The White Goddess (2 page)

Certainly, for all its literary qualities,
The
White
Goddess
is a work of massive scholarship. Considered as a study in anthropology, it springs directly from Sir James Frazer’s
The
Golden
Bough
(first published in 1890), and those who have read Frazer are likely to find
The
White
Goddess
most accessible. In a sense, Graves’s work rests on a brilliantly simple transformation of Frazer’s theory.
The
Golden
Bough
had demonstrated that a wide range of primitive religions centred on a divine king, a man who represented a dying god of vegetable fertility and who either killed his predecessor, reigning until killed in his turn, or else was sacrificed at the end of a year’s kingship. Graves’s contribution was to supply the missing female part in this drama: to suggest that originally the god-king was important not for his own sake, but because he married the goddess-queen; and that whilst kings might come and go, the queen or goddess endured.

Nonetheless, the broader notion that human society was originally matriarchal was one in which Graves had many predecessors, most notably the Swiss archaeologist J.J.Bachofen, whose
Das
Mutterrecht
(‘
Mother
Right
’, 1861) had argued that matriarchy was a remnant of a primitive era before the domestication of animals, when the part played by the male in procreation was not understood. The female was seen as the sole source of life; the dominance of goddesses and female rulers naturally followed. (Graves may well first have heard of such theories from W.H.R.Rivers, the psychiatrist and shell-shock specialist who had become a close friend after the First World War. Rivers, who had been an anthropologist with an active interest in ‘mother-right’ as a social phenomenon, must have known the work of Bachofen and his followers.) Such theories, though controversial, are still very much alive. A recent proponent has been the American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose books
Goddesses
and
Gods
of
Old
Europe
(1982) and
The
Language
of
the
Goddess
(1989) are thoroughly in harmony with Graves’s ideas.

In the fields of poetry and aesthetics, precursors of
The
White
Goddess’
s perspective are perhaps easier to find. It is evident that Graves’s idea of a divine female power, manifest under many names and forms in the goddesses of the ancient world, and appearing in historical times to possess the women who have inspired poets, has a great deal in common with the idea of the ‘eternal feminine’ which fascinated so many writers in the late nineteenth century. The ‘Gioconda’ of Walter Pater’s
Renaissance
(1873), who ‘has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave…and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes’; Swinburne’s ‘Proserpine’ (‘goddess and maiden and queen…’), Yeats’s ‘Rose of the World’, and even the threefold heroine of Hardy’s last novel,
The
Well-Beloved
,
all embody such a vision. Significantly, when Graves was preparing his Oxford lectures in 1964, he was a little perturbed to find that his concept of the poetic Muse as a particular woman possessed by an inspiring goddess was not attested by any quotations in the
Oxford
English
Dictionary.
‘I would feel happier,’ he admitted, ‘to know that some other poet – Raleigh or Coleridge or Keats, for instance – …had anticipated me in this usage.’
1
As this discovery suggests, whilst the poetic relationships Graves describes are certainly ancient, his particular view of them may be one that received expression only in the late nineteenth century.

This would not be surprising; for in many respects
The
White
Goddess
has its origins in the ‘Celtic’ literary movements of the
fin
de
siècle.
Graves’s grandfather, Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick (1812–99), had been a prominent Irish antiquarian and a pioneer in the decipherment of Ogham inscriptions; and his father, the poet Alfred Percival Graves (1846–1931), had been an important figure in the Irish Literary Revival: Robert had spent his childhood in a household full of the literary bustle of a committed ‘pan-Celtic’ poet and educator. He had soon rejected most of his father’s ideals; but when in the 1940s Taliesin and the Battle of the Trees seized on his imagination, he was able to turn at once to ‘a shelf-ful of learned books on Celtic literature which I found in my father’s library (mainly inherited from my grandfather…)’.
2
He was resuming, however belatedly, a family tradition, and there is a sense in which
The
White
Goddess
might claim to be the last product of the Irish Literary Revival. Many of the books Graves used are still on the shelves in his study at Deyá: P.W.Joyce’s
Social
History
of
Ancient
Ireland
and
Origin
and
History
of
Irish
Names
of
Places
;
R.A.S.Macalister’s
Secret
Languages
of
Ireland
; Lady Charlotte Guest’s
Mabinogion
;
the many-volumed
Transactions
of the
Irish
Texts
Society
,
of the
Ossianic
Society,
of the
Honourable
Society
of
Cymmrodorion.

