Robert Graves' (and Orson Welles'?) Conundrum:

[Glenn Anders]

In the wake of his publication on Wellesnet Main Page of several Wellsian poems by Chris Welles Feder, one of our moderators, Larry French, has posted two poems by Robert Graves, author of I Claudius and The White Goddess, under the provocative title, "Orson Welles' Favorite Poet: Robert Graves?" From Welles' answer to Kenneth Tynan's question on his attitude toward women, we can see his devotion to Graves' White Goddess (along with muses, in Welles' case, of several other hues)

And according to Peter Tonguette:

"Robert Graves once wrote, 'There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.' Graves was Welles' second favourite writer after Dinesen, and few filmmakers have exemplified Graves' axiom better. As an actor, Welles worked for-hire in second-rate films (money without poetry) to earn the funds to subsidise his work as a director (poetry without money), in his final years enacting the dream of his own very particular lost paradise: that of the true independent, the real maverick, quietly and serenely crafting his utterly homemade last things."

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/27/welles_dreamers.html

If true, we might surmise that, considering Graves' monumental output of poems (854 pages in the Complete Poems), many of them gems, in terms of modern poetry, Robert Graves might indeed have been Welles' favorite poet.

[Not only that, but in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Tonguette notes that Bogdanovich began reading Graves, his poems and The White Goddess, at the urging of Welles. Bogdanovich says that several of his own unrealized projects -- hopefully after completing Welles' TOSOTW -- are to be based on Graves' works.]

Larry French's selections, "Jonah" and "1915," are evocative, but I have always thought that the modern essence of "film in poetry" or "poetry in film" is Graves' "Warning to Children":

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string.

-- Robert Graves [from Minstrels]

Is this Orson Welles' magical and ironic message, or is it not?

The poem is as profound as any I know, for it encompasses all our rosebuds, and in that brown paper parcel is Orson Welles, his life and all his works. Not to mention our own lives and lesser ambitions. I can well imagine Welles thinking of a number of his films (including the obvious CITIZEN KANE) while reading this insidiously innocent poem, and then, nodding his head. I hope "Warning to Children" might be an addition to our new Main Page category of Wellsian Poetry.

[I urge you to read the poem aloud to yourself in order to appreciate how well it applies to a film like CITIZEN KANE, Welles' life, or the lives of any of us. A truly universal poem.]

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

That does seem like a beautifully written poem, Glenn, although I have to confess (to my shame, I suppose) that I've never had much interest in, or appreciation for, poetry. I admire the poetry that is part of Shakespeare's plays, but alot of pure poetry that many people revere often strikes me as incomprehensible and not very moving. I did very much enjoy the one Robert Graves novel I've read - I, CLAUDIUS - but I haven't read much of his poetry, basically for the reason I listed above. I do know that Graves favored his poems more then his novels, and said that his novels were the dogs that he sold in order to keep his cats (the poems). This sounds somewhat analogous to Welles's doing films as an actor to support his work as a filmmaker, although I'm sure that most of Welles's 'actor-only' films are hardly of comparable quality to Graves's novels.

I also find intriguing Graves's statement that the purpose of poetry was to invoke the White Goddess, the subject of one of his most famous books. As Graves was Welles's favorite poet, the links between the two warrant further exploration, especially concerning Graves's belief in prehistoric societies run by women, and in his use of young women as 'muses' for his artistic inspiration. I wonder how much Welles shared that belief.

[NoFake]

What I find intriguing about the poem is its verbal encapsulation of Welles's "magic box" -- the Thorne Rooms he showed Barbara Leaming...

[Glenn Anders]

Well, mteal, if we think about it, Robert Graves likely had a tremendous influence on Welles. Graves was Welles' kind of man, in many ways. Born 1895, died 1985 (six weeks or so after Welles), he was making his first mark in 1925 when Welles was ten. He had a very long prime, lasting into his 70's. His books were hailed in almost every arena as masterpieces: Biography: Psychology: The Meaning of Dreams (1924); Lawrence and the Arabs (1927) Autobiography: Good-Bye to All That (1929); Historical Novel: I, Claudius (1934); Educaion: The Reader Over My Shoulder (1943); Philosophy: The White Goddess (1948); Theology: The Nazarene Gospel Restored (1954); Translation: Greek Myths (1955); True(?) Crime: They Hanged My Charming Billy (1957); History: The Siege and Fall of Troy (1962); Short Fiction: Travel: Majorca Observed (1965); Collected Short Stories (1965); Poetry: Collected Poems (1975), etc. Over 100 books in all.

