Martin Seymour-Smith

From Philosopedia

Martin Seymour-Smith (24 April 1928 - 1 July 1998)

Martin Roger Seymour-Smith was a British poet and biographer, one who became known as a critic.

(See his 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written Secaucus, New Jersey: Citadel Press, 1998. Also see Simon Jenner's comments concerning Seymour-Smith, saying he had been a bantam-weight boxer in the army and that he had a deep attraction to astrology, which he thought was not a "belief" but a methodology.)

Obituary

Seymour-Smith's obituary in London's Independent (3 July 1998) was written by Robert Nye:

It is not always the case that a true poet is recognised for what he is in his own lifetime. Martin Seymour-Smith was known to the general public as a brilliant biographer and controversial critic and compiler of literary reference books. But it is for a pure stream of deeply moving and utterly original poems that this writer is likely to be remembered.

Robert Graves may have seen no less when the 14-year-old Seymour- Smith turned up on his doorstep one weekend during the Second World War, when Graves was living in a village in Devon. "You looked so serious with your little case," Graves told him later. Seymour-Smith had sought out the senior poet because of the way a single Graves poem, "The Legs", had spoken to him. That poem is about the merit of going one's own way, and resisting all pressures to conform. It was something that Seymour-Smith managed to do all his life, despite many vicissitudes.

The early friendship with Graves was not a matter of master and disciple. Graves acknowledges the young Seymour-Smith's help in the introduction to his extraordinary "grammar of poetic myth" The White Goddess (1948), and later employed his friend to act as tutor to his children when the family returned to Mallorca. The older poet treated Seymour-Smith as an equal, his poetic peer, and from the start they shared a passion not just for poetry but for myth and magic and the roots of language. It is possible that Graves learned as much from Seymour-Smith as Seymour-Smith learned from Graves. The figure of the inspired poet-child Taliesin, in The White Goddess, has struck more than one observer as owing something to the encounter between Graves and Seymour- Smith at the moment when Graves was beginning work on his study of poetic inspiration.

Seymour-Smith's first books of verse, published in pamphlet form in the Fifties and then collected in two more substantial books, Tea with Miss Stockport (1963) and Reminiscences of Norma (1971), earned him the attention of other independent poets whose friendship meant much to him: Norman Cameron, James Reeves, David Wright, and later C.H. Sisson. He saw himself (quietly but firmly) as belonging to a tradition of English poetry which reached back through these men to Thomas Hardy and John Clare, and beyond them to Coleridge and Donne.

It was not a tradition in much favour at the time, though Seymour- Smith did find a place in Philip Larkin's Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. The discerning, in short, were aware of this man's presence on the sidelines of a game in which he chose to play no part - the game of poetic fame. He comments wittily on this state of things in his poem "Request on the Field," written in response to James Reeves's urging him to "get on the pitch among the knaves and fools / And play the game according to their rules":

I heeded your wise words, and now am on the field

With shirt and socks and red-cross shield.

But before you dribble off, at captain's call,

Could you explain the absence of a ball?

That lively irony is characteristic of him in a certain mood, but his greatest poetry lies elsewhere, in a handful of poems which pursue and puzzle out the quintessence of sexual despair. Vital amongst these are the 13 poems which comprise Section III of Reminiscences of Norma, giving that book its title, and his poem "The Northern Monster" which concludes:

I had forgotten, in a mortal heat,

The distance of love's act from its intention;

That boundless North, which threatens to defeat

Both love's reality, and its invention . . .

Such lines suggest Seymour-Smith's affinity with Donne and Henry Vaughan. C.H. Sisson has remarked that Seymour-Smith "is a poet of the kind, and sometimes of the quality, of Henry Vaughan. Yet he seems armed, by his sophistication, to do battle in the larger world of 20th-century illusions".

Those illusions took a battering in Seymour-Smith's 1,200-page Guide to Modern World Literature (1973) and in his later Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature (1976), encyclopaedic works of erudition in which hundreds of authors are discussed. Anthony Burgess likened Seymour-Smith to Samuel Johnson because of these books, and certainly he resembled Johnson both in the breadth of his interests and the passionate audacity of his judgements. But there was always a quiet side to his scholarship also, most evident in his fine old-spelling edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets (much praised by William Empson) and in his monumental and authoritative biographies of Robert Graves (1982, revised edition 1995) and Thomas Hardy (1994).

His final collection of poems, Wilderness: 36 poems 1972-1993 (1994), again bears out Sisson's characterisation of Seymour-Smith's poetry as "the common speech of a highly sophisticated mind". The Times said of this book that "anyone who cares for English poetry will want it", pointing out that "Here, plainly, is a poet who writes poems only when he has that to say which can be said no other way".

His wife, Janet Seymour-Smith, died two months later:

JANET SEYMOUR-SMITH, wife of the poet Martin Seymour-Smith, has died two months after the sudden death of her husband. She died in her younger daughter Charlotte's arms, the official cause of death being pneumonia, but those who knew her will say that it is more a matter of completeness, and that this remarkable woman died not exactly of a broken heart but because her heart was spent.

