This Day in Literary History (Birth of Robert Graves, War Poet and Would-Be Nobelist)

July 24, 1895—Robert Graves, a soldier physically and psychologically wounded during WWI, who went on to a long career as a wide-ranging man of letters, was born in Wimbledon, near London, England.

Writing well in one genre is a major achievement in and of itself, but how many writers can you think of succeed as well at fiction as at poetry? As far as I’m concerned, though many have tried their hand at both, only a halfway have consistently equaled their achievement in each: Goethe, Pushkin, Hardy, and Graves.

During the 1970s, I became familiar with Graves’ work through the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of his I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God.  The miniseries revived interest in these two novels from the 1930s that had been inspired by a work he translated: Suetonius’ gossipy history The Twelve Caesars. As the 13 episodes featuring delicious imperial intrigues unfolded, the two Graves novels climbed to the top of the trade paperback bestseller list.

By this time, the octogenarian Graves, living for decades as an expatriate in Majorca, Spain, had come to resemble “a prototypical sea captain, a weathered oak of a man with a leonine face, ropy hair, and the brusque hauteur of a man used to exercising his command,” according to English journalist and longtime Masterpiece Theatre host Alistair Cooke.

It had taken the world quite a while to come around to Graves’ own high self-estimate, which had emerged continually in outspoken interviews over the years. In fact, he had become “such a professional surpriser that only a conventional opinion from him could still shock us,” wrote the English-born American novelist-essayist Wilfred Sheed in The Good Word and Other Words (1978):

“It has been a unique privilege of our time to watch the building of Graves, from shell-shocked schoolboy in World War I to Mediterranean warlock, encanting at the moon. As an expatriate in Majorca, Graves remains a bit of an Edwardian tease, as willful and unflaggingly facetious as a Sitwell; yet in another sense, he has grown more fully and richly than is given to most. His literary opinions are so quirky that they seem designed solely to start lengthy feuds in the London Times; yet in terms of his own art they are not quirky at all.”

The professional making of Graves could easily have been the personal unmaking of him, as implied by Sheed: his traumas in the trenches of France in the Great War. Breaking off his studies at Oxford to enlist at the outbreak of hostilities, he had fought in the Battle of Loos and again in the Somme offensive in 1916, when a shell fragment lodged in his lung was so severe that he was mistakenly reported dead on his 21^st birthday. 

After convalescing, Graves returned to the trenches in 1918, suffering yet another injury. The Armistice announcement in November of that year only led him to wander “along the dyke above the marshes of Rhuddlan…cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead.”

Forty years after his service, Graves was still counting the cost, as demonstrated in his poem “The Face in the Mirror”:

“Grey haunted eyes, absent-mindedly glaring

From wide, uneven orbits; one brow drooping

Somewhat over the eye

Because of a missile fragment still inhering,

Skin deep, as a foolish record of old-world fighting.”

In the decade after the Armistice, Graves’ reaction was even more visceral, as he found himself recoiling at strong smells (from fear of gas attacks) and loud noises. He was only finally able to confront his anguish head-on in his 1929 anti-war memoir, Goodbye to All That.

It is still regarded as one of the finest literary products of the Great War, even though, as critic Paul Fussell noted, it was really more like “fiction disguised as a memoir,” with so much deviation from literal fact that it pained fellow veterans Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Blunden and Doctor J. C. Dunn.

Proceeds from Goodbye to All That were substantial enough to enable Graves to reside most of the rest of his life in Majorca. It also meant that he could write and live much as he pleased.

His personal nonconformity manifested itself most vividly in his relationship with the American poet Laura Riding. Already a father of four by the mid-1920s, Graves brought her into his household to reside with him and wife Nancy, then decided to add to the proceedings Geoffrey Phibbs, an Anglo-Irish librarian. (At one point, Graves even threw himself from a third-story window in imitation of Riding, who had just thrown herself from the fourth floor.)

