Abstract: Alan Hodge was one of Robert Graves’s key collaborators before and during World War II. This paper reviews the life of Alan Hodge and focuses on his work with Graves and Riding, examining the excitement and challenges of such working relationships between writers. The paper includes a detailed look at the creation and reception of The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939, published in 1940.

Keywords: Alan Hodge, Jane Aiken Hodge, Laura Riding, Norman Cameron, Ezra Pound, Brendan Bracken, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, social history, correspondence

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This paper reviews the life and career of one of Robert Graves’s main collaborators in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Alan Hodge, with a particular emphasis on their joint work The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. With so much emphasis on the life and writing of Graves, it is important not to lose sight of the many people who helped him in his work, and the profound impact Graves had on his collaborators’ lives.

Before The Long Week-End

Alan Hodge was born on the 16th of October 1915. He grew up in Liverpool and went up to Oriel College, Oxford to read History. He also wrote poetry. As an undergraduate, Hodge helped launch Programme, the journal of the Oxford English Club.[1] Programme was a lively journal full of the distinctive self-assurance of young undergraduates. Over several issues in May and June 1935, Hodge argued with Ezra Pound. In Programme 5, Hodge wrote a review of Pound’s A Draft of Cantos XXXI-XLI which led to a ‘Message to Oxford’ from Pound in Programme 6, and then ‘A Rejoinder to Mr Pound’ by Hodge in Programme 7.[2] The argument was about the relationship of economics and finance to poetry. Pound criticized the undergraduate journal’s ‘dilletante refusal’ to look at economic factors in life in their pursuit of the arts. Hodge, in response, emphasized that poetry must deal with emotion and feelings. From the beginning, the editors of Programme were interested in the works of Laura Riding. The original editor, George Sayer, wrote an essay about Riding in Issue #3 (19 February 1935). In Issue #12 (4 December 1935), there was an editorial on Riding, and, in the same issue, Hodge wrote a review of Epilogue (Laura Riding and Robert Graves’s collaboration, which appeared in autumn 1935). At this time, Riding was living with Graves in Deià, Mallorca. They had moved there following dramatic events in London in 1929, which resulted in an apparent suicide attempt by Riding and the end of Graves’s marriage to Nancy Nicholson. Hodge sent his review of Epilogue to Riding and asked if he might visit her in Mallorca.[3] Riding replied to Hodge’s letter on 20 December 1935, pointing out that Hodge had confused her thoughts on objective feeling and the poetic state of mind. She suggested that, if he wanted to learn more about the poetic state of mind, he should visit her and Graves in Deià.[4] Riding also objected to Hodge’s description, in his review, of Epilogue as ‘the expression of a group of writers centred in [sic] her at Majorca’ Riding wrote to Hodge that ‘Epilogue is an adult production, and serious writers do not center themselves sentimentally in one person but associate on a principle of mutual usefulness’. (Friedmann, p. 273). By Christmas 1935 Hodge was in Deià. He was twenty years younger than Graves, and fourteen years younger than Riding. He was twenty years old when they first met. In his diary for Christmas Eve, 1935, Graves described Hodge as ‘20, young, blonde good head’.[5] Hodge returned to England after his first visit but returned to Mallorca in the summer of 1936 to work further with Riding and Graves. As a result of the Spanish civil war, Riding, Graves and Hodge were forced to leave Deià in August 1936 and return to England (Friedmann, p. 284).