In these circumstances it may seem odd that
The
White
Goddess
contains no mention of W.B.Yeats, or of his collaborator in the collection of Irish myth and folklore, Lady Augusta Gregory. After all, Yeats’s youthful devotion to the charismatic Maud Gonne would seem to offer an outstanding example of the creative relationship between muse and poet; and literary historians have often coupled Yeats’s
A
Vision
with
The
White
Goddess
as the modern period’s masterpieces of poetic myth-making in English. Moreover, Yeats had been a close friend of Alfred Percival Graves.

Robert Graves, however, cherished a lifelong distaste for Yeats and all his works, a product of his own early rejection of everything ‘Celtic’ intensified later by Laura Riding’s abhorrence of Yeats’s attitude to poetry (epitomised in his teasing suggestion, in a letter to her, that poets should be ‘good liars’). Although it might seem that to write
The
White
Goddess
without a single reference to Yeats must have required heroic determination, it is much more likely that the omission was unthinking and intuitive, an instinctive avoidance of a tainted source. Tellingly, Graves’s library contains just one volume by Lady Gregory,
Cuchulain
of
Muirthemne
(1902). Inside, in a hand of the 1960s, Graves has scrawled ‘Philip Graves from Robert Graves from Philip Graves’ – a riddling indication that the volume came from his half-brother Philip and is to be passed on to his grandson, another Philip. The inscription reads like a brusque dismissal, a laconic reminder that the book is just passing through and has no permanent place in his collection.

Comparison with Yeats’s
A
Vision
is nonetheless instructive. Both books were written in a tempest of inspiration by poets in their fifty-second years; both present systems of myth which underlie their authors’ poems and will shape their future work; both owe much to women. But the contrasts are equally important. Yeats claimed a supernatural origin for his book – its materials were dictated by spirits – yet refused to commit himself as to its ultimate validity, quoting the spirits’ own confession: ‘We come to give you metaphors for poetry’. Graves’s book, on the other hand, shows a curious disjunction between passages of inspired fervour and an argument which proceeds ‘scientifically’, drawing its evidence from archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and even chemistry. It assumes a tone of the scientific and the factual never attempted by Yeats. This has helped to make Graves’s argument far more acceptable to a late-twentieth-century readership which remains uncomfortable with avowed occultism or myth-making. Yet Graves’s most explicit public word on the nature of the Goddess remained surprisingly close to the terms chosen by Yeats’s spirits. ‘Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot reasonably be argued,’ he told his New York audience in 1957; ‘let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess.’

The emphasis on metaphor is a useful reminder that
The
White
Goddess
is, among other things, a work of literary criticism, proposing a specific theory of English poetry. As such it shows Graves drawing not only on Celtic scholarship and anthropology but on major works of literary scholarship which had appeared during the 1920s and 1930s. John Livingston Lowes’s
The
Road
to
Xanadu
(1927) had set a precedent for conscripting the reader into a process of detection that led through realms of myth, dream and legend in pursuit of the poetic imagination; and a technique for disentangling the
Hanes
Taliesin
may have been suggested by
A
Song
for
David
(1939), W.F.Stead’s innovative book on Christopher Smart’s
Jubilate
Agno
(a poem which has much in common with Taliesin’s song). By reordering the lines, Stead had been able to show that a long poem previously regarded as ‘mad’ or ‘nonsensical’ was in fact a coherent work whose religious riddles and puns followed a meaningful pattern. If Graves did not know these books before, it is possible that he read them in 1942 when gathering material for the book on poetic thinking which he had planned to write with Alan Hodge. There are fictional influences too. For example, Chapter I’ s extraordinary vision of the Goddess’s nests as seen in dreams, with its accompanying quotation from Job – ‘Her young ones also suck up blood’ – derives from M.R.James’s ghost story ‘The Ash Tree’ (itself a fine portrayal of the Goddess in her ‘hag’ aspect).

