Playboy Interview: Robert Graves

The long and distinguished career of Robert Graves began where it might well have ended--in the trenches of France in 1915, when a shellburst nearly emasculated him, "clinically killing me." But Graves obviously resurrected himself and, in the intervening 55 years, has become a famous, sometimes notorious poet, critic, translator, mythologizer and commentator on the passing scene. Now 75, Graves spans our century. He has explored almost all its dimensions in his 130-plus published books, moving through it with a prickly, idiosyncratic style inherited partially from his father, an Irish poet, and his mother, a Bavarian gentlewoman fond of Gothic castles and supernatural legends.

Graves first wrote poetry when he was 11 years old; he has never stopped. After returning from World War One, he married his first wife, sired four children and continued writing poems and sociopsychological criticism until he could no longer stand the society that was the core of his criticism. He left England and his personal ties in 1929, and his leave-taking book, "Good-bye to All That," remains both the best description of those troubled times and a characteristically honest self-portrait.

He moved to the then-remote Mediterranean island of Majorca, where he has lived ever since, except during the Spanish Civil War and World War Two, when he returned to England briefly and reluctantly. In 1945, he went back to Majorca with his second and present wife and settled in to raise his second set of four children. Living on his island, Graves has remained far enough from contemporary social and literary whirls to develop startlingly original notions about the way books and people should be. Catholic taste and a penchant for prodigious scholarship have helped him along the way. As a novelist, Graves pioneered the technique of transcribing past events into present-day nomenclature and psychology--a feat he feels comes from a poetic ability to suspend time in the mind. His 1934 novel "I, Claudius" stands as a landmark among historical "reconstructions."

As a critic, he has consistently held out for what he calls the native tradition of English poetry, one rooted in love and dedicated to an exploration of the complicated relationship between men and women. He says, "No individual love, no grass, no birds or animals--that is what makes ... most modern poems so disastrously dull." He also steadfastly affirms the need for meter and rhyme in poetry, which brings him into headlong collision with nearly every other major contemporary poet. No matter. His gadfly essays have attacked them all, notably Yeats and Eliot, as talented but misled.

Graves's mythological researches have shocked and outraged the academic community but have drawn no conclusive rebuttal. Strongly supporting his hypotheses with evidence "intuited" from history, he has asserted that all true poetry begins in savage, prehistoric matriarchal rites; thus, all poets owe fealty to a cruel, capricious Earth Mother he calls the White Goddess. He has declared that Christ survived the cross and died in his 70s preaching in India and, with equal seriousness, that drinking milk causes homosexuality in some men. He was among the first to claim that hallucinogenic drugs were fundamental to most of the world's great religions and he himself has tripped to "the land of the dead" via magic mushroom; he reports that it was a fine experience because he could see sounds and hear colors. These are desirable qualities for a man who says that Solomon's "Song of Songs," which he is currently retranslating, is really the account of a wedding ceremony.

Yet with all these accomplishments, Graves has never felt himself anything but a poet. His poetry, he says, is his "spiritual autobiography." He claims he writes all the rest so he can afford to write poems. "Poetry, as I understand it, is written from personal necessity, not for the market. It is made as an oyster makes pearls." Presumably, Graves means out of sand and time, with a generous boost from the private muse he thinks must inform, through love, every poem worth the name. His latest collection of poems celebrates this belief. And many think his efforts have made him the finest love poet of the century. In 1961, he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford and he has won prizes at two Olympic Games for poems, most recently, the Gold Medal at Mexico City's 1968 contest. Queen Elizabeth II and the American National Poetry Society have also awarded him gold medals for his poetry, though he returned the American one when he found it wasn't really gold.

Iconoclasm marks Graves's every activity. In lectures to college audiences, he mentions the mind-expanding properties of drugs, then informs his listeners only the "priestly" should use them. His polyglot scholarship confounds and annoys strait-laced academicians, though many pick up his ideas for investigation. Charged with sad, deeply felt emotion, his poetry is carefully wrought and elegantly expressed, which perplexes and delights readers accustomed to more modern modes. Even his day-to-day surroundings set him apart. Playboy correspondent Jim McKinley, a friend and neighbor of Graves, conducted this revealing interview in Graves's Majorcan home.

"Though I've known Robert for some time," he writes, "and been to his house often, there still seems an aura of mystery, of special knowledge, around him and his house. Nothing menacing or forbidding, just special. From our mountain village, you walk out toward Graves's house along a narrow road for about a mile. You go between lemon and olive trees, listening to the finches and sheep bells and looking at the Mediterranean. It seems a fitting setting for Graves, with his interest in the ancients. You can't help visualizing him striding along in a tunic. This 75-year-old, six-foot, three-inch man marches the two miles to and from the post office twice a day, at a pace you can't match even though you're 40 years younger. He always wears a hat on these jaunts, a floppy straw or a tam or a Spanish black pull-down thing that looks like a World War One flier's helmet. It sits on a big head--gray-haired, gray-eyed, with a nose crooked from a low rugby tackle and an occasional left hook.

"We talked in his study, in the house he built when he came to the island many years ago with a poet friend named Laura Riding. She is long since gone. Now the room resonates to his soft speech--a Mayfair accent that can't hide the Celtic burr underneath--and to the sounds of Graves's second family, his lovely wife, Beryl, and their children. A white poodle scratches once in a while at the oak door. His youngest son, Tomas, 16, entertains visiting grandchildren and nieces with a guitar. Graves leans back in a handmade rocking chair that squeaks. He wears a loose gray shirt, open at the neck, and, as always, a bright scarf at his throat. Very calm and serene.