A very Wellsian man! Many works in areas which Welles liked.

And think of Welles going about his entire life in the hands, or at least in the company, of women: Mother, girlfriends, wives, actress colleagues, mistresses -- He lived a life like Graves, wih many muses at his side. White Goddesses, as I've said, of many hues.

Believe me, mteal, if you will read "Warning to Children" aloud every morning for a week, you will learn to love poetry. No poem is more affecting or instructive to anyone, at any age. Each time you read it, the image will be the same, but the emotion and your reaction will be a little different!

-----------------

NoFake: I'm so pleased that you caught the reference to the Thorne Room, which Welles evidently considered seminal in his development as an artist. I consider it the most poignant, most revealing moment in Barbara Leaming's Revised Biography of Welles.

Remember how, a few weeks before his death, Welles sent Leaming to the Institute in Chicago? And she brought back from the room in the Museum photos of the shadow boxes. How disappointed he was that the photos neglected to include the frames!

That may be the lost key to Welles' work, the secret that he kept all his life, as the Advisor urged the king to do in MR. ARKADIN. It is the perfect corollary to "the brown paper parcel"!

Glenn

[Le Chiffre]

I remember Welles did tell Bogdanovich that, in order to understand his work, one should read Graves's THE GREEK MYTHS, which supposedly uses the classic myths to chronicle the transition from Matriarchal to Patriarchal society. I did read a biography of Graves a few years ago, and one thing I remember about it is that Graves conceived some of his greatest poetry while doing mundane household chores, like washing dishes or vaccuming, which is why he enjoyed doing those chores. Why the muse would come to him at such a time as that is anybody's guess.

In the early 90's Bogdanovich made a cameo in NORTHERN EXPOSURE's 'Orson Welles' episode, plugging a pagan calender based on ideas in THE WHITE GODESS. I've got an audio-only recording of that episode, but hopefully it will make it to DVD soon.

For some reason, the Graves poem brought to mind this one by Poe, although I can't say if it it's related thematically:

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

[ToddBaesen]

Glenn,

Thanks for that info on Robert Graves. I'd forgotten that Charles Laughton's I, CLAUDIUS was based on Graves book. And of course, Welles might have directed Laughton later on in Bertolt Brecht's GALILEO.

And to M TEAL thanks for the reference to THE GREEK MYTHS. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

From The Introduction to Robert Graves' GREEK MYTHS (1955).


A study of Greek mythology should begin with a consideration of what political and religious systems existed in Europe before the arrival of Aryan invaders from the distant North and East. The whole of Neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artefacts and myths, had a remarkably homogeneous system of religious ideas, based on worship of the many-titled Mother goddess, who was also known in Syria and Libya.

Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless, and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored, and obeyed the matriarch; the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery. Thus the first victim of a Greek public sacrifice was always offered to Hestia of the Hearth. The goddess' white aniconic image, perhaps her most widespread emblem, which appears at Delphi as the omphasos, or navel-boss, may originally have represented the raised white mound of tightly-packed ash, enclosing live charcoal, which is the easiest means of preserving fire without smoke. Later, it became pictorially identified with the lime-whitened mound under which the harvest corn-doll was hidden , to be removed sprouting in the spring; and with the mound of sea-shells, or quartz, or white marble, underneath which dead kings were buried. Not only the moon, but (to judge from Hemera of Greece and Grainne of Ireland) the sun, were the goddess' celestial symbols. In earlier Greek myth, however, the sun yields precedence to the moon - which inspires the greater superstitious fear, does not grow dimmer as the year wanes, and is credited with the power to grant or deny water to the fields.

