The first thing you should know about Robert Graves is that he was funnier than his reputation allows. The second thing is that he was always broke. These two facts are related in the way that most important facts about artists are related: the humor was structural, load-bearing, the mechanism by which an extremely intelligent man survived the gap between what the world paid him and what he was worth, and the poverty was what kept the humor from calcifying into performance. You cannot become smug about your own wit when the roof needs tiles.
I found him in Deyá in the spring of 1954. He had just come through a bout of TB and what I recognized, without him saying so, as the particular depression that follows prolonged proximity to one's own mortality. He was convalescing. He was also, because this is how Graves worked, writing two things simultaneously: a novel about something Claudian that has since blurred in my memory — not because it wasn't good but because the other thing ate all available attention — and someone else's book.
The someone else was William Sargant. Psychiatrist. Maudsley Hospital, St Thomas', Harley Street. The kind of Englishman who is introduced at dinner parties as charming and described in private as known for his eccentric views on lobotomy and hallucinogenic drugs, which is a thing an actual colleague actually said about him, and which I think is one of the finest sentences in the history of British understatement.
Sargant had written a manuscript about how minds break. Specifically, about Pavlov — the dogs, the bells, the salivation, all of that — and how the same mechanism that makes a dog drool at a sound it has learned to associate with food also makes a Methodist weep at the name of Jesus, a prisoner confess to crimes he didn't commit, and a revival-tent audience throw themselves on the ground speaking in tongues. Same physiology. Same three progressive phases of collapse. Same window of heightened suggestibility at the end, when the old patterns have been shattered and the new ones can be written in.
Sargant's thesis — and this is the part that made me set down my drink — was that the arrow went the wrong way. Everyone assumed the intelligence services had invented brainwashing and religion had inherited a diluted version. Sargant was arguing the opposite. The revivalists had it first. Wesley had it in 1739. The drummers in West Africa had it before that. The intelligence community had simply observed what religion was already doing, given it a clinical vocabulary, and claimed credit.
I had been to Wesley's field sermons. I had watched three thousand people in a field outside Bristol go through exactly the phases Sargant was describing, and I had thought at the time — this was the 1740s, and I was thinking in an 18th-century vocabulary that lacked the word Pavlovian — that what I was seeing was a man who had accidentally discovered how to reach inside another person's nervous system and rearrange the furniture. Wesley didn't know what he was doing. He was doing it anyway. The mechanism didn't require understanding. It required a crowd, sustained stimulation, escalating emotional intensity, and a personality template ready to install at the moment of collapse.
I had also, rather more recently, watched the Ballards do the same thing in auditoriums across the American Midwest with their decree sessions — hours of synchronized chanting, "I AM" repeated until the words stopped being words and became something autonomic, a physiological lever, the verbal equivalent of Pavlov's bell. Edna knew what she was doing. Guy didn't need to. He was the front, the showman, the voice that carried the crowd past its resistance threshold while Edna ran the operation from backstage. I recognized the structure. It was my structure, reflected back at me through a funhouse mirror with a thing wearing my name standing behind the glass.
And here was Graves, in his garden in Deyá, with the manuscript spread across a table made from a door balanced on two sawhorses, editing the whole thing into shape. Because Sargant could not write. Sargant could observe, analyze, synthesize, and draw conclusions that would have made Pavlov himself uncomfortable, but he could not write a paragraph that made a human being want to read the next one. And Graves could. Graves could make anything readable. This was his gift and, at that particular moment, his most marketable skill. He had asked for a third of the royalties. The royalties turned out to be considerable.
"He provides the opinions," Graves told me, tapping the manuscript with a pencil sharpened by a knife — always a knife, never a sharpener, which I have learned to read as a man who either writes outdoors or was raised by people who considered mechanical pencil sharpeners a sign of moral decline. "I provide the structure and the layout." He paused. The pause was the comedy arriving. "To make the saliva flow."
