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To T. S. Eliot
23 March 1947
My dear Eliot
I have just about finished work on The White Goddess proofs, but since they are still in galley the index will have to wait for the page proofs. I will send them to you by ordinary post, or in _. someone's luggage if that is quicker. But I feel very bad about the present increase in the length of the book I have made as a result of getting back here to my library and being able to make good the sketchier parts of the argument. I have, for example, added what amounts to a whole chapter at the end to explain the historic steps by which Christian mysticism, with its opposition of ideal godhead to the material trinity of World, Flesh and Devil, developed as an improvement on the original Mother-and-Son Orphic mysteries concerned with the δαιμων ξνιαυτοϛ This is most important as allowing me to explain the exact difference between/the God-worshipping mystic eulogized in Aldous's Perennial Philosophy and the Goddess-worshipping poet — between whom stand many Catholic betwixt and betweens — but to reach that point I had to go into the question of why Iahu (Jehovah) was originally a title of Isis; and what the mystical meaning of the jewels of the High Priest's (and the King of Tyre's) breastplate, nearly all mistranslated in the Authorized Version, was; and how they are related to the Sacred Grove sequence in the 'Wisdom' mystery of Proverbs. Deep waters! Deep, but pellucid. So, as I say, the book grew, having already grown far beyond its original size and now I don't know what you'll say, about the - extra 15,000 words!
There are two alternatives:
1) Print it as it stands and charge the public more; and if the public can't be made to pay enough to make the first edition an economical proposition, tell me that I must forfeit a part or all of my advance.
2) Break the book in two. It divides fairly well at the end of a chapter on galley 162, since the extra material is mostly at the end and the last galley 24 will have index tacked on it. I would of course prefer the first solution.
As a poet you'll sympathize with me for having felt obliged to pursue the argument to the finish; as a publisher-that-was I sympathize with you for having so unexpected and awkward a problem on your hands. So there's no question of any quarrel or lack of confidence between us; but what must be done will be done. Certainly the book is very much better now, and though I can't claim to have got everything right I have been able to check and cross-check all my phonier-seeming theories and there are not many important elements in the history of Western myth not examined.
Yours v. sincerely —
Robert Graves
Text Copyright © of Robert Graves Copyright Trust