Robert Graves
Famous Sons & Daughters No.11: Robert Graves (1895-1985)
The acclaimed war poet and novelist, Robert Graves, spent several years living and working at Galmpton during the Second World War, and some scholars have described this as one of his most prolific periods of writing.
He made his home at Vale House in Greenway Road, and could often be spotted at the beach in Brixham with his young children, or pottering on the creekside by the Dart. It was a spell of relative calm in the turbulent life of the I Claudius author and classic scholar.
Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon. His parents were Alfred Perceval Graves, a man of letters and school inspector of Anglo-Irish and Scots descent, and Amalia von Ranke, the niece of the great German historian Leopold von Ranke. His family was patriotic, upper middle class, well-educated and strict. As a toddler Graves was taken to watch Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession, one of his earliest memories. The young Graves often visited his German cousins, and when he faced German soldiers as his enemies during World War One, his inability to shake the idea that he was fighting his family contributed to the misery that inspired Good-Bye to All That, his famous autobiography, published in 1929 and never out of print.
The book looks first at the author’s childhood, his struggles through adolescence at the British public school, Charterhouse, (he disliked and was disliked by most of his peers and was afraid of the majority of his masters), and his opinion of his father as an oppressive patriarch. Graves was expected to go to Oxford and had already secured a classical scholarship at St John’s. With the outbreak of the First World War, he thought he had a chance to escape to manhood and glory. His own poetry and prose describe neither manhood nor glory but terror and madness in the war.
Graves went straight from school into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and documented his respect for the regiment, as well as his discomfort at having secured a commission despite his lack of military experience. He served in France from 1915, when he quickly became a captain, to 1917, and it was there that he began his friendship with the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow Fusilier.
Graves’ detailed description of trench warfare and the killing of German prisoners makes for harrowing reading. He was severely traumatized by his war experience. Graves was wounded when he was struck by a shell fragment, a piece of which passed through his shoulder and chest, seriously injuring his right lung. He was presumed killed then pronounced dead by his surgeon in the field and by his commanding officer in a telegram to his parents, but subsequently recovered to read the report of his own demise in The Times! Amazingly, given the extent and the nature of his wounds, Graves made a full recovery and was assured of home-service for the duration of the war. However, like many of his fellow invalided combatants, Graves could not overcome the feeling of guilt that he had left his soldiers in the horror of war while he was safe. He managed to have himself posted back to the front, but before he saw any further action, he was met by his company surgeon who threatened him with court-martial if he did not immediately remove himself from the front.
Graves never forgot the five day train journey after he was wounded, surrounded by squalor and unchanged bandages. The trench telephone scared him such that he never got over it, and lived without telephones for the rest of his life. He was haunted by ghosts and nightmares.
Back in England, Graves trained troops for service in France while maintaining contact with his fellow poets. When Sassoon published a statement condemning the war, Graves stepped in to convince the military authorities that his friend was suffering from nerves. Sassoon avoided a court martial and was sent to hospital in Scotland instead, where the pair became friends with another poet, Wilfred Owen.
Before the war ended, Graves married Nancy Nicholson, the daughter of a painter and a modern woman who refused to take on Graves’ name and preferred wearing trousers to dresses - to his mother’s dismay! After the armistice, Graves resigned his commission and took up his fellowship at St John’s. The couple worked on a children’s book together but attempts at supporting the family by running a grocery store quickly failed. By this time they had four children. The stress of family life, little money and Graves’ persistent shell-shocked condition put a strain on the marriage, which finally collapsed in 1929 when Graves left England with the American poet Laura Riding and settled in the mountain village of Deia in Majorca. Their relationship was turbulent and marked by dramatic events – including Riding leaping from a window and fracturing her pelvis – but during their time together they published a tremendous amount of work, and Graves produced significant material including his biography of T.E. Lawrence, Goodbye To All That, I Claudius and Claudius The God.
The couple moved to America when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and by the end of the year Graves was living in Galmpton, the relationship having finally blown itself apart. With him was Beryl Hodge, the wife of writer Alan Hodge, who became Beryl Graves. As the Second World War began, England was in turmoil, and the despairing Graves desperately tried to assemble a new life and begin a new family. In Devon he described a personal peace. The couple went on to have four children.
But the war raged on and in 1943, Graves received the news that his son, David, was missing in action. While he and Nancy held out hope that he would be found alive or that he might have been taken prisoner, later reports suggested otherwise. David, Robert and Nancy learned, had been shot while attempting to single-handedly take out a well-defended enemy position. The chances that he had survived were not good. Graves took his family back to Majorca and made Deia his home for good.
In 1948 he published The White Goddess and his fame and celebrity grew. He had a number of relationships with women he described as his muses.
Robert Graves died in 1985 after a long and slow mental and physical disintegration. He is buried in Deia, his grave marked with a simple concrete slate with the inscription: “Robert Graves, Poeta, 1895-1985”.
First Published May 2010 By The Dart
