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  • Writer to deliver paper on Graves in Mallorca

    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.
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