A tempestuous, torrid and sordid tale lies behind Robert Graves’s lost play But It Still Goes On which is being staged for the first time.
Graves was a towering figure in 20th Century literature with his WW1 war memoirs, poetry, historical novels (I, Claudius) and writing on mythology. But he had an extraordinarily tangled emotional life, at one point taking poet Laura Riding in as his secretary, then lover in a menage a trois with his then wife Nancy. Riding who appeared to be more than slightly mad, certainly manipulative and thought she had occult powers then pulled an Irish poet, Geoffrey Phibbs, away from his wife to make up a menage a quatre. Phibbs fled after a few weeks and Graves was sent to bring him back.
After an evening of high hysteria, Riding threw herself off the balcony of the four-storey flat. She was not expected to survive but did after an expensive hospital stay for which Graves had to foot the bill, which serendipitously drove him to write his bestselling memoir of the First World War, Good-bye to All That. The play features a tempestuous female character who falls from a great height.
Graves was born 24 July 1895 4.26am in London. Laura Riding 15 January 1901, New York.
She was a Sun Capricorn with a head-in-the-clouds and ethereal Neptune opposition Jupiter Venus in adventurous Sagittarius. Of most significance however was her Pluto in Gemini opposition Uranus squaring onto Mars in Virgo which was an unstable volcano of anger, ruthlessness and recklessness on a very short fuse.
Graves had his Sun in at zero degrees Leo with a Moon Mars conjunction in late Leo; and a very complicated Venus in Virgo square Neptune Pluto in Gemini. The latter no doubt spurred his creativity but would make him prone to obsessions and wouldn’t make for an easy emotional life. His Venus was conjunct her Mars so he would be drawn like a moth to a flame by her high-wire temperament. Her (almost certainly) Scorpio Moon squared his Moon Mars, so it was a combustible combination.
Tr Neptune was conjunct his Moon as she made her leap, and he paid for his treatment though she shut him out thereafter,
Their relationship chart had a cruelly unkind and explosive composite Mars square Saturn Uranus; and an illusory/disappointing composite Sun trine Neptune. Though out of his torment she spurred him on to write some of the ‘greatest and most lyrical love poetry of the 20th Century.’
A nightmare muse but she did act as a catalyst for some of his most memorable work.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/did-robert-gravess-lover-fall-window-pushed/
Marjorie is there any chance of comparing Graves horoscope to that of fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon who also served in the same Regiment during the Great War. They were once firm friends but fell out over the publication of Goodbye To All That which Sassoon believed exploited certain events in his Sassoons own family life for profit. Graves appears to have often struggled with money and I think Sassoon also got tired of bailing him out financially. Incidentally Sassoon’s own account of his war experiences is every bit as good as Graves and on occasions a good deal more honest since Graves mixed quite a lot of apocryphal army tales with hard fact to make his book a commercial best seller.
Will do tomorrow I loved Sassoon’s books when I read them years ago. He was quite a tortured man as indeed was Graves.
I Claudius and Claudius the God are superb and I would recommend them to anyone who wanted to know about Ancient Rome and be thoroughly entertained at the same time. All time classics.