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: SEP-OCT 1933

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

Location: Canellun

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No date

My dear Siegfried

In saying goodbye, in what I hope will prove a final letter, I shall not go particularly into the points you have raised but make a general summing up. In reopening this correspondence I was being sentimental, imagining back to the time when I knew and liked you — loved you was more like it. I thought that by now you would probably have settled down into a serenity of mind which would make the revival of our friendship possible. You have ever since then been demonstrating its impossibility from your side, but the real reasons are only now allowed to appear. Your real feeling about me is that I am a disturbing influence, a challenge to your literary self-complacence as the author of some of the best books published since 1900. If thinking that to have written the Heart's Journey is to have fulfilled the whole duty of a poet, or that it is anything but a monument to your emotional shortcomings makes you happy I have no more to say. Our friendship never rested for me on a basis of contrasted literary accomplishment: I am not proud of any book I have written or jealous of any of yours. Be a Sir Edmund Gosse if you must; you'll be a good one. That literary chat about selecting dung-worms as a subject for poetry, and the impossibility of Dickens being improved by me, and my deliberate incomprehensibility and sterile obscurity would delight Sunday Times readers. I shall let your seventieth birthday pass without so much as a silver scent-bottle in homage. (But I am getting involved in 'points' again, I find.)

I was merely referring, indirectly, to the fact . . .' Your unwillingness to refer to anything directly wastes a lot of time. I suppose my 'talking through someone else's bonnet' is a reference to Laura. If you had said straight out that Laura was an obscurantist influence on my way of writing that could have passed as an ordinary ignorant remark, or if you had said that Laura herself wrote nonsense that could have been set against the testimony of other people that she is the most accurate writer there is. But you come out with a comic-postcard piece of vulgarity which is the counterpart of the lace-Valentine vulgarity of your Heart's Journey: and that ends it.

So, for the last time,

Yours

Robert

I forgot whether I told you -that I have got a year's respite for my indebtedness and that you therefore need have no immediate conscience-gnawings about letting me starve.