Hodge was now part of the Graves/Riding circle, then based in England after their exile from Spain. He made several contributions, poetry and essays, to the later editions of Laura Riding’s literary magazine Epilogue.[6] In October 1936, Hodge arranged for Riding to visit his Oxford college, Oriel, to address the English Club on ‘The End of the World’.[7] This was during Hodge’s last year as an undergraduate. The American writer Tom Matthews recalled meeting Hodge in Oxford about that time and described him as ‘a small blond boy with a cherubic soprano’s face, an incongruously deep and hollow voice, and a deliberate sententious manner; he seemed about sixteen’.[8]

In Oxford, Hodge began a romantic relationship with a fellow undergraduate Beryl Pritchard. Hodge told Graves about Pritchard in January 1937, and Graves and Riding took a great interest in this development in their protégé’s life. At the beginning of 1937, Hodge also planned to go to Spain to assist the Republican government but Laura Riding said ‘don’t’,[9] and, instead, encouraged him to write and complete his novel Year of Danger, based on his experiences with a former girlfriend, Audrey Beecham (whom Riding and Graves had met during their visit to Oriel in October 1936). The novel was apparently excellent but, sadly, he destroyed the manuscript.[10] The loss of this book was regretted by Graves and Riding. Hodge was said to be undemonstrative, and uncomfortable with strong emotions,[11] and this may explain his decision to destroy his novel, unwilling to publicly share his inner life. Hodge was also an Observer for the British Mass-Observation project which was started in 1937 with the aim of recording everyday life in Britain through the work of untrained volunteer observers. Hodge, it appears, was an Observer for this group during the coronation of King George VI in May 1937.[12]

In June 1937, Hodge welcomed Graves and Riding back to England on their return from a visit to Lugano, and introduced them to Beryl soon after. Beryl joined Hodge for a visit to Graves in hospital in July of that year. Hodge graduated from Oxford the summer of 1937and began helping Graves with the novel Count Belisarius (eventually published in 1938). [13] In January 1938, Hodge married Pritchard, and, in the summer of 1938, Alan and Beryl accompanied Graves and Riding to Rennes, Britanny. Hodge had scouted the town and encouraged them to go there.[14] While Alan and Beryl were in Britanny with Graves and Riding, Graves and Beryl became increasingly close. The group remained in Britanny for about ten months but, in April 1939 Graves and Riding left Brittany for America and were later joined there by Alan and Beryl Hodge. Riding was anxious to meet the poet and literary critic Schuyler Jackson whom she had been fascinated by for five years.

Events in America were tumultuous, fracturing Graves relationship with Laura Riding. The full story of this visit is well-known and will not be repeated fully here except to note that Hodge was among those severely impacted by Riding’s strange behaviour at that time. The result was that Riding transferred her affection to Jackson, her future husband. Jackson’s wife Kit suffered a horrific mental breakdown in June 1939, which Riding may have prompted. At this time, Graves became even closer to Beryl and they clearly fell in love, under the watchful eyes of a not very supportive Riding. In these difficult circumstances, Graves returned to England with Hodge in July 1939. Hodge went on to Warsaw and was there when Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, just managing to escape via Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Norway.[15] Beryl left America several months after Graves and Hodge and, on her return, Graves, not Hodge, met her in October 1939 at Liverpool docks. It was quickly decided that Beryl would live with Graves at the house he was staying at in Great Bardfield in Essex. Beryl went to London to explain the situation to Hodge who appears to have taken the news surprisingly well. Beryl and Robert would remain together for the rest of their long lives.[16] The relationship between Alan, Robert and Beryl remained remarkably amicable despite understandable rough passages. In October 1939, Graves wrote to Hodge ‘Dear Alan, – I think that since this has had to be, it will end happily for us all; you know now [how] I have always felt towards you. And how to me the only painful thing has been when it seemed that you were fighting me.’[17] Beryl continued to write letters to Hodge, and, as we shall see, Graves’s correspondence with Hodge was voluminous from this point on. Hodge appears to have been a very private man and we don’t know how he truly reacted to losing his wife to his older friend and mentor.[18]

As well as assisting on Count Belisarius, Hodge provided research assistance for Graves on the two Sergeant Lamb novels. In October 1939, Graves and Hodge began to collaborate on The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain 1918-1939. Their working partnership survived despite the reality that Beryl had left Hodge for Graves.