"We are surrounded with leather-bound books, wood carvings, all sorts of 'magical objects,' as Graves calls the innumerable stones, rings, icons, glass marbles, feathers and pottery he has accumulated from around the world. The ambiance is warm, nearly religious. Before we begin, Graves's wife comes in with tea from Ceylon and homemade bread and the marmalade Robert made from lemons and oranges in their garden. 'I like it tart,' he says. Judging from appearances, Graves is very much the patriarch, the country gentleman at home. Yet for most of his artistic life he has sworn allegiance to woman as supreme. The interview began on that note as his wife carried out the tray."

[Q] Playboy: Much of your literary work centers on love and morality and the historical roles of the male and female. Do you think the sexual revolution has altered any of these traditional values and relationships?

[A] Graves: If you mean free sex, before and after marriage, it violates the moral principles on which the state was founded. And of course the birth rate will probably go up, despite contraception, and once you have 2.3 births per family instead of 2.0, that sends everything haywire. Then the natural genius of the race for self-preservation calls a halt and the result will be a sharp increase of homosexuality, and also drug taking, some of which may cut down people's lives to the 30s and 40s.

[Q] Playboy: Would you explain that?

[A] Graves: What happens when you encourage free sex is that you pervert the natural sexual drive into one of excessive sexuality. This excessive sexuality is then manifest in overpopulation, even beyond the check of contraception. Threatened by disaster through overpopulation, man probably tends to rein his heterosexual drive. This leaves the instinct for sexuality, made excessive by free love, to find its outlet in homosexuality or drug taking. And, as I said, heavy use of some drugs cuts a person's life span, because the human body is physically debilitated and later destroyed.

[Q] Playboy: You view these trends as a result of permissive sexual attitudes?

[A] Graves: To a great extent in cities of the West; and take what's happened in Africa, where there was once widespread emphasis on the sanctity of woman and her role as moral agent. Today, this tribal morality has completely broken down. This is a product of the West, the introduction of Western culture and sexual morality, of missionaries destroying the ancient tribal ways of solving problems, even the population problem. I know of only one place where the old tribal ways are intact and that is in Brazilian jungles, because they are protected by the government. And the most shocking evidence of moral breakdown is in the civilized Western countries.

Two nights ago, I went to a night club in Palma, because some friends of mine were singing there. In the intervals, there was dancing. I hadn't seen dancing for some time, since all the carefree, wild, easy jumping around of the 1950s. But here were couples jigging opposite each other and simulating the sexual act. To me, that was disgustingly public, because I believe the original human instinct, like that of all intelligent beasts, is to perform sexual acts in privacy. But as soon as the ancient taboo on open sex activity--which starts from both natural caution and true affection--is broken down, you develop this cult of obscenity. If anybody had seen this dancing 20 years ago, he'd have either gone and kicked their bottoms or stalked out. The most amazing thing was that these dancers were respectable tourists from the luxury steamship in the harbor.

[Q] Playboy: Many would call what you saw symptomatic of a new interpersonal freedom--and your reaction rather prudish.

[A] Graves: Many people have no idea how to separate worthwhile things from stupid, even dangerous things. Such exhibitionism isn't free or good. It comes close to mindless perversion. It signals the end of romantic love, and I don't believe people really want that. I even think that they feel a bit uncomfortable with their new freedom, with the attitude that "anything goes." What freedom do you get by the abandonment of all moral sense and the discovery that you can "get" almost any girl you want by giving her enough drink or drugs?

[Q] Playboy: True enough. But does responsible permissiveness, if you'll permit us to use the term, necessarily lead to moral breakdown?

[A] Graves: You must remember the moral nature of permissiveness. Women dictate morals and you cannot separate sex and morality. Historically, it is the woman who must rule and guide in this realm. She is the moral officer and when she is denied this prerogative--as in today's patriarchal society--a moral breakdown follows, because the only moral code a man has is his sense of honor, and few still have that nowadays.

[Q] Playboy: Would you explain?

[A] Graves: My explanation lies in history and the changes in societies and cultures which took place centuries ago. You see, before the second millennium B.C., matriarchal peoples controlled the lands in the Middle East and Europe and established a high civilization there. Women ruled. Men were allowed only to have their harpoons, sailing ships, hatchets, slings, and so on. There was no marriage as in the male-dominated societies, where women belong to men. In matriarchal systems, women dictated morality and kept men honorable. A woman had her man for as long as she wanted to and then discarded him. Therefore, all ancestry was traced through the mother: A woman agreed that she had children by a man, but this had absolutely no effect on property, because all lands and houses were held by women. They set up clans that produced needed goods which were exchanged with other clans. But once a clan produced a surplus of nonperishable goods, the barter system broke down. If one clan had too many copper ingots in reserve, or blue beads, or canoes, say, as opposed to vegetables or fruit, these would become a symbol of power. A superfluity of silver and copper was the start of money. That's how world trade and money started.

