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: 28 JUL 1918

Recipient: Marsh, E.M. (1872-1953)

Location: Bryn y Pin

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28 July 1918

Bryn-y-pin

St Asaph

My dear Eddie

Excuse pencil, but Sunday morning is always spent in bed and Nancy won't allow ink in bed (don't blame her either). Today I got your Memoir and have been reading it this morning: it is awfully well done and more and more do I regret that the meeting you promised me in 1914 with Rupert never came off. How impossibly these days such enjoyment of life and feather- heartedness reads: I'm much more of an optimist than any of my friends (indeed I expect the war to finish within a few months) but my capacity for such prehistoric happiness as Rupert had is nothing.

I have a philosophic happiness of a sort by comparing my state, say, with that of Ardours and Endurances or poor old Counter-Attack with this new hole in his funny old head; and here I have flowers and good friends and poetry and fair health and work and my fusiliers and above all Nancy, but times are very bad aren't they? Poor Nancy's mother died the other day of pneumonia and it's been rotten since then: the mother was quite one of the best painters going, in the front rank, tho' she painted very little.

Little poetry worth anything being written (by the way, my friend Peter is publishing a little book privately but it won't be good except for an occasional line; curiously twentieth-century and un-Georgian). I read Davies's Poet's Pilgrimage to Nancy with great pleasure: a delicious book, we both loved it. Davies is a great man, one of the few. How he knows the Welsh!

I don't suppose Ivor has done much more with them there songs?: meanwhile, Eddie, I am just finishing my new poems (lots of new ones you've not seen, and I think very good) to send to Heinemann.

Would you be awfully nice then and either send me the originals, or kinder still, typescripts, because I want to get the thing ready in a week or so.

We are also well on into a children's book of rhymes which Nancy is illustrating.

You'll see the ms. of both of course. But there's not much that will want changing, I hope.

Thanks awfully for the Memoir.

Yours affectionately

Robert Graves