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Robert Graves, poet, novelist, biographer, mythographer, classical scholar and translator was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, a well-to-do suburb of London, and died in 1985 in Deya, the Majorcan village he had made his home (with the exception of the Spanish civil war and the Second World War) since 1929. Graves married twice. His first marriage to Nancy Nicholson, the daughter of the painter William Nicholson, produced four children: Jenny, David, Catherine and Sam. His second marriage to Beryl Pritchard produced a further four children: William, Lucia, Juan and Tomas.

Graves' career spanned the majority of the 20th century. He was a youthful witness to the evolution of this century's self-conscious notion of its own modernity. He nearly died fighting for a belief in nation and England at a time when modern ideals were displacing the notion of 'for king and country' with sometimes contradictory socio-political ideals. He witnessed the same upheavals and suffered many of the same trials of his avant-garde contemporaries (such as Andre Breton, Soupault and Apollinaire in France and T.E. Hulme, David Jones and Wyndham Lewis in Britain) in the World War I yet, along with other poets like Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, wrote about them very differently. He saw things going wrong again and decided then to say 'Goodbye to All That' and try out life on his own terms.

His own terms led him to domestic crisis as he separated from his wife and his family to follow a dominant and domineering woman and poet. His own terms saw him abandon, not just England, but the modern world, modern living and modernism to move to a rural village in a remote part of an island set off from the European mainland where he could write the books that he thought needed to be written: some might say for himself, others, the books that he thought a sane world needed. One thing is certain, Graves' life itself was very rarely stable.

The period immediately following Robert Graves' birth is described in an amusing an impressionistic manner in the opening pages of his autobiography. The juxtaposed images of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession, that he witnessed at the age of two or three, and then that of the terror of his encounter with his father's Shakespeare folios say much: his family was patriotic, upper middle class, well-educated and strict.

His childhood seems unremarkable and his struggles through adolescence at the British public school, Charterhouse, seem rather de rigeur: he disliked and was disliked by most of his peers and was afraid of the majority of his masters. Toward those whose company he did seek, he developed rather innocent though clearly earnest homosexual feelings. He was expected to go up to Oxford where he had already secured a classical scholarship at St. John's College (Oxford). Like most adolescents, Graves viewed has father as an oppressive patriarch and, with the convenient outbreak of the Great War, thought he had an opportunity to escape childhood and oppression for manhood and glory.

Graves' own poetry and prose is the best source for a description of his war experiences. It suffices to say that Graves found neither manhood nor glory but terror and madness in the war. He was wounded, left for dead and pronounced dead by his surgeon in the field and 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, though home in the most 'honourable' circumstances possible, Graves could not overcome the feeling of guilt that he had left his soldiers in peril while he himself was safe. He managed to have himself posted back to the front. Before seeing action again though, he was met by his company surgeon who threatened him with court-martial if he did not immediately remove himself from the front.

He returned to England and tried to make himself as useful as possible to his regiment in training troops for service in France while maintaining contact with his fellow poets. Graves played an important part, for example, in saving Sassoon from court-martial after the latter went absent without leave and wrote to his commanding officer denouncing the war. The two officers had become firm friends while serving with the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The story is well documented in the biographies and is the subject of Pat Barker's novel, "Regeneration".

Before the armistice, Graves married Nancy Nicholson. Nancy was a 'modern woman' who refused to take on Graves' names and preferred wearing trousers to dresses (much, according to the biographers, to his mother's dismay!). Though their relationship was initially happy and productive (Nancy and Robert worked on a children's book together), the stress of family life, little money and Robert's persistent shell-shocked condition caused them troubles. It is not surprising, then, that Laura Riding's arrival spelled the beginning of the end of their marriage.

Laura Riding and Robert Graves' relationship was immensely influential upon both of their lives and careers. After Riding's arrival in England, she began to exert an influence on more than just Graves' writing. Following a sequence of events so crazy that they seem more suitable to fiction than reality (including, for example, Laura Riding leaping from a third floor window and breaking her pelvic bone in three places), Graves abandoned his family and moved with Riding from England to Spain. The events of this period were so momentous that all three biographers, Martin Seymour-Smith, Richard Perceval Graves and Miranda Seymour, dedicate a significant proportion of their studies to them.

