Living With Books:
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Modern Reworking of the 'Odyssey' And a Jewish Family's Life in Wales WHEN ROBERT GRABVES wrote I, Claudius twenty years ago, his knowledge of and...
...At times, especially in the early sketches, there are suggestions of the humor, the extravagance and the poetry of Dylan Thomas's celebration of his boyhood in Wales, but for the most part Abse strikes his own note...
...It is easy to be funny or whimsical or sentimental or lyrical about being young, but quite hard to be honest...
...It is a long way from Nausicaa's Sicily in the eighth century BC to Wales in the twentieth century AD, and, aside from the proximity of their publication dates, the only reason for coupling Homer's Daughter with Dannie Abse's Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve (Criterion, $3.00) is the fact that each is, in its own way, worth reading...
...But in its own right, as a tale of adventure, intrigue and romance, the novel is absorbing...
...His book, a collection of sketches rather than a novel, describes a boy's growing up in a Jewish family in Wales in the 1930s...
...He has a way of setting forth the wildest surmises as if they were cold facts...
...None of the later novels is as good as I, Claudius and Claudius the God, and some of them—for instance, The Islands of Unwisdom—are pretty pedestrian, but the general average is high...
...Perhaps the most important thing to say about Abse is that he respects his boyhood...
...He ignores the currently acceptable patterns, both in his poetry and in his fiction, and vigorously pursues his own interests...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Modern Reworking of the 'Odyssey' And a Jewish Family's Life in Wales WHEN ROBERT GRABVES wrote I, Claudius twenty years ago, his knowledge of and insatiable curiosity about the past produced an historical novel of great distinction...
...The secret of Graves's success as an historical novelist is his ability to work with assumptions quite different from those on which contemporary culture is based...
...In this, as he acknowledges, he is following Samuel Butler, among whose least-read works is The Authoress of the Odyssey, and he also follows Butler in putting Nausicaa on the island of Sicily...
...Homer's Daughter (Doubleday, $3.95), though not on the level of the Claudius books, is one of the best...
...The story parallels in a general way certain episodes of the Odyssey, including the climactic slaughter of the suitors, for Graves assumes that Nausicaa wove her own experiences into the story, and it is great fun to see how ingeniously he works the parallels out...
...Abse's honesty is unfailing, and he has the ability to communicate what he feels...
...In detail, however, he modifies Butler's theories and comes up with an account that is more plausible than Butler's original guess...
...The place of Robert Graves in contemporary literature is a problem for the critics—or would be if they paid attention to his work...
...Since then, he has let his imagination range from the thirteenth century BC to the indefinite future...
...we rarely lose ourselves in his world...
...We neither minimize nor exaggerate its strangeness, but accept it...
...Assuming, as most scholars do, that the Odyssey was a composite work that took shape a couple of centuries later than the Iliad, Graves argues that it was given its present form by a woman, who actually appears in the epic as the Princess Nausicaa...
...He doesn't seem to believe that they were written to provide some modern novelist with an outline for his novel...
...He invades the world of antiquity as if he had a right to be there, and apparently he has...
...Graves, on the other hand, plunges us, as he has already plunged himself, into Nausicaa's world...
...He deals with legends and myths, but not in the fashionable way...
...It is particularly a note of awareness...
...But, in any case, he has written a lively book...
...To some extent, it could be the story of any boy anywhere, but in the background is much that is Jewish, much that is Welsh, much that belongs specifically to the troubled decade before the war...
...The boy is sensitive to the problems of his older brothers, the eccentricities of his relatives, the urgencies and reticences of his companions, and he makes contact with love and death...
...At the same time, though he is absorbed in his world, a boy's world, he is strongly moved by the currents of history—for this is a Jewish boy in the Hitler era...
...Moreover, in The White Goddess he linked his historical researches to the question of the nature of poetry, which has always been his principal concern...
...As usual, it is hard to tell whether Graves is wholly serious or not...
...It will be interesting to see what he does next...
...Abse, who has had two books of poetry published in England, is, in his very early thirties, a practicing physician in Cardiff, Wales...
...For me, Marguerite Yourcenar's much-admired Hadrian's Memoirs is weakened by the fact that we never quite get away from the present: Some of the time Hadrian seems a contemporary, and some of the time we are regarding him with self-conscious antiquarianism...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 11