All of which was very well, but it weakened the centrality of the clans. And when one clan was able to trade with clans outside the tribe, rather than inside, that clan gained power. When the balance was upset and others wanted an equal share of the power from external trade, this led to piracy and then to war by the men who did the trading. Piracy and acts of violence--wars--are a male affair. Under a matriarchy, women would also arm to keep peace within the tribe and on the frontiers. The female aim was life and fertility. But between 2000 and 1000 B.C., the patriarchalist nomads broke in from the deserts and invaded the matriarchal lands. The patriarchalists, who had never had a clan-exchange system and lived from their flocks and herds, were driven west by desiccation. They invaded the matriarchal lands, where they saw the opportunity to gain more goods of symbolic wealth and power. Also, with these male-dominated invaders, we began to develop our picture of the submissive female. The patriarchalists had no need of women for their sacred rites. Women were little use to them except to bear children, sew skins and milk cows. The English word daughter means milkmaid.

[Q] Playboy: That's the same sort of male chauvinism men are being accused of today by militant feminists. How do you feel about the tactics of the women's liberationists?

[A] Graves: As soon as women organize themselves in the male way, with societies and memberships and rules, everything goes wrong. For regaining true femininity, the impulse must be a natural woman-to-woman understanding, spontaneous and secret.

[Q] Playboy: What do you see as the woman's proper role in our own time? Do we need a change in the attitudes of both sexes?

[A] Graves: Attitudes toward women have changed a great deal lately but in the wrong direction. The traditional rules were that a man opens a door for a lady, pays for her dinner if they go out together, doesn't force himself on her in any rude way, gives her presents. But the unisex system aims to abolish this relationship, and that's a great pity. The very act of love is a giving by the man to the woman, and the man is the more pleased the greater the sense he gets of her enjoyment. It's very sad today to see old women giving young men presents in order to keep their affection. Women should be limited to the giving of ties and that sort of thing as presents--on birthdays and at Christmas. Anything more destroys the proper relationship of man to woman. I also think that all house property should be in the name of women, not in the name of men, because otherwise they can't be its real managers.

[Q] Playboy: Why should women be the managers of property?

[A] Graves: Well--to answer a fool according to his folly--that makes a man much more careful about whom he marries. If you marry a woman and give her control over the house you live in, you have to watch your step. Otherwise, after seven or eight marriages, you won't have many houses left.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think marriage will continue to exist in its present form?

[A] Graves: I think marriage as an institution will be out in a generation's time. There can still be unwritten contracts between a man and a woman if they want to be together, and no one should disturb them. The woman won't be dependent on the man for providing for children, because the state will be doing that. The present arrangement is what makes women so tyrannous and cross when they have to bear the burden themselves.

[Q] Playboy: Without marriage, will women be able to function effectively as men's moral officers?

[A] Graves: Marriage in the real sense is beyond institution. But you find that only in about one case in ten: a man and a woman who keep an enshrined dependence on each other, year after year, which is not simply sex or children. They are defined a real couple. To find real couples is as delightful as it is rare. When a man and his beloved are concerned about each other even when apart, they can, without making a conscious decision, offer love to one another over that distance. They can miraculously create all sorts of strange happenings. These are part of the miracle and they are created by a love axis between a man and a woman. On this love axis they can do amazing things for each other by twisting time and space into a ring--end to end, so that they perceive and control events and emotional states in an apparently impossible way. The lovers exchange radiant messages outside of time and space, often unknowingly.

When I speak of love, of course, I always differentiate between two phases of love. Many people say they are in love, but being in love with a person and loving a person are quite different. Being in love will imply a definite sexual or physical attraction which naturally asks to be consummated. But one can love people without any need for sexual or physical attraction. One can love people as if a brother or sister. I have a lot of relationships like that. When we speak of lasting ties between a man and a woman, this means that they seldom get divorced while they are still in love. When they are in love--that's the time of the greatest emanations or radiations. The electrical forces are enough to bring on a tropical storm or blow a fuse.

[Q] Playboy: Does everyone give off these radiations?

[A] Graves: Some people don't radiate at all, so they don't really exist, at least not in any noticeable way. If they died, nobody would notice their absence. I don't claim to have any great radiative powers myself. But I know that everything in this room, in which I have lived for so long, has my radiations in it. Most people, through their own emanations, imbue their household property with themselves. For example, my house here, which seems full of spirits, like everything in it. There is practically nothing in this room which isn't handmade--those glasses, pictures, bookshelves, everything. But even things that are machine made can be imbued with your spirit. You can make even a machine part of you. It takes about six months or a year to tame a machine. Until then, it remains inert and sterile. Say a camera which learns to take wonderful photos but which you lose; even if you get another just like it, it will take six to 12 months before it can take your pictures properly. You see, human beings need time to put their spirit into modern machines. And expendability, planned obsolescence, makes this very difficult; things are worn out before we can tame them. Especially cars and musical instruments.

[Q] Playboy: You've written that certain places on earth give off mysterious radiations that affect the inhabitants. How?

[A] Graves: There are some sacred places made so by the radiation created by magnetic ores. My village, for example, is a kind of natural amphitheater enclosed by mountains containing iron ore, which make a magnetic field. Most holy places in the world--holy not by some accident, like a hero dying or being born there--are of this sort. Delphi was a heavily charged holy place.

[Q] Playboy: The increasing use of drugs seems related to what you apparently think is a human need to feel some sort of mystical relationship with other people and places, to sense the radiations. How do you feel about drug use?

[A] Graves: Most people use drugs for kicks, without the crucial element of moral responsibility. I have eaten the Mexican magic mushroom myself--but only in a state of grace to explore the ancient paradise of Tlalocán. I have no need or use for meditation. In fact, I wrote a pertinent rhyme the other day:

In a small heap triangular

Our budding Buddha meditates.

Gates of Nirvana stand ajar,

He stares unwinking at the gates.