Miranda Seymour has also written a novel, The Telling, that recounts the continuation of the sad story. Seymour's novel fictionalises the events that occur after Graves and Riding's arrival in Pennsylvania where they travelled, on Riding's prompting, after Graves' friend, the editor of Time Magazine, Tom Matthews, secured a good review of Riding's poetry. The reviewer, Schuyler Jackson, his wife and four children invited Graves and Riding into their home. As Richard Perceval Graves in the third volume of his biography tells it:

Having decided that the handsome Schuyler must be hers, Laura had behaved with calculated ferocity. :Schuyler Jackson's wife Kit, the good-natured mother of their four young children, was a serious :obstacle; but within six weeks, through sheer force of will, Riding had reduced her to a demented and :violent creature prepared to 'confess' to witchcraft before being removed to an insane asylum. By :then, the atmosphere of horror had become so pervasive that many of those present would come to :believe that they had been in the presence of great spiritual evil.

On Kit's departure, Laura Riding had taken over the running of the Pennsylvania farmhouse in the :hamlet of Brownsburg, just south of New Hope, Pennsylvania, which she and Robert and a few other :members of her inner circle had been sharing with the Jacksons. Soon afterwards, she had disappeared :into a bedroom with Schuyler for two days, emerging to announce (for the benefit of anyone who was :uncertain about her present views on the subject) that 'Schuyler and I do'. (Robert Graves and The :White Goddess, 5)

Clearly this and Laura's leap through a window is stuff for the silver screen. Even in a post-Fatal Attraction Hollywood context, it's difficult to imagine these events in anything other than a Hollywood Schlock-buster. Yet, it seems as though R. P. Graves' description of events is, and perhaps justifiably, biased. There seems little doubt that, at this time of her life, Riding exerted control over a number of individuals who idolised and idealised her. Catherine Dalton, Graves' daughter of the first marriage, perhaps best expresses the family's feelings toward Riding. In Seán ó Mórdha's documentary on Graves' life for the BBC series 'Bookmark', Catherine and Robert's daughter of the second marriage, Lucia, go to the Bloomsbury house on St. Peter's Square where Laura made her famous leap. Lucia describes the event, as though to Catherine but actually for the benefit of the camera. When she reaches the dramatic conclusion: Laura shouting 'Goodbye chaps' and making her leap, Catherine adds: 'I suppose she survived... she shouldn't have, but she did. A mistake, I think.'

It's easy to vilify Laura Riding. Graves was but one victim of her personality and her ambition. But then, Graves had his victims too. What cannot be questioned is the value of some of the work that they did together. Much of it remains important to both literary history as well as to scholarship. Together, they founded the small, yet important, Seizin Press, co-authored two very successful books (A Survey of Modernist Poetry, London: Heinemann, 1927 and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, London: Cape, 1928) as well as a disastrous novel, published under the pseudonym 'Barbara Rich' entitled No Decency Left.

A Survey, in fact, is the first published work that describes the poems being written by TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, ee cummings, Gertrude Stein, and Edith Sitwell amongst others of the period as 'modernist'. It is also ironically, as some critics argue, not only the first work of criticism on the Modernists but also the first anti-Modernist criticism. It is safe to say, in the context of works such as A Survey and A Pamplet that neither Graves nor Riding would have evolved as they did had it not been for one another. They influenced each others' works throughout their years together (1926-1939). Numerous biographers and scholars have argued, and quite correctly at that, that the relationship continued to influence their works long after they separated.

Before Riding, indeed, before Nancy, there were several other influential people, places and events in his life. Both of his parents, Alfred and Amy, proved an influence on Graves. Alfred because he, himself, was a poet and an educator and Amy because of her stern Victorian temper. There are several emphatic statements in Graves' autobiography, Goodbye To All That, that express Graves' attitude toward his parents' influence on his development beyond question. Not the least of these is the moment when Graves, returned home as a disenchanted, embittered and wounded soldier is put on 'parade' by his parents, proudly patriotic, completely Victorian and entirely ignorant of their son's frustration and embarrassment (1957, Penguin, 165-7). Here, the circle from the first page of the autobiography is squared: Graves' 'modern' attitudes are in conflict with his parent's old-fashioned mores. However, it also should not be forgotten that Graves and his friends relied on Alfred's literary reputation and, most especially, on his literary connections to see their own work published and favourably reviewed. Alfred represented the poetry of both Robert and Siegfried Sassoon, for example, while they were serving the trenches.

