Martin Seymour-Smith

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Martin Seymour-Smith (b.April 24th, 1928 - July 1, 1998) was a British poet, critic and biographer.

He began as one of the most promising of Anglophone post-war poets, but became more famous as a critic, writing biographies of Robert Graves (whom he met first at age 14 and maintained close ties with), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, and producing numerous critical studies. He was also interested in astrology.

The poet and critic Robert Nye only averred what many other poets, including Graves himself, C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Grigson, James Reeves, and others claim: that Seymour-Smith, 'relying heavily on the non-productive side of myself' remained one of the finest British poets after 1945. His Collected Poems have been recently published (Greenwich Exchange, 2005).

He sprang to prominence in 1963, editing the first old-spelling edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Characteristically, his commentary probed issues around Shakespeare's sexuality which upset many in those (just) pre-Profumo days. Later, the author's 'Fallen Women' (1969) and 'Sex and Society' (1975) would become 'standard plundering material for more famous works' as the author good-humouredly claimed. He had known Alex Comfort from their schooldays, himself then writing 'The Joy of Sex' (1972) and the two often swapped notes, emptying hotels in the process.

As a scholar Seymour-Smith's 'Poets Through their Letters Vol 1' (Wyatt to Coleridge) was acclaimed but never sold. Hence no Volume 2. Nevertheless, this, and other critical books paved the way to his greatest achievements.

Meanwhile, his two volumes 'Tea with Miss Stockport' (1963) and 'Reminiscences of Norma' (1971), praised by many including Peter Porter whom Seymour-Smith had hardly courted, led to the acclaim cited above. But a perceived creative silence till his last extraordinary collection, 'Wilderness' (1994) led inevtiably to his poetry fading with the reading public.

His Guide to Modern World Literature is an encyclopedic attempt to describe all major 20th-century authors, in all languages. The book is over 1450 pages long. Daringly individualistic, it has been found to be eccentric and occasionally frustrating but always readable and highly stimulating. As Cyril Connolly summarised of the first (1973) edition: 'I'm very much afraid he will prove indispensible.' And many judgements previously thought eccentric have proved sound. For instance, his criticism of Lawrence Durrell singled out his poetry as his real achievement; John Fowles, Muriel Spark, C. P. Snow and even Ted Hughes first felt the chilling of their reputations in these covers. The stature of Anthony Powell's 'A Dance to the Music of Time' (1951-76) as the greatest fictional post-war achievement was asserted: a view endorsed by Kingsley Amis, Hilary Spurling and an increasing number of readers since. And Seymour-Smith's prediction that T. S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' would not survive as a great poem by 2000, have been arguably vindicated.

The polyglot Seymour-Smith further used the book to champion writers he regarded as underrated, such as James Hanley, Laura Riding, Vallejo, Pio Baroja and Jose Maria Arguedas, while attacking those he felt were overvalued, such as George Bernard Shaw, W.H. Auden and as mentioned above,T.S. Eliot.

He also wrote other large surveys of literature, including 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written and Novels and Novelists, A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980).

[edit] Seymour-Smith and Astrology

This is of course a vexed topic, bleeding into the area of 'pseudo-science' - something this combative writer delighted in rebutting, challenging sceptics to a reading.

Seymour-Smith was taught the rudiments of astrology in 1956 by his old friend Robert Graves, whom he had known since the age of 14. Like many other Anglo-Irish poets, Yeats and MacNeice included (a Protestant quantifying response to a pervading Catholic symbolism?), Graves was exercised by astrology. Yet unlike these poets whose astrology books are well-known, he left the writing of a book on the subject to his pupil.

'The New