Janet Seymour-Smith was many things besides being what she was first and foremost: Martin's muse. A classical scholar, she provided Robert Graves with the translations of original texts which formed the basis for his two- volume The Greek Myths (1955). She worked indefatigably to help her husband in the making of his Guide to Modern World Literature (1973, revised and expanded 1985), described by one reviewer as "an amazing feat of a book, about half a million words long; half the size of Proust, nearly as big as the Bible".

In fact when some expressed incredulity that Martin could actually have read all the authors on whom he passed judgement in that vast but so lively volume he used, cheerfully, to confess that he hadn't. Some were undoubtedly left to Janet. Her mind was his mind in such matters. And what a mind it was - as incandescent as it was delicate and particular. She was certainly, for instance, the Proustian in the family, and delighted in the complete edition of A la Recherche du temps perdu in the Pleiade text which had been given her for a birthday present, comparing Proust's prose with Monet's painting of water-lilies.

Proust's celebration of Combray, the long-lost paradisal place kept alive in love by remembrance, had deep personal significance for her. When Martin died, Janet's message in tribute to him at his funeral was "Car bien des annees ont passe depuis Combray" ("Many years have passed since Combray"). Her daughter Miranda repeated the words for her own passing rite.

She was born Janet de Glanville in 1930 in Exmouth, Devon, where her father was a GP. Her childhood was spent in the West Country and at school in north Wales before she went up to Somerville to read Greats (Latin, Greek, ancient history and philosophy). It was at Oxford that she met Martin, two years her senior, already a published poet and the centre of an admiring circle but at first just one of the many young men who were dazzled by her. Asked at this time by her lifelong friend the novelist Susan Chitty what she thought of the young poet, Janet replied: "Martin will always be around."

The words proved prophetic. For the rest of her life, with the exception of its last eight weeks, Martin was always around. The pair were indivisible and the vitality of their marriage saved Janet on more than one occasion over the next five decades when her own intellectual brilliance exacted its toll. She suffered all her life from episodes when she was overwhelmed by her own mind. At these times, above all, she relied on Martin's love and care and protection. But he relied equally on her as the mainspring of his being and the very pulse of his poetry, much of the best of which was about her, though never sentimentally:

Oh but compassion's gift is merciless,

Lover: delusion's ghost cannot forgive

That in its element, of my distress,

I cruelly make you, you unkindly, live.

"Unkindly", there, means against kind, or as some might say, unnaturally. There was never any lack of the other kind of kindness in Janet Seymour- Smith.

The couple were married at the British Consulate in Mallorca, in 1952. They had gone to the island to live with Robert Graves, who had been Martin's friend since his childhood and whose biography he was eventually to write (Robert Graves: His Life and Work, 1982, revised 1995) - a book which Janet rightly insisted was by far the best of the lives of that poet, as well as being the one which other biographers of Graves have relied on for primary material and because it is written with a fellow poet's inwardness.

As well as helping Graves with The Greek Myths, Janet taught Latin to his son, William. Martin and Janet's first child, Miranda, was born in 1953 while they were still living in Mallorca. Their second daughter, Charlotte, was born soon after their return to England a year later.

Some difficult years followed, during which they lived in various rented cottages in Sussex, while Martin laboured at uncongenial schoolmastering jobs, before he became a full-time writer in 1961. Three years before that they had moved to the rambling old house in Bexhill-on-Sea, originally a Working Men's Library, which was to be their home for the next 40 years. Here, when their daughters had grown up, the emblems of their love became a series of cats, all named after characters in novels by Thomas Hardy: Picotee, Tamsin, Sweetapple.

Martin worked harder than any other serious writer of his generation, pouring out (usually for little money) a stream of critical studies, as well as major biographies, most notably the Graves and his 1994 biography of Thomas Hardy, a true labour of love. Poetry, and the writing and reading of poems, was at the heart of the Seymour-Smith household. The last book Martin published in his lifetime was the volume of poems Wilderness, dedicated to Janet, which contains these lines from a poem entitled "To My Wife in Hospital":

Two people who were very old

Once loved each other so much

That a god decreed

That they should die at the same time

And become one tree.

That poem goes on, ironically, to lament the fact that he and Janet never even managed to walk the long hot way to visit such a tree when they were together in Umbria. "Too far, really, / We said".

Tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed, Janet Seymour-Smith inspired such poems most notably from her husband, but also from others who fell under her spell. She was capable all her life of calling forth love and devotion from those with whom she came in contact, yet treated her admirers with intelligent amusement as well as tact and tenderness.

A lover of roses and Grand Opera (especially Verdi) and in her younger days of greyhound racing, this uniquely gifted woman who gave so generously of herself in nurturing and sustaining her husband's work was always as Graves called her "splendid Janet". I once heard her silence three drunken poets who had been denigrating Milton simply by reciting from memory the first two dozen lines of Lycidas and then saying, "Not that we have to like this stuff, but here we are 300 years on and I can't quite forget it, you see."