Volume 34, Number 11 · June 25, 1987
A World's Beginning
By John Wain
Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic
by Richard Perceval Graves
Viking/Elisabeth Sifton Books, 387 pp., $24.95
One evening in 1922 Robert Graves, villager of Islip, Oxfordshire, unexpectedly entered the cottage of another villager, Dick Wilkinson, as the family were having their evening meal. 'What's for supper, Dick?' Graves asked, and on being told that there was bread, cheese, and pickles, pulled up a chair and joined in. Asked what he thought he was doing, the poet explained that the Wilkinsons' cat had got into the Graves larder and eaten two kippers that he had bought for his supper. (The story doesn't say what Nancy Nicholson, his wife, was going to have for her supper.) A meal for a cat against a meal for a man: it was a fair exchange.
Review, 3500 words
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