Robert Graves

Graves was thoroughly aware of the controversy that the interpretative passages in The Greek Myths were likely to engender, and discussed the matter on several occasions in correspondence with his publishers. When the intended length of his volume became obvious, there was some discussion of whether the accounts of the myths themselves should be separated from the notes, but having discussed the matter with the editorial board at Penguin, A. S. B. Glover wrote to Graves on 13 May 1952 that, ‘in view of the special public for whom we issue our books—and I note from a remark of your own that you are conscious that it is a special public—we feel that the separation of the context from the notes would, all things considered, be very unfortunate’. It was nonetheless the case that Graves took deliberate steps to mitigate the extravagance of his arguments, asking Glover to ‘tell Alan Lane I am pulling my punches in the explanation with many more perhaps’s and it seems and the introduction is now a model of tentativeness and discretion’.

He also sought to reassure his publishers and his readers as to the validity of his anthropological credentials by suggesting that the title of Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute might be put after his name on the title-page (he had been elected to this position in 1954). Although on some occasions Graves showed a kind of sensitivity towards the values of the academic establishment, on others he was far more bullish: in a letter to Selwyn Jepson, at the time when Viking Press pulled out of publishing a hardback edition of The Greek Myths in America on the recommendation of its scholarly readers, he referred scathingly to these latter as ‘Professors Tush and Bosh’.

In a letter to Ava Gardner he was somewhat more measured in evaluating his work, but accurately predicted the kind of reception it would receive when he wrote: ‘I am not a Greek scholar or an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a comparative mythologist, but I have a good nose and a sense of touch, and think I have connected a lot of mythical patterns which were not connected before, Classical faculties will hate me, and I will get a lot of sniffy reviews.’


- Robert Graves and the Classical Tradition, A. G. G. Gibson, Pages 195-196