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: 06 MAR 1956

Recipient: Savage, Derek (1917-2007)

Location: Palma

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To Derek Savage

Palma

3 March 1956

Dear Derek:

It's always a pleasure to see your handwriting on an envelope, even if I read inside that you've been having a hard and unhappy time. But somehow you survive; and it's nice to have you as a name to quote when people say that there are no honest critics who are good, or good who are honest.

Yes: Crowning Privilege was criticism only in matrix (a crystalline rock of personal belief and prejudice), at least the lectures were. The written pieces came closer to criticism. (O dear, seven books published last year; five new books already finished in 1956 — two long Penguin Classics;* a book of satiric short stories called ;Catacrok!; a book (with Joshua Podro) about recorded appearances of Jesus in the flesh, after the Resurrection, from AD 30 to 70 AD — glad I don't mean visions, but solid appearances — Christian, Jewish, pagan, Latin, Moslem and Sanscrit documents quoted — not conclusive, but suggestive; a critical edition of English Ballads for schools; another book Winter in Majorca already out. Three more books projected: one nearly done: one half done. Too many. I also have written some short poems.'

So pleased you have a room of your own. I once had an attic — it was wonderful for poems, and smelt of apples.

Siegfried: yes, too much money. But he didn't settle as a landed proprietor for some time after the War — lived in a Westminster flat and played the piano, also godfather to destitute young actors. He was never really a rebel against society, only against British military stupidity, and joined the Daily Herald merely because the Socialists had been anti-War; and for no other reason. True he never really fitted into county Society because of being a Sassoon, a name greatly scorned in good King Edward's day, and more when . he died. But he wanted to. I met him accidentally the other day, and he was very glad to greet me; but slipped away into furtive retreat. Besides his homosexual soul-scar, he has an Enoch Arden complex — or so he told me once —- and a lot of self-protective dishonesty. He never read Marx or preached Socialism in my hearing.

Herbert Read: another mess. I have always avoided him. And carries Jung in a carpet bag, as the Scots are said to have carried :5 the Holy Ghost, in the Civil Wars, to London.

Beryl and ourselves all well. Tomas, now 3, is terrific; Lucia is beautiful and thoughtful and amusing and recently spent ten days with her big sister Jenny at Rome. No teen-agers here — the step is cut out somehow. Girls; and women.

Love to all

Robert

* Suetonius and Lucan