Robert Graves by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

Author:Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Shortly after this letter was sent, only days after Mabel Nicholson’s death, Graves was alarmed to hear of Sassoon’s own narrow escape from death as he returned from one of his ‘Mad Jack’ raids on the Germans. Once Graves knew that Sassoon would recover, and even after Sassoon had repeated his criticism of The Patchwork Flag collection, he continued to be ‘bloody happy’, reminding his older friend that he was also ‘bloody young’.22 Sassoon responded with another verse-letter to put beside Graves’s to him from Bryn-y-Pin, a letter that would cause great trouble between the two men over a decade later. (Lying wounded in a London hospital, Sassoon’s epistle had opened: ‘Dear Robert, / I’d timed my death in action to the minute…’)

Sassoon’s comments on The Patchwork Flag convinced Graves not to publish it, but they were not entirely negative; he offered suggestions and some praise too. He liked ‘The Leveller’, for instance, not surprisingly since, as Graves points out, it is as good a skit on Sassoon as Sassoon’s The Daffodil Murderer was on Masefield. Graves based it on the death of two men he had known who were killed by the same shell: ‘one a sodden Anglo-Argentine and t’other a boy of 18, very young-looking; the first called out “mother, mother” and the other cursed God and died.’23 The last verse, Graves admits, is ‘pure Sassons [sic]’:24

Old Sergeant Smith, kindest of men,

Wrote out two copies there and then

Of his accustomed funeral speech

To cheer the womenfolk of each.25

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