The Tangle of Meanings, A Book of Poetry and Paintings

Then there was my twin brother and my sister. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me. I remember from very early childhood my mother, who was a teacher, reciting a lot around the house. I remember coming across drawings that my father had done, poems that he had written, watercolors that were hanging in our living room—his original watercolors—and a terrific series of books: There was also an old Victrola with a lot of classical records. And so my family always had this interest in the arts. Coming from a Methodist minority in a French Catholic island, we also felt a little beleaguered.

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The Catholicism propounded by the French provincial priests in St. Lucia was a very hidebound, prejudiced, medieval, almost hounding kind of Catholicism. The doctrine that was taught assigned all Protestants to limbo. So we felt defensive about our position. This never came to a head, but we did feel we had to stay close together.

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It was good for me, too, to be able to ask questions as a Protestant, to question large authority. Nobody in my generation at my age would dare question the complete and absolute authority of the church. Even into sixth form, my school friends and I used to have some terrific arguments about religious doctrine. It was a good thing. I think young writers ought to be heretical. Would you describe his creative work and how it affected you?

My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. He was very young when he died of mastoiditis, which is an ear infection.



Lucia in those days was crude or very minimal; I know he had to go to Barbados for operations. He had a self-portrait in watercolor in an oval frame next to a portrait of my mother, an oil that was very good for an amateur painter. I remember once coming across a backcloth of a very ordinary kind of moonlight scene that he had painted for some number that was going to be done by a group of people who did concerts and recitations and stuff like that. So that was always there. Rather, in a sense, it gave me a kind of impetus and a strong sense of continuity.

From the Archive, Issue 152

I felt that what had been cut off in him somehow was an extension that I was continuing. I remember a couple of funny lyrics that were done in a Southern American dialect for some show he was probably presenting. They were witty little satirical things. I remember more of his art work. The original is an oil painting and even now I am aware of the delicacy of that copy. He had a delicate sense of watercolor. Later on I discovered that my friend Harold Simmons, who was a professional painter, evidently was encouraged by my father to be a painter. Would you talk about their importance to you?

You asked, Dr Sieghart prescribed

When he found out that we liked painting, he invited about four or five of us to come up to his studio and sit out on his veranda. He gave us equipment and told us to draw. Now that may seem very ordinary in a city, in another place, but in a very small, poor country like St. Lucia it was extraordinary. He encouraged us to spend our Saturday afternoons painting; he surrounded us with examples of his own painting. Just to let us be there and to have the ambience of his books, his music, his own supervision, and the stillness and dedication that his life meant in that studio was a terrific example.

The influence was not so much technical. Of course, I picked up a few things from him in terms of technique: But there were other things apart from the drawing.

Poetry prescriptions: verse to cure all ills

Mostly, it was the model of the man as a professional artist that was the example. After a while, the younger guys dropped out of the drawing thing and Dunstan St. Omer and I were left. There is a carton brimming with press clippings on the floor. Over the fireplace is a shelf with the works of T.

Lawrence; on the mantel, Greek, Roman, Oriental, and African figurines. He knew Hardy, and Hardy knew—. Gertrude Stein first told Robert Graves about Majorca. He returned ten years later and has lived there ever since. There is an orchard with fifteen kinds of fruit trees, a large vegetable garden, and an English-style lawn of Bermuda grass.

Robert Graves is the author of over one hundred books, besides a number of anonymous rewrite jobs for friends. At various times during the following interview, he was setting the table, correcting a manuscript, checking references, cutting his nails with an enormous pair of scissors, picking carrots, singing folk songs, and slicing beans.

He was not an easy man to keep up with.

Well, everything is made by hand—with one exception: Almost everything else is made by hand. Oh yes, the books have been printed, but many have been printed by hand—in fact some I printed myself. Apart from the electric light fixtures, everything else is handmade; nowadays very few people live in houses where anything at all is made by hand.

Paris Review - Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37

What nearly always happens is that the Muse finds it impossible to sustain the love of a poet and allies herself with a pretended poet who she knows is not a real one. Someone she can mother. The King or poet represents growth, and the rival or tanist represents drought. Your poems, especially your love poems, get more intense as you go on.

Is that a function of age or experience?