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Palma
3 June 1954
Dear my James:
You are very welcome to write about Graves, for whom I have a power of attorney, if you can face the moral problem, which is: whatever you find bad, strained, untrue in my Collected Poems, by which I mean the 1947 edition (and in next January will mean the 1955 New York edition which cuts and amends still more), you should have told me about as a friend when it first appeared and suggested improvements; so you censure yourself if you censure me. Ha, ha!
Nobody has ever written a book about Graves before, except myself — that biography Goodbye to All That — but the question is whether (so to speak) the fruit is yet ripe enough to pick. Possibly the Cambridge Lectures will ripen it, and my many recent contributions to Punch, both of which are obvious signs that I'm going respectable. I should have thought Cassell might be a suitable publisher, but if you prefer Chatto, because of Day- Lewis, why should I care?
It will be an extremely difficult book to write, and if I had to do it for poor Graves, I'd emphasize the clearer view he has gradually been getting of what is his own peculiar line and what isn't; point out that at times he has gone badly astray (e.g. in the Mock- Beggar Hall volume) and realized this just in time. He has never, however, I claim, worn anybody else's hat as regards rhythm or diction or where-are-you. Or do I lie? But as censure is morally barred, so is praise; the main point being Graves's forty-five years' obsession about getting poems right. One odd thing Graves does is to preserve all the drafts of all his poems; a habit of probably thirty years — no, five more. You see there how it all happens: the only exception being 'Pure Death' which Graves wrote on one of those clever things you buy in railway bookstalls for taking notes on and erasing them again.
But isn't critical work difficult? The vocabulary I mean. Soup- tureenish and cock and hoop
The Fertisan was fine. So sorry about Mary's sister. Have just made a nice historical discovery about Chopin and Sand, and why she hated Majorca so, and feel all set up.48
Love
Robert
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