The Long Week–End

Thanks to the sterling efforts of Graves’s Literary Executor William Graves and William’s son Philip Graves, we are fortunate to have access to transcripts of Graves’s letters written to Hodge during the time they worked on The Long Week-End. The first letter mentioning the project dates to October 1939 (the same month that Beryl left Hodge for Graves) and correspondence about the book continues through April 1942. Many of the 120 letters sent to Hodge in this period provide fascinating details on their progress on this book.

Just a month or so after the invasion of Poland and the British declaration of war (and Hodge’s escape from Poland), Graves wrote to Hodge on 11 October 1939:

Faber’s [sic] want me to do a bright social English history of 1918-1939 (‘Social’ in its widest meaning). I have no time for it, but I wonder if you, or you and Sally [Graves’s niece Sally Chilver], or someone, could write it: whether they want my name on the book I do not know– perhaps there is something in this? Would you like to think about this?’[19]

Graves adds a footnote: ‘there might be a compromise.’

On 1 November 1939, Graves again wrote to Hodge

And one thing is clear: I will have to be responsible for the final form of every sentence of the book, whoever writes it – I mean, it must be all of a piece with itself, and I would be working with you, or anyone, reserve the right to veto any passage that seemed out of key (expecting of course, the same sort of criticism of anything I wrote) – and it would be impossible, also, to put more than one collaborators name on the cover – not Karl’s, Sally’s etc besides yours.

This reads confusingly, but you know what I mean. I think the thing would be: to undertake the book, but reserve the right to add as joint author the name of any person whose contribution in my knowledge, amounted to 50% of the work – whether yours or anyone else’s [20]

In addition to working with Hodge, Graves was assisted by his secretary and assistant Karl Goldschmidt and his niece Sally Chilver.[21] The correspondence also mentions help on this project from Gordon Glover, Honor Wyatt, Beryl Graves, Beryl’s older sister Evelyn Neep, and Graves’s children, Jenny and Catherine Nicholson, and David Graves. Graves also used his wide network of friends for aid on particular details — for example John Aldridge on painters, Basil Liddell Hart on military matters.[22] These details demonstrate Graves’s extraordinary powers of collaboration and the willingness of so many friends and family members to assist him. Hodge received the co-author credit but, in reality, he was the major contributor in a large team of people helping Graves.

Faber’s preference was for Graves to be the soul author, but Graves saw this as an opportunity to help his friend Hodge by sharing with him money he received from the publishers for the book. [23] The letters make it clear that Graves was concerned with treating his helpers fairly. Goldschmidt, as always, provided a great deal of help and was given the book’s dedication – ‘To K.G. in gratitude for much hard work’ — but Goldschmidt was not listed as a co-author. The exact extent of each participant, including the key participant Alan Hodge, in the eventual book remains uncertain.

Many of the letters contain convoluted explanations of how to compensate Hodge based on the money from Faber. Graves complains about Faber’s ‘meanness’ about money but the work continued.[24] At some point in December 1939, Graves thought that the book would be ‘washed out’.[25] The war made it questionable whether either Karl Goldschmidt or Alan Hodge would be available to help on the project.

The letters show there was some question about how to title the book. In March 1940, Graves suggested something like ‘Class 1940: a contemporary History’.[26] Then in April, he was thinking of including ‘peace’ or ‘peace years’ in the title.[27] By May (when he and Beryl were now living in Galmpton, Devon), Graves wrote that the title was ‘still simmering’. He was considering ‘A Lull Between Wars — A record of happenings in Great Britain between 1918 and 1939’.[28] At the end of May 1940, he was wondering about choosing between his suggestion ‘Twenty years Peace’ and the snappier ‘The Long Week-End’.[29] The credit for the fortuitous choice of the eventual title belongs to Graves’s daughter, Jenny Nicholson. [30]

The Long Week-End was published in November 1940. A ‘Second Edition’ (or Second Impression) appeared in 1950 but, as the ‘Note to the Second Edition’ (written in 1949) explains: ‘We regret that because the type of our book had to be melted down during the war, it has been necessary to reprint the original text by a photographic process, which has prevented us from either making corrections or adding footnotes’.[31]

