Robert Graves · 1895–1985

The Author

Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, London on July 24, 1895, to a literary and artistic family. His father, Alfred Graves, was an inspector of schools and a minor poet; his mother, Amalie von Ranke, was the niece of the great German historian Leopold von Ranke. The German connection would haunt Graves. During the First World War, his half-German ancestry — and his middle name, von Ranke — made him an object of suspicion in an England consumed by anti-German hysteria.

Graves went to Charterhouse School and then to Oxford — but the Great War interrupted everything. He enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1914, and in July 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by shrapnel that he was reported dead. His parents received the telegram. His obituary appeared in The Times. He survived, but barely — a piece of shell had passed through his chest, and the doctors gave him little chance. Recovery was slow, painful, and incomplete. The war would mark everything he wrote for the rest of his life.

The War Poet

In 1929, Graves published Goodbye to All That, his memoir of the war and its aftermath. It remains one of the great war books in the English language — blunt, unsentimental, and scalding. It records the horrors of trench warfare, the stupidity of the high command, and the author's desperate effort to escape the England that had tried to kill him. The book also chronicles his first marriage — to the painter Nancy Nicholson — and its disintegration under the pressure of his postwar trauma.

Majorca and the Masterpiece

In 1929, Graves moved to the island of Majorca with the American poet Laura Riding. The relationship was intense, collaborative, and ultimately destructive — but it was during this years in Spain that Graves wrote the two books that would make his reputation: I, Claudius (1934) and its sequel Claudius the God (1935). He wrote them quickly, partly for money — he needed funds to keep the household running. He had no idea he was writing a classic.

The Research Method

Graves was a classicist by training. He translated Latin and Greek texts — his translations of Apuleius and Suetonius remain highly regarded — and he knew the ancient sources intimately. I, Claudius draws primarily on Suetonius's The Twelve Caesarsand Tacitus's Annals. The novel is remarkable for how closely it sticks to the historical record. The poisonings, the orgies, the murders — the Romans recorded these things themselves. Graves simply assembled what they wrote, filled it with life, and gave it a voice: the voice of the one man who saw it all and lived to tell the tale because everyone dismissed him as a fool.

The Later Career

After the Claudius novels, Graves turned increasingly to mythological and poetic scholarship. The White Goddess (1948) — his study of the muse-goddess in Western poetry — became a cult classic, though it baffled some critics with its esoteric arguments. His two-volume The Greek Myths (1955) remains a standard reference. But he became an increasingly controversial and isolated figure in English literary circles — estranged from many old friends, prickly, certain of his genius in a world he felt was incapable of recognizing it.

Death in Majorca

Graves remained in Majorca for most of his life after the war, becoming one of the island's most famous residents. He died on December 7, 1985, at the age of ninety. He had lived long enough to see I, Claudiusadapted into one of the most acclaimed television series ever made — the 1976 BBC production with Derek Jacobi, which brought his vision of ancient Rome to a global audience and cemented his reputation as one of the twentieth century's great storytellers.

— Robert Graves