Books: The Artful Pursuit of Goddesses

ROBERT GRAVES by Martin Seymour-Smith Holt, Rinehart& Winston; 608 pages; $22.50

The 20th century was born in the trenches of World War I and Robert Graves attended, with bloody hands and a shell splinter whistling through his lung. He described the "goddawfulness" in Good-bye to All That (1929), an autobiography that survives rereading with its old pleasures and astonishments intact. There was, for example, the official report that Graves had died of wounds when, in fact, he was recovering. Remarked Siegfried Sassoon, a greatly relieved comrade-in-arms and fellow poet: "Silly old devil... he always manages to do things differently from other people."

Graves has built an immense reputation going against the grain. In an age of jangling modernists he wrote stately romantic poems. A major theme: absolute love cannot last between man and woman, but there is always hope for a miracle. Graves' body of critical opinion has puzzled academics, and his popular novels of antiquity (I, Claudius, King Jesus) have infuriated historians and theologians. He continues to differ from nearly all his literary contemporaries in perhaps the most basic way: he is alive. At 87, the old warrior-poet still sits atop his Olympus on Majorca, the nobly weathered head shielded from the sun by a broad black hat. He moved to the Spanish island on Gertrude Stein's recommendation ("It's paradise if you can stand it") and has spent most of the past 50 years in the cliff village of Deya being crusty, godlike and protean. Graves' bibliography lists 59 collections of poetry, 20 works of prose fiction, 43 books of essays, autobiography and criticism, four anthologies, ten translations and one play.

Biographer Martin Seymour-Smith handles much of the fiction as inspired entertainments and a good deal of the criticism as counterattacks in the literary wars. Graves' targets were not insignificant. Vachel Lindsay: "jazz Blake, St. Francis of Assisi playing the saxophone at the Firemen's Ball." Ezra Pound: bad rhythms and "a wet handshake." Dylan Thomas: "a Welsh demagogic masturbator who failed to pay his bills." T.S. Eliot: "a marvelous satirist with a true poetic sense who had sold out to institutionalized religion."

Graves himself practiced a highly personalized form of intellectual witchcraft. With a clash of symbols and his customary brass, he rejected the Judaeo-Christian patriarchy for his White Goddess:

All saints revile her, and all sober men

Ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean

In scorn of which I sailed to find her

In distant regions likeliest to hold her

Whom I desired above all things to know,

Sister of the mirage and echo.

More metaphor than mythology, the Goddess is vital to Graves' poetry and much more. "The political and social confusion of the last 3,000 years," he once told a visitor, "has been entirely due to man's revolt against woman as a priestess of the natural magic, and his defeat of wisdom by the use of intellect."