The book consists of twenty-six chapters exploring different aspects of life between the wars (e.g. women, politics, sex, arts and entertainment) and is roughly chronological in order. The style of the book is entertaining – the prose witty and evocative. The book received mixed reviews. The historian R.C.K. Ensor reviewing it in the Manchester Guardian wrote ‘As revue it is excellent, as history naught.’[32] William D. Clark, reviewing the book in The Journal of Modern History suggests Graves was misled perhaps by the ideals of the Mass Observation school, resulting in a ‘strange unfocused photograph of the times, in which, although the ‘camera-eye’ has never lied, it has failed entirely to introduce any perspective or integration’. He continues: ‘no one who has lived from 1918 to 1939 will learn very much from it, but he will enjoy refreshing his memory’.[33] Others were more generous. In the American Sociological Review, Alfred McClung Lee stated it is regrettable ‘that so few books do so well the useful task Graves and Hodge assigned themselves. Records of other centuries and of other cultures have their significance, but these authors demonstrate how much we can soon forget of our own immediate past, and how useful it would be to remember more detail more vividly.’[34] Graves wrote to Hodge about another review in the Times Literary Supplement and felt that ‘the review will sell the book.’[35]

The less academic reviews were mostly positive and the book has won over many readers and scholars in the years since its publication. Many reviewers were perhaps unaware that Graves was working on several other projects (novels and poetry) at the same time The Long Week-End was written. In addition, it should be remembered that the book was created very quickly, Graves and Hodge supplying a typescript to Faber in August 1940 after only about ten months work.

In the Note to the First Edition, Graves and Hodge point out that they chiefly relied on memoirs and newspapers. As to the accuracy of newspapers, the Note has the striking cautionary remark that there was disagreement in the Press about ‘even so important and recent an event as the German re-occupation of the Rhineland’. They write: ‘According to a large body of opinion it took place in March 1934, not 1936. We cannot explain this’. They were perfectly aware that the correct year was 1936 but the cautionary note has an unsettling effect, as if to say history itself cannot be trusted.[36] Much of the research for The Long Week-End was carried out in newspaper archives and it is noteworthy that the book begins with a criticism of newspapers: ‘The more newspapers people read, the shorter grows their historical memory; yet most people read little else’ (p. 11).

It is impossible to know exactly what details Hodge and Graves contributed to their joint project. However, it is clear that Hodge was the junior partner in the book. Graves is inserted several times in the book, and it is likely that he was mostly responsible for these passages which, characteristically, mythologize him. Hodge, by contrast, remains mostly unseen. At the conclusion of a chapter exploring Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the work of the British philosopher J.W. Dunne, one of Graves’s poems, ‘Midway’ (originally published in Poems 1929) is quoted attributed to ‘a poet of the Twenties’ without crediting Graves. In a later chapter, the authors share (again anonymously) a rather cruel review Graves wrote of a book called The Magnificent Hadrian and, later in the book, there is a quote from Graves’s own diary regarding a dramatic meeting Graves had with Winston Churchill where they discussed Churchill’s frustration with Baldwin’s policies.[37]

Typically, Graves would make changes to his work where he saw potential for improvement. One line in his poem ‘Midway’ was originally written as: ‘Time and Space | Once more distract us with their rough-house turn’. In The Long Week-End, the line becomes: ‘Do not amuse us with their rough-house turn’; and in later collections in the 1950s and 1960s the line becomes ‘Amuse us merely with their rough-house turn.’[38]

It is interesting that it was decided to reprint Graves’s rather cruel review of the book The Magnificent Hadrian written by Sulamif Ish-Kashir.[39] Foreshadowing The Reader Over Your Shoulder, the review mostly consisted of a selection of passages from the original book followed by Graves’s improved rewritten version of each passage. Graves and Hodge state that the reviewer (Graves) chose to make an example of what he saw as a bad trend in historical biography. In retrospect, this seems a weak excuse for the biting tone of the review.

