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].
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