Perils of Utopia

WATCH THE NORTH WIND RISE (290 pp.) --Robert Graves--Creative Age ($3).

Britain's Robert Graves is one literary campaigner against God who refuses to find his compensation in Communism, Existentialism, or any other materialistic system. In eccentric loneliness, Graves worships his own spectacular deity--a lady known as the White Goddess, whom he declares to be the true Godhead and only true muse of poets, and to whose abandonment by erring man he attributes most of the mess in the world today.

Graves was not obsessed with Her when he wrote his earlier poems and historical novels (I, Claudius, Sergeant Lamb's America). But last year he published an erudite mythological study of Her nature and origins (The White Goddess--TIME, Sept. 6) which packed such a punch that even poised Poet T. S. Eliot sagged at the knees, gasping: "Prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable." Graves has exhorted his fellow artists to wake up to the fact that the Goddess (who represents for him Nature, and the mysteries of birth, love and death) is the

. . . one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling . . .

Goodbye to All That. But the poets have gone on with their own private concerns, and the Christian has calmly continued to worship Christ--furiously described by pagan Poet Graves as

The outrageous Child who stole the axe of power,

Debauched his virgin mother

And fiercely vowed he would be God the Father . . .

So, in his new novel, Graves has brusquely abandoned a world that is so out of step with him and has created a Utopia--a world named New Crete, where, after Christianity has been destroyed by world wars, man has at last recognized the Goddess. The hero of it all is a Rugby-and Oxford-educated poet by the name of Edward Venn-Thomas.

He is snoozing beside his wife in the "Late Christian Epoch" (the 20th Century) when the Goddess "evokes" him into an unstated time in the future. At first glance, he thinks New Crete looks wonderful. Money and machinery have been abolished; matriarchy has made everybody happy; poets, witches and magicians are thick as nuts and considered an elite class.

The women of New Crete have a wonderful time choosing husbands, but sex, for the elite, is only for breeding purposes; the rest of the time, explains a poet, "we lie side by side, or foot to foot, without bodily contact, and our spirits float upward and drift in a waving motion around the room." Homosexuals and other biological misfits, such as hens that cannot lay eggs, are treated to euthanasia. (The same goes for those who violate "custom" and are repudiated by their class.) Otherwise, all violence, even impoliteness, is tabu--though occasionally New Cretan males are allowed to let off steam by pummeling each other with sticks or donning colored shorts and playing football to the music of a song called 0 Land of Our Mother, the Footballers' Queen. New Crete has a large class of bureaucrats known as "recorders." Their chief function is to destroy as many records as possible.

Goodbye to the Dam. In fact, everything is so cream-smooth in New Crete that Poet Venn-Thomas wonders 1) if the magicians, who are vegetarians, wouldn't be better off with a few chunks of red roast beef and 2) why the Goddess ever brought him there.

He soon finds out, when the Goddess herself appears in the form of an unscrupulous female named Erica--a "triple-faced, ash-blonde bitch" with whom Poet Venn-Thomas had had a gruesome love affair in the Late Christian Epoch. What Erica does to overcivilized New Crete is something awful. She plants some 20th Century cigarettes in the closet of a cute little nymph named Sapphire; she fouls up the witches, hexes the horses, mortifies the magicians. By the time she's through, New Crete is on the verge of collapse--at which point Poet Venn-Thomas sensibly decides to whirl back to the bloody old 2Oth Century with little Sapphire. All this is Poet Graves's way of saying that to be too good (as were the New Cretans) is just as bad as to be too bad (as people are today;. Cries the Goddess:

When water stinks, I break the dam,

In love I break it.

What Graves seems to be saying is that the Goddess is malevolent, too, and that her worshipers must recognize this or degenerate into stagnant smugness.

Watch the North Wind Rise is no great shakes either as a novel or a sociological essay. But it manages to stand up--and to stand out--as another rich expression of Robert Graves's fantastical mind. To laugh in the face of his Goddess is only natural; but without this pure yet beastly muse Graves would probably not be what he emphatically is--one of the finest poets of the Late Christian Epoch.

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