Preoccupied though it is with the making of poetry,
The
White
Goddess
has much to say also about interpretation, most remarkably in Chapter XIX, ‘The Number of the Beast’. Here Graves turns aside from his pursuit of the magic roebuck to test his poetic intuition on ‘a simple, well-known, hitherto unsolved riddle’, namely the Number of the Beast mentioned in the biblical Book of Revelation. The logic of this exercise will reward careful attention. Graves first uses his ‘analeptic vision’ – a kind of historical clairvoyance – to read the riddle as an inscription referring to the Roman Emperor Domitian; he then ‘corrects’ it to refer to Nero; finally he argues that both versions are correct, although conceding that the second one could never actually have been written. Intuition, it seems, has read not only a text but the text’s hidden history, for which historical proof can be gathered after the reading is done. As for the original intentions of the biblical author, ‘Who can say whether the sense was put there by St John, as it were for my benefit, or by myself, as it were for St John’s benefit?’ The chapter shows how far Graves’s method differs from that of the scientist. Where the scientist must choose the most economical interpretation, Graves chooses the interpretation richest in meaning: if poetic intuition is in good working order, historical evidence to confirm the reading will turn up later.

For Graves himself, more than reading and writing was at stake.
The
White
Goddess
was a book which made sense of his personal as well as his literary past. Sydney Musgrove has shown
1
that many of the themes and preoccupations of
The
White
Goddess
had been present, in fragmentary or embryonic form, throughout his earlier work. More importantly, it is likely that
The
White
Goddess
arrived so insistently because its writing was a necessary process of therapy. Graves’s intense personal and poetic relationship with Laura Riding had ended in 1939, with her decision to remain in Florida with Schuyler Jackson. Graves had been stunned and, in a sense, disoriented: despite the increasing strains of their relationship, he had been accustomed for the past dozen years to accepting Riding’s (often ferocious) critical judgments on his work, and her (frequently megalomaniac) views on poetry and politics, as carrying a virtually divine sanction. By 1940 he had fallen in love with Beryl Hodge, the wife of his friend and co-author Alan Hodge. The new relationship caused no friction: as we have seen, Graves and Hodge continued to collaborate after Beryl and Robert had set up home together at Galmpton. But whilst Beryl’s love and support had probably saved Robert from a serious breakdown, the deeper trauma of the sudden and painful conclusion to his frighteningly intense relationship with Riding cannot have been quick or easy to deal with. It is clear that the myth of the terrible, beautiful, inspiring and destroying Goddess enabled Robert Graves to come to terms with the part Laura Riding had played in his life, to view it as part of a larger drama that transcended the personal; to see what had happened to him as what must happen to every poet, as the acting out of a myth. Even so, one senses the personal lurking near the surface of the book at many points. To read the story of Llew Llaw Gyffes in Chapter XVII, or of Suibne Geilt in Chapter XXVI, with Riding’s rejection of Graves in mind, is a very poignant experience. And yet little in the book is
merely
personal. In Graves’s discussion of that same Llew Llaw Gyffes story, for example, occurs his brilliant demonstration that sacred kings were ritually lamed by dislocation of the hip – a suggestion which resolves so many mythical and historical puzzles that the reader has a positively frightening sense of seeing for a moment directly back into a prehistoric world. Intellectually, we reflect that Graves may or may not be right; emotionally, we are convinced – and shaken.