:14 -0400 (EDT)
>From: mobydick@westerncanon.com
>Subject: Lecture Hall Message 22

>From: marie …….:

>Dated : June 20, 1999 at 17:21:12
>Subject: the Shout and Other Stories

>I am in fourth year at university in France and I am preparing
>a study on Robert Graves and the importance of fantasy,
>unreality in reality, and the flavour of 'supernatural' in his
>English short stories. It would be great to have some comments
>about that and about any link it could have with his poetry.

This is a particulary interesting question. Graves' short stories are quite different from most of his novels, in that the stories reflect aspects of his personal experience in a significantly modified form. The novels by contrast are reworkings of existing narratives, usually with some interpretative spin (Graves spoke of I, Claudius as an interpretative biography). His most famous short story is 'The Shout', written not sooner than his period of professorship in Egypt (and not, as stated by Graves himself in his 1965 preface to the Collected Short Stories, dating from 1924). Exactly why Graves wrote 'The Shout' is unclear: the couple in the story is loosely based on himself and his wife Nancy, but no known incident in his life up until its writing seems to fit. There is a later incident however, which does seem to reflect aspects of the story: the breaking up of Schuyler Jackson's marriage by Laura Riding.

In the Introduction to the Collected Short Stories Graves acknowledges that: "Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range: I fetched back the main elements of The Shout from a cricket-match at Littlemore Asylum, Oxford." However elsewhere he says that the idea of the story occurred to him "one day while I was walking in the desert near Heliopolis in Egypt and came upon a stony stretch where I stopped to pick up a few mis-shapen pebbles; what virtue was in them I do not know, but I somehow had the story from them." [see Richard Perceval Graves, The Years with Laura Riding 1926-1940, Ch. 7: 'Seeing Ghosts'; and note 73 to the Chap.]. Given the way Graves worked his material, both accounts are likely to be correct, and 'The Shout' is a composite of these elements forged together in part by his unconscious (during the twenties Graves was heavily influenced by Freudian ideas, and wrote a book on the meaning of dreams). The story also reflects an interest in whether or not the soul is bound to the body during every moment of life - perhaps prompted by a wish to explain the phenomena of the shared dream, premonitions, and also ghosts.

My own guess is that the man with the 'terror shout', Charles, actually represents Laura Riding, who was in Egypt with Robert and Nancy. The story would therefore reflect the destructive impact of Riding on the relationship between Robert and Nancy. Except that, in the story, 'Charles' is exorcised by the breaking of the stone which holds his soul. In real life the outcome was quite different.

The same technique (incubation of an idea in the unconscious) seems to underlie much of Graves poetry. 'The Clipped Stater,' which is notionally about Alexander the Great, utilises elements from a number of sources, including events in the life of T.E. Lawrence. This braiding together of ideas could of course, in theory, be done consciously, but Graves felt that poets who wrote in this way, under the tutelage of the god Apollo, were frauds.

In Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), Graves included a poem (available on the web) which is an example of the fantastic intruding into reality: 'Corporal Stare'. It appears to recount an incident which happened during his time in the trenches: a man who had been killed appeared to Graves and his companions while they were having a meal:

Then through the window suddenly,
Badge, stripes and medals all complete,
We saw him swagger up the street,
Just like a live man - Corporal Stare!
Stare! Killed last May at Festubert.
Caught on patrol near the Boche wire,
Torn horribly by machine-gun fire!
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind

In the later Goodbye to All That Graves recounts an incident which seems to be the basis of the poem:

At Béthune, I saw the ghost of a man named Private Challoner... When he went out [to France] with a draft to join the First Battalion, he shook my hand and said "I'll meet you again in France, sir". In June he passed by our 'C' Company billet, where we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from Cuinchy... Private Challoner looked in at the window, saluted, and passed on. I could not mistake him, or the cap-badge he wore; yet no Royal Welch battalion was billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up, looked out of the window, and saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert in May.
[Chapter 14 of the 1957 edition]

In the same passage Graves gives details of the civilised menu of the dinner: in the circumstances, an equally fantastic intrusion into the unreal reality of the war in France.

Not much has been changed here - perhaps because the incident has power and meaning in itself, in its strangeness, without the necessity of a literary metamorphosis to make the hair on the back of the neck stand. Graves has however altered the rank and name of the soldier, collapsing together the ghost and his reaction to the apparition.

Graves is unusual as a poet in supplying a good deal of useful detail about his working methods: to some extent his writings on poetry illuminate aspects of his prose technique also. I would recommend that you consult: the Collected Writings on Poetry, edited by Paul O'Prey, 1995; The White Goddess, (1961 edition); The Meaning of Dreams, 1924; and also Poetic Unreason and other Studies, 1925. Richard Percival Graves three volume biography is probably the best available for the study you propose, followed by Martin Seymour-Smith's Robert Graves: His Life and Work, 1982; expanded edition, 1995].

