GRAVES IN SHORT STORIES

Press, 16 June 1979, Page 17

GRAVES IN SHORT STORIES

The Shout and Other Stories. By Robert Graves. Penguin, 1978. 300 pp. $2.95. Robert Graves’s short stories have been reissued to draw attention to the first story, now the title of the collection, which is being made into a film. It is a sad, chilling little tale, written in 1924, and one shudders to think what the ’current cult of bad “supernatural” films has made of it. In fact, “The Shout” is not typical of this collection which contains stories in three groups: those set in England, those derived from the author’s long sojourn in Majorca, and three gems set in Imperial Rome, a world very familiar to the author of “I Claudius.” Graves’s stories are a feast of unlikely treasures. He writes with passionate feeling of the Christmas truce of December, 1914, and with wry humour of death on a sub-Antarctic island. A familiar ribald joke, in a new guise, enlivens a dull tennis-party week-end. and amid flashes of autobiography comes the sad case of the boy who, at 13, realised he “knew everything” but who forgot it because his teachers did not leave him ulone long enough for him to write it down. Graves has a waspish pen: “the police today don’t believe in witches; only in fairies — real down on fairies they are.” And he is a master of the

unexpected twist in the tail. The collection with “The Shout” is a good deal better than the book’s unpleasant cover picture would suggest. — Naylor Hillary.