Letter of the Week

Every week, on this page, we will show a different letter from a selection of letters from Paul O'Prey's books on Robert Graves correspondence In Broken Images and Between Moon and Moon.

Date: FEB 1923

Recipient: Sassoon, S.L. (1886-1967)

Location: Worlds End

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Dearest Siegfried

Very many thanks for Conflict and Dream: I find nothing in it that contradicts and much that confirms the work I'm doing now on Conflict and Poetry.

Also I am very glad to meet Tupper in the spirit of friendliness which I never allowed him before: and really he's a good bird at times. Future literary historians will compare your anti-major complex:

When I am old and bald and short of breath,

and elsewhere, with Tupper's sonnet on Army Caste.

Hard Routine

Sets caste and class each by itself aside.

You fierce-lipped major, rich and well allied,

To these poor privates hardly deigns to speak.

And the idea of comparing the Great Exhibition of 1851, the material side of it that is, with the emotional aspect you will be accused of having stolen straight from his:

Great Exhibition

Yet was it an unsatisfying meal

A poor dry pittance to the souls of men.

Other points of contact between you and him there are but not many, you having a direct opposition to his religious complacency, a necessary reaction in the 50ies when the country was recovering from a terrific shaking in the early century and the lean times after the peace; an objection to the family system, which suited him but failed you; an objection to Royalty-toadying (owing to your collateral family history) while with him it was a form of life inseparable from religion, from the position of the Queen (the first religious sovereign since George III before his madness) as head of the Church. And so on.

Tupper wasn't good or bad; he was inevitable and contributed to poetry what at any rate was a jumping off ground for your poetic violence and cynicism. Requiescat in pace.

I enclose a poem retaining the original: unless you demand it.

I also enclose proofs of Whipperginny. They are uncorrected. Have been sorting all my letters and papers including yours and Rivers's and reading them. I feel ashamed of myself for my recent bloodiness to you, but you have been bloody too, haven't you?

Love from

Robert

PS. On Sunday we go to camp, for a week, in two Army tents at Toronto's farm at Tutney. Come and visit us there. 'Swallow your pride, let us be as we used to be.

R.G.