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.

This Day in TV History (Joan Wilson, American Force Behind ‘Masterpiece Theatre’ and ‘Mystery,’ Dies)

July 4, 1985—Joan Wilson, an executive producer responsible for turning the British-originated series Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery into American public television standbys, died of pancreatic cancer at age 56 in Boston.

In a sense, this post, written on the Fourth of July, is my equivalent of counter-programming: an acknowledgement that America, for all its claims to independence, remains enthralled to the Mother Country for its notions of good taste.

Over the years, the sniffing of certain critics has been audible over these series’ middlebrow inclinations, stately costume dramas, and what Slate’s Bryan Curtis saw as its “curatorial” cultural mission. (Indeed, the longtime default criticism of Merchant-Ivory films was that they were slightly higher-budget alternatives to Masterpiece Theatre.)

But in the ‘70s, a time when much of American commercial TV in the 1970s consisted of cops, lawyers, improbable adventurers (The Six Million Dollar Man), and jiggle queens (Charlie’s Angels), TV series that aimed for quality felt like an oasis for viewers like me.

I began watching this fare when The Six Wives of Henry VIII first aired on CBS in the summer of 1971, then rebroadcast a few months later, without commercial interruptions, on PBS as part of Masterpiece Theatre. From then on, I watched other series under the latter umbrella such as Elizabeth R, The First Churchills, The Last of the Mohicans, Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, and adaptations of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Not all of these were successful—indeed, The First Churchills moved at a glacial pace, in hagiographic style, about a controversial figure who deserved a far more incisive treatment: Sir John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. But at their best, they offered the opportunity to see top-flight talent: Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Kate Nelligan, and Anthony Hopkins, among others.

A former actress, Ms. Wilson was not present at the creation of the series. That distinction belonged to Stanford Calderwood, President of WGBH, and Christopher Sarson, executive producer at the same PBS affiliate, who—seeing the rapturous attention given in England in 1967 to the mini-series The Forsyte Saga, thought something like this could work in the U.S. They convinced Mobil to underwrite the costs of Masterpiece Theatre.

The departure of Sarson opened the way towards Ms. Wilson overseeing the series and taking it to new levels of popularity and cultural influence through casting suggestions, and, where needed, tough-minded editing to make the fare more palatable to U.S. audiences. 

Upstairs, Downstairs might not have become positively addictive for American audiences had it not been trimmed by half of its 50-episode length, and clipping several minutes from a Roman orgy scene in I, Claudius helped PBS avoid greater condemnation from American puritans.

The consistent result was “what American middlebrows have been seeking since the advent of the medium: TV without guilt,” according to William Henry III of The New York Times.

Michael Gorra, a professor of English at Smith College, summed up much of the not-so-secret appeal of Masterpiece Theatre to many academics in an essay included in Prime Times: Writers on Their Favorite TV Shows:

“Costumes accents, servants, the past, a safe past that couldn’t hurt us, at least not over here. I loved all that, and if you push on most English teachers my age, they’ll admit to having loved it, to having their own period of swooning Anglophilia in front of their parents’ TV.”

I am not a fan of the odor of Anglophilia emanating from both Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery, and I wish that PBS had used these series as springboards to long-lasting American counterparts.

But, despite such carping by me and others, the cultural influence of these British imports was not only significant but beneficial. Bookstores benefited from the spotlight given to I, Claudius and The Jewel in the Crown, and the success of mini-series featured in Masterpiece Theatre led American TV to experiment with the genre, often with great success, in the 1970s and 1980s.

Recognizing the importance of series host, Ms. Wilson cultivated friendships with English journalist Alistair Cooke for Masterpiece Theatre and actor Vincent Price for Mystery.

Ms. Wilson was also connected, in the most deeply personal way, with her programming, as her second husband was Jeremy Brett, who, before Benedict Cumberbatch, made Sherlock Holmes must-view TV on Mystery.

Flashback, November 1977: ‘I, Claudius’ Offers Villainess for the Ages

When I, Claudius began its 13-episode run in America as part of Masterpiece Theatre in November 1977, censors at the Public Broadcasting Service cut roughly two minutes from the first episode that they felt might raise hackles over racism (African dancers were shown dancing naked to celebrate a Roman military victory), then braced themselves for a tidal wave of protests over what they did allow to pass: rampant adultery, nudity, incest, a nymphomaniacal empress, violence. Nothing happened. Americans didn’t care much, it seemed, about the possibility of ancient Rome corrupting contemporary national morals.

Instead, viewers (or, at least, those of PBS) took to their hearts the kind of incessant, whiplash-inducing double-crosses they wouldn’t see again for another two decades, on HBO’s The Sopranos. Powering this toga-and-sandal saga of ancient Rome was a woman of infinite ingenious stratagems named Livia (also possessing the same name as the Mafia mama). But the ancient Roman royal’s plotting left even the New Jersey matriarch far behind when it came to the mystery behind the malevolence. There was little if any need to explain what William Hazlitt called the quality of “motiveless malignity.”