Brown rice his food, water his drink.

Hey, stop that meditating! Think!

[Q] Playboy: How does that poem relate to drug usage?

[A] Graves: There is a sort of false mystic who uses the drug of meditation about nirvana to stop himself from active thinking. You see, hallucinogens were originally to be used solely for religious purposes and only in the hands of the priestly elite. In fact, all the big religions of the world, with the exception of Christianity, which is of late and mixed origin, derived their ideas of heaven from experiences with a particular form of mushroom, the Amanita muscaria. Its effect is to deny a sufficient oxygen supply to the brain and thereby set loose hallucinations. The Indian, the Oceanic, the Mexican, the Greek, the Sumerian, the Hebrew, the Babylonian and the Vedic religions all originally had their ideas of heaven produced by this drug.

But let me recall the Greek story of Tantalus, which I think best illustrates the danger which historically befell mortals, nonreligious persons, who merely wanted to experiment with this divine ambrosia for their own pleasure. Tantalus was a mortal who defied the gods by partaking of the hallucinatory mushroom. Therefore, the gods bound him up to his neck in water. He was terribly thirsty, but whenever he lowered his head to drink, the water sank away. And above his head hung the most beautiful fruits; but when he raised his hand to grasp them, they also disappeared. This was his punishment for having eaten the food of the gods and inviting his mortal friends to try it. No one who is not priestly is entitled to it.

[Q] Playboy: So you liken those who take drugs for kicks to Tantalus?

[A] Graves: They will have his punishment. And just as Tantalus was condemned by the gods never to be able to achieve anything he desired, few of them will ever reach their maturity or their goals.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any circumstances under which you would condone the use of drugs by people not of a priestly elite?

[A] Graves: Well, I have an idea which might be useful. I think that at the time Protestants have their confirmations and Jews have their bar mitzvahs, about the age of 14 or 15, children should be isolated and put under very strict discipline for three weeks. They should be fed very little and kept away from all distractions. Then they should be given the sort of treatment one got in the ancient Greek mysteries. They should be purged and frightened and then given a harmless hallucinogen. While under that, they should be taught the moral rules of life. This was done in the old days at Eleusis. And that is why, in spite of having a ridiculous state religion with seven gods and five goddesses in which nobody believed, there was basic good faith and proper behavior among those so initiated. The priests of Dionysus screened the adepts for three years. Initiates were promised they would go to the paradise they had visited under the drug if they continued in a state of grace. If any had bad visions, this was because they weren't in a state of grace.

[Q] Playboy: In their search for mystical experience, their spiritual wanderings and their renunciation of personal property, many of today's hippies have been likened to the early Christians. Do you see any similarity?

[A] Graves: The hippie culture is wholly unreligious; they have no god and no prophet. Yet some of its aspects can be admired, in a way. For example, a man and his "family." a good-sized commune of 20, came here after they were chucked out of Ibiza for hashish. I rather liked him. He was a big Negro who had spent five years in a Mexican jail, but the experience hadn't spoiled him. Instead, it had made a man of him. Here he at once appropriated my neighbor's flute and he tried to get my guitar, but I liked him anyway--he had a great conscientiousness about his family and there was no nonsense about him. He was a strong man and a good man. He could love.

[Q] Playboy: Are those characteristics--strength, responsibility, love--what make a man good, as far as you're concerned?

[A] Graves: In my opinion, if a man hasn't got honor, he's worth absolutely nothing. And, unfortunately, too many people are tricked out of their honor by some means or other, like having to obey a boss. If he tells them to do things they know are wrong and they do them, they have lost their honor.

[Q] Playboy: How do you define honor?

[A] Graves: Honor is the sense of your correct relation to your immediate surroundings, including your fellow workers. It's your duty to your clan or crowd, if you belong to one. Yet few of us belong to a real clan now that tribal systems have been dispersed. We're just reckoned to belong to some sort of industrial or agricultural complex. The hippies, of course, have their clans and remain true to them. Even thieves, until recently, had a strong sense of honor among themselves. Their honor allowed them to rob other people but not within their clan.

[Q] Playboy: At least for thieves, that would seem to be less honor than professional courtesy.

[A] Graves: The difference is small but indicative. I was here the other day when a young Californian wandered in and started reading my letters. I said, "Here, what are you doing?" He replied, "Isn't that an interesting remark?" and pointed to a letter. Whereupon I said, "Listen, if this were England, I would have taken you by the neck and kicked you out of the room, but as you come from a place where the traditions of manners and privacy are seldom preserved, where people wander through each other's houses, I must only say that one doesn't do that in my house." He stopped and never did it again.

[Q] Playboy: Can you generalize about people's behavior from this one incident?

[A] Graves: Well, at least I believe people instinctively know what is right and wrong. When you don't realize your behavior is wrong, you deceive yourself. That's a severe punishment, both for you and for the one you've wronged.

[Q] Playboy: Hemingway once remarked that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Would you agree with that?

[A] Graves: It's rather an over simplification. I never really trusted Hemingway.

[Q] Playboy: Would you agree, then, with Edmund Burke that "all that is necessary for the forces of evil to prevail is that enough good men do nothing"?

[A] Graves: That's a very wise remark. But, of course, if good men do nothing, they aren't good men. Good is a positive action--like behaving well in someone's home. But I'm afraid there aren't enough good men acting positively today. That's why I don't think anything can be done for the world the way it is at the moment, because the people at the top are so scared of the people below who are able to destroy them. The police forces all over the world and, to some extent, the soldiers have been so infiltrated with evil elements that no one trusts anybody. Nothing can be done except for good people to avoid evil people and avoid being closely involved in the big lie.

