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Love Is the Object. For a man who can read a lot into a mushroom, Graves remains singularly incurious about the ancient sites that have spurred so much of his writing. At 62, the author of I, Claudius finally did go to Rome for the first time. In Centaurs he candidly admits that he has yet to see Athens, Corinth, Mycenae, Constantinople and Jerusalem. "The truth is, I dislike sight-seeing," says Graves. Most modern cities fill him with despair and still another theory: "I believe that closer research into human fatigue-reactions would show that perfectly straight lines and perfectly flat surfaces, perfect circles, and exact right angles, induce between them much of the mental illness for which functionally-built modern cities are notorious."
As for the afterworld, all suggested versions strike Graves as equally and disastrously dull, be it "the Moslem Heaven of sherbet, tiled baths and complaisant houris" or "the Norse Valhalla with its endless battles and mead-orgies" or "the Judaeo-Christian Heaven of golden temples, where only a chaste sodality reigns." They all lack love, says Graves (two marriages, seven living children), and he adds of himself: "I have never not been in love since boyhood." Again and again he makes plain his feeling that love is a poet's major subject and his only object. Recently, for a friend named Ava Gardner, Graves copied out one of his poems, some lines of which he thought described her well. With a change of pronoun, they are as aptly suited to him:
She speaks always in her own voice
Even to strangers . . .
And
She is wild and innocent, pledged to love
Through all disaster . . .