Robert Graves: His Life and Work (review)

Abstract

Reviews Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982. PP. xiii + 609; 19 illustrations . $22.50. Robert Graves is not usually considered a modernist poet. His syntax is clear, his form is regular, and his main subject is love. Preferring to align himself with traditional English poets from Skelton to Hardy, he has vehemently dissociated himself from Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Despite Graves's choice of antecedents, Martin Seymour-Smith's biography suggests a link between Graves and his contemporaries by dramatizing the depth of his dread of vulgarity. Modernists' use of "vulgar" as their supreme pejorative epithet reflects more than contempt for philistine materialism; it also betrays an ambition to attain an aristocratic superiority to bourgeois respectability. The hauteur of Villiers de l'lsle-Adam's epigram, "As for living, our servants will do that for us," has social as well as aesthetic implications. Declaring themselves exempt from the rules of conventional morality on the strength of their fealty to higher values, some modernists imitated upper-class mores; others simply disregarded common decency. But pursuing an impersonal ideal in their art did not help them shape their personal lives. This biography illustrates the results of believing oneself superior to vulgarity in life as well as in art. By modernists standards, any biography is vulgar in its concern with the particularities of a life, especially sex and money, but this book makes vulgarity one of its themes. Seymour-Smith follows the 364 biography Vol. 7, No. 4 development of Graves's vocabulary for this trait from "wet," the term of his school days, to plain "vulgar," to absolute "goddawful." Its definition kept expanding. Sentimentality and hysteria were certainly vulgar , but so was any expression of personal feeling. Spending money was vulgar, but so was not having any to spend. Prudery was vulgar, but so was lust. Anything concerned with life rather than art was vulgar. Such a definition made the ambition to avoid vulgarity futile, but Seymour-Smith blames Graves's failure on Laura Riding, the American poet who lived with Graves from 1926 to 1939. Their mutual aim of making their poems and lives consistent with an absolute standard is judged misguided idealism in Graves but crass vulgarity in Riding. Although Graves regarded Riding as a necessity to his life and work, Seymour-Smith treats her as a scapegoat for the excesses of his subject. This bias makes the book's interpretations less reliable than its comprehensive account of events. Seymour-Smith has known Graves since 1943 and benefits from the cooperation of Graves, his wife Beryl, and many of their friends. They have provided documentation of their reminiscences in diaries, letters received, letters written but not mailed, telegrams, even scribbled notes more than fifty years old. In addition, an anonymous donor sent him a lifetime's collection of "Ridingiana," which informs his account of the association of Graves and Riding, the center of Graves' career as well as this book. Presented in a lucid narrative, all this data will constitute the basis of future debates. As a source of information, this biography will be as "indispensable" as the book jacket blurb claims. Knowing Riding objects to discussions of her work in relation to Graves's, Seymour-Smith professes his respect for her but in fact assaults her reputation. In 1970 he wrote an appreciation of her work in the Review and subsequently sought her cooperation on a proposed biography. She demanded that he treat her work apart from Graves's and further that he cease to communicate with Graves. This was a strict condition indeed, and Seymour-Smith could not fulfill it. Although I tried to comply with both prohibitions a few years later, she felt that my book (Laura Riding's Pursuit of Truth, Ohio University Press, 1979) also failed to portray her justly. I am certainly not Riding 's authroized defender, but blatant distortions of literary history must be corrected. Seymour-Smith's thesis is that Graves was the victim of domineering women—his mother, his first wife, Riding, and a series of young women. They are presented as the sexual objective correlatives REVIEWS 365 for his myth...