[Q] Playboy: What's the big lie?

[A] Graves: It's money, which originated when the clans began bartering item for item. It all started with interclan exchange of love gifts. Yet, from this sense of mutual dependence, kindness and generosity, there arose greed, cunning, usury. Still, until recently, it consisted of something you could at least see: gold and silver. Now there is no money left. Money today is all checks, promises. Being promises, it is also lies. And people get caught in the lie and can't get out. The evil people are the ones who worship money. They are held back by no morality, not even the ordinary restraints that are found in any organized religion such as Catholicism or Protestantism or Judaism. The very evil are in control. The number of workers who are free from obedience to money is extremely small. It's practically impossible to be free from it, because money means power and our world is power oriented.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think young people realize the danger and will do something about this evil in high places?

[A] Graves: Well, I'm hopeful that they will. They seem to be reaching back for suprarational knowledge.

[Q] Playboy: How can suprarational knowledge solve the world's problems?

[A] Graves: Because of their interest in occult powers, the young are looking for answers beyond the computer--which was the middle generation's answer. They are trying to control the emanations of our human condition, the sources of thought which extend forward and backward through time, to get direct experience and understanding. A new interest in the occult is a symptom, and a hopeful one in some ways. There are some hopeful young people in California who have taken my book The White Goddess as their Bible. They have wild-wood celebrations of her, which is a definite rejection of the ordinary life that California offers. No young people who are searching for suprarational knowledge ever have any quarrel with me. I am 75; their fight is with people from 30 to 60. It's the pre-World War Two generation they're against. Take their attitude toward the computer. They have a great advantage over the middle generation, which has not, like them, been taught to think mathematically. They can take a computer by the hand and talk to it and make it do what they want. So if they wanted to bust the whole system up, they need only put the wrong plug in the wrong place and destroy millions of phony dollars, of business accounts, and the whole money ethic would go to pieces. And I'd not be too sorry to see that happen.

[Q] Playboy: How do mathematical training and computers relate to suprarational knowledge?

[A] Graves: Mathematics and the knowledge one gets from the occult are allied. In fact, I've found in writing poetry that I have postulated major mathematical theories, including the anticipation or suspense of time. My poem Alice, written in about 1923, enunciated what is called in mathematics the theory of parity. Recently, I wrote a poem about Omega-minus--the theory underlying ideas of anti-worlds and anti-matter. You imagine a line--everything on one side is positive, everything on the other is negative. Then you can assign phenomena to one side or the other. The concept is used now as a means of outwitting the tyranny of time. I found long ago that I could suspend time while in the poetic trance, which seems to be the top level of sleep. I could capture or recapture events by forward and backward leaps of the mind. I was really where my mind was.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think young people will use this kind of suprarationality for the good of society?

[A] Graves: Possibly. That depends on them. There are some bad young people. There have always been bad ones. On this island, for example, we house a whole lot of both good and bad. The police throw the bad out, the ones who can't face the reality of life here. These are the ones who come around begging for food, who steal clothes off lines and sell pot openly. They have little to offer--usually nothing more than a minor gift of playing their small handmade bamboo flutes. On the other hand, I have elsewhere met a great number of young and brilliant people in whom I have confidence, who will be able to use suprarationality for the good. These people are far from being fools; they realize what the World War Two generation doesn't: They know exactly how much dirt goes on in high places. They represent the coming cataclysm.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] Graves: They will revolt against such things as the secret security police now active all over the world. They will try to restore law to its proper place. You know, law has gone right down the river. All the evil things reported from ex-colonial parts of the world haven't been done in the name of war but in the name of police action. Look at the war in Vietnam. First of all, it's not a war, it's a police action. That's why they have been dropping napalm and using poison. They're behaving like the police, not soldiers. I respect soldiers, real soldiers, but I seldom respect the police anywhere. They lurk behind too many governments. The evil they foster has never been so operative as now. None of the troubles plaguing the world today have been planned by decent heads of state, or heads of armies, but by men without honor who have infiltrated and taken control of the secret forces that do all the real damage and fighting.

[Q] Playboy: Why have they taken control?

[A] Graves: Power, power, power. Evil power. Madness. Why, these people don't even particularly rejoice in their accomplishments--in other people's suffering. They can't even confess, "I've killed a man and I'm not ashamed of it." Soldiers in an honest war can at least say that. But this other sort of people lies concealed. Things can never be mentioned, never taken up, not even to get them in front of Parliament or Congress or any honest people. No, this situation is very different from war, or what we used to call war. The last honorable war was the first part of World War One, and that went to pieces in 1916.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you call the first part of that war honorable?

[A] Graves: Well, in the case of World War One, the Germans did break a treaty. The old rule was that when nations broke their word, they had to be stopped. For a nation to lose its honor by breaking a rule or a code is the same as an individual losing his honor; therefore, the nation must suffer the consequences. However, since the Germans in that case were very strong and we were on the verge of defeat, it was only by using dishonorable means halfway through the war that we were able to win. That marked the end of old-fashioned war. Bad as wars had been, there were many cases of old-fashioned courtesy. These persisted into World War One, especially in the fraternization between English and the Germans out in no man's land in Christmas 1914. But in 1915, we were told that times had changed, that fraternization would be punishable by death. Nevertheless, two battalions who had been facing one another on the previous Christmas did get together. But even that was nearly wrecked when some bloody fool started shooting. After that incident, things got worse. The Germans had started the trouble in the spring by using poison gas, which was against international rules. But then, so also were our officers' pistols with dumdum bullets.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there has ever been a truly good war?

