In her diligent and insightful biography of Graves, Jean Moorcroft Wilson teases the truth from Graves’s exaggerations, mis-rememberings and downright fibs. Moorcroft Wilson, who has written the lives of Sassoon and Edward Thomas, is an even-handed biographer. She is by turns compassionate and caustic. She is clear-sighted when cutting though Graves’s 'condescending and disingenuous' attitude to his father’s poetry.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s commanding new biography reveals the poet to be a slipperier character than we imagined ... Wilson tells this story with meticulous attention to detail and an almost omniscient command of her sources. In doing so she offers a number of small but necessary corrections to the sometimes self-serving inaccuracies of Graves’s own account of the same period, and persuasively argues that Graves’s father made a more significant contribution to his son’s poetic success than Graves was prepared to allow. The real strength of this biography, however, lies in the care and vigour with which it animates the conflicting strands of Graves’s personality. To encounter him in these pages is to feel something of the relentlessly explosive energy with which he lived the first half of his life. Wilson lands him like a Zeppelin bomb.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson, the veteran biographer of First World War poets, devotes 10 of her 24 chapters to Graves’s wartime experience, from his joining the army a week after Britain declared war, to his exemption from service with damaged lungs in 1918 ... an exemplary biography and a terrific entertainment. Moorcroft Wilson knows the territory of war inside out, and explores Graves’s peculiar psyche with sympathy but a sharp eye for his failings. She brings this difficult, unlovable but strangely impressive man yelpingly to life.
The new book by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, an expert on the poets of World War I, takes up the narrative established by Graves himself and deepens it with new material. Her telling of Graves’s early homosexuality is more open but still confusing. If you need to know precisely how he acted as a homosexual, you won’t get much help here. It’s all still very cloudy, wrapped up in his boyhood friendships and loyalties, with a gauze of closeted innocence and idealism. Wilson writes sympathetically about young men in the trenches ... Wilson’s book, at times so detailed that its pages blur before the eyes, is best in chapters on the war, a bit muddier about what follows.
It is bracing to be reminded by Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s new biography of Robert Graves that the rugged poet/all-rounder wrote Good-bye to All That, his lucid and mordantly sane autobiographical account of soldiering in the First World War, while recovering from a double suicide attempt ... Moorcroft Wilson’s absorption in detail makes her a slightly rhythmless storyteller, but by the end of her long and very thorough book we feel satisfyingly well acquainted with its courageous, obtuse, devoted, fragile, durable, and maddening subject.
Though Graves is best remembered, at least in the United States, as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Moorcroft Wilson has written a poet’s biography. A reader who couldn’t be bothered to acquire a copy of Graves’s war poems...could almost reconstruct an anthology from the quotations Moorcroft Wilson includes. She is adept at linking Graves’s verse to his life, but never loses sight of it as art. The book’s central failing must stem from Moorcroft Wilson’s ambition: because she treats Graves at such length and in such depth, the book ends well before its subject has conceived, much less written, the works that he’s best known for. The twin Falls of Graves and Riding (Graves capitalized the incident) and the subsequent composition of Good-Bye to All That make for a dramatic conclusion, but readers eager to learn of The White Goddess and I, Claudius must wait for the next volume.
This sober biography includes convincing readings of his poetry, but it takes Graves’s charismatic lover to set the narrative alight ... Her treatment of Graves’s prose is rather less convincing than her readings of his poetry ... Moorcroft Wilson gives an excellent account of the folie à deux that led to the collapse of most of Graves’s friendships, and eventually to Riding hurling herself out of a fourth-floor window, followed by Graves from a window one floor down. The trouble is that by placing this combination of sex and violence at the end of her book, where it inevitably feels like the climax of Graves’s story, Moorcroft Wilson scuppers her stated objective of shifting 'the emphasis back to … the first world war'.
The first volume of Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s Life is extremely thorough. It sets out the facts of Graves’s life throughout the period covered by Goodbye to All That, and is an excellent guide to the exact number of grains of salt with which to take the claims made by Graves in his autobiography. Generally this is rather a lot of grains, often it’s tablespoons ...There is no doubt that Moorcroft Wilson’s thoroughness and sobriety will make this book a valuable resource for scholars. But Miranda Seymour’s Robert Graves: Life on the Edge, which covers the whole of his life in only a few more pages than it takes Moorcroft Wilson to bring us to 1929, remains a better read – partly because Seymour is willing to confess that Graves could be completely impossible.