The Long Week-End also revisits topics of particular personal importance to Graves, including a passage on the importance of Laura Riding (despite their falling out after the events in America, Graves and Hodge maintained respect for her genius),[40] and an acknowledgement that Graves‘s autobiography Goodbye to All That was ‘reckless’ and ‘written with small consideration for anyone’s feelings’ (p. 216). The book’s comments on contemporary poetry remind us that this was an area where Graves could not be neutral. Faber, as we learn from a letter from Graves to Hodge, insisted that a description of early poems by T.S . Eliot as ‘pornographic’ be removed before The Long Week-End was published.[41]

History is always a selection from the sea of stories, and the approach of Graves and Hodge seems to me more successful than many in capturing details of the time that would resonate with future generations. In the chapter on amusements, they mention a jocular headline about relativity ‘Hun Professor catches light bending’, a play on the popular phrase ‘My word, if I catch you bending’ from ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’ (p. 117). Like so many others in this period, the authors were fascinated by the new science of relativity. Graves did not have a particularly scientific bent, but clearly some of these ideas encouraged him in exploring the magic of additional dimensions, and his belief that he had the ability of ‘analepsis’ — knowing what happened in the distant past. Later in the book, Graves and Hodge can’t resist quoting a low-brow American Limerick current in the Twenties:

I don’t like the family Stein!

There is Gert, there is Ep, there is Ein.

Gert’s writings are punk,

Ep’s statues are junk,

Nor can anyone understand Ein. (p. 200)

The authors also reflect on the positive impact of the 1937 coronation on stamp collecting, a topic Graves had explored to great effect in his 1936 novel Antigua Penny Puce (p. 369). There is also discussion of developments in ballet in the inter-war period (p. 348-49). Other passages explore the Yo-Yo craze, Mah-Jong, horoscopes, the Lambeth Walk dance, the detective novels of Agatha Christie, and the great cricket controversy of ‘body-line bowling’ (which the British referred to euphemistically as ‘leg-theory’).[42]

The Long Week-End’s memorialization of contemporary phrases is entertaining and preserves what otherwise might be lost — for example, ‘I hope you don’t mind: it’s only a Virgin’ (when offering Virginian cigarettes) (p. 43), the coinage of the phrases ‘It’ girl and ‘Oomph’ girl (p. 140). Finally, we are told, that as part of the mania for King Tut, there was a serious proposal to name an underground extension ‘Tootancamden’ although I have not found corroborating evidence for this (pp. 125–26).

In addition to all these details, the book provides a politically balanced account of these years and leads us gradually to the disturbing point just before the outbreak of World War II, [43] with Chamberlain’s declaration of war. Without knowing what would happen in the War, the authors describe carefully the delicate, stressful period just before.[44] The last chapter of the book is evocatively titled ‘Rain Stops Play, 1939’.

A very different approach to The Long Week-End emerged around the same time - the Mass Observation movement. This project, mentioned above, was launched in 1936 by two young men, the amateur anthropologist Tom Harrisson and the poet Charles Madge. The filmmaker Humphrey Jennings was also part of the original group. The project focused on Bolton (‘Worktown’ as it is called in the Mass Observation literature) and Blackpool. The Mass Observation project relied on untrained volunteer observers to maintain diaries, reply to questionnaires, and anonymously record people’s conversations and behaviours in the street, in pubs and at various public occasions. Seizing an excellent opportunity, the Mass Observation group also mobilized resources to study the day of the coronation of King George VI on 12 May 1937. As mentioned above, Hodge was actually a participant in this Mass Observation 1937 coronation project but The Long Week-End makes no mention of Hodge’s role in Mass Observation despite including a description of Mass Observation (pp. 402–03). The description in The Long Week-End notes that the newspapers were not very kind: the Sunday Times nicknaming the project ‘Mass Eavesdropping’, The Spectator renaming it ‘Busybodies of the Left’. The photographer Humphrey Spender was a key member of the project, photographing daily life in Bolton, and was sensitive to the discomfort the project may be causing. He was uncomfortable, painfully conscious of class differences, and well aware that people were suspicious of his camera, but he was committed to this work.[45] Graves and Hodge observe that, by the time of the writing of The Long Week-End, Mass Observation had begun to concentrate more on investigating public opinion, a complement to the contemporary work of Dr Gallup (p. 403).