His poetry would eventually amount to 55 collected volumes, but Graves turned his hand to other genres, too, such as a biography of Lawrence of Arabia, translations, cultural criticism (The White Goddess, a meditation on myth-making), and historical novels that took in not only ancient Rome but also the misunderstood wife of poet John Milton, a British soldier’s view of the American Revolution, and even Christ (King Jesus).

One work that particularly appealed to me when I came across it in my college years was a collaboration with Alan Hodge, The Reader Over Your Shoulder. Grammarian Patricia T. O’Conner has termed it “the best book on writing ever published.”

Under normal circumstances, it would be hard to resist any volume that not only offers 41 principles for writing but also examples of how they were violated by luminaries such as T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, J.B. Priestley, H.G. Wells, and Bertrand Russell. (In one barb, British philosopher A.N. Whitehead is charged with "becoming as conventionally loose as any featherheaded undergraduate.") But the book is even more delicious when Graves and Hodge own up to mistakes of their own.

So prolific and versatile was Graves that in 1962, he ended up on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was only revealed seven years ago that he missed out on this great honor not so much for the inferiority of his work to that year’s winner, John Steinbeck, but because of the frequent behind-the-scenes politicking associated with the award.

In 1962, a key Nobel Prize committee member was reluctant to award any Anglo-Saxon poet the prize before the death of Ezra Pound. Even though Graves wrote far more than just poetry, the heart of his achievement was seen as lying in that genre, so that members pressed colleagues to look for other candidates.

Flashback, July 1916: Somme Stalemate Saps War Spirit

As it completed its second full year, World War I bore all the marks of an unprecedented gash across the landscape of civilization. The Battle of the Somme, the Allied campaign to change the grim arithmetic of casualties and futility, only worsened matters. With 1.5 million shells fired, the biggest artillery bombardment the world had ever seen (even heard in the South of England) as a week-long rologue, British and French soldiers rushed forth into battle on July 1, 1916, only to be cut down by the waiting German guns—60,000 British casualties in those 24 hours alone, including 20,000 dead, the greatest loss of life in the nation’s military history.

Could it get any worse? No, but it could remain remarkably bad throughout the month and well into autumn, as the Somme would soon feature commanders who used Napoleonic tactics rendered obsolete by modern weaponry; common soldiers left physically and psychically wounded in ways little understood at the time; and writers who sought to make sense of it all. When the fight ended four months later, the British incurred more than 400,000 casualties, while their French allies lost 200,000 and the Germans half a million. Together with the Battle of Verdun (discussed in this prior post of mine), the Somme came to symbolize the horror of trench warfare.

(Believe it or not, the image accompanying this post comes from a British propaganda film meant to drum up homefront spirit during the fight, The Battle of the Somme. Well, I guess this image of a badly wounded soldier could have been worse—if it showed the rats that the soldiers had to contend with, not to mention the gas masks frequently worn there.)

Oh, yes—and the futility and basic absurdity of such warfare, for the battle was waged not on as site of military significance, but at the spot on the map where British forces adjoined their French allies.

Reading these last two paragraphs reminds me of nothing so much as America’s Civil War. But Britain’s leaders, let alone those of the other nations in this conflict across the Atlantic, seemed to have learned nothing from the conflict that had occurred across the Atlantic a half-century before, and so they were doomed to suffer similar outward convulsions and internal divisions.

That enormous single-day loss of life, for instance, will remind Americans of the bloodiest 24 hours in their own history, the Battle of Antietam—except that the Somme was even worse. The number of British dead, wounded and missing in action for this one day was more than double the combined Union-Confederate toll for the legendary Civil War battle.

Although the depth of the carnage is reminiscent of Antietam, the manner in which the first day of the Somme unfolded resembles nothing so much as the third day of Gettysburg. An offensive-minded commander (for the British, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig; for the Confederates, Robert E. Lee) preceded an order to attack with an unprecedented artillery barrage—in the case of Gettysburg, a morning shelling that was the greatest seen in the Western Hemisphere to that point; at the Somme, a week-long bombardment. Far from softening the defender up as intended, the bombardment was largely ineffective (e.g., British medium-range fire fell consistently short of its target, and 30% of the shells were duds). 

