Box 35
Wabasso
Florida 32970
May 18th1983
The Editor
The National Review
150 East 35th Street
New York, N.Y. 10014
Sir:
I am writing to you on the review of Martin Seymour-Smith’s Robert Graves: His Life and Work published in your issue of March 18th, Mr. Jeffrey Meyers the reviewer: this came only recently to my attention. The extremeness of Mr. Meyer’s denigatory attack on myself that figures centrally in the review makes it likely winner of honors for the most rhetorically murderous treatment of me to be found within the book itself, or in any of the reviewing nastiness that the lying resentful fictions about me constituting the book’s hate-centerpiece have roused in manly reviewer emotionality. Lies appeal to the disposition to lie, especially where, in a manly breast, some resentment towards a target of lies rankles. The main source of the lies-inspiring lies of the book on Graves is, of course, Graves himself. He never up-rooted his congenital disposition to lying, which I early recognised in him, the recognition prompting a poem in which he lyingly reported that I had plucked out the lie in him. So long as I could keep alive a comradeship of believing in his wanting to be, despite all the natural dishonesties encumbering his professed identification of literary and moral ambition, he was, to all outward effect, a loyal and grateful recipient of much he set himself to adopt from my principled practice. When I came to the end of my comradely capacity to believe there to be any basis of spiritual aspiration in his literary ambition, his resentment, combined with his liars art in unrestrained release, propelled him into course of full-scale hypocrisy, engineered with as much of what he had learned from me (as he has put it) as his thieving skill could put at his service. A little more on Graves, before I turn to the case of Jeffrey Meyers. Mr. Meyers, with sickly crediting of Graves’s corruptly self-fond picturing himself, writes that Graves gradually patched up friendship with most of the people with whom Laura made me quarrel. This is among the most gruesomely wicked of the Graves perversions of the actualities of his relations with others. It is linkable with his monstrous lie about his relations with his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, zealously reproduced by Mr. Meyers, and found to the taste of all other reviewers pleased to have two women to damn for all the peculiarities of Robert Graves, whom no man of simplest honesty of judgement-instinct has ever really liked, as a plain or literary man. Graves compounded the lie of his war-shattered nerves with the later lie of an unnervingly unhappy marriage with Nancy Nicholson, who not only was ‘bitchy’ in her case of her womanly dignity of person, but, with brave good cheer, cleaned-up Graves, good-humoured him into some social presentableness, graciously indulged his personality-failures as childish clumsiness, made their home a place of friends – gave him something out of which to try to make a human life of his own. After my becoming his friend, and hers, my way of undifferentiating amicability affected considerably his behaviour -style during the entire thirteen years of Graves’ association with me, he had friends, through my cultivation of friendships, in abundance. His plaint of quarrels forced upon him by me is equitable with his plaint about the effects of his war-experience. The true record of relations between others and myself in those years is not one of quarrels but of friendships in happy number, in which Graves had unlimited share.
But to come to the case of Jeffrey Meyers, which involves the retailing of lies about me with the reinforcement of resentfully spewed maledictory calumnies of his own devising. Mr. Meyers made himself known to me some years ago with a request, accompanied by an elaborately detailed bibliographical list of his writing achievements for leave to consult me for the benefit of a planned biography of Wyndham Lewis. I declined to commit myself to assisting him, on the ground that I had had very little contact with Lewis, and that I wished to reserve what I might have to tell of and pronounce upon him for references to him I might find it appropriate into my memoirs. I told him that if I published anything on the subject of Lewis composed for my memoirs before they were published he could regard it as reusable by him. This was the substance of my communication. The violence of the Meyer’s characterisations of me – he says, that I am “surely the most unpleasant literary personality of our time (Brecht, by comparison is charming)”- is preposterous in relation to that of Seymour-Smith, whose resentment has its source in his failure to win my acceptance of a desire of his presented to me in the mid-1960s to make me rather than Grave, the subject of his major literary-career. I had good reasons for my decision. But beside his feeling deprived of an alternative to the attachment to Graves, become disturbing, Mr. Meyers’ feeling frustrated by loss of a fancied profitable little deal in the merchandise of extensive research operation in academically opulent title-fields is of a petulance not entitled to the rating of frenzied vindictiveness. It is the frenzied envy of a man who has immersed himself idiotically in intellectual business beyond his intellectual depth.
With reference to the abysmal intellectual ignorance and incompetence Mr. Meyers ascribes to me, it needs to be said that, as we are both holders of Fellowship awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and in principle held in unreserved esteem by it, it is put in an uncomfortable position by his public airing of his sweeping contempt of me. As to S. Matthews, author of a book of slanderous assault on my late husband and myself, on which Meyer and Seymour-Smith have both gorged themselves, this is a man whose jealous sense of literary failure and unwholesome personality tendencies made him a dangerous friend. The lies he has put in to circulation about us have been seized upon by a mixed lot of rancor-prone people. I cannot but feel that renders such treatment of me as the article by Mr. Meyers published by you contained, so full of rancor and free with lying matter, are owed some counterword from me.
I am, respectfully,
Laura (Riding) Jackson