Kent Good Times Dispatch, CT
June 30 2006
Writer to deliver paper on Graves in Mallorca
A work begun long ago will find an outlet this summer when Georgianne
Ensign Kent presents a paper, “Poet to Poet: T.E. Lawrence and the
Riddle of S.A.,” at the Robert Graves Conference in Palma, Mallorca,
in July.
The theme of the conference, sponsored by the Robert Graves Trust, is
“Robert Graves and His Collaborators.”
Ms. Kent, who has made Kent her home since 1991, said she was first
attracted to the story of T. E. Lawrence, the impossibly enigmatic
hero of a World War I “Arabian Nights” adventure, after the film,
“Lawrence of Arabia” was produced in 1962. “I was looking for an idea
for a book,” she said succinctly, adding that she wanted to present
an existential view of the largely medieval Lawrence.
“Existentialism was hot back then, but by the time I finished the
book it was not so hot,” she observed wryly.
Still, researching the book brought her to Dorset, England, a place
she came to love so much she returned there to work on a second book.
The Lawrence project gave her an opportunity to have discourse with
the poet Robert Graves, and it introduced her to the worlds of
archaeology and the Middle East.
Graves, was her first outlet. Born in Wimbledon, England in 1885,
educated at Oxford and equally at home as a writer of fiction,
non-fiction and poetry, he was both friend and biographer to T.E.
Lawrence. It was to Graves that Lawrence turned for criticism of his
dedicatory poem in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and it was to Graves
that Ms. Kent turned for insight into her subject.
Ms. Kent’s paper, which details Graves’ rewriting of a verse of
Lawrence’s poem and the mystery of the identity of the person to whom
it was written, will include a correspondence that she conducted with
the English poet.
“Lawrence sent his poem to Graves and asked him if it were poetry or
prose,” Ms. Kent said, adding that Graves gave an equivocal answer.
“He rewrote one of the stanzas and sent it back to Lawrence. It was
very beautiful,” said Ms. Kent. “Of course, that was not what
Lawrence wanted and he didn’t use it.”
Graves apparently retained his reservations about Lawrence’s poetic
abilities. When Ms. Kent later asked him if he considered Lawrence to
be a poet, he replied yes, “not for what he wrote, but for the way he
lived.”
Graves was nevertheless a friend of Lawrence’s and profited from the
association. Lawrence sent him truncated chapters of “Seven Pillars
of Wisdom,” his account of the war in the desert, for Graves to
publish during a period of financial need. And Graves later wrote
“Lawrence and the Arabs,” a successful biography of the warrior.
In return, Graves was protective of his friend’s legacy. When
Lawrence’s sole surviving brother sought to stop the production of
“Ross,” a play that depicted Lawrence as homosexual and sadistic,
Graves joined in the battle.
Ms. Kent eventually dropped the Lawrence book and moved on to other
projects, later publishing three works under her maiden name: “The
Hunt for the Mastodon,” “Great Beginnings: Opening Lines of Great
Novels,” and “Great Endings: Closing Lines of Great Novels.”
It was not until much later, when she was participating in an
archaeological dig in Mallorca, that the path of her life crossed
Graves’ again. “I was on a dig in Mallorca where he lived and I
wanted to see his house,” she related. “It was inhabited by his
widow, but she died before I got there. So I wrote to his oldest son,
William, who said the house was going to become a museum, but that he
would show it to me. I had the amazing good fortune to be shown
Graves’ house by his son.”
During that tour she told William Graves of her correspondence with
his father about Lawrence and he suggested her participation in the
upcoming conference.
Ms. Kent said that the passage of decades required her to go back and
prepare her Lawrence material again. “I did a lot of research,” she
said. “Last year I was in Oxford and did some work at the Bodleian
Library [the main research library at the university].”
The work on her Lawrence paper temporarily put on hold her most
recent project, a biography of her Armenian grandmother, Vartanoosh,
which will be published later this summer.
Here, again, other interests have grown in fields sown by her early
Lawrence research. “Lawrence introduced me to England, to archaeology
and to the Middle East,” she said. “I wouldn’t have gone to the
Middle East when I did or to the places I went, if it were not for
Lawrence.”
The story the Armenians, a culture that suffered genocide during
World War I, and of her family’s emigration to the United States
struck an emotional chord with her. She began to research her family
background, spending a month with her aged grandmother in Florida,
taping her memories of the past.
“My grandmother came to this country in the late 1880s after first
escaping to Beirut,” she recounted. “I stayed with her for a month,
taping her memories-some of which she embroidered. I started with
that, but then I would check the stories on the Internet and many
have turned out to be right. For instance, there were rumors of a
possible massacre in Beirut, so they moved inland to a town called
Zhale. She described how the houses were built one on top of the
other. I found a picture of the town on the Internet and the houses
were exactly as she described them. She was a really dynamic woman.”
Ms. Kent said she will self-publish the book, titled “Vartanoosh,”
and expects its main distribution to be among the extended family.
Ms. Kent studied journalism at Northwestern University, expecting to
pursue a career in magazine writing. She found herself sidetracked
into advertising, however, and spent 25 years-“broken up by decisions
to go write books”-in that field. Eventually she left advertising
altogether and worked for a while in a medical office, a position
that she loved.
“Then I met my husband and moved her in 1991,” she said. While in
Kent she penned her two anthologies of first and last great lines.
She said her current goal is to complete her book on her grandmother.
“I have other ideas [for future works], but nothing that has
crystallized yet,” she said.