Books, Arts & Manners: Posthumous Existence

Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926, by Richard Perceval Graves (Viking, 387 pp., $24.95)

Robert Graves—a major modern poet and author of I, Claudius, The Greek Myths, and The White Goddess—was born in London in 1895 and died two years ago in Majorca at the age of ninety. His grandfather was the Protestant Bishop of Limerick, his father a popular Irish poet and Inspector of Schools, his adoring and possessive German mother related to the historian Leopold von Ranke. He grew up in a stifling religious atmosphere that turned him into a young prig and took decades, as well as an atheistic wife, to overcome. He suffered the typical bullying and misery during his early years at Charterhouse school, and escaped to holidays in Bavaria and Wales, and to boxing and poetry, to heal his body and soul. After studying incompetently taught Latin and Greek for 14 years, he questioned the wisdom of prolonging his classical education at St. John’s, Oxford, where he had won a minor scholarship.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926, by Richard Perceval Graves (Viking, 387 pp., $24.95)

Robert Graves—a major modern poet and author of I, Claudius, The Greek Myths, and The White Goddess—was born in London in 1895 and died two years ago in Majorca at the age of ninety. His grandfather was the Protestant Bishop of Limerick, his father a popular Irish poet and Inspector of Schools, his adoring and possessive German mother related to the historian Leopold von Ranke. He grew up in a stifling religious atmosphere that turned him into a young prig and took decades, as well as an atheistic wife, to overcome. He suffered the typical bullying and misery during his early years at Charterhouse school, and escaped to holidays in Bavaria and Wales, and to boxing and poetry, to heal his body and soul. After studying incompetently taught Latin and Greek for 14 years, he questioned the wisdom of prolonging his classical education at St. John’s, Oxford, where he had won a minor scholarship.