The Robert Graves Diary Project

The Manuscript: Literary Importance

Because 1935-1939 was one of the most productive and creative in Robert Graves’ long career, his Diary has proved of particular interest to literary scholars and biographers. Not alone has this manuscript received attention from twentieth-century historians and biographers of Graves, Laura Riding, and other significant cultural figures who were part of the Graves’ Circle prior to and during the Spanish Civil War and preceding the Second World War, but it is of increasing interest to cultural historians and critics investigating literary collaboration(s) and attribution(s), diasporic and expatriate culture(s), and literary modernism.

Recent scholarly interest in cultural and historical assessments of Modernism has thrown into relief Graves’ agency and experience as a participant, critic, and writer in literary Modernism, not least his collaboration with Laura Riding, as well as his engagement with international and political issues of the 1930s, his location as an expatriate writer—all of which are central preoccupations of the Diary from 1935-1939. According to Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness the relationship and working partnership developed by Robert Graves and Laura Riding was one of the most productive literary collaborations in twentieth-century poetry. They were among the earliest to use the term “modernist” as a literary and classificatory term, and during the years covered by the proposed project, they were to engage in many collaborative projects, most notably the co-founding of the Seizin Press (1927-1939, which published, amongst others, Gertrude Stein), the Focus epistolary project, and the creation of the Epilogue periodical (1935-1938). According to Mundye and McGuinness, “these works emerge from a particularly intensive period of their professional and personal relationship; one during which the paths of their different longer-term preoccupations intersected.” (Mundye 2002) Some dynamics of this contested collaborative relationship emerge from Graves’ biographical narrative in the Diary entries and from the associated contemporary commentary, but these dynamics are equally reflected in the complex role of Riding as intended reader of the Diary.

The period of the diary is noteworthy also for Graves’ forced return to Britain from voluntary exile in Majorca as a result of the Spanish Civil War, and his (and his circle’s) responses to the increasingly ominous European political scene: among these are Graves, Riding, Goldschmidt and Gelat Marroig’s experience of the Spanish Civil War, including meetings with Churchill attempting to persuade him to intervene on behalf of the Republicans; Graves’ actions in saving Karl Goldschmidt, a German Jew, from extradition to Nazi Germany, and Graves’ meetings with Lester Pearson, then working in the Canadian High Commission in London, seeking to obtain Goldschmidt an immigration visa to Canada.

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