The White Goddess (113 page)

Mr Jarrell accuses me of a sort of schizophrenia in thinking so highly of women and cheerfully accepting the more disagreeable side of their nature, although, as he points out, I have been, in my day, a boxer, a full-back at football, and a fighting soldier. But is that so strange? Was it not the code of mediaeval chivalry, which the troubadour poets extolled in the Virgin’s name, to be a parfit gentle knight: a lion in battle, a lamb in the bower, however cruel one’s mistress? Have British soldiers fought less gloriously when they served under a queen rather than a king – Elizabeth, Anne, Victoria? It is a complete fallacy that the toughest fighter is the cave-man who knocks his women about. The most miraculous victory against odds in Classical times was won by the Epizephyrian Locrians of Calabria against their neighbours of Croton; and these Locrians were then the only people in Europe who still had a matrilineal constitution, with the women politically in the ascendant and a supreme Moon-goddess their sole deity.

I am aware that the Protestant dogma reflects well enough the sociological set-up of, say, the United States Bible Belt, non-conformist Britain, and the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland and South Africa. Most of the devout Christian women in those Churches are perfectly content with their social position, and therefore with the Virgin Mary as a representative of womankind. They look up to their husbands, give in to them, take motherhood seriously, do not consider themselves the equal (let alone the superiors) of man, restrain their wayward passions, support good causes, neglect their own looks, and do not grudge men their monopoly of the priesthood. They sometimes even take a masochistic delight in being ill-treated, abused and betrayed by extravagantly swaggering
he-men, while they pinch and scrape. They are not to be either praised or pitied – that’s how they come. But they cannot appreciate Muse-poetry. For them the Apollonian poet, even the fraudulent rhetorician, or the prosy hymn-writer, suffices. Yet it is a question how far Chaucer’s ‘Patient Griselda’, or Bunyan’s Christiana, or David Copperfield’s wife Agnes, are the results of domestic conditioning; whether they differ in circumstance, rather than in nature, from the numerous predatory women of our own day, born in unhappy homes and soured by the patriarchal system, who enjoy breaking up insecure marriages and making a living from male weakness and credulity.

Some of you are looking queerly at me. Do I think that poets are literally inspired by the White Goddess? That is an improper question. What would you think, should I ask you if, in your opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued; let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess. All we can know for sure is that the Ten Commandments, said to have been promulgated by Moses in the name of a Solar God, still carry religious force for those hereditarily prone to accept them; and that scores of poems written in the Muse-tradition still carry the authentic moon-magic for those hereditarily prone to accept that. Apostles of Solar Reason ‘scorning the lunar ray’ may reject such poems as idle or nonsensical; but respectable anthropologists (and anthropologists are scientists) now give
de
facto
if not
de
jure
recognition to all sorts of crazy deities, male and female – such as the Voodoo deities of Haiti (some of African origin; others renegade Catholic saints) – whose invocation causes ecstatic behaviour in their worshippers and produces if not miraculous, at least inexplicable, phenomena.

By ancient religious theory the White Goddess becomes incarnate in her human representative – a priestess, a prophetess, a queen-mother. No Muse-poet can grow conscious of the Muse except by experience of some woman in whom the Muse-power is to some degree or other resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his function properly unless under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. (Under a republic he tends to turn seedy and philosophical.) A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse. In many cases the power of absolutely falling in love soon vanishes; if only because the woman takes no trouble to preserve whatever glory she gets from the knowledge of her beauty and the power she exercises over her poet-lover. She grows embarrassed by this glory, repudiates it, and ends up either as a housewife or a tramp; he, in disillusion, turns to Apollo who, at any rate, can provide him with a livelihood and intelligent entertainment – and goes out of circulation before his middle twenties. But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet makes a distinction between the Goddess as revealed in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman in whom the Goddess may take up residence for a month, a year, seven years, or even longer. The Goddess abides; and it may be that he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman.

Mr Jarrell, having read my autobiography, concludes that when the woman in whom the Goddess was once resident for me abdicated, I identified myself for all intents and purposes with the Goddess. He writes, very naughtily: ‘There is only one Goddess, and Graves is her prophet, and isn’t the prophet of the White Goddess the nearest thing to the White Goddess?’

I flatly deny that, even though Mr Jarrell claims to have found general confirmation of his theory ‘in Volume Seven of Jung’s
Collected
Works
– the second part of the essay entitled “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”.’ No, my autobiography was written nearly thirty years ago, and much has happened to me since, as he might well have deduced from my later poems. Being in love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of woman’s nature – the decrescent axe-head – and many Muse-poems are written in helpless recognition of this by men whose love is no longer returned.

*

It will be noticed that the Elizabethan poet who makes this pilgrimage to Mary the Egyptian at Walsinghame, the mediaeval patron saint of lovers, has loved one woman all his life, and is now old. Why is she not old, too? Because he is describing the Goddess, not the individual woman. The same is true of Wyatt’s:

It is not ‘
She
flees
from
me
’, but ‘
They
flee
from
me
’: namely the women who were in turn illumined for Wyatt by the lunar ray that commanded his love – beginning with Anne Boleyn, later Henry VIII’s unfortunate queen.

I hesitate to delve into Mr Jarrell’s emotional biography as a means of discovering how far he regards romantic falling-in-love as a grotesque pathological event. But I cannot think the act unmanly, or discreditable, far less grotesque. Nor am I a prophet of the Goddess. A prophet is, by definition, one who speaks in the name of a deity, like Moses or John the Baptist, or Mohammed, with: ‘Thus saith the Lord!’ No man can decently speak in a woman’s name. The Pythian Priestess at Delphi did not give clever, ambiguous, political answers to her visitants (instead of genuine oracles) until Apollo captured the Goddess Gaia’s oracular stool and installed his own docile nominees. To acknowledge the Goddess’s power is a very different matter from saying in a ringing baritone: ‘Thus saith the Goddess!’ A simple loving declaration: ‘There is none greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess!’ has been made by every Muse-poet in the English language (and by countless others, down the centuries, in various European, African and Asian idioms); though the Goddess is sometimes, of course, given such cautiously abstract titles as ‘Nature’, ‘Truth’, ‘Beauty’, or ‘Poetry’. Myself I think it most unlikely that this grotesque habit will end for a few centuries yet.

*

You think perhaps that I am holding out on you by not trying to account for the hauntings? But surely it is enough to record what there is
no logical means of evaluating? When a simple citizen, who is neither very good, very wicked, nor very anything else, is struck dead by lightning while running for shelter to the Subway, and is the only victim of the storm, what do people call that? They call it an act of God: meaning that it was a blind accident. Well, in that case, what should you call a more-than-coincidence of the sort I have described?

This brings me to my fourth disclosure. I offered
The
White
Goddess
in turn to the only publishers I knew who claimed to be personally concerned with poetry and mythology.

The first regretted that he could not recommend this unusual book to his partners, because of the expense. He died of heart failure within the month.