Andrew Motion

In two minds | 16 August 2018

The poet’s strange combination of devotion and detachment was most evident in his relationships with his wife, his mistress and the poet Geoffrey Phibbs

‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my own conceit — and always surprised to find that anyone likes my work or character.’ This admission by Robert Graves — made to his then friend Siegfried Sassoon in the mid-1920s — goes to the heart of his character as a man and a poet. It projects a powerful mixture of defiance and neediness, which in his personal life produced a series of highly disruptive assertions and reversals, and in his writing life an equally striking set of commitments and walkings-back.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson, who has previously published fluent biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas, is a reliable guide to all these contortions. Her book tells only the first half of Graves’s story, but adds a valuable degree of detail to the several existing biographies and, thanks to the sympathy it shows for all aspects of Graves’s character, is consistently illuminating.

Right from the start Graves was conscious of his own dividedness. His mother’s Irish origins and his father’s German background may have created for him a childhood in which the prevailing mood was ‘earnest, religious and worthy’, but it also stimulated a sense of deracination — and even (when he became the butt of anti-German feeling in the years leading up to the war) of being unwelcome.

Graves’s response was to combine attempts at fitting in (learning English manners at the six prep-schools he attended in the first seven years of his education, then polishing them at Charterhouse) with acts of rebellion. His expertise in boxing, of which he later made a good deal in Good-Bye to All That, is a good example. It both earned him the respect of those he wanted to respect him, and was by its nature a proof of aggression.

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