Seven Days in New Crete

Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 23:00:15 +0000
Subject: Re: "Seven days in New Crete"

>I am an Italian university student. I am specializing in English
>literature at the University of Pescara, Italy and, for my thesis, I am
>preparing a study on Robert Graves' fiction... I have found this archive and I have
>thought to call for help. In a chapter of my thesis I have to tell about a Graves'
>novel, called "Seven days in New Crete", but in my country I was not able to
>find any news about it. It would be great to have some critical comments
>on this novel and any link it could have with another novel, called
>"1984" by George Orwell about the utopian thematic. I would be very happy
>if somebody paid attention to my help request. Thanks a lot, Alessandra.

Alessandra,

'Seven days in New Crete' is one of several works in which Graves explored his thesis that the original theological and social structures of the human race were matriarchal. In other words,that the principal divinity - in fact the only original divinity - was once 'The Goddess', and that, formerly, social organization had feminine characteristics, as contrasted with the 'masculine' social structures of the modern world.

The principal discussion of this thesis can be found in 'The White Goddess', first published in 1948. The idea first surfaced in 'The Golden Fleece'. It quickly dominated Graves thoughts, and 'The Golden Fleece' was put aside while Graves wrote the first draft of 'The White Goddess' (originally titled 'The Roebuck in the Thicket'). The matriarchial idea also plays a significant role in the novel 'King Jesus'. Graves translated Apuleius' 'Golden Ass' in the same decade, and Apuleius' work seems to have confirmed Graves in the belief that he was on the right track. The 'Goddess' is a key figure in Apuleius's novel, though in his work it is a specific goddess who is referred to (Isis), rather than 'The Goddess' of Graves' thesis.

The novel fits broadly into the category of science fiction, and explores a utopian future. Graves began planning a utopian novel in the summer of 1940 [see: Richard Perceval Graves' 'Robert Graves and the White Goddess': 'Work in Hand', p18] whose ideas of social and political organisation were founded chiefly upon former ideas of Laura Riding which he hoped would eventually inspire a 'practical organization of decent people'. He told his son David of his idea for the novel: David was however not impressed, and said that 'any practical organization of decent people would be suppressed at once by the government' and that he thought it 'time this Western industrial civilization was ended'. Possbily because of this criticism, the novel was laid aside for nearly seven years.

New Crete is divided into kingdoms, but powers of the kings are 'entrusted to them by their queens'. The governing principle is a custom based 'not on a code of laws, but for the most part on the inspired utterances of poets' who receive the guidance of the Muse (the Goddess). The system is run by women who 'act directly on behalf of the Goddess'. Thus women are 'naturally' treated by men as the superior sex. RPG comments that:

'This is a society living in harmony with the natural world; and each individual is allocated to one of the 'five estates' not by birth but by capacity. Money has been abolished; different villages have different social customs, so that one may live in a monogamous, polygamous, or even polyandrous society and yet be perfectly virtuous; there are even 'bagnios', brothels which it is no disgrace to visit, and 'where one goes when one isn't in love with anyone in particular but feels unhappily lecherous'; while war has become ritulalized into a kind of moderately violent rugger, so that the only deaths, apart from those by natural causes, occur as part of the ritual of goddess-worship.' [Richard Perceval Graves' 'Robert Graves and the White Goddess' p143-4].

'Seven Days in New Crete' is not in fact a serious utopia: its inhabitants are unhappy with its complacency and indifference: the New Cretans do not possess 'the quality that we prize as character: the look of indomitability which comes from dire experiences nobly faced and overcome'. Therefore the rulers have deliberately introduced 'a seed of trouble... since true love and wisdom spring only from calamity'. Graves novel is therefore anti-utopian.

On the face of it, there isn't much to connect Orwell's '1984' and Graves' utopian novel. They were both composed in the late 1940's, and both result from an anxiety about evident tendencies in the modern world. Orwell's literary sources included Wells, London, Huxley and Zamyatin (principally Zamyatin): I do not know whether or not Orwell read Graves' book. However both works are responses to the political and social dislocations of the early twentieth century. Both men wished for the creation of a new social order, but were rather pessimistic about the practicalities of this. Graves was particularly influenced by Laura Riding's ideas on politics and society during their time together, though afterwards he reacted against them: it is therefore interesting to speculate on the nature of 'Seven Days in New Crete' had Graves written it while still under the spell of Riding. It might have been whole-heartedly utopian in outlook.

Are there significant parallels between the novels? In both novels society is split up into different areas and levels, which have different rules of behaviour, as if they were autonomous societies: in Orwell's novel these are the 'zones of influence'; and in Graves' future society different areas of New Crete have different customs and mores. War has been ritualised in both societies: in '1984' it serves to underpin inequality and to soak up overproduction. Also, in both Orwell's and Graves' novels there is a social hierarchy: in '1984' membership of the oligarchy (the party) is presented as essentially non-hereditary - this is because the oligarchy's purpose is to preserve itself, rather than the families of its members; in 'Seven Days in New Crete' status is acquired on the basis of 'capacity'. Both societies continue because the ruling elite has the power to nominate its successors. Thus in both cases the society is totalitarian, in that all the reins of power are in the hands of a small oligarchic group, whatever the outward appearances of difference and diversity.

Both these novels owe a great deal to the circumstances of their creation, and looking at the context of their creation is probably the best way to make useful comparisons.