Myths, Muses & Mushroom
FOR CENTAURS (382 pp.)—Robert Graves—Doubleday ($4.95).
Robert Graves's mother used to warn him against becoming "like people who feed birds in public gardens, and usually have two or three perched on their heads." But Mother scarcely foresaw the strange-feathered notions that would roost inside Graves's head. Out of this intellectual aviary fly de-crested myths, twice-tweaked Bible tales, a poetic cockatoo called the White Goddess, and great whooping cranes of scholarly controversy. As a man who travels "full-speed in the wilder regions of my own, some say crazy, head," Graves ranges airily from poetry to poltergeists, from mushrooms to Majorca (his expatriate home). Though the form changes—essay, lecture, story, poem—the wryly cantankerous wit and charm remain the same.
The Little Foxes. Graves is one of the few men of letters who can talk shop, for example, without putting up the shutters of boredom or obscurity. What does a good poet do? He captures the sound of his own voice talking, says Graves, a natural voice and "not the one in which we try to curry favour with children at a party, or with an election crowd, or with a traffic cop.'' To show what happens when a poet merely apes passing fashions. Graves does a parody of a Japanese haiku called "The Loving Parents":
Forgiven come direct
Unspare expense
Cable soonest collect!
In his more eccentric vein. Graves maintains that neither Benedict Arnold nor Judas were traitors. Sample argument: "A dishonest treasurer, as Judas is represented as being, would not have sold out at that petty price." The title piece of Food for Centaurs is a superlative action shot of Graves in the fine, frenzied throes of a theory. By some recondite detective work, he reaches the conclusion that the centaurs' food was mushrooms. It was a very special scarlet-capped European mushroom, known as the fly-amanite. According to Graves, this mushroom is fiery to the taste, imparts extraordinary muscular strength and creates overpowering sexual desire.
In antiquity, says Graves, some mushrooms went by the nickname of "little foxes." This sets the stage for one of his brazenly assured and highly speculative exegeses of Biblical texts. It is highly unlikely, argues Graves, that Samson caught 300 real foxes, set their tails afire and turned them loose to burn the cornfields of the Philistines. What he probably did was to arm 300 soldiers with flaming torches and inflame the men with the mushroom wonder drug. When the lovely Shulamite in The Song of Solomon cries "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines; for our vines have tender grapes!", she is asking for the fiery aphrodisiac, according to Graves, to be washed down with flagons of wine.