Sayers and Graves

I really appreciated this post by Adam Roberts on his long-term fascination for the work of Robert Graves, especially The White Goddess, which Adam calls “One of my holy books.” I told Adam that I appreciate this post because I have always found Graves not only alien to my sensibility but even alienating — and Adam, justifiably, asked me what I meant by that. So I replied thus (I’ve edited and expanded, and added some links):

Well, primarily it’s that he strikes me as a monomaniac: he’s done a vast amount of reading, but only what supports, or can be turned in such a way as to seem to support, his White/Triple Goddess thesis ever makes its way to the reader. Nothing ever points in the other direction, nothing ever complicates his vision: everything is grist for his endlessly turning mill. Even his famous two-volume edition of the Greek Myths — books I bought fifty years ago and have often enjoyed — grinds his small collection of axes. It feels inhuman to me. And when you couple this with the intensity of his hatreds, he seems a pretty unpleasant character.

By the way, when Sayers was working on her Paradiso translation she read Graves’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia, with its notoriously vitriolic introduction: Graves despised Lucan and sought to portray him in every possible negative light, and especially emphasized Lucan’s astronomical ignorance. (E. V. Rieu thought that introduction so hostile that he threatened to cancel the contract unless Graves toned it down, which he did, but only a bit.) I should add that Graves is following A. E. Housman’s lead here: Housman called Lucan a “blundering nincompoop.”

Brief digression: I have long thought that the great classicist Seth Benardete made a brilliant point with exemplary concision: “All the careful exactness of Housman goes along with a pettiness of spirit that at least at times is out of control and expresses a contempt for whatever he does not understand.”

Anyway: Sayers thought it was Graves who was ignorant, and sought to prove it, even enlisting as a temporary research assistant an exceedingly bright undergraduate named Brian Marsden, who later became a very distinguished astronomer at Harvard. He helped her to discover many points on which Graves was wrong and Lucan right. (Decades later he wrote an enjoyable essay about the experience.) Sayers also meticulously went through Lucan’s Latin to show that Graves had deliberately mistranslated him to make him seem more stupid. For instance, in the translation Lucan mentions a lunar eclipse than was followed the very next day by a soar eclipse, and Graves calls attention to the ridiculousness of this in a note. But, Sayers discovered, Lucan didn’t write that it happened the next day; Graves had added that. This appears to have been only one among several, or even many, additions to the Lucan’s text, though I would need to do a lot more work than I’ve done to confirm the point.

Sayers spent most of the last year of her life on Graves’s manifold intellectual wickednesses; it’s the main reason she didn’t finish her translation of Dante. When asked why she was doing it, she answered:

because I can’t bear to see a man treated like that, even if he is two thousand years dead, and because I believe Lucan is substantially talking sense, and I want to get to the bottom of it. I don’t care what it costs or how long it takes. I want justice. I want honest scholarship and accurate translation. The classical scholars won’t take an interest; either they think astronomy is too remote and boring to bother with, or they say, “Oh, Graves! what does he matter?” But he is distributing his sneers to a quarter of a million Penguin readers, and I don’t like it. (End of speech)

“Damn the fellow!” she writes in another letter. “I wouldn’t mind so much his murdering Lucan if he didn’t dance on the body.” I want to be more generous to Graves, more receptive to his ideas, but I don’t think working on Sayers is making that any easier….

She was at least comforted to find some allies. A distinguished professor of classics from St. Andrews University, H. J. Rose, sent her his review of Graves’s The Greek Myths, which he called “a series of tangled narratives, difficult and tedious to read and made none the better by sundry evidences of their author’s defective scholarship.” Sayers replied with gratitude, saying that Rose’s review “filled me with malignant joy.”