And so, khaki-clad British troops—many the product of the “New Army” swelled by recruitment posters featuring military hero Lord Kitchener, sunk by a submarine only the month before—marched into sunlight in perfect order along a 15-mile front, across open fields, like so many sitting ducks, under the watchful gaze of three ranks of Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops safely entrenched, on higher ground, in dugouts. 

Only minutes before the fateful assault, an operation to disrupt the German defenses occurred in the form of two huge mines, containing more than 100,000 pounds of explosives. The advancing “Tommies” could then, the thinking went, exploit the resulting confusion around the two craters to avoid the enfilade fire that would surely come from the Germans.

Civil War buffs will recall a similar plan involving Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces in the summer 1864 Petersburg campaign. The resulting “Battle of the Crater” resulted in 4,000 Union casualties. On the other hand, the mining operation meant to ease the capture of La Boiselle Salient led to nearly 12,000 combined casualties in Britain’s 8^th and 34^th Divisions. British planners had not reckoned with the possibility that German intelligence, piecing together newspaper articles, soldiers’ indiscreet talk and reports from spies, would figure out that the twin explosions would in effect provide advance warning of the follow-up assault by the Tommies.

Over the years, Haig has been excoriated so soundly and repeatedly that in some quarters, a reaction has even occurred in his favor. A number of his partisans say he learned from his mistakes, with some claiming that he came around to see the value of new weaponry. One historian, William Philpott, even nominated him as Britain’s greatest general.

But Haig’s lack of imagination—his inability to grasp how tactics had to evolve in the face of new technology—is nowhere better illustrated than this passage from a 1926 when he still saw a future for horses in combat:

“I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity for the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well-bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.”

Even a relatively sympathetic historian such as Peter Hart—who argued, in The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front, that “Haig’s way was excruciatingly painful but it was the only realistic way at the time”—ends up acknowledging the myopia of the general and his subordinates:

“There seemed to be no limit to the number of times that it had to be demonstrated to them that isolated attacks on a narrow front would not succeed without overpowering artillery to devastate everything in both that and the adjoining sectors. The British rarely seemed to realise that an attack to 'improve' a tactical position did not do so unless it succeeded. Too often there was no proper analysis of how many guns and shells needed to be fired to subdue a given frontage and depth of trench lines. And there seemed to be no limit to their optimism that the German Army and the entire German Empire stood ready to collapse if there was just one more push towards Bapaume.”

The Somme was also remarkable for the authors who lived long enough to recapture the experience of the campaign, in one fashion or another, in their writing, including:

*Alan Seeger, an American who, before being killed on July 4, 1916, wrote “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” a poem taken to heart by the young John F. Kennedy;

*J.R.R. Tolkien, whose grittily realistic battle scenes from his Lord of the Rings trilogy reflect his service in the Somme;

*Robert Graves, whose bitter 1929 antiwar memoir Goodbye to All That narrated his participation in the attack on the High Wood three weeks into the campaign, where he suffered a wound so grievous that his parents were mistakenly informed of his death;

*Wilfred Owen, trapped underground at the Somme, was transferred for treatment of his shell shock to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where he began to write the verses that made him the most acclaimed British poet of the Great War;

*Siegfried Sassoon, Owen’s fellow shell shock victim at Craiglockhart—and who, unlike his friend, survived the war;

* Ford Maddox Ford, who translated his experience with shell shock into the novel sequence Parade’s End.

In this small sample of soldiers, the number of shell-shock victims from the Somme looms large. But they were only a handful compared with the total number of those afflicted with this disease, later called combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress syndrome. A 2011 article on the BBC Web site by Joanna Bourke, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, estimates that by the end of WWI, the British Army had dealt with 80,000 cases of this. Altogether, war neuroses represented one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army.