[A] Graves: There have been wars of honest defense. Also wars which were fought for fun. I'll tell you the story of one. It provides a parable for us. It was called the War of the Burnt Child and happened in New Zealand. At the time, the Maoris were awfully bored with life, because there were no wild beasts to hunt and very few sharks. The men got restless, tired of telling jokes and wrestling and playing their version of football. The malaise grew. One day, a special, very limited sort of war broke out--a sort difficult to introduce in higher civilizations, because everyone would cheat. In this case, there was a tribe whom we'll call the Cardinals. They were neighbors of another tribe we'll call the Tigers. One day the Cardinals heard of a shocking incident in the Tiger village. A man and a woman had quarreled over some trifle and upset the cooking pot, badly scalding a child. The Cardinals agreed that this was the most disgraceful thing they had ever heard of. How could a poor innocent child suffer for the stupidity and bad manners of his parents?

So the Cardinals decided they would teach the Tigers a lesson. They sent out an emissary to say, "You Tigers are a disgrace to the country. How dare you behave like this? We demand an immediate explanation, for the good of mankind." The Tigers became very cross at this and told the Cardinals to mind their own business, since the accident referred to was caused by a careless dog, not by the parents. The child was burned, true, but received great care and affection from his parents. The Tigers then demanded an apology from the Cardinals and the inevitable ensued.

The two tribes decided on war for the following Thursday. They agreed on the place and on one major rule: If anybody got killed, they had to stop. Finally, at the agreed place and hour, and after a great exchange of oratory, they clashed. It was a wonderful war--clubs bashing, lots of bruises. Finally, the Cardinals managed to subdue the Tigers, round them up and bind them. They had a tremendous victory celebration, including a feast three miles long, which meant that the eatables stretched that far along a road. Before the preparations were completed, the Cardinal chief said, "I think the Tigers should be allowed to witness this victory celebration." So they were invited to dine and the Cardinals made speeches about the heroism of their troops, until finally their chief said, "We must praise the Tigers, too, or the victory is worthless."

Everyone became very drunk. Then came a fine idea from the Cardinal chief. He said, "And now, valiant Tigers, you understand that we have won and that your village is ours. We propose, therefore, to go there at once and live. But, since we think it shameful to make you homeless, you can have our village." So the Cardinals occupied the Tiger village and the Tigers occupied the Cardinal village and there was no war for a very long time.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds like a fairy tale. Can you seriously compare it with a real war?

[A] Graves: My example points out the way civilized people who have faith in each other's honor should settle war. It took a breach of faith like that in World War One to degenerate warfare to the way it is conducted today. Another thing I would like to point out about both World Wars is that they were started by the Germans, and the Germans are a peculiar race. I know because I am a quarter German. The funny thing was that the Germans were once the good boys of Europe. They were the artists, the musicians, and they cleaned up the streets and brought in sterilized milk, and so on. Anyway, something happened in the 1860s. The real history has never come to light. But there was a small group who decided on a course of evil for Germany and, because the citizens were malleable, very brainwashable, they fell for it. Gradually, the rearming led to World War One, to Nazism and Hitler and World War Two.

[Q] Playboy: Don't you think there have been great men whose leadership was good?

[A] Graves: I don't like the word great. It simply means held in public awe and esteem, and too many people are held in public awe and esteem who are not great. In my work, I have often pointed out that all the so-called great figures of the Napoleon, Hercules, Alexander type must invariably ruin the country that gave them birth. Men like them will sacrifice anything, including their own country, simply for personal power. They hold a strange fascination for their followers and that's what does the trick. I hope we won't get that anymore. Stalin is gone. He was a "great" figure who did a lot of damage. Hitler's gone, too, though some think he's hiding out somewhere, maybe in Australia. If so, he'd be too old to do much more damage. But other people are doing the injury now--the strong evil elite who are the heads of security services. Unfortunately, they aren't always known, even by their kin.

[Q] Playboy: Is there a good elite to counteract all this evil?

[A] Graves: Yes, there are many good people around, people who are doing a very fine job. If you'll pardon the chauvinism, the good power and influence of the queen of England is terrific. Without her, we would be right in the refuse bin.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Graves: First, she is a woman, and a very intelligent one. Second, she is the key to the British constitution, a symbol of the Commonwealth. We've been lucky at crucial points in our history to have a queen. As we saw in the old matriarchies, female rulers always seem to behave better than kings. And, of course, there are good people who are not in the limelight. The real mathematicians and scientists are not known widely. Nor do they want to be, because if they do anything well publicized, they get threatened. I was talking to a cancer specialist recently. I said to him, "Are you aware of the extraordinary figures for bowel cancer in men in their 30s and 40s who happen to be nuclear physicists?" He said, "Yes, and it has nothing to do with their work in physics."

[Q] Playboy: Are you implying--or was he--that someone gave them cancer?

[A] Graves: That's easy enough to do these days, which is why we need more good people than we have. Good people know and recognize each other. Through them the bad guys can be broken down, their policies reversed. But such goodness isn't an organized thing at all. There is merely an understanding between people when something goes wrong. The very force of that conviction is enough to break the wrong thing. Paradoxically, the evil people are few in number and really very vulnerable. Confronted by good, they recognize its power and get scared. Then they can be defeated.

