The Golden Fleece [antikvár]

Introduction Robert Graves wrote the fictional prose narrative ('novel' might be too confining a term) of The Golden Fleece between November 1943 and July 1944. It was published by Cassell in October of that year. He was living at Vale House Farm in the village of Galmpton in South Devon with Beryl Pritchard, the woman who would prove the most constant of his consorts. The most adventuresome traumas and triumphs of his life were behind him and it is possible to discern from within The Golden Fleece a sidelight cast on its author's life. The portrait of Jason and his crewmates on the Argo is suffused vdth a restrained hindsight. In winning back the Golden Fleece from King Aeetes at Colchis, the Argonauts will reach so illustrious a pinnacle that nothing that follows can ever quite equal it. Perhaps Graves, in the settled domesticity of Vale House Farm, spealang little but thinking much on four decades of action-packed life, felt he had reached a similar point. The ascent had certainly been hard and its most perilous incidents had left their scars, both mental and physical. If Graves's mother was not the Gorgon of some accounts, she was at least formidable, over-exacting, a setter of standards against which her son would measure himself and find himself wanting. His parents' decision to send their bookish, idealistic son to Charterhouse, then an enclave of philistine bullying, was a test he was bound to fail. They failed him in turn, when he wrote despairingly of his persecution there, preferring his housemaster's blithe assurances that all was well to Robert's own account of his unhappiness. Incapable of real compromise - a lifelong trait - he survived by pretending to be mad and immersing himself in the classics. Charterhouse was to lead to Oxford. The pitch of Graves's loathing of educational institutions at that time can be gauged from his chosen means of escape. On 12 August 1914 Robert Graves enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Graves's wartime experience, his reactions to it, and the wide conclusions he would draw from it are documented with pitiless precision leavened only by a degree of mirthless irony in Goodbye To All That, published in 1929. In the trenches and in No Man's Land, Graves's idealism broke against a reality too terrible for it to comprehend. In contrast to his great friend rx