The approach of Mass Observation was completely different to the newspaper-based research of Graves and Hodge, and any direct comparison of two such different methods would not be very helpful. One can compare the lasting contribution of the two projects. Mass Observation had the promise of bringing invaluable new data to the research of social history but, as far as results, the very readable Long Week-End looks likely to outlast the various publications of the Mass Observation movement.

The Long Week-End was not particularly important to Graves. Like many of his prose works, it was carried out quickly while working on many simultaneous projects. The speedily written The Long Week-End does what it set out to do — provides a readable and entertaining account of what was on people’s minds in the years between the wars, and skilfully selects items of interest that would otherwise likely be forgotten by the next generation. As one of the reviewers pointed out in 1941, someone who lived through the interwar period might not learn much from the book (Clark, p. 364). However, someone born afterwards would find much of great interest. Details, for example the inter-war obsession with crossword puzzles (Long Week-End, pp. 131-32), resonate with what they knew of their parents and grandparents and shed light on a recent but lost world. Graves and Hodge’s book still gives pleasure to its readers today.

After The Long Week-End

After finishing The Long Week-End, Hodge and Graves co-wrote The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943). They also collaborated (with Norman Cameron) on a book of poems Work in Hand (published 1942).[46] The plan was that Hodge would also collaborate with Graves on the book The Roebuck in the Thicket (eventually published as The White Goddess). However, Hodge soon realized he was not well suited for this project and told Graves in September 1943 that he couldn’t be of much help.[47]

Word War II was ongoing. In 1943, Graves’s son David was reported missing and later presumed dead. Hodge spent the Second World War at the Ministry of Information, serving Harold Nicolson and then Brendan Bracken. In 1944 he took a job as book-reviewer for the London Evening Standard. After the war, Hodge continued to work for Brendan Bracken for some years, joining him at The Financial Times in 1946.[48] Hodge was a guest at the wedding of Jenny Nicholson (Robert Graves’s daughter) in February 1945 where, we are told, Graves had his arm around Hodge.[49] The end of the war, though so long desired, had a strange effect on many, including Alan Hodge. He wrote on Whit Monday (21 May 1945), a couple of weeks after V.E. day, to Beryl: ‘now I find myself short-tempered, and really angry if I am expected to think of something more than a day ahead’ (p. 107).

Hodge had another difficult relationship in 1944, [50] but some years later, on the 3 January 1948, he married Jane Aiken. They had two daughters.

From 1946 to 1952, Hodge worked with the publishing firm Hamish Hamiton. His editorial work there impressed Raymond Carver who wrote on 4 December 1949 to the publisher Hamish (‘Jamie’) Hamilton:[51]

Your man Hodge is a superb editor, the rarest kind of mind. These trained-seal critics even the best of them, bore me at least two thirds of the time. Give a man a name of prestige and he is already a fair way to being an ass. I do not suggest that Alan Hodge lacks prestige, but he is still in that happy territory where the man’s voice is more important than his name. ..Surely no one could write better introductions. The Betjemans (I may have spelled that wrong), the Quennels, the Mortimers, etc. are always a little intent on making a good appearance before their admiring public. Hodge is concerned with the book and damn all else.

