XII.
“How sweet is mortal
sovranty” – think some:
Others – “How blest the
Paradise to come!”
Ah, take the cash in hand
and waive the Rest;
Oh,
the brave Music of a distant Drum!
Anyone
who’s followed this blog for any length of time (and I haven’t been posting
regularly, I know) will realise that I don’t have a lot of time for Robert
Graves. At this point, with the pertinent reference to taking cash in the verse
above, it seems an appropriate moment to discuss this.
Graves did some wonderful things in his
career, there’s no denying: he gave us I,
Claudius and Claudius the God and
rendered the Greek Myths more or less comprehensible for generations of
readers. He was one of the very few poets of the Great War to make it out alive,
which is incredible enough; unfortunately, he seems to have developed some
hang-ups in his early life which forced him into a bad decision in later years.
Graves was part of the generation of
writers in the post-War era which included characters like W.H. Auden,
Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh. Graves wrote and published alongside
them and was considered their peer, at least in literary terms. After his war
poetry, Graves dabbled in some other short works which were dramatically
homoerotic (this, in a country where homosexuality was still, at least
technically, illegal), unlike most of his other contemporaries who had taken
the lesson of Oscar Wilde to heart and kept schtum.
The reception of these works was cool, especially by the subject who inspired
them, and Graves went into hiatus for awhile thereafter.
He returned to publishing having married
and settled down and, presumably, having sorted out his sexual proclivities.
Thereafter, he seems to have taken a violently dismissive stance against all
homosexuals, a knee-jerk reaction which, on the face of it, seems to stem from
not having been allowed to join the “cool kids” club all those years ago.
Graves was convinced that Omar Khayyam
was gay; he was absolutely sure that
Edward FitzGerald was, too. He violently opposed the publishing of FitzGerald’s
translation and called him all kinds of hateful and pejorative things whenever
the Rubaiyat came up in conversation.
Unfortunately for him, his violent insistence on being taken on faith in this
matter and his manic opposition to the poem on this basis, forced many people
to reject his stance and embrace the poem even more strongly. For most,
Graves’s antipathy was an idée fixe,
and his rantings seemed to indicate that there was a problem of a personal
nature involved, rather than an actual, critical issue with the writing.
But things were to get worse.
In 1967, a Persian student approached
Graves with what he claimed was an authentic translation into English of a
manuscript which pre-dated the Calcutta
Ms. which FitzGerald had used as the basis of his poem. This fellow, Ali
Shah, claimed that he and his brother (back in Persia) had discovered these
verses and were keen to publish them in the West, thus restoring the primacy of
Omar Khayyam by side-stepping the FitzGerald morass. Graves swooped in and
embraced the project. He talked up the Shahs’ version to various publishers and
soon there was a bidding war to see who would get to print it. Various
manuscript extracts began to circle about, and money started to change hands,
necessary – Ali Shah said – to keep his brother safe in his tumultuous home
country and to ensure the recovery of the quatrains.
Robert Graves went ballistic: finally, he
said, that old shirt-lifter FitzGerald was going to get his; at last the old
pillow-biter was going to get what was coming to him! He lobbied hard to get
people to pony up the cash for the project and interviewed widely with anyone
who would offer his point of view the column inches he felt the matter deserved.
Then, the embarrassment:
Ali Shah, the original verses and, more
importantly, the money, vanished. Last seen heading back towards Persia, he and
his brother vapourised into the ether, and were never heard of again. Graves
was left holding the baby and the questions he was being targeted with were of
a particularly uncomfortable variety: why weren’t copies made? Why didn’t he
have the verses examined by an expert before crying “hallelujah!” from the
rooftops? Why did he take the Shah brothers so immediately at face value?
Of course, it was all because they were
telling him things that he wanted to hear. In time it was revealed that the
quatrains were mainly obscure and abstruse versions of the original rubaiyat found in the Calcutta Ms., and not particularly
original at all. That they had been composed within the Twentieth Century was
also proven – on the basis of grammatical shifts and word usage – and the whole
matter looked very black for Mr. Graves.
Initially, he went on the attack,
claiming that any attempt to re-translate them into English was far better than
clinging on to FitzGerald’s “homosexual” version; by way of demonstration, he
re-worked some of the quatrains himself, but with less than stellar results. In
the end, a volume of the translation did
appear, probably in a bid by the publisher to try and recoup something out of
the debacle, but the scandal had already queered the pitch (so to speak) and
sales were lacklustre. Graves moved to Mallorca and stayed there, grumbling,
until he died.
As
I’ve tried to indicate in previous posts, the jury is still well-and-truly out
in regard to the sexual tendencies of both Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyam.
On balance, there might be something to Graves’ claims, but nothing definitive.
By stark contrast, there’s a whole lot that comes out of Graves’ own writing
which indicates that he might be protesting too much.
In the final analysis, Graves’ claims are
inconsequential. Nothing he came out with holds water; nothing was relevant to
the literary work; and no attempt by him (or the Shahs) to ‘improve’ the poetry
came close to attaining that goal. It was a case of two fraudsters making off
with a fortune and one man’s inarticulate misdirected rage bringing about his
own destruction. As to the sexual orientation of the authors, does any of it
even matter?
Graves’ hang ups, nowadays, amount to
little more than the music of an increasingly distant drum.
