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: 31 OCT 1927

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

Location: Waldon Wood Cottage

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31 October 1927

Dearest Siegfried

I'm not of the Charles Beverly Humbert gang as you suggest but it's very difficult to explain how I am not. It's something like this: I have never in my life tried to arrange a review of one of my own books and have even made a practice of antagonizing reviewers. To arrange a review would be to say that I cared for the opinion of reviewers which of course I don't or that I expected to make money from my books which, again, I don't. I even have a snobbish feeling against selling more than a thousand copies.

If you can imagine me in the case of the Lawrence book being so ingenuously unauthorial that I don't regard it as my book at all, but merely a collation of Lawrence material supplied from various sources and commissioned by Cape and (accidentally) edited by myself as a sort of joke; so unauthorial indeed that I can even act as a tout for it, you'll be at the truth. You can even go further and say that I am anxious not for the money on my account but for Cape not to fall down on the book after having made such big arrangements, particularly as G.B.S. has prophesied that he'll crash on it.91 I would neither have expected nor wished Sir Edmund to review the book favourably as a piece of writing by me -I shall never include it in my collected works -but I would have said that it's a very rich collation of Lawrenciana and likely , to interest him, and good to write about. If he is offended I am very sorry -it was, as you say, 'crass stupidity' on my part not to realize that you and he would not understand my perversely impersonal feelings about the book -and if you will write this to ,: him in explanation it would be good -add my sincerest apologies. He'll get his copy anyhow. Let him add it to his library where it has a place in the biographical section, shut the glass case after it and forget that I wrote to him.

As for you Siegfried and the Herald; I know you too well to apologize. Forget it. I won't write to E.M.F. after this. Now let's stop!

Yours as always

Robert

Do get on with your Jorrocks book and I'll review it in the Waste World journal, a very good paper, all about what happens to entirely useless things like old sausage skins, discarded felt slippers, etc., after they reach the dust cart. This is not intended nastily. But that Colonel Whatever his name's hunting books should be put to (literary) use delights me. Nothing is wasted. (My Scotch grandmother!) Seriously, I do think it's going to be a very good book indeed.