Hodge also published translations of Haroun Tazieff and Georges Simenon for Hamish Hamilton.[52]

Hodge went on to be the founding co-editor of History Today where he worked from 1951 until he died.[53] In his obituary in The Times, the writer notes that Hodge’s stewardship of History Today was ‘executed in a manner at once scholarly, imaginative and judicious’.[54] Hodge also served as an editorial assistant on Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples from 1953 until 1957. Churchill was very fond of Hodge and the two remained friends until Churchill’s death in 1965.[55] Hodge destroyed many of his drafts of the History so that their discovery would not impugn Churchill’s originality.[56]

From 1957 to 1959, Hodge joined the team of historians assisting Anthony Eden with writing his memoirs.[57] In 1960, he also worked on a biography of his old mentor Brendan Bracken but was hampered by too close a relationship to the subject and by Bracken’s order that his private papers be burned after his death. Hodge gave his notes on the biography to Andrew Boyle and Charles Lysaght who both issued biographies of Bracken in the 1970s.[58] In 1960, Hodge and Peter Quennell (his co-editor at History Today) collaborated on The Past We Share: An Illustrated History of the British and American Peoples.

Hodge remained friends with Robert and Beryl until his death on 25 May 1979 but his work with Robert mostly ended in 1943.[59] By the time of Hodge’s death, Hodge and his wife had decided to live apart but remained on good terms,[60] and she had been to visit him the day before he died, showing him a card from Beryl and a new reprint of The Reader Over Your Shoulder.[61]

Observations

This article does not set out to be a biography of Alan Hodge (although I believe he would be more than worthy of one). His life and relationship with Graves, Riding and others does shed light on the complexity of literary partnerships. The impact for a young man of twenty being embroiled with such powerful and inspirational figures as Graves and Riding must have been considerable, if not overwhelming. Graves and Riding appear to have been equally delighted to find a young man so sympathetic to their literary and poetic views. In the course of a few years, Hodge lived in Mallorca, England, France, the United States, and travelled through much of Europe before the outbreak of World War II. In this same period, he married and shortly afterwards lost his wife to his older mentor.

Hodge was drawn into Riding’s world and worldview. Julian Symons recalls an awkward meeting with Hodge (whom he calls ‘X’ in the essay) discussing Laura Riding. Symons had visited Riding and Graves on 7 May 1938. Riding encouraged Symons to meet with Hodge who was writing an article on Auden. Symons spoke openly to ‘X’ (whom he describes as ‘warm and friendly’) about Riding. Symons described her personality as aggressive and her conversation as rather wearing. Hodge felt he had to pass on Symons’s criticisms directly to Riding — Robert thought that was a mistake. A small example of the many difficulties that must have been involved in navigating the Graves/Riding circle.[62] In 1938, while in Rennes, Brittany, the stress of working with Riding and Graves began to weigh more heavily. Martin Seymour-Smith notes that Hodge once came home drunk on Pernod, saying, perhaps mocking Riding’s self-confidence, that ‘whatever he said was true’.[63]

Like others before him, Hodge went from devoted disciple of Riding to breaking with her, especially after the events in the United States. Like Norman Cameron’s widow, Alan Hodge’s widow Jane Aiken felt that Laura Riding caused great harm to her collaborators.[64] The impact of the traumatic stay in America must have been considerable. Seymour-Smith wrote:

Riding had an acute and uncomfortable sense of Alan Hodge’s disgust with her: she later referred to it as ‘hatred’, and called it ‘rebellious’. But Alan, an undemonstrative man, did not want to show his disgust, he wanted to be elsewhere. Intense emotion was disagreeable to him.[65]

Both The Long Week-End and The Reader Over Your Shoulder show the effectiveness of the Graves/Hodge partnership in prose. This was the peak of their working relationship where Graves was clearly the senior party. For Graves, this was a continuation of a practice of working with many helpers and assistants, as he had with the Claudius books. Both Hodge and Graves probably assumed that they would keep working together but, as we have seen, Hodge felt he could not follow Graves into his work for The White Goddess. The younger man wrote to Graves in 1943, ‘I should regard your epitome as a kind of myth; needing telling and interpreting as only you can do it. I think it is a good myth — that is, it has truth, and it is not necessary to ask whether it is entirely factually true’ (Lockhart, pp. 375–76).

