Books: Epithalamium

WIFE TO MR. MILTON—Robert Graves —Creative Age Press ($2.75).

Breathing heavily, his Bible under his arm, Poet John Milton climbed into the bridal bed. He read his “numb and stark” bride, Marie, a few snatches from the Song of Solomon (“How beautiful is my beloved …”), marked the place with a rose petal, then pushed Marie out of bed to give thanks that the species had been created male and female. When Marie complained that the bridal party had given her a fierce hangover, Mr. Milton lost patience. “Phlegmatic and ungrateful wretch!” he barked. “What a froward, drivelling flibbergib have I taken to my bosom!” Then he booted her out of bed again, turned over and read the Greek classics for the rest of the night.

This is Poet-Novelist Robert Graves’s imaginary conception of John Milton’s wedding night. Nobody really knows the inside story of Milton’s unhappy first marriage to Marie Powell. But most literary historians have given the venerable, thrice-married author of Paradise Lost all the breaks.

Now Robert Graves, brilliant, 49-year-old veteran of 60 volumes of fiction, poetry and biography, has given Poet Milton a drubbing—on the same scanty evidence. His new novel, Wife to Mr. Milton, is an icy, wife’s-eye-view of the Puritan Revolution’s dourest man and greatest poet, set against the backdrop of the English Civil War. It is based on Marie’s “secret diary” (which exists only in Author Graves’s imagination), plus Graves’s solid knowledge of Milton’s life & times.

“A Rude and Nasty Custom.” In Graves’s account, young, gay Marie Powell dutifully married John Miltonbecause her father was in debt to him. “I sorely fear,” warned lusty Mother Powell “that you will go through Purgatory . . . with that stiff-necked, canting, Judasly rogue.”

Poor Marie found it hard going. At the wedding, her husband refused to let the best man tear off the bride’s garters and wear them in his hat—”a rude and nasty custom,” he barked. At meals he propped a book against the saltcellar, read gloomily. Marie used to hear his Latin pupils screeching as he beat them (if they failed to screech in grammatical Latin, he beat them again). Marie had beautiful hair, but Husband Milton was entirely too occupied combing his own long locks to notice hers.

“No man in the world was ever so sincere and modest in his self-devotion,” wrote Marie in her secret notebook. When her husband discovered the notebook he was furious. “A bad wife is to her husband as rottenness to his bones,” he roared. Screamed Marie: “Do not provoke me . . . you Stinkard, Base Slubberdegullion, Cheesy Plagiarist, Immortal Whip-Arse, Eater of Stinking Beef!” Poet Milton hurriedly sent her home to learn manners, and Mother Powell shrieked that he deserved to be whipped. But after a few years Father Powell saw that the Parliamentary forces were going to win the Civil War, so he sent Marie back to her influential husband.

High in Cromwell’s favor, Poet Milton had calmed down a bit. Marie was sorry for her husband (“the proudest and most pitiful of men”) because he was going blind from reading too much. But she despised him as a political hypocrite who had once demanded freedom of the press, but was now a ruthless government censor and friend of the dictator Cromwell.

Poet’s Heir. When Marie became pregnant, Milton hung pikes and pistols over her bed, made her walk the icy roads so that his heir would be husky. “There is a beast in … Russia,” he boomed impatiently, “whose female brings forth by passing between two trees . . . and so presses her womb to a disburdening.” In the next five years Marie disburdened herself of two girls and a boy, died in childbed in 1652. By then, blind, ambitious John Milton had convinced himself of the hopeless condition of human nature and had started writing the epic on which all his hopes were set: Adam Unparadised, later known as Paradise Lost.

Wife to Mr. Milton is not to be compared with Author Graves’s admirable earlier historical novels (I, Claudius; Sergeant Lamb’s America). As a study of Milton in his middle years it is a pretty rough bundle of prejudices. But as English social history it teems with fascinating facts and stories, all skillfully woven into fiction by a talented, professional hand.