(Untitled)

[fpb]

inverarity's review of Steppenwolf reminded me of the pleasure that more than one of Hermann Hesse's books had given me. Now my whole shelf of German literature was lost in the Move from Hell, and space here is at a premium, so I decided to get a few e-copies of my favourites - The Journey to the East, Narziss and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game and

Comments

[fpb]

When Robert Graves died, in 1985, I was in St.John's College, Oxford - the same where he had been educated. There was, alas, a chapel commemoration, and I absolutely refused to go. Not only for the indecency - an indecency matched and redoubled in later occasions, alas - of giving Christian ritual and a Christian sacred building to the celebration of a man with his views, but above all because I was and remain convinced that The White Goddess is a deliberately evil book. The effect of the First World War, on many people who experienced it at the front line, was to have them go "Evil be thou my good." Mussolini rejected his humanitarian socialism and pacifism, and reinvented himself as a leader of thugs; and in the same way, Graves, who like Mussolini came from a "progressive" and anti-Christian background, said "goodbye to all that" and turned a genuinely prodigious lyrical talent to the service of homicidal nonsense. The celebration of human sacrifice and of shedding human blood in the name of his "Goddess" in its closing chapters takes the famously English vice of male masochism and raises it to a cosmic level. Even worse, if that were possible, is the monstrous inversion of the truth that makes the female sex the seat of the murderous and barbaric energies of nature the author claims to worship. I think it is ordinary experience that women are in general a pacifying, civilizing element; that is, his theory is simply false to most human life. But when you ask yourself whether there is any female feature that can be identified with Graves' dreams, then one does spring to mind - that element of hysteria, of unreason, of hatred of debate and compromise, that made Kipling say that the female of the species is deadlier than the male. That characteristic exists; it can be found attached to real female human beings (though not, so far as I can see, without some previous motivating trauma) and can make life most unpleasant for the people around. Graves, in effect, has chosen the most unattractive and unconstructive element of the feminine - the same element which led Kipling, who evidently had encountered it in his personal life, to oppose female suffrage and legal equality - to be consecrated and invested with divine identity. Nothing worse or more radically negative has been said about women in history; Graves' female divinity stands for murder, barbarism, regression and more or less soft tyranny. It is a horrendous insult to the average woman, and sheds a sinister light on all those so-called feminists who actually think it worth promoting and praising.

[fellmama]

I think a lot of people confuse being powerful with being right. I can see why second-wave feminists in particular would seize on something that fulfilled their need for the feminine in the divine. But! . . .