Pugnacious as a youth, with a boxer’s broken nose, Graves later became something of a mystic—a disciple of the poetic muse, his White Goddess. Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s painstaking account of Graves’s war years culminates, a decade after the fighting, in the publication of his classic memoir Good-bye to All That ... Although his love poems are acknowledged as among the 20th century’s finest, his war poems have languished by comparison. Blame may be laid on Graves himself, who, in his own words, 'suppressed' all but a few, deeming them too redolent of 'the war-poetry boom.' Now, 100 years after the armistice, Ms. Moorcroft Wilson capably restores Capt. Graves to the ranks of his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and Rupert Brooke ... Graves’s best war poems stand cheek-by-jowl with the finest of his generation, yet his reputation has never relied primarily on them.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson's new biography describes the disastrous innocence that led Graves to enlist in August 1914. Just 19, he was feeling nervous about going up to Oxford; he wanted a break from study and the army seemed to offer an escape. He did not doubt that Britain was in the right nor that the war would be waged with impeccable honour, and be all over within a few months. One year later, all illusions lost, Graves was writing poems whose brutally confronting physical descriptions of the dead and wounded horrified even Sassoon ... Jean Moorcroft Wilson has already written biographies of Sassoon and Edward Thomas. She knows the territory so well that she risks an overdetailed narrative. This volume ends with the publication of Goodbye to All That, when Graves was 35. It rounds off the war experience, and brings Riding, Graves' manipulative muse, to centre stage. What to do with the next 55 years? The author's final sentence, 'I look forward to continuing the story', sounds courageous.
After her biographies of Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Edward Thomas, Jean Moorcroft Wilson now turns to Robert Graves with the first volume of a planned two-part Life. It takes us to 1929, marking the publication of Good-Bye to All That and Graves’s departure from England for Majorca with Laura Riding. Moorcroft Wilson has it in mind to rectify a perceived neglect, not of Graves’s poetry as a whole, but of his war poems in particular. She proposes that while many readers would identify him among the war poets, they might be pushed to identify particular poems to make the case ... What Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s readable and absorbing biography helps to make clear is that Graves had, or was possessed by, a poetic vision which, though shaped by the conflict, and responsive to it, maintained a degree of independence whereby the art was elevated above its occasions.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson's...book tells only the first half of Graves’s story, but adds a valuable degree of detail to the several existing biographies and, thanks to the sympathy it shows for all aspects of Graves’s character, is consistently illuminating ... It also, by promoting a curious combination of devotion and dissociation in his sensibility, seems to have given a governing shape to the marriage he made shortly before the war ended — to Nancy Nicholson, with whom he had four children. For the same sort of reasons it even more decisively affected the life they subsequently shared with Laura Riding in a ménage à trois that, before it finally and notoriously ended with Riding and then Graves jumping out of windows in a flat in Hammersmith ... In the closing pages of the book, we see Graves and Riding living alone together in Majorca, with money in the bank, thanks to the success of Good-Bye to All That, swaying in a precarious balance for which they have paid a very high price in terms of friendship with others. We also understand there’s not a hope in hell it will last. Cue volume two, which Moorcroft Wilson says she looks forward to writing, and we should look forward to reading.
...Drawing on newly available documentary resources, Wilson here analyzes the literary manifestations of combat trauma on Graves, insightfully illuminating why Graves turns from realistic to mythical perspectives on the war. But readers also see Graves’ artistic mutations within the context of broader postwar uncertainties—about family, faith, love, sex, friendship, and nationality. The vortex of uncertainty begins spinning more wildly when the volatile poet Laura Riding enters Graves’ life, hardening his literary judgment, shattering his marriage and family, even impelling him to follow her in a seemingly suicidal plunge through upper-floor windows ... Wilson promises further insights into the imaginative journey of this improbable pair in a second volume chronicling the later decades ... Readers fascinated by this complex poet will eagerly await that volume.
As Wilson acknowledges, Graves has been the subject of several well-regarded biographies. She justifies her new examination of his youth, war experiences, and early career on the basis of material recently available, including published letters to a fellow soldier, eight unpublished letters to one of his sisters, and his lover Laura Riding’s autobiographical writings. Despite these sources, however, this biography offers a familiar, if finely nuanced, portrait of Graves, his family, and his scandalous relationship with the mercurial Riding ... A sympathetic perspective on Graves’ eventful life.
In this detailed, sometimes plodding biography of English novelist Robert Graves, Wilson labors to demonstrate the significance of the author’s WWI poetry, drawing on extensive new material ... Readers will benefit from some background knowledge about WWI poetry, as Wilson tends to stay on the micro level of Graves’s experience. The volume only covers one-third of Graves’s life, which perhaps does not merit quite such meticulous investigation, but does allow Wilson to carry out a thorough study of a famed author’s wartime record.
