Aversions to food have prompted knowing comment since antiquity, and interpretations are not lacking in our own assiduous day. However that may be, Graham’s “case” was consistent with his hostility to all matters imposed on him—whether by circumstance or natural forces, or at the will of others: a motif unmistakable in the pattern of years. The helplessness or complicity of our humanity in its involuntary needs, cravings, and decay aroused a resentment conspicuous above all in many of Graham’s responses to women. For much of his life he had wrestled, in love and in his books, with the paradox of desire and consummation, illusion and disgust, ecstasy and blame. It was not difficult to imagine him holding the view ascribed by Plutarch to Alexander the Great—another abstemious eater—that “sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was merely mortal.”