The moon's three phases of new, full and old, recalled the matriarch's three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman) and crone. Them, since the sun's annual course similarly recalled the rise and decline of her physical powers - spring a maiden, summer a nymph, winter a crone - the goddess became identified with seasonal changes in animal and plant life; and thus with Mother Earth who, at the beginning of the vegetative year, produces only leaves and buds, then flowers and fruits, and at last ceases to bear. She could later be conceived as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the crone of the Underworld - typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite and Hecate. These mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon-goddess became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons - maiden, nymph and crone - appeared in triad to demonstrate her divinity. Her devotees never quite forgot that there were not three goddesses, but one goddess; although by Classical times, Arcadian Stymphalus was one of the few remaining shrines where they all bore the same name: Hera.
Once the relevance of coition to child-bearing had been officially admitted - an account of this turning-point in religion appears in the Hittite myth of simple-minded Appu - man's religious status gradually improved, and winds or rivers were no longer given credit for impregnating women. The tribal nymph, it seems, chose an annual lover from her entourage of young men, a king to be sacrificed when the year ended; making him a symbol of fertility, rather than the object of her erotic pleasure. His sprinkled blood served to fructify trees, crops and flocks, and his flesh was torn and eaten raw by the queen's fellow nymphs - priestesses wearing masks of bitches, mares and sows. Next, in amendment to this practice, the king died as soon as the power of the sun, with which he was identified, began to decline in the summer; and another young man, his twin, or supposed twin - a convenient ancient Irish term is 'tanist' - then became the queen's lover, to be duly sacrificed at midwinter and, as a reward, reincarnated in an oracular serpent. These consorts acquired executive power only when permitted to deputise for the queen by wearing her magic robes. Thus kingship developed, and though the sun became a symbol of male fertility once the king's life had been identified with its seasonal course, it still remained under the moon's tutelage; as the king remained under the queen's tutelage, in theory at least, long after the matriarchal phase had been outgrown. Thus the witches of Thessaly, a conservative region, would threaten the sun, in the moon's name, with being engulfed by perpetual night.

There is, however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be that they adopted many of the 'weaker-sex' characteristics hitherto thought functionally peculiar to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law. Leaders of totem clans were chosen and certain powers awarded them, especially in times of migration or war. Rules for determining who could act as male commander-in-chief carried, it appears, in different matriarchies: usually the queen's maternal uncle, or her brother, or the son of her maternal aunt was chosen. The most primitive tribal commander-in-chief also had authority to act as judge in personal disputes between men, insofar as the queen's religious authority was not thereby impaired. The most primitive matrilineal society surviving today is that of the Nayars of Southern India, where the princesses, though married to child-husbands whom they immediately divorce, bear children to lovers of no particular rank; and the princesses of several matrilineal tribes of West Africa marry foreigners or commoners. The royal women from pre-Hellenic Greece also thought nothing of taking lovers from among their serfs, if the Hundred Houses of Locris and Epizephyrian Locri were not exceptional.

Early Greek mythology is concerned, above all else, with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly, or twice-yearly sacrifices; and end, at the time when the ILIAD was composed and kings boasted: "We are far better than our fathers!", with her eclipse by an unlimited male monarchy. Numerous African analogues illustrate the progressive stages of this change.

When the shortness of the king's reign proved irksome, it was agreed to prolong the thirteen-month year of 100 lunations, in the last of which occurs a near-coincidence of solar and lunar time. But since the fields and crops still needed to be fructified, the king agreed to suffer an annual mock death and yield his sovereignty for one day - to the surrogate boy-king, or interrex, who died at its close, and whose blood was used for the sprinkling ceremony. Now the sacred king either reigned for the entire period of a Great Year, with a tanist as his lieutenant; or the two reigned for alternate years; or the queen let them divide the queendom into halves and reign concurrently. The king deputised for the queen a many sacred functions, dressed in her robes, wore false breasts, borrowed her lunar axe as a symbol of power, and even took over from her the magical art of rain-making. His ritual death varied greatly in circumstance; he might be torn in pieces by wild women, transfixed with a sting-ray spike, felled with an axe, pricked in the heel with a poisoned arrow, flung over a cliff, burned to death on a pyre, drowned in a pool, or killed in a pre-arranged chariot crash. But die he must. A new stage was reached when animals came to be substituted for boys at the sacrificial altar, and the king refused death after his lengthened reign ended. Dividing the realm into three parts, and awarding one part to each of his successors, he would reign for another term; his excuse being that a closer approximation of solar and lunar time had now been found, namely nineteen years, or 325 lunations. The Great Year had become the Greater Year.

Throughout these successive stages, reflected in numerous myths, the sacred king continued to hold his position only by right of marriage to the tribal nymph, who was chosen either as a result of a foot race between her companions of the royal house or by ultimogeniture - that is to say, by being the youngest nubile daughter of the junior branch. The throne remained matrilineal, as it theoretically did even in Egypt, and the sacred king and his tanist were therefore always chosen from outside the royal female house; until some daring king at last decided to commit incest with the heiress, who ranked as his daughter, and thus gain a new title to the throne when his reign needed renewal.

