Robert Graves

Graves was born into an upper-middle-class family in Wimbledon, then part of Surrey, now part of south London. He was the eighth of ten children born to Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931), who was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe. His father was an Irish schools inspector, Gaelic scholar, and the author of the popular song "Father O'Flynn"; his mother, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke (1857–1951), a grandniece of the historian Leopold von Ranke, was his father's second wife. One of his many uncles was the officer commanding the Nore during the First World War, Admiral Sir Richard Poore.

At the age of seven, double pneumonia following measles almost took Graves's life, the first of three occasions when his doctors despaired of him as a result of afflictions of the lungs; the second was the result of a war wound, while the third came when he contracted Spanish influenza in late 1918, immediately before demobilisation.

Name

Graves's birth was registered in 1895 under the name of Robert Ranke Graves. He was baptised into the Church of England as "Robert Ranke" on 1 September 1895 at Wimbledon.

In 1909, Graves was enrolled at Charterhouse School as Robert von Ranke Graves. On 15 August 1914, he was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers under this name, and it appeared in The London Gazette again when his commission was confirmed in March 1915. However, he appears to have soon abandoned the addition of "von", as during the First World War having a German name caused him difficulties.

On 23 January 1918, Graves married Nancy Nicholson at St James's Church, Piccadilly, under his true name of Robert Ranke Graves.

In Germany, Graves's books are usually published with "von" included in his name.

In 1927, Graves published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. The autobiographical Good-Bye to All That (1929, revised by him and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Siegfried Sassoon. In 1934, he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources (under the advice of classics scholar Eirlys Roberts) he constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935). I, Claudius received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1934. Later, in the 1970s, the Claudius books were turned into the very popular television series I, Claudius, with Sir Derek Jacobi shown in both Britain and United States. Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.

Graves and Riding left Mallorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and in 1939, they moved to the United States, taking lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Their volatile relationship and eventual breakup were described by Robert's nephew Richard Perceval Graves in Robert Graves: 1927–1940: the Years with Laura, and T. S. Matthews's Jacks or Better (1977). It was also the basis for Miranda Seymour's novel The Summer of '39 (1998).

After returning to Britain, Graves began a relationship with Beryl Hodge, the wife of Alan Hodge, his collaborator on The Long Week-End (1940) and The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943; republished in 1947 as The Use and Abuse of the English Language but subsequently republished several times under its original title). Graves and Beryl (they were not to marry until 1950) lived in Galmpton, Torbay until 1946, when they re-established a home with their three children, in Deià, Mallorca. The house is now a museum. The year 1946 also saw the publication of his historical novel King Jesus. He published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth in 1948; it is a study of the nature of poetic inspiration, interpreted in terms of the classical and Celtic mythology he knew so well. He turned to science fiction with Seven Days in New Crete (1949) and in 1953 he published The Nazarene Gospel Restored with Joshua Podro. He also wrote Hercules, My Shipmate, published under that name in 1945 (but first published as The Golden Fleece in 1944).

In 1955, he published The Greek Myths, which retells a large body of Greek myths, each tale followed by extensive commentary drawn from the system of The White Goddess. His retellings are well respected; many of his unconventional interpretations and etymologies are dismissed by classicists. Graves, in turn, dismissed the reactions of classical scholars, arguing that they are too specialised and "prose-minded" to interpret "ancient poetic meaning," and that "the few independent thinkers... [are] the poets, who try to keep civilisation alive."

He published a volume of short stories, ¡Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny, in 1956. In 1961, he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, a post he held until 1966.

In 1967, Robert Graves published, together with Omar Ali-Shah, a new translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The translation quickly became controversial; Graves was attacked for trying to break the spell of famed passages in Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation, and L. P. Elwell-Sutton, an orientalist at Edinburgh University, maintained that the manuscript used by Ali-Shah and Graves, which Ali-Shah and his brother Idries Shah claimed had been in their family for 800 years, was a forgery. The translation was a critical disaster and Graves's reputation suffered severely due to what the public perceived as his gullibility in falling for the Shah brothers' deception. It was in 1967 that the first full-length assessment of Graves' work was published. Swifter Than Reason by Douglas Day concentrated on Grave's development as a poet from his earliest work in 1916 to the most recent collection, using Graves' critical writings as commentary.

In 1968, Graves was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry by Queen Elizabeth II. His private audience with the Queen was shown in the BBC documentary film Royal Family, which aired in 1969.

From the 1960s until his death, Robert Graves frequently exchanged letters with Spike Milligan. Many of their letters to each other are collected in the book Dear Robert, Dear Spike.

Children

Graves had eight children. With his first wife, Nancy Nicholson (1899–1977), he had Jennie (who married journalist Alexander Clifford), David (who was killed in the Second World War), Catherine (who married nuclear scientist Clifford Dalton at Aldershot), and Sam. With his second wife, Beryl Pritchard Hodge (1915–2003), he had William (author of the well-received memoir Wild Olives: Life on Majorca with Robert Graves), Lucia (a translator and author whose versions of novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafón have been quite successful commercially), Juan (addressed in one of Robert Graves' most famous and critically praised poems, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice"), and Tomás (a writer and musician).