It is a sad fact that Robert did not participate in his father's centenary celebrations. One could suppose that his absence suggested that he was afraid to admit his adolescent indulgence in denigrating his father now that he was a mature and established poet in his own right. Graves absence suggests that he was afraid to admit that his father was an important reason for the early successes of his own career-and besides, it was highly unfashionable to be close to a father who was so clearly a relic of another era (Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 124-5).

Robert Graves had various mentors throughout his career; however, he encountered three of the most significant during the war and in his Oxford days: W. H. R. Rivers, T. E. Lawrence and Basanta Mallick. All three, at various stages, dominated Graves' thought and influenced his work but, unlike the ideas of many of the more 'fashionable' theorists that Riding insisted that she and Graves subscribe to, all three remained, to a greater or lesser extent, influences on Graves' life and work.

After Graves' return from America, his relationship with Beryl Graves began in earnest. As the war began, England was in turmoil and Graves began trying to assemble a new life and begin a new family. Indeed, based in Devon as the rest of Europe was drawn into a vortex, he and Beryl briefly experienced something of a personal peace. The terror of Laura Riding had faded and their life was beginning anew. However, anything like an 'idyll' was impossible at this time and soon the events of the war began to overtake them in the most dramatic ways.

In 1943 Robert Graves received the dreadful 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 taking out a well-defended enemy position. The chances that he had survived were not good.

By 1946 as England and Europe began to survey its post-War state, Graves managed to secure transport for his family back to Majorca. Once safely back there, then other than annual trips to England, occasional visits to the continent and even rarer trips to America, the Graves' made Deya their home for good.

The period began what should have remained a period of domestic harmony and literary productivity; however, after 1948 and the publication of The White Goddess, as Graves' fame and celebrity grew, Graves began a period of discovering muses who provided him with a flesh-and-blood manifestation of his poetic and mythic muse. Some of these relationships were short, others seemed largely innocent and more flirtatious than serious or deeply poetic; however, four were, without doubt, significant to Graves' life and, subsequently, to his work.

Graves' first muse after Nancy Nicholson, Laura Riding and Beryl Graves, indeed, the first after he articulated his White Goddess theories, was Judith Bledsoe. Judith, by all accounts, was a naïve young girl who found in the older Graves something of a father figure whose intellect and worldly knowledge was appealing. Graves found in her the physical embodiment of the White Goddess. It seems that in the case of Judith, as in the muses that followed, who or what the person might actually have been seemed less important to Graves than what he believed the person to be. And so Judith who at first was clearly enamoured with the attention she was receiving began to buckle under the pressure and, as R. P. Graves reports, Beryl "... took Judith out to lunch alone, and quite calmly asked her whether she wanted Robert or not. To which Judith could only protest, quite honestly, that she loved Beryl and Robert more than her mother and father, and that she had no intention of doing anything to injure their marriage" (The White Goddess, 188).

Again, this document is only intended to be a brief survey of the life and works of Graves and the biographers give a much fairer treatment of the complications and the intricacies of Robert's fascinatingly convoluted life where I can only reduce and summarise.

Graves had three further muses in his life: Margot, Cindy and Juli. Of the three, Cindy was potentially the most destructive to Graves. Her story is painful to read and I refer the reader to any of the biographies for the account though I do think that Miranda Seymour's might be the best. Juli, the fourth and last muse, took on the role only toward the end of his life and then, it seems, was there as a salve to his battered mind and spirit and less a temptress and inspiration. Though, it is true, that his last good poems were written for and about her.

Over his long career but most especially at the height of his fame, Graves had many celebrity friends including films stars like Ava Gardner and Ingrid Bergman, fellow writers like T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein, and was courted (to the annoyance of the general Deyan population) by tens of hangers-on and aspiring poets. He was, himself, a celebrity whose appearance on television and radio programmes virtually guaranteed a good audience.

Robert Graves passed away on December 7, 1985 after a long and slow mental and physical disintegration. He is buried in Deya. His marker is a simple concrete slab with the inscription: "Robert Graves, Poeta, 1895-1985".

The Robert Graves Trust and Society are online here: www.robertgraves.org