This is a Pavlov joke. The book is about Pavlovian conditioning. The editor's stated contribution is to make the prose produce the same response in readers that Pavlov produced in dogs. Whether Graves intended the joke — I am certain he intended the joke. Whether Sargant caught it — I am less certain. But it doesn't matter, because the joke is also the truth: a book about how narrative structure reorganizes the human nervous system was being structured by the one man in the English-speaking world who understood narrative structure as a technology. Graves wrote The White Goddess. He had mapped the grammar of European mythological possession — the specific patterns by which a story enters a mind and rearranges it from inside. He was, in effect, applying the very mechanism the book described to the book itself.
The mythographer who had mapped how stories possess people was editing the manual for how people are actually possessed.
For the royalties.
I sat in his garden and read the manuscript in one sitting while Graves pruned something — he was always pruning something, the garden was his workshop and his excuse — and I understood three things.
First: Sargant was right. The arrow did go religion-to-intelligence, not the reverse. I had the receipts. I had been in the rooms. Wesley's fields and the Ballards' auditoriums and the ritual spaces of three continents all used the same physiological lever, centuries before any intelligence agency had a name for it.
Second: Graves was dangerous, in the way that only people who don't know they're dangerous can be. He had already, two years earlier, told a banker named Wasson about ancient mushroom ceremonies in Mexico — passed along information about indigenous practices that had eluded botanists and explorers for nearly five hundred years, which is how Graves phrased it, because Graves phrased everything as though it were occurring in a footnote to a poem about the Trojan War. Wasson was a vice president of J.P. Morgan. His expedition would be funded — I knew this, or suspected it, or had the operational instinct for it — by people who were not J.P. Morgan. The mythographer was at a crossroads he could not see, and the roads all led to Langley.
Third: the book would work. Not just as argument — as device. Graves had made it readable, which meant it would be read, which meant the techniques it described would pass from clinical obscurity into the general discourse. Sargant sent a proof copy to Ewen Cameron at McGill, specifically urging him to read the chapters on brainwashing. Cameron had been running psychic driving experiments since 1953. CIA funding arrived in 1957 — the same year the book was published. I am not saying the proof copy was the bridge. I am saying that a bridge appeared at the precise moment one was needed, and the mythographer had built it for a third of the royalties.
Sargant, years later, sent Cameron a note. Whatever you manage in this field, I thought of it first. This is the most casually devastating sentence in the history of psychiatry, and I say this as someone who attended a party at Allen Dulles's house where Sargant explained the manipulative applications of voodoo to the director of the CIA over cocktails, which is a sentence I could not have written in any century before this one and had anyone believe me.
Graves died in 1985. He never knew what his editorial work had bridged. He never knew that his letter to Wasson about mushrooms had set in motion a chain of events that included CIA front organizations, a Life magazine cover story, and the eventual psychedelic revolution. He understood myth as grammar and grammar as power, and he applied both with the casual precision of a man who was simply earning the roof tiles, and the consequences rippled outward in directions he never tracked because he was already writing the next poem.
I think about him often. I think about the garden in Deyá and the manuscript on the door-table and the pencil sharpened with a knife and the pause before the punchline. To make the saliva flow.
The funniest people are always the most dangerous. Not because humor is a weapon — although it is — but because humor requires the same structural understanding of human response that conditioning requires, and a person who can make you laugh has already demonstrated that they know where your levers are. The difference between the comedian and the brainwasher is intent. The mechanism is identical.
Graves knew this. Sargant almost knew this. Pavlov's dogs, I suspect, had opinions about it that no one thought to record.
The three nodes of the 1950s consciousness-manipulation nexus are Sargant (the theoretician), Cameron (the practitioner), and Graves (the unwitting structural engineer). The first reverse-engineered his Methodist childhood. The second ran a deep-sleep ward. The third needed roof tiles and understood that all three problems — how stories enter minds, how minds break, and how to make prose produce a physiological response in readers — were the same problem, seen from different angles.
In 1957, both Battle for the Mind and the "Seeking the Magic Mushroom" article in Life were published. The mythographer's fingerprints are on both. The brainwashing bible and the psychedelic genesis story. He would have found this very funny. He was always funnier than his reputation allows.