An article by neuropathologist Daniel Perl in the scientific journal The Lancet Neurology, then summarized in a New York Times Magazine article last month by Robert F. Worth, offers the hypothesis that blasts in modern warfare can leave scars on the brain. TNT, first used by the German Army in 1902, was employed on a far greater scale in WWI, leading to development of shell shock.

The Allies learned hard lessons about fighting at the Somme, lessons they were able to apply in outlasting the Kaiser’s military machine (with American help) over the next two years of the war. But it came too late for the men who fought at the Somme in July 1916. Peter Simkins, a historian at the Imperial War Museum, noted, in an interview for the Great War documentary on PBS, that veterans of the Somme were primed to go “over the top” in taking enemy positions, but it was all for nought then:

"But it's sustaining the impetus of the advance once they've gone over the top that's important. If they've got the wrong weapons with which to fight, if they're carrying rifles and bayonets and they're up against machine guns, the formula is wrong.”

This Day in Film History (Troubled Korda ‘I, Claudius’ Abandoned)

March 21, 1937—An auto accident involving actress Merle Oberon proved the last straw for the production of I, Claudius, which ceased following weeks of trouble on the set of the adaptation of Robert Graves’ works on imperial Rome.

British and American viewers became addicted to the 1976 Masterpiece Theatre miniseries starring Derek Jacobi in the title role, and early last summer HBO announced plans to film their own version soon, in a deal with the makers of their series Rome. But The One That Got Away was Alexander Korda’s in 1937—a project starring Charles Laughton as the stammering member of the imperial Caesars who, amid an atmosphere of unremitting corruption and treachery, survives to assume the throne.

Korda, a Hungarian émigré to Britain, was in the middle of a solid decade-long run as an independent producer of intelligent, often history-based drama, including Fire Over England, That Hamilton Woman, The Private Life of Henry VIII, and Rembrandt.  At the height of his artistic and commercial prestige, he also had a good track record as a director, and could very well have taken over this role as well.

Instead, he turned to Josef von Sternberg to take direct Graves' script of his own novel in the form of an "autobiography" of the Roman emperor. Sternberg had a reputation as a “woman’s director,” in no small part due to the several films he made at Paramount featuring Marlene Dietrich. Korda's choice might seem curious at first, given that the main character in I, Claudius was male. But Sternberg’s films often were suffused with themes of corruption and sexual depravity—certainly elements of the Roman Empire—and Korda thought that Sternberg could carefully guide his lover Oberon in the complex role of Messalina, the virginal teen bride of Claudius who eventually becomes the worst of female Roman voluptuaries. The price of Sternberg's acceptance of the job: he had no say in the casting of Oberon.

But unexpectedly, it was Laughton rather than Oberon, a young, beautiful, but not terribly gifted actress, who presented problems for Sternberg. Though the two had previously been friendly, Sternberg now left the actor adrift as he groped for a woman into his character.

Many actors would have killed for Laughton’s gifts, which included a marvelous voice, the ability to play comedy and drama with equal dexterity, and an intelligence so keen that, a decade later, he worked with Bertolt Brecht on perhaps the best English translation of the playwright’s Galileo. But the actor was in a sham marriage to Elsa Lanchester to conceal his homosexuality from the public; he believed himself physically hideous (“I have got a face like an elephant's behind!"); and when he couldn’t find the key to a character, the portly star’s torment could capsize a production. Korda, who had worked with him previously (including his Oscar-winning role as Henry VIII), remarked, “With him, acting was an act of childbirth. What he needed was not so much a director as a midwife.”

Sternberg made it painfully obvious to cast and crew that Laughton was on his own in the role. But, no matter how frustrated set observers might have felt with the tormented star, the director squandered any reservoir of sympathy he might have had with them because of his own behavior. His aristocratic pretensions (including what many believed to be a bogus "von") and his hypocrisy in sneering at Laughton's mental anguish (Sternberg had suffered a nervous breakdown when his own career at Paramount came crashing down) increased tensions on the set immeasurably.

