The White Goddess (3 page)

Such was the book whose first draft Graves wrote during those few weeks of 1944. Not surprisingly, publishers were slow to take the bait. Cassell and Jonathan Cape in London, and Macmillan in New York, rejected it. (In his 1957 lecture Graves would suggest that the bizarre death of Macmillan’s vice-president, Alexander Blanton, was a kind of judgment for his rejection of the book.) For a time Graves had high hopes of Oxford University Press, where the poet Charles Williams was an editor. Williams admired Graves’s poetry and they had exchanged friendly letters about Graves’s novel
Wife
to
Mr
Milton
;
moreover, Williams was writing an ambitious sequence of poems about Taliesin. He was indeed enthusiastic about
The
White
Goddess
,
finding it ‘thrilling…astonishing and moving’. Graves’s later claim that Williams ‘regretted that he could not recommend this unusual book to his partners because of the expense’, like his attribution of William’s untimely death to this dereliction of poetic duty, was unfair. Williams argued for the book’s acceptance, but the Director of the Press, Sir Humphrey Milford, refused to be persuaded. There was, he pointed out, a paper shortage; the Press had in hand such ambitious series as the
Oxford
History
of
English
Literature.
‘The Press,’ Milford told Graves’s agent with perhaps a touch of contempt, ‘is already committed to these works of scholarship and not to his study of the poetic mind.’ So the typescript went to Dent, who also turned it down.

At length, the luck turned.
The
White
Goddess
was accepted by T.S.Eliot of Faber and Faber: a singular piece of generosity and intellectual courage on the part of a poet who had been roughly handled by Graves and Riding, and who knew the risks involved in committing his publishing house to a deeply controversial work. The much less well-known Creative Age Press of New York soon followed suit. For the jackets, Graves’s friend and secretary Karl Gay drew (‘with me standing over him all the time’, as Graves said) two little emblems. One shows the Roebuck in the Thicket (after the design on an antique cameo ring which Graves later lost) and the other, as Graves told Eliot, ‘the goddess Carmenta giving Palaimedes [
sic
]
the eye which enables him to understand the flight of cranes which originated the alphabet’
1
– an icon described in Chapter XIII. It is clear from the letters that Graves regarded these devices as integral parts of the book and so, for the first time since 1948, the present edition includes both.

The
White
Goddess
was greeted by mixed reviews. American critics were mostly enthusiastic but bewildered, a natural result of having to come to grips with such a book in just a few weeks. In Britain the book went to more knowledgeable reviewers, who tended to be firmly
pro
or
contra.
Perhaps the most perceptive review was by the poet John Heath-Stubbs, in
The
New
English
Weekly
(8 July 1948). Heath-Stubbs saw the book as having ‘in reality, an importance quite independent of any unlikely-seeming theories about Irish or other alphabets’ and as ‘a plea for a return to imaginative, mythopoeic, or poetic forms of thought’. He linked Graves with Yeats and Williams as perhaps the only modern poets who had ‘made that intellectually conscious use of traditional mythological symbols which constitutes… “Bardic” poetry’. On the other hand the professional archaeologists were predictably scathing. Glyn Daniel, then the best-known archaeologist in Britain, dubbed Graves’s theories ‘fantasies’ and his book ‘outrageous’ (
The
Listener,
4 June 1948). Graves replied in print to this, and to one other hostile review in
The
Spectator
. His replies are given in Appendix A.

More surprising was the reaction of readers. Evidently
The
White
Goddess
had touched a hidden spring in the public mind, and demand for this difficult, erudite book was strong and steady: the British edition sold out and was reprinted in less than five months, and a new edition followed in 1952. Readers’ letters about the book reached Graves in ever-increasing numbers, some confessing to Goddess-worship in unlikely places. The biologist and popular science-writer Lancelot Hogben (author of
Mathematics
for
the
Million
and
Science
for
the
Citizen
),
for example, wrote of his admiration for the book, concluding ‘There cannot be many of us. So I will subscribe myself in the fellowship of She whom we venerate in her three phases or waxing, fullness and waning…’

By now, Graves had returned with his family to the village of Deyá, Mallorca, to live at Canelluñ, the house Graves and Laura Riding had built together in 1931 and had occupied until the Spanish Civil War drove them from the island in 1936. Graves had made the move back to Mallorca in 1946, whilst
The
White
Goddess
was awaiting publication, and had corrected the proofs at Deyá. It was there that the last acts of the remarkable drama of
The
White
Goddess
were to be played out. For, having drawn into the open the mythical pattern underlying his life and work, Graves now became more and more its prisoner as well as its beneficiary. Increasingly, a preoccupation with the idea of the Muse came to shape both Graves’s and his readers’ views of his poetry. In
The
White
Goddess
itself it is noticeable that the original myth of the Goddess and her ephemeral male consorts easily undergoes a subtle inversion, whereby a rather different pattern emerges – that of the male poet and the succession of women who (as Graves wrote of Wyatt’s mistresses) ‘were in turn illuminated for [him] by the lunar ray that commanded his love’. This view had consequences for Graves’s personal life, and led to the series of intense emotional relationships with young women – the so-called Muses – which stimulated Graves to the love poems of his later years but also subjected him at times to pain and humiliation. The stories of the four ‘Muses’ and their impact on the lives of the ageing poet and his family need not be retold here: they are available in Richard Perceval Graves’s
Robert
Graves
and
the
White
Goddess,
1940–85
and (an inside view from a member of the family) in William Graves’s
Wild
Olives:
Life
in
Majorca
with
Robert
Graves.
But it is hard to believe that these relationships would have developed as they did had
The
White
Goddess
never been written. For better or worse, it was the book which fixed the popular image of Graves, and increasingly his own self-image.

