Robert Graves: A Biography

Best known for his historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Robert Graves was recognized as one of the better Edwardian and First World War poets, although, for a time, his work was somewhat sidelined by the modernists. His autobiography Good-Bye to All That is one of the landmark memoirs of the war in the trenches on the Western Front. By the time of his death, Graves was internationally famous, seen as one of the twentieth century’s best poets whose prose works were sold all over the world. This first single-volume biography in over a decade will shed new light on this intriguing and eccentric life.

Biography of author and poet, best known for his novel I, Claudius.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In the popular imagination, the private lives of artists are rarely happy. British poet and novelist Robert Graves thought it best they were miserable. Whether the domestic train wrecks he contrived as a consequence actually benefited his writing, as he believed, is doubtful. Bruce King s concise and oddly circumspect biography doesn t attempt to resolve the issue. But as an introduction to a fascinating author, it asks the right questions. As a schoolboy and during military service in the First World War, Graves was, in all but deed, homosexual. Soon, though, he was working hard to underplay the sexual preferences of his early manhood. After a failed marriage to an ardent feminist who, curiously, dressed like a man and professed contempt for the male sex, he consistently pursued women who treated him abominably and who offered no hope of regular sexual gratification. It s enough to activate the latency sensor on the least sophisticated gaydar. Eventually these humiliating relationships produced the personal mythology of artistic creation that is The White Goddess. In that book, Graves outlines an instinctive religion in which unloving women are the idols and bad sex the central rite. Thankfully, the metaphysics and melodrama didn t stop him writing wonderful books. The novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God are an uncanny imagining of patrician life in ancient Rome. The deceptive simplicity and traditional structures of his poetry helped preserve the English lyric from Pound and Eliot s elitism. Did Graves really need the White Goddess to write? Did he actually believe in her? King doesn t say. But at least this biography should leave readers wanting to know more. --Mark Martin

Writer and editor who lives in Paris. He knew Graves in the 1960s and 1970s in Mallorca. His previous works include Three Indian Poets: Ezekiel, Ramanujan and Moraes (2005), The Internationalization of English Literature 1948-2000 (2004), and a biography of V S Naipaul.