Complete Short Stories

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Robert Graves was born in 1895 in Wimbledon, son of Alfred Perceval Graves, the Irish writer, and Amalia Von Ranke. He went from school to the First World War, where he became a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. His principal calling was poetry, and both his
Selected Poems
and his
Complete Poems
have been published in Penguin. Apart from a year
as Professor of English Literature at Cairo University in 1926 he earned his living by writing, mostly historical novels which include:
I, Claudius
;
Claudius the God
;
Count Belisarius
;
Wife to Mr Milton
;
Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth
;
Proceed, Sergeant Lamb
;
The Golden Fleece
;
They Hanged My Saintly Billy
and
The Isles of Unwisdom
. Throughout his writing life he also published over fifty short stories,
many of which originally appeared in magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. They have all been brought together in his
Complete Short Stories
. He wrote his autobiography,
Goodbye to All That
, in 1929 and it rapidly established itself as a modern classic. His two most discussed non-fiction books are
The White Goddess
, which presents a new view of the poetic impulse, and
The Nazarene Gospel Restored
(with Joshua Podro), a re-examination of primitive Christianity. He translated Apuleius, Lucan, and Suetonius for the Penguin Classics series, and compiled the first modern dictionary of Greek Mythology,
The Greek Myths
. His translation of
The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam
(with Omar Ali-Shah) was also published in Penguin. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1961, and made an Honorary
Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, in 1971. Robert Graves died on 7 December 1985 in Majorca, his home since 1929. On his death
The Times
wrote of him, ‘He will be remembered for his achievements as a prose stylist, historical novelist and memoirist, but above all as the great paradigm of the dedicated poet, “the greatest love poet in English since Donne”.’

Lucia Graves is a literary translator
and author. Her translations (from and into Spanish) include works by her father, Robert Graves – among them his
Collected Short Stories
– and more recently Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s
The Shadow of the Wind
. She is the author of
A Woman Unknown: Voices from a Spanish Life
, which is a personal account of her years in Spain, and
The Memory House
, a historical novel.

Robert Graves first published his
Collected Short Stories
in 1964. Until then they had appeared in miscellanies which came out from time to time, bringing together his latest essays, poems, talks, reviews, stories and other loose material on his desk; or else they had only seen the light in magazines. Among the stories he left out of his 1964 collection are gems like ‘Está En Su Casa’,
‘Flesh-coloured Net Tights’ and ‘Bins K to T’, presumably due to limitations of space. This volume aims to bring together all the short stories written by Graves.

In the brief introduction to his
Collected Short Stories
, Graves claims that ‘Pure fiction is beyond my imaginative range’, and adds that most of the stories in the collection are true stories, ‘though occasional names and references
have been altered’. I can vouch for that, having myself lived through some of the experiences described in the pieces about our family life in Majorca during the 1950s – stories such as ‘A Bicycle in Majorca’, ‘A Toast to Ava Gardner’ and ‘School Life in Majorca 1955’. Indeed, most of his short stories are either strictly autobiographical, or else are based on events which he heard first-hand from
friends or family. There are some exceptions, such as the three tales set in Roman times and ‘The Shout’ – although even in this imaginary setting Graves admits his presence: ‘Richard in the story is a surrogate for myself: I was still living on the neurasthenic verge of nightmare.’
¹

Among Graves’s writings there are pieces of an autobiographical nature which cannot readily be classified as short
stories. In compiling this book, the main problem has been to decide where the dividing line can be drawn between an autobiographical story and a piece of non-fiction containing elements of personal history. At all times I have been guided by Graves’s own choice of material for his
Collected Short Stories
.

Historically speaking, the themes range from accounts of his Edwardian childhood and his
schooldays – as in the early piece ‘My New-Bug’s Exam’, ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’ (1955), or ‘My Best Christmas’
(1962) – to a story set in New York in the late 1960s – ‘No, Mac, It Just Wouldn’t Work’ – in which Graves writes about the contradictions of Western society and the development of inner-city violence.

It is interesting to relate that Graves did not always find it easy to publish his
stories, as his correspondence with
The New Yorker
in the 1950s shows. ‘You Win, Houdini!’ was turned down for being ‘so tough and unpleasant as to be cruel’. ‘A Toast to Ava Gardner’ met with all sorts of problems with the legal department, who were afraid of infringing the American libel laws and suggested endless changes of tone and wording – such as calling her Miss Gardner throughout, instead
of Ava. ‘The Viscountess and the Short-haired Girl’ was found to have excessive ‘under-cover sexual adventures’.

The stories are arranged in chronological order, and have all been previously published. The texts I have used belong to the last published version of each story in book-form, or in periodicals when they were not otherwise published. For my main source, the
Collected Short Stories
, I have used the original English edition, 1965. I have picked up some minor inconsistencies and typographical errors, some of which were corrected in the 1968 Penguin edition. I would have been inclined to leave Graves’s Spanish misspellings untouched, but as the Penguin edition incorporated a number of corrections, I decided to make these consistent wherever appropriate. At the end of the volume
there are publication details of each story.

Lucia Graves