The second half of Hodge’s life makes an interesting contrast to his eight years with Graves. Hodge was now fully back in the world of England and, in lieu of Graves and Riding, he now had close relationships with new mentors such as Brendan Bracken and Winston Churchill. Bracken was very supportive of Hodge, suggesting him for important writing assignments for Churchill and Eden. They were very close and, on occasion, Bracken would tease Hodge (Lockhart, p. 204). In 1942, Lockhart remarked in his diaries that Bracken called one of his secretaries (Bernard Charles Sendall) ‘Sunshine’ and Lockhart suggested that his other secretary, Hodge, be called ‘Gloom’ or ‘Rain’ (Lockhart, p. 167). Working with Churchill involved attending many distinguished dinner parties and visiting Churchill in his villas in the South of France.[66] One can see some reflection of Graves’s obvious fondness for Hodge in Churchill’s affection towards his young assistant and his family.[67] Hodge, a modest man, provided generous support to all these major figures in his life.

Hodge’s emphasis shifted from poetry to history (his subject at Oxford). In his youth, and during his time with Graves and Riding, Hodge had written many poems but his main focus for the last twenty or so years of his life was his important work on History Today.

Hodge maintained his friendship with Robert and Beryl for the rest of his life but there were some rocky patches. In the mid 1950s, Graves became increasingly annoyed with the delays in publishing Norman Cameron’s poems.[68] The copyright had been left to Hodge when Cameron died in 1953. On 4 August 1954, Graves wrote to James Reeves ‘What is happening about Norman’s Poems? Alan does not answer letters; I tried to apply sanctions by saying I wouldn’t continue to subscribe for History Today unless he wrote, but even that he failed to answer’.[69] In a 27 July 1955 letter to Reeves, Graves wrote: ‘Alan promised me last year he’d get on with the job of Norman’s poems ….. I think it’s stinking. And no excuse: none.’[70] Eventually, the collected poems were entrusted to Cecil Day-Lewis. On 14 November 1955, Graves again wrote to Reeves to say ‘Cecil Day-Lewis got a promise from Alan to send poems and introduction; then silence; but writes to me that he will get them from him or die in the attempt!’.[71] The Collected Poems of Norman Cameron finally appeared in 1957 with an introduction by Graves.[72] Given the new direction and priorities in Hodge’s life, it is understandable that it was challenging to return to this project from his earlier life

Overall, the years after the war form a striking contrast to Hodge’s youthful exciting nomadic years from 1936 to 1939. Contact with either Graves or Riding could be very destructive, as well as exhilarating and inspiring. Hodge devoted several years to that poetic world. After the war, he settled down to a career more focused on biography and history. He found new mentors who supported and encouraged him without the difficult emotional entanglements he found with Graves and Riding. His boldness and confidence led him to reach out to Riding in 1935, and set the course for the remainder of his interesting and varied life.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, for giving me the opportunity to review their collection of the Oxford University student literary magazine Programme. This paper would not have been possible without the Online Database of Robert Graves Letters and I am indebted to the work of William and Philip Graves. As always, I am grateful to my sisters Helena Simon and Julia Simonne, and my wife Sabrina Zirkel for their helpful review and support. I am also grateful to Michael Joseph and Anett Jessop for their encouragement. An earlier version of this paper ‘Memory and History: Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Long Week-End’ was presented at the San Francisco meeting of the Pacific Coast Modern Languages Association on 22 November 2025.

Christopher Simon is an independent scholar. His research interests include 20th century British literature, and Greek and Roman archaeology. His article on ‘Robert Graves and the Emperor Claudius’ appeared in The Robert Graves Review, 1.3 (Summer 2023). The author may be contacted at cgsimon@berkeley.edu.

NOTES