A decisive stage in the process, and one which turned Graves into something of a cult-figure for the last decades of his life, was the appearance of the third British edition of
The
White
Goddess
in 1961. It was the first time the book had been available in Britain as a paperback, and the period was propitious. The 1960s, with all the radical cultural changes they brought, were getting under way; new religions, new psychotherapies, new sexual freedoms and new psychedelic drugs were all starting to spread across the western world. Occultism, paganism and a kind of feminism were in the air.
The
White
Goddess
was in tune with many of these developments, all the more so as Graves revised it in 1960. It had already been enlarged for the second British edition (1952), where Graves had added Chapter XXVI, ‘Return of the Goddess’. Now, between 24 March and June 17 1960,
1
Graves gave the text a thorough working-over, strengthening his arguments, cutting out some rather dated references to Russian Communism and the Second World War (his interest in politics had waned over the years), and adding extracts from his 1957 lecture to form the challenging ‘Postscript I960’. Two changes in particular demand attention and show how skilfully he judged the mood of the time and the needs of his book. From the end of Chapter XV he deleted two paragraphs on the Tarot which, however they might appeal to the ‘hippy’ section of the audience which the book would soon be finding, were the passages most likely to alienate those others who wanted to take the book seriously as anthropology. One of the book’s strengths, as Graves must have known, is that it radiates magic, yet never allows itself to be reduced to occultism. At this point, for a single moment, Graves had lost his balance and begun to write like an ordinary magus. He was right to remove the passage; yet its intrinsic interest is such that it may be given here, safely outside the boundaries of the work itself:

So much for the largest cut. But Graves also made additions, and amongst them a whole layer of material – each passage brief, but in aggregate subtly changing the flavour of the book – on the subject of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The reason was that since 1949 Graves had enjoyed a growing friendship with R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Dr Valentina Wasson, who were expert mycologists. Gordon in particular was interested in hallucinogenic mushrooms. His interest was more than theoretical, and in late January 1960 he had initiated Graves and a group of other friends into the mysteries of the Mexican
Psilocybe
Heimsii
,
which they ate together in Wasson’s New York apartment. Graves described his extraordinary and beautiful visions in a 1961 lecture, ‘The Poet’s Paradise’. Four months later in May (in the midst of the period when Graves was revising
The
White
Goddess
)
they experimented again; this time, for lack of the genuine article, swallowing ‘synthetic psilocybin’ (perhaps the newly-discovered LSD). The results were disappointing, but Wasson, and the world of mushrooms, remained important matters in Graves’s thinking for a good many years afterwards. The Wassons (who deserve, and will doubtless someday have, a biography to themselves) are amongst the hidden inspirers of 1960s culture, for their work influenced not only Graves but also Carlos Castaneda, and Wasson was a friend of Dr Albert Hoffmann, discoverer of LSD. Among their less obvious monuments are the string of references to a Dionysiac mushroom-cult which gave added appeal to
The
White
Goddess
as it entered the age of the ‘psychedelic revolution’.

And there was now no doubt of that appeal. After 1961 the steady trickle of letters Graves received about the book swelled into a torrent. No longer need he complain of a lack of help in ‘refining’ his argument. Experts, real and self-styled, in archaeology and early Welsh, in runes and classical studies, in witchcraft and pharmacology, wrote to offer ‘corrections’ (often themselves of dubious correctness) and extensions to his theories. Less erudite readers wrote to tell him of their dreams, their drug experiences, their migraines, their writer’s block, their experiments in magic. When Graves claimed in his 1957 lecture that he ‘studiously avoid[ed] witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling…and so on’, it may possibly have been true. Five years later it certainly was not. His writings had led to a friendship with the Sufi occultist Idries Shah; and in
his
wake came Gerald Gardner, a leading theorist of the modern witch-cult. Graves did not take to Gardner, but by the early 1960s magicians and witches of several kinds were writing to Graves, and the correspondence was not always one-sided: he seems to have been willing to give advice on matters of ritual as well as on the use of hallucinogens.

During Graves’s last decades, as his poetry came to its end and his mind failed,
The
White
Goddess
continued to extend its influence. Its ideas, simplified and sometimes garbled, became a part of general literary parlance, so that critics and reviewers could refer to ‘the White Goddess’ in passing without mentioning Graves, sure that readers would catch their drift. Artists in other media were tantalised by the possibilities. Already in 1960 there was interest in a film version, and Alistair Reid had collaborated with Graves in sketching a screenplay of this most unfilmable of books. In 1983 a ballet based on the book was performed at Covent Garden. In 1986 the painter Julian Cooper completed a large canvas, ‘Reading the “White Goddess”, Windermere’, which has become the best-known serious treatment of a ‘Lakeland’ subject in graphic art this century. Literary repercussions have been equally plentiful. To discount all but the most obvious debts, the book has had a fundamental influence on works of poetic theory as different as Peter Redgrove’s
The
Black
Goddess
and
the
Sixth
Sense
(1987), Peter Russell’s
The
Image
of
Woman
as
a
Figure
of
the
Spirit
(1991) and Ted Hughes’s
Shakespeare
and
the
Goddess
of
Complete
Being
(1992). It would be hard to find a significant poet in Britain who has not read at least parts of the book and engaged in some way with its notions.