The White Goddess (4 page)

Yet Graves’s own thinking had never ceased to develop. By 1963 his vision of the Goddess was changing again. In his Oxford lecture of that December – published as ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’ – he began to speak of the White Goddess’s ‘mysterious sister, the Goddess of Wisdom’. This new vision of a Black Goddess, to be reached by the poet who can pass uncomplaining through the ordeals imposed by her ‘White’ sister, was no doubt inspired by the many Black Virgins to be found in the churches of southern Europe, some near Deyá, as well as by discussions with Idries Shah about ‘the Sufic tradition of Wisdom as blackness’.
1
The Black Goddess offered the glimpse of a more harmonious and tranquil future. She is the poet’s ‘more-than-Muse’:

The final stage of Graves’s vision of the Goddess, this aspiration suggests that he was coming to see an incompleteness about
The
White
Goddess.
Always there have been readers (perhaps the earliest was John Heath-Stubbs in 1948) who have felt that the Muse presented in the book is too fond of ‘serpent-love and corpse-flesh’, too closely tied to the physical cycle of birth, copulation and death familiar to the materialistic modern world-views Graves rejected. The Black Goddess offered enchanting possibilities. But they were not to be developed. Although Graves continued to write poems for another decade, despite suffering increasingly from the memory-loss which heralded what was perhaps Altzheimer’s disease, in prose at least his exploration of the theme was over.

The
White
Goddess
remains, after
Goodbye
to
All
That
and the
Claudius
novels, his most renowned and influential book, and also one which eludes all simple judgments. Graves himself wrote ruefully to Patricia Cunningham (in a letter of 22 August 1959, apparently unposted):

*

The purpose of this edition is to present the text of
The
White
Goddess
as Robert Graves revised it in 1960, incorporating a few corrections which consistency requires. The source has been Graves’s own copy of the 1958 second American edition published by Vintage Books of New York, which incorporated all his previous alterations to the text, including the extensive additions made for the second British edition of 1952.

Graves’s copy of the paperback Vintage edition is a remarkable and evocative object. The first three-hundred-odd pages are speckled with thousands of blue pencil underlinings wherever Graves, the stylistic perfectionist, has caught himself in an ugly repetition. Thus, finding the words ‘he had no notion of the true identity of “the nymph Orithya” or of the history of the ancient Athenian cult of Boreas…’ Graves has underlined all five ‘of’s. These markings must have been merely a self-punishment for careless prose; they have evidently nothing to do with rewriting the text.

The actual revisions take several forms, in many combinations of colour and medium. Minor misprints are corrected in blue pencil, and one such correction (Vintage p. 152) has been further corrected in black ink. One correction (Vintage p. 144n) is in ordinary black pencil. More substantial corrections have been made in blue ink, and a few details marked in red ink. Several passages have been rewritten, or have had extensive new material added, in blue ink, with red pencil then used for further refinement, and blue ink again on top for final thoughts. No chronology can be deduced for all this, but as margins became full Graves took to gluing in slips of white paper with further material in blue or blue-black ink and/or red pencil. There are ten of these slips in all, and a patch of glue suggests that an eleventh has fallen out from between Chapters II and III. Most of the slips contain material about mushrooms.

It seems inconceivable that this confusing palimpsest of a book was sent to Faber, who were supposed to incorporate its revisions into their 1961 edition of
The
White
Goddess.
Surviving sheets of typescript, in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo, suggest that Karl Gay typed out the corrections as a list, and that Faber were supposed to use this, alongside a clean copy of the Vintage edition, for typesetting. Only a few such sheets now exist, but they show that Graves made some further corrections on the typescript. At certain other points where the typed sheets are now lost we can also tell that Graves made such refinements, on the typescript or the proofs or both, because the changes in his Vintage copy turn up with subtle alterations (often, significantly, to avoid ugly repetitions) in the Faber 1961 edition. In these cases alone, the Faber text has been preferred to what Graves wrote in his Vintage copy.

In the event, not all of Graves’s revisions were incorporated into the 1961 edition. We do not know why, but many alterations – ranging from small local adjustments up to wholesale changes like Graves’s decisions to put
AD
after rather than before dates, and to spell ‘Juppiter’ with one ‘p’ rather than two – were overlooked. In some places either Karl Gay or Faber misread Graves’s handwriting; and, in addition to reproducing some minor errors missed by Graves in the Vintage edition, the 1961 text added hundreds more. To say this is to express no disrespect towards Faber and Faber:
The
White
Goddess
is, after all, a printer’s, editor’s, proofreader’s nightmare – complex and capricious in argument, peppered with strange names and quotations in dozens of languages, full of tables and diagrams. The 1961 edition has done good service through many reprints. But it has now been possible to remove these errors and to present the text, as nearly as possible, as Graves would have wished to see it.