Under these circumstances, Oberon's auto accident came as "a godsend," according to Emlyn Williams, the actor-playwright who played Claudius' mad nephew, the cruel Caligula. Indeed, some cynics have wondered not just about Oberon's injuries (she did not end up in critical condition), but whether they occurred at all. The accident furnished such a ready pretext for ending the production, in this view, that the whole thing smelled phony.

I think that argument can be dispensed with easily: If Oberon was faking, then why did she carry a facial scar for the rest of her life--one noticeable enough that her second husband, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, had to create a special compact spotlight that would reduce the incidence of notable lines such as this?

Just before production was abandoned, Laughton believed he had finally found the key to his character, a royal thrust into circumstances beyond his control, in the fate of King Edward VIII, and he began to listen obsessively to the latter’s famous abdication speech. The ironic thing was that, if the actor wanted a real royal model to follow, he might have tried to learn more about the man who assumed the throne after Edward stepped down, his brother George VI—someone who, like Claudius, suffered mightily from his vocal impediment (as the world now knows, famously, because of The King’s Speech).

Given Korda's record as a producer and director, there is plenty of reason to mourn the loss of I, Claudius. Among the list of potentially great (or at least fascinating) films that never got made (including two by Orson Welles, It's All True and The Other Side of the Wind), this takes pride of place. 


Most of the talented personnel associated with the film moved on to projects at least as good as this (notably Oberon, cast two years later in Wuthering Heights). The one whose career was never really the same was Sternberg. He was involved in eight other movies over the remaining three decades of his life, but I, Claudius represented his last significant attempt to stay on the radar as a filmmaking force. His last years were notably dour. He had a great deal to teach film students at UCLA, but interviewers inquiring about his last work, including the young critic (and future director) Peter Bogdanovich, ended up getting a stream of short, surly responses.

Among these interviewers were the makers of a documentary from the 1960s about the making and unmaking of I, Claudius, The Epic That Never Was, narrated by Dirk Bogarde. On camera, Sternberg notes that the film was shut down because of "the actors"--a contention that surviving cast members had to restrain themselves in rebutting.

A long, telling excerpt from this documentary--including a haughty, none-too-pleased Sternberg--along surviving footage--can be found here.

Quote of the Day (Siegfried Sassoon, on a WWI Vet’s Experience)

“Robert, there's a war in France;
Everywhere men bang and blunder,
Sweat and swear and worship Chance,
Creep and blink through cannon thunder.
Rifles crack and bullets flick,
Sing and hum like hornet-swarms.
Bones are smashed and buried quick.
Yet, through stunning battle storms,
All the while I watch the spark
Lit to guide me; for I know
Dreams will triumph, though the dark
Scowls above me where I go.”— Siegfried Sassoon, from “A Letter Home (to Robert Graves)” (1916)

On this Veteran’s Day, I think we have to do more than just mouth platitudes about honoring service personnel for their courage and bravery. Somehow, as hard as it is to conceive, we have to imagine the horrible cauldron of war through which they pass. Only then can we truly understand their sacrifice. Few veterans have fought so tenaciously--then sought to tell the world about it--with the searing power that British WWI soldier Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) summoned. This particular poem, written in May 1916 to fellow veteran Robert Graves (himself a poet-novelist-memoirist of later note), comes from the collection, The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (1919).

Quote of the Day (Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, With a Principle of “Grace of Expression”)

“OVERLONG SENTENCE. Sentences should not be so long that the reader loses his way in them.”—Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, with one of 16 principles related to “grace of expression,” in The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose

Poet, novelist, and memoirist Graves (in the image accompanying this post), born on this date in 1895, also co-produced, with Hodge, what is arguably the most audacious of the many guides to clear modern prose. I say “audacious” because how many other writers would list George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Hemingway and Aldous Huxley among the sinners against the sound English sentence? If even such illuminati were guilty of the some literary transgression, perhaps there’s hope for the rest of us.