Books: Perils of Utopia

(2 of 2)

Goodbye to the Dam. In fact, everything is so cream-smooth in New Crete that Poet Venn-Thomas wonders 1) if the magicians, who are vegetarians, wouldn't be better off with a few chunks of red roast beef and 2) why the Goddess ever brought him there.

He soon finds out, when the Goddess herself appears in the form of an unscrupulous female named Erica—a "triple-faced, ash-blonde bitch" with whom Poet Venn-Thomas had had a gruesome love affair in the Late Christian Epoch. What Erica does to overcivilized New Crete is something awful. She plants some 20th Century cigarettes in the closet of a cute little nymph named Sapphire; she fouls up the witches, hexes the horses, mortifies the magicians. By the time she's through, New Crete is on the verge of collapse—at which point Poet Venn-Thomas sensibly decides to whirl back to the bloody old 2Oth Century with little Sapphire. All this is Poet Graves's way of saying that to be too good (as were the New Cretans) is just as bad as to be too bad (as people are today;. Cries the Goddess:

When water stinks, I break the dam,

In love I break it.

What Graves seems to be saying is that the Goddess is malevolent, too, and that her worshipers must recognize this or degenerate into stagnant smugness.

Watch the North Wind Rise is no great shakes either as a novel or a sociological essay. But it manages to stand up—and to stand out—as another rich expression of Robert Graves's fantastical mind. To laugh in the face of his Goddess is only natural; but without this pure yet beastly muse Graves would probably not be what he emphatically is—one of the finest poets of the Late Christian Epoch.