[Q] Playboy: But how can we tell the good guys from the bad guys?

[A] Graves: By the pricking of one's thumbs, Shakespeare said.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think there are good and bad nations?

[A] Graves: I find the Dutch a very good people. They have behaved very well since they lost their empire and they behaved very well in the big wars. I am also very fond of Hungary, I suppose because they have always brought me good luck and have more poets to the square mile than any other nation in Europe. One finds poets there even among high party officials. The Hungarians, I am told, originally came from Babylonia, from which they were expelled. They retained, however, their extraordinary fineness of thought, honed by centuries of city dwelling before they were forced to become desert horsemen and eventually went down to Hungary.

[Q] Playboy: In conversation, you seem to be preoccupied with legend, myth and history. The same is even truer of your poetry, which almost never addresses itself to contemporary topics. Why?

[A] Graves: Laura Riding said in our collaboration A Survey of Modernist Poetry, "Poetry must act in the vacuum left by the death of historical time to determine values." She meant that all history has already happened, that moral values are not tied to time but, rather, spring from the same magic as poetry. The trouble with people who write poems about current events is that the inspiration comes from a masculine, Apollonian, rational source. Some Americans, for example, are now expending their poetic talents on the Vietnam war. That sort of subject defeats poetry. Of course, there has always been verse based on current events, but it should be satiric. One shouldn't rant in poems against individual political situations. One can describe, in a highly personal way, how outside events are affecting one. But there must be a differentiation made in poetry between the right hand--the truly creative one--and the left, which is the satiric, destructive one. You must differentiate between satire and real poetry. Satires are needed; otherwise, one can't keep the balance between real poems and topical comment. In satire, you can say what you like; you can break all the rules of euphony in describing the threat of evil. But most of the problems I face are universal, beyond topical events and historical time. Poetry based on such universals can establish lasting values.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Graves: If it emphasizes the extreme dependence of man upon woman for her moral guidance and of woman upon man for his practical doing. Within this man-woman relationship, all values are shaped. By emphasizing and making that relationship clear, poetry can establish the important principles of life. Patriarchal or Apollonian poetry started with ballads about war. Beowulf and the Icelandic sagas are examples. Such poems were enough for the men of the time when they sat together in a mead hall, throwing plates and bones at each other. But they lack lasting emotional value, because they are centered on war, not love. All poetry of value is matriarchal in its origin.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Graves: Begin with the most venerated poem in the Western world, The Iliad. It starts off, "Sing to me, Muse, of the anger of Achilles and its terrible consequences." The invocation of the Muse is a phrase borrowed from religious rituals which took place in such matriarchal cultures as the early Greek. The women would dance around a pile of stones which represented a phallus. They circled round and round, singing a song. They soon got worked up with the dancing and the singing and would naturally have been taking drugs, the hallucinatory mushroom laced with ivy and laurel. Finally, somebody would shriek, "Sing to me!" Then one of the dancers would become inspired exactly as in voodoo celebrations in Haiti. And, in the same way, the celebrants would know that someone was going to be "ridden" by a deity. In the matriarchal case, it was always the love goddess who possessed someone, and this someone began to sing in inspiration. So poetry originated. And Homer begins The Iliad that way, in order to keep the people absolutely still.

[Q] Playboy: Then you believe poetry, like drugs, creates a trance in the poet?

[A] Graves: And therefore in the hearer, too. An enormously important part of poetry is the incantatory and hypnotic effect. All poetry really is, or should be, hypnotic. Homer, for example, used meter to hypnotize, by recalling the dactylic steps around the sacred hermae. By using this beat, he put the audience in a state which took possession of their minds and they could understand what was behind the entire poem. The point about poetic meter is that it puts people into a semi-trance, so that they can understand what the poet has grasped in his trance. All real poems are written in a trance.

[Q] Playboy: Do you mean that the poet's unconscious mind writes the poem?

[A] Graves: I mean that he goes out of himself to magical regions. Trance is the lightest form of sleep, a form in which you can think in a reasonable way and, at the same time, you can dredge up from your memory all the words and images you don't even know you know. All kinds of strange things appear. These images find their own rhythm and their own meter. In this state, one is really thinking in the fifth dimension. In the poetic trance, the poet can apprehend from the future as well as look into the past. That was said of the Greek poets and it's certainly true of the ancient Irish poets. My own poetry is based very squarely on the Celtic. That, in turn, is based on a very early magic which goes back as far as you like.

[Q] Playboy: Do Americans write in this tradition?

[A] Graves: No longer. Their abandonment of incantation is one of several things wrong with American poetry. To begin with, you have been put under a trance by certain rhythmic patterns in your mind. Soon the words adapt themselves to these rhythmic patterns. But as soon as your modernists start breaking things up and scattering words and punctuation marks around the page, they break the hypnotic order. One should always start a line with a capital letter and indent. That's enough of a command to the reader to read carefully. If he does so, and if the poem is a real one and well written, the various verse systems hidden within the poem will hypnotize both reader and poet. The poet thus brings himself to think in a way in which he does not normally think and which is really a defeat of time.

[Q] Playboy: Is there anything you like about American poetry?

[A] Graves: Not since my friends Frost and Cummings died. When I was a student, we left English alone. We wrote verse in Latin, Greek and French to learn. So anything we wanted to do about writing English poetry, we did on our own but with a classical background. You can't be a poet in English, except a peasant poet, unless you're familiar with the whole history of the English language, which you can't understand without some knowledge of Latin. All but a few basic Anglo-Saxon words and a couple of key borrowings from the Spanish and the Hebrew are based on the vernacular Latin as spoken by the French, the Spaniards, the Italians or the Church.