Achaean invasions of the thirteenth century BC seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition. It seems that the king now contrived to reign for the term of his natural life; and when the Dorian arrived, towards the close of the second millennium, patrilineal succession became the rule. A prince no longer left his father's house and married a foreign princess; she came to him, as Odysseus persuaded Penelope to do. Genealogy became patrilineal, though a Samian incident mentioned in the Pseudo-Herodotus' LIFE OF HOMER shows that for some time after the Apatoria, or Festival of Male Kinship, had replaced that of Female Kinship, the rites still consisted of sacrifices to the Mother Goddess which men were not eligible to attend.

The familiar Olympian system was then agreed upon as a compromise between Hellenistic and pre-Hellenist views: a divine family of six gods and six goddesses, headed by the co-sovereigns Zeus and Hera and forming a Council of Gods in Babylonian style. But after a rebellion of the pre-Hellenic population, described in the ILIAD as a conspiracy against Zeus, Hera became subservient to him. Athena avowed herself 'all for the Father' and, in the end, Dionysus assured male preponderance in the Council by displacing Hestia. Yet the goddesses, though left in a minority, were never altogether ousted - as they were at Jerusalem - because, as Herodotus puts it, the revered poets Homer and Hesiod had 'given the deities their titles and distinguished their several provinces and special powers', which could not be easily expropriated. Moreover, though the system of gathering all the women of royal blood together under the king's control, and thus discouraging outsiders from attempts on a matrilineal throne, was adopted at Rome when the Vestal College was founded, and in Palestine when King David formed his royal harem, it never reached Greece. Patrilineal decent, succession and inheritance discouraged further myth-making; historical legend then begins and fades into the light of common history.

[Skylark]

The Greek Myths - Good scholarship on that - Comprehensively summarizes the entire mass of Greek mythology - with interesting socio-historical commentary - on something of a Frazer/Freud anthropoligical track, it seems.

[Glenn Anders]

ROSEBUD!

[Le Chiffre]

A few random thoughts:

I'd forgotten that Charles Laughton's I, CLAUDIUS was based on Graves book. And of course, Welles might have directed Laughton later on in Bertolt Brecht's GALILEO.

What a shame the Laughton I, CLAUDIUS was never finished. I think it might have been Josef Von Sternberg's magnum opus. I have on tape the wonderful 1964 docu THE EPIC THAT NEVER WAS, which chronicles the doomed production. Graves himself appears in it briefly.

The moon's three phases of new, full and old, recalled the matriarch's three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman) and crone. Them, since the sun's annual course similarly recalled the rise and decline of her physical powers - spring a maiden, summer a nymph, winter a crone - the goddess became identified with seasonal changes in animal and plant life; and thus with Mother Earth who, at the beginning of the vegetative year, produces only leaves and buds, then flowers and fruits, and at last ceases to bear. She could later be conceived as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the crone of the Underworld - typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite and Hecate. These mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three

This calls to mind the three witches in MACBETH ("pale Hecate's offerings"), written by Shakespeare, some say, to please King James, who had written a book on how to identify witches. Welles made his film right around the time Graves's THE WHITE GODDESS was first published.

Once the relevance of coition to child-bearing had been officially admitted - man's religious status gradually improved, and winds or rivers were no longer given credit for impregnating women.

Here's where the plausability gets a little shaky for me. That seems kind of incredible that it took them so long to figure that connection out.

The familiar Olympian system was then agreed upon as a compromise between Hellenistic and pre-Hellenist views: a divine family of six gods and six goddesses, headed by the co-sovereigns Zeus and Hera and forming a Council of Gods in Babylonian style.

In the original screenplay for JOURNEY INTO FEAR, the pro-Nazi Dr. Muller is reading a book called THE SUMERIAN PANTHEON by Fritz Holler. I'm assuming the Sumerian and Babalonian pantheons were pretty much the same. I wonder if that's a real book. I couldn't find any mention of it anywhere on the Net.

[Glenn Anders]

Interesting information, mteal, about the Nazi Dr. Muller reading Sumerian mythology. Mesopotamia (roughly, Iraq) was the beginning of Western Civilizations as we know it, and books like Ur of the Chaldees, based on British excavations after the occupation of Iraq in 1919 [later to be carried on by the University of Pennsylvania], was very influential. The Nazis, in their Aryan theories, believed they could trace themselves from this period, there and further East in India. The Nazi Government sent teams of anthropologists to these sites, looking for records and artifacts to support their own mythology.

The early societies were driven by fear, and so, in order to handle the fearsome elements all around them, they turned what they could not explain into religious mysteries. Later, it became, "My view of the religious mysteries is better than yours!" Strangely, we seem to be returning to where we began.

And I quite agree with your connection of Welles' Macbeth to Graves' The White Goddess.

Glenn