You can keep Nancy Merchand’s Livia on The Sopranos, Kathleen Turner’s siren Mattie Walker from Body Heat, or Joan Collins’ minx Alexis on Dynasty (a show patterned, creator Esther Shapiro later claimed, on I, Claudius). The Livia of television’s I, Claudius (as opposed to Alexander Korda’s aborted screen epic, a story I related in a prior post) got there first, by centuries.

I hadn’t realized, until I read Thomas Vinciguerra’s fine retrospective on the making of the show in the Sunday New York Times, how closely we came to missing out on the glories of the sly performance by Sian Phillips (pictured here) in the role. Poor thing—as nearly every actor you can name does, she initially tried to fathom her character’s motivation, and was floundering as a result.

Finally, director Herbert Wise took her aside and said: “Just be evil. The more evil you are, the funnier it is, and the more terrifying it is. ” As a result, she was able to go with the glories of dialogue (written by scenarist Jack Pulman) such as the following, featuring Phillips and George Baker as Tiberius, the son from a prior marriage that Livia would love to replace current hubby, Caesar Augustus, as emperor:

Tiberius: “Mother, I'm a happily married man. Julia doesn't interest me. She wouldn't interest me if you hung her naked from the ceiling above my bed.”

Livia: “She might even do that if I asked her!”

Tiberius: “Aren't you forgetting something? She's still married to Marcellus, and Marcellus is not dead yet.”

Livia: “When I start to forget things, you may light my funeral pyre and put me on it, dead or alive.”

Phillips might have played the Welsh mother in the Masterpiece Theatre version of How Green Was My Valley, Marlene Dietrich in a one-woman show for the stage, and, in real life, the onetime wife of Peter O’Toole. But for me and thousands of other I, Claudius fans, she’ll always be indelibly associated with the greatest schemer in a society filled with voluptuaries of power.

TV Quote of the Day (“The Jewel in the Crown,” on Sports, Race and Class)

Capt. Ronald Merrick (played by Tim Pigott-Smith): “Are you one of those people who think that if you teach an Indian the rules of cricket he'll become an English gentleman?”

Guy Perron (played by Charles Dance): “Hardly sir. I know quite a few English gentlemen who play cricket brilliantly but are absolute bastards.”—The Jewel in the Crown (1984), written by Ken Taylor, adapted from Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, directed by Ken O’Brien and Christopher Morahan

At times in its 40-year history, Masterpiece Theatre has been “Just-Okay Theatre.” But it reached one of its peaks with The Jewel in the Crown, which premiered on U.S. screens on this date in 1984.

For those viewers who find PBS to be hopelessly Anglophilic at times, Jewel provided a nice compromise: yes, there was a British cast and a British subject, but the script explored, with acute psychological insight and telling dramatic impact, the story of the messy end of imperial rule in India, the so-called “Jewel” of the title, in the 1940s.

Because both works dealt with the legal and social consequences that sprang from an accusation of rape involving a white woman by an Indian, critics have invariably compared Scott’s tetralogy with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, published more than four decades earlier.

The resemblances between the two were reinforced in 1984, as director David Lean’s adaptation of Forster’s novel opened in New York only two days before Jewel began its run on the small screen. (Reinforcing the perceived similarities: both adaptations featured Dame Peggy Ashcroft as a compassionate elderly expatriate. Sometimes she must have wished she could have used the same dialogue and not worry about memorizing a whole new set of lines.)

For all of the skill Lean displayed in his last completed film, A Passage to India compromised the novel's ending on the parting of ways between colonial rulers and their subjects.

No such concession to audience taste was made in Jewel, which used every minute of its 14 hours to show how tangled and anguished the whole “imperial embrace” had become. The epic scope that TV provided, in that window of time, allowed the mini-series to stay largely true to Scott’s plot.

The quote above gives a sense of the incisive character development and ironies that carried over from novels to mini-series. The villain of the series, Ronald Merrick, becomes an emblem of the imperial corruption of power, as he brutalizes during interrogation the half-Indian, half-white Indian lover of the young white woman, Daphne Manners, who dared to reach out across the subcontinent’s color line.

Yet Merrick is not one-dimensional, even here. The grown-up scholarship boy is bristling with double resentment—at the Indians who would usurp his place of authority in this rapidly changing colony-cum-nation, and at the white liberals who dare to think that manners are culturally, not genetically, inherited.

At the same time, Merrick is tragically unaware that the code of the “English gentleman” has little if anything to do with morals, let alone manners—particularly for those members of the ruling class he aspires to join.

And, for all the tremendous damage he causes to one man’s life, he is ready to risk his own for the code that binds him to the natives he can’t understand. “I am your father and your mother,” he tells one, enunciating the paternalistic principle of Man-Bap—then falls victim to a devastating attack it takes him months to overcome. In the end, he is as much a casualty as those victimized by his sadomasochistic abuse of power.