Vol. 8 No. 17 · 9 October 1986
pages 19-20 | 3391 words
Hello to All That
Martin Seymour-Smith
- Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895-1926 by Richard Perceval Graves
Weidenfeld, 387 pp, £14.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 02 977894 8
This is the first volume of a projected three-volume ‘definitive’ biography of Robert Graves by his nephew, Richard Perceval Graves. It takes over where the author’s father, Robert’s younger brother John Graves, left off. John, who died in 1980, had been described by Robert as a ‘typically good pupil of a typically good school’ (to which he returned as teacher); he had for long contemplated the composition of a book called My Brother Robert. The outstanding virtue of his son’s first volume – which almost exhausts the private information he holds, mainly derived from the diary of the poet’s father Alfred Perceval Graves – is that it is a worthy completion of the task John Graves set himself. He would not have gone beyond 1931 and the death of Alfred Perceval. As Richard Perceval Graves remarks, John was ‘a devout Christian, a loving father, and a most honourable, unselfish man’. The difficulties begin here. This author, who has written accounts of the lives of T.E. Lawrence, Housman and the Powys brothers, closely resembles his father. But Robert Graves did not at all closely resemble his ‘typically good’ brother; nor does he resemble his ‘typically good’ son – who, although he has ‘known’ and ‘loved’ his uncle ‘since childhood’, did not know him very well at all, and was never the recipient of his confidences. Nor, for that matter, was Robert capable of speaking in the moralistic terms employed by Richard Perceval. But his family for the most part (there are exceptions) was – and is. This gives The Assault Heroic an unexpected dimension.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 20 · 20 November 1986
From Richard Perceval Graves
SIR: Although readers of Martin Seymour-Smith’s review of the first volume of my biography of Robert Graves (LRB, 9 October) will not necessarily expect him to greet my book with unalloyed pleasure, they have a right not to be misled by him on factual details. Two small examples may suffice; despite Martin’s very kind offer to help me with Volume Two, he has used these examples as the basis for the damaging assertion that ‘where this biographer speculates, and where he can be checked, he is mistaken,’ and for the still more damaging implication that I have neglected to do ‘a little elementary homework’. One wonders, incidentally, what he would have asserted or implied had it been I, and not he, who had mistakenly added two years to Robert’s career at Charterhouse.
According to Seymour-Smith’s review, I think that a letter to an influential person ‘must have been sent well after 19 July 1917’, when in fact Seymour-Smith knows – though he did not previously tell us – that it was written on 19 July 1917. I am certainly interested to learn the precise date, but at no point do I declare that the letter must have been sent well after 19 July. On the contrary, that date fits in perfectly with my account on page 181, and also confirms my speculation on page 352 that the letter was written ‘between 19 July … and 24 July’. According to Seymour-Smith’s review, I think ‘that the press-cutting in which Sassoon announced his pacifism was Graves’s first news of it.’ This remarkable statement flies in the face both of my narrative account and of my reference notes. On page 177 of my book, for example, I specifically stated that ‘Robert was sent a copy of Sassoon’s statement on 10 July,’ and on page 352 I specifically point out that the relevant press cutting ‘was not published until 27 July 1917’. And incidentally it is Seymour-Smith on page 55 of his book who begins the sequence of events under discussion with a ‘newspaper cutting’ arriving in Graves’s post: so in this case he has not only accused me falsely, but accused me of his own error! Need I say more?
Richard Perceval Graves
Shrewsbury, Shropshire