Even this, however, has not been a simple matter. To correct obvious misspellings, to alter a mistaken chapter-number in a Biblical reference or to settle the inconsistency between, say, ‘wryneck’ and ‘wry-neck’ does not ask great ingenuity. But other ‘errors’ are less clear-cut. Three examples may serve to indicate a range of problems. On page 379 Graves tells us that ‘The Son…was also called Lucifer or Phosphorus (‘bringer of light’) because as evening-star he led in the light of the Moon’. This is incorrect; Lucifer is the morning star (the planet Venus seen at first light) and never the evening star. But the error is woven into the logic of the sentence. It cannot be changed; and indeed, in its context the association between the Son, Lucifer, and the Moon is strongly evocative. It may be an error, but to correct it would damage the book.

A more intricate conundrum occurs on page 335, where Graves quotes – not quite accurately – the poem ‘The Fallen Tower of Siloam’ which, he says, he wrote in 1934. His diary, however, shows that the poem was written on March 19 and 20, 1937. Clearly, one might think, the book is in error: why not correct the date to 1937? But look at the context. Graves is discussing the poet’s sense of ‘the equivocal nature of time’. ‘The coincidence of the concept and the reality,’ he tells us, ‘is never quite exact’. The poem, he says, was written ‘with proleptic detail’. Prolepsis, according to the dictionary, is ‘the representation or taking of something future as already done, or existing’. Graves has moved the date of his proleptic poem back by three years. A simple error? A private joke? A coded message? The quoted lines contain the words ‘We were there already…’ In the circumstances, I dare not alter the date.

One much larger alteration I have made. In both the Vintage and the 1961 editions, the two paragraphs beginning ‘It will be objected…’, now on page 476, appeared on what is now page 105, after the words ‘Isle of Avalon’ and before ‘The joke is…’ They were clearly out of place in style, matter and logic. They jarringly interrupted Chapter VI’s account of Arthur’s grave at Glastonbury with a discussion of a quite different topic. Careful reading of the text shows that they are in reality a missing piece from the argument of Chapter XXVI. They were amongst new material added in 1952, when Graves was enlarging existing paragraphs to form the present Chapter XXVI. The printer evidently misunderstood Graves’s instructions and introduced these two paragraphs at the wrong place. Curiously, Graves overlooked the error in every subsequent proofreading: perhaps its subject (woman’s superior claims to divinity, as compared with man’s) was so central to his thinking that it seemed apposite at any point.

But the error is clear. And (in contrast to their incongruity with Chapter VI’s Glastonbury passage) as Dunstan Ward has pointed out,

After consultation with Beryl, William and Lucia Graves, and with the directors of the Robert Graves Programme, the paragraphs have been placed in what is obviously their correct position. Most readers will never notice the change – which is as it should be.

The diagrams in the present edition are taken from the 1961 Faber edition. The first American edition (Creative Age, 1948) gave its diagrams poorly-drawn, amateurish lettering. The second American edition (Viking, 1958) showed a great improvement, using strong calligraphic letters, apparently drawn by Karl Gay. But the British editions have always used a printed font for the lettering and this tradition (sanctioned, after all, by both Graves and Eliot) has been followed here.

The text of ‘The White Goddess: A Talk’ is reprinted from
Steps:
Stories,
Talks,
Essays,
Poems,
Studies
in
History
,
London (Cassell), 1958. This text contains here and there a few words omitted from the version in
5 Pens
tn
Hand
,
New York (Doubleday), 1958, and differs slightly in punctuation. The two letters to the press are reprinted from their original periodicals.

And now, here on the verge of the enchanted forest, thanks must be given to all those who have helped. I am grateful first of all to Beryl Graves, for help and advice on countless matters, for generous hospitality at Canelluñ and for unrestricted access to her files and archives and to Robert Graves’s study, where much of the work was done under the tolerant eye of the little flute-player, who still sits on his brass box on the mantlepiece. To William and Elena Graves I am grateful for warm hospitality and tireless help of many kinds. I thank also Lucia Graves for valuable advice and information; Patrick Quinn and Dunstan Ward of the Robert Graves Programme for enthusiastic guidance and meticulous scholarship; Dr Robert J. Bertholf, Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo for information and advice on Graves manuscripts; Frances Whistler and Peter Foden for searching the archives of Oxford University Press; Dr I.L.Finkel of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum for advice on Babylonian calendar beasts; Dr Edmund Baxter for help with locating texts; and Professor Charles Rzepka of Boston University for some detective work. For constant encouragement and inspiration I am grateful to my wife Amanda, to whom (for obvious reasons) the editor’s part in this volume is dedicated.

Grevel Lindop

March 1997