Joe Bennett: You can’t beat a good book

A good biography will show what they chose not to write, will tell the stories behind the stories, expose the soil from which the flower of writing grew.Photo / 123rf

OPINION

I gave myself a book for Christmas, a biography of Robert Graves the poet, second-hand for $20.

It may seem odd to want to read about a writer’s life when what they wrote themselves should be enough, but what they wrote is what they chose to write.

A good biography will show what they chose not to write, will tell the stories behind the stories, expose the soil from which the flower of writing grew. And that, to me at any rate, in interesting.

I have long loved Graves’ poetry. Not the love poetry, for which he is best known, but the more ordinary stuff, stuff springing from a world I recognise.

I think of the horny-handed sailor telling excited children that ‘every ocean smells alike of tar.’ Or the mythical Lollocks, ‘by sloth on sorrow fathered,’ that embody our discontents.

When the imbecile aged

Are overlong in dying

And the nurse drowses,

Lollocks come skipping

Up the tattered stairs

And are nasty together

In the bed’s shadow.

Or when he observes a slowly burning fire of wet branches and how ‘at each heel end a dirty sap breaks out,’ then adds

Confess, creatures, how sulkily ourselves

We hiss with doom, fuel of a sodden age -

Not rapt up roaring to the chimney stack

On incandescent clouds of spirit or rage

Graves the man is less clear-cut than his poetry. I saw him interviewed on television in what must have been the early 1970s. I recall nothing of what he said but I was struck by his manner.

He had a sort of giggling hauteur, amused by the attention being paid him, but disdainful of the interviewer’s questions. He wore a hat and a neckerchief, and he seemed not to belong to the modern world.

What I didn’t know then, but have now learned from reading, is that he was already beginning to suffer from dementia. He wrote his last poems in 1975 then took another cruel decade to die.

He’d been born in 1895 which put him on a collision course with the First World War. As a 20-year-old officer in the trenches, he was so severely wounded that a telegram was sent to his parents declaring him dead. Somehow he overcame the physical injuries, but the psychological damage was intense. Shell-shock, they called it then. Today we use different words, but changing the words doesn’t change the horror.

He eventually recovered enough to write an autobiography Goodbye to All That and went to live for most of the rest of his life on the Spanish island of Majorca. He married twice, siring two broods of children 20 years apart, but was serially and openly unfaithful to both his wives, bedding a string of beautiful young women whom he declared to be his muses and essential to his poetry. Nice work if you can get it.

All this and more I learned from Miranda Seymour’s biography. It’s a weighty scholarly work: 400 pages of text and 20 of photographs are followed by 34 pages of notes, three of acknowledgments, a six-page bibliography and a 15-page index.

The research and writing must have taken years and it will probably be the last word on Graves’ life.

But for all that, I feel as I often feel after reading a biography, that the jar has come down and just missed the wasp.

That despite all the research there’s a quality of Graves that has not been captured, the indefinable something that made him the writer that he was, the writer who has given me such pleasure.

So I prefer to finish the way Graves himself once finished a collection of his poems. These are the last three lines of the last poem on the last page:

So now, my solemn ones, leaving the rest unsaid,

Rising on air as on a gander’s wing

At a careless comma,

I think we can agree that that is genius.