How do you make the life of a poet work on screen? It helps if they had scandalous personal lives (Rimbaud and Verlaine in Total Eclipse, Dylan Thomas in Last Call and The Edge of Love). Robert Graves was last seen on the sidelines of Terence Davies’s biopic as the friend of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon (Benediction). Now the tables are turned, with a cameo of Sassoon in a film about the early career of the man who would go on to become professor of poetry at Oxford and to win the Queen’s gold medal for poetry.
Graves is an unfashionable figure today, known chiefly through I, Claudius, the TV serialisation of two of his novels, starring Derek Jacobi as the Roman emperor. But he regarded himself first and foremost as a poet, memorably declaring that “prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat” – a line that William Nunez, writer-director of The Laureate, reluctantly had to excise from his script because none of the show dogs had yet been born in the years he chose to cover.
Those years, between 1928 and 1930, turn out to be a gift for a film that follows in a hallowed tradition of lit-pics in which the introverted act of creation comes second to the “creativity” of writers’ love lives – think Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Christine Jeffs’ 2003 Sylvia, or Emma Mackey and Oliver Jackson-Cohen in last year’s Emily, directed by Frances O’Connor, the glamorously fictionalised portrait of the least romantically inclined Brontë.
The Laureate gives us that most exotic of domestic arrangements, a menage a quatre. Tom Hughes’s Graves is in his mid 30s, shell-shocked and struggling to write, when the bucolic life that he shared with his artist wife, Nancy Nicholson (Laura Haddock) in an Oxfordshire cottage is turned upside down by the arrival from the US of the intellectual adventuress Laura Riding (Dianna Agron). Their unconventional relationship evolves into a four-person game of swapsies, after Riding reels a starstruck young Irish poet, Geoffrey Phibbs (Fra Fee), into what they called their “holy circle”.
With cameos for Sassoon, TS Eliot and Edmund Blunden, as well as publisher Jonathan Cape, this is a goldmine of vintage literary gossip – but how true to life is it? “If you’d said it was like Downton Abbey, I would have said great, because everyone’s going to say, ‘Oh, it’s a movie about poets’,” says Nunez, who makes no apologies for the occasional detour from biographical fact. For instance, Graves and Nicholson had four children when Riding arrived in their household, but in the film they only have one. This was in part a pragmatic decision. The vast majority of the people who see the film will watch it as a straight drama, Nunez points out. He didn’t have a huge budget to play with, “and if it had four children, I’d have to write something for them to do, so that was an economic decision”.
But he admits that is not the only reason. In terms of the story, “I think, no matter what day and age we are in, a man leaving his wife with four children is a tough one to get sympathy for, and I wanted people to go along with Robert’s journey. It’s really a film about the power of creativity, and, you know, it all comes at a cost for any writer, painter or musician.”
In an age of male artists being called to account, Nunez’s candour is disarming. In briefing sessions with Hughes – “a big Beatles fan” – he drew a parallel with John Lennon. “I told him just to look at this part, as when John Lennon was with the Beatles, and he was successful, and he was married to Cynthia Lennon. And then all of a sudden, he met Yoko Ono, who was a polarising figure, but he made the conscious decision to go with her and he became a different artist. His ability to write great music didn’t go away, just like Robert Graves’s writing didn’t go away, but his trajectory went another way.”
Nunez discovered Graves as a teenager in New York through the TV serialisation of I, Claudius and his mother’s book of the month club collection of novels, only later moving on to his poetry and to the war memoir that made his name, Goodbye to All That. “There are people who like the war poems and others that like the novels, so if you ask me if he sold out or not. I’d say, No, he just became a different artist that maybe more people enjoy.”
Equally contentious, for fans of Laura Riding, who was a poet and critic of some renown in her own right, was the portrayal of her as a marriage-breaker and good time girl who led everyone on, including Nicholson, and jumped out of a fourth floor window when she didn’t get her way. The window incident is a matter of fact, Nunez points out, as is the fact that Graves jumped out after her, only from a lower window.
His cast includes the poet’s de facto godson, Julian Glover (playing Graves’ father), who met Riding when they were living in Mallorca, where they ran their own influential publishing imprint until the Spanish civil war forced them to leave. “She was such a polarising figure – probably a better editor than an artist. They [Riding’s defenders] can’t deny that, and it is part of the allure of the story,” says the director.
Riding had no children, and none of the four that Graves had with Nicholson are alive, but three from his second marriage, to Beryl Hodge, turned out for the film’s premiere in Mallorca. “They were relieved, because of course, no one wants to see their own dirty laundry,” says Nunez. “But what’s interesting to me, and this is just my supposition, is that they were fine with it because it obviously happened before any of them were born.” Graves continued to have his “muses” while married to Beryl. “I wonder whether they would have been as happy if I wanted to pursue that angle of an old man chasing young muses around in Mallorca.”
If the film is relatable to people who would never pick up a book of poetry then it will have done its job, says Nunez, who attributes his biggest compliment to a “British gentleman” who went up to congratulate him after the Mallorca premiere. “He said, ‘I served two tours in Afghanistan. And when I came home, I had the exact same problems reconnecting with my wife, and I started having an affair, and it totally tore us apart. And I didn’t know anything about Robert Graves, but now I’ll read something.’”
• This article was amended on 28 April 2023. An earlier version mistakenly said that Robert Graves was poet laureate.
• The Laureate is released on 5 May.