But as for American poetry. I would say that there are more poets--more true poets linked to magic--in the remote climate of Australia than in the whole of the United States. One of the problems is that many American verse writers are paid too well. There is too much money handed out--enormous sums and prizes--for nonpoems. As a result, real poets are so few that I could count them on the fingers of one hand. Look at this book I've just received from America. Nothing but typographical tricks. Poetry concrète.

[Q] Playboy: Yes, but on the back is this inscription: "Allen Ginsberg says this man has creative genius."

[A] Graves: I suppose the author has said the same about Allen Ginsberg, who has a kind heart and a sense of humor but is no more a poet than my Aunt Lisa.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't his work poetry, however different it is from yours?

[A] Graves: No. And I'm very glad to be able to talk to Playboy about such poets and their use of sexual subjects. To me, an important thing about sex is that, apart from farmyard animals and one or two rare exceptions such as doves, the sexual act is always performed in utter secrecy, simply because when one is engaged in it, one becomes very vulnerable. People can suddenly jump from ambush and crack one in the skull. So lovers must find someplace hidden in the middle of the woods, where they can hear people coming, or on top of a hill, where they can see people coming.

Therefore, because of its secret nature, you should not talk or write about sex. You can have love and sex talk with the person you're in love with--that's another matter. But any talk of sex with others is anti-human, especially if one constructs a scientology about it. There are a lot of people who write pretended love poetry but have never been in love, and the poet who has no Muse is abysmally dull. That's what is wrong with Alexander Pope and others of his contemporaries. That's what is right with John Donne. You feel the poet's original vision--it's re-created in you. A. E. Housman's test is also valid enough. He said that when a poem is truly good, the hair on the back of your neck rises. And now we're just beginning to find out about the magnetic properties of hair.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any, beyond the static electricity one gets on a comb?

[A] Graves: Ask any trichomaniac! I'm convinced that if you cut your hair very short, as the Puritans did, you're limiting your potential for electrical discharges and receptions. If cutting your hair does limit your electrical potential, then it also probably limits your capacity for love and poetry. But aside from reading poetry of the real sort, I've only twice had the hair rise on the back of my neck. In both cases--very strange experiences--it occurred on a moonlit hill where there had been pre-Christian rites.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about them.

[A] Graves: I had gone back in time to some primitive situation, by what I would call the television effect. You know, you can revive bygone scenes in some haunted houses by entering them at the same hour and in the same sort of weather that marked the emotional conditions of the original scene. I suppose that I judge poems by a variation of that effect. I get in touch with the poet, his time, his mind, the evolution of his poem. Maybe that's why there are very few poets I can read. Most of the 18th Century is blanked out, apart from a few unliterary ballads. But there is the rich period between John Skelton and Shakespeare. And there are occasional poems of the early 19th Century--such as those by Coleridge and Keats.

[Q] Playboy: Though you seem to care most about poetry, you've devoted a great deal of time to writing novels, mythological researches, plays and short stories. Why?

[A] Graves: Because I count all that as work and one must work to survive. And sometimes, if some event or historic point interests me, I regard it as my duty to write it down, usually in prose. Poetry does not count as work somehow. It can't be planned or discovered. It forces itself upon you without your knowing what it's all about. It comes like the tense headache before a thunderstorm, which is followed by an uncontrollable violence of feeling, and the whole air is ionized. You feel absolutely wonderful when you get the first line or two down on paper. Naturally, it takes three or four days before you bring the poem to its final state, and even then, years later, you may spot a word that's wrong. You know that it's been worrying you in the back of your mind all along.

[Q] Playboy: Does rewriting ever kill the original inspiration?

[A] Graves: No, but it often persuades you that the Muse was not there. Her presence leaps out at you if she really was there. So do your many mistakes. You write a poem and you find it tightening itself up, tightening, tightening--squeezing out the last drop of water.

[Q] Playboy: As one who has centered his life and self-expression on writing, what do you think of predictions by men such as Marshall McLuhan that future societies will have no need for the written word?

[A] Graves: Even if writing does disappear, there's no reason for gloom. Poetry existed long before the printed word. Long after the poems of Hesiod and Homer had been recorded, great numbers of poems were remembered and handed down orally. This still goes on in the bardic tradition, especially in Wales and Ireland. No, poetry and songs will never vanish, even if print does.

[Q] Playboy: Will poetry survive the conflict of good and evil you described earlier?

[A] Graves: I hope so. But I'll tell you happily and cheerfully: Nothing can stop the landslide, the coming cataclysm. Nothing can stop the wide destruction of our ancient glories, amenities and pleasures. There will be a bust-up quite soon.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you say this "happily and cheerfully"?

[A] Graves: Because it's a cataclysm that ought to happen. And I know that the human race will survive it. But it will be only the strong, the morally strong, who survive. I think we must trust the new generation, except for the ones who have deliberately opted out of humanity. We must trust the ones who manage to stay in, to stay alive and struggling--young people especially, who have not been corrupted by the intervening generation. They will survive because they will know what they're up against. So I'm not frightened about the world ending. A few nuclear devices may explode and cause immense damage. But we will then be fortunate that the whole loveless system will have given way in a general breakdown. And if good fortune is with us--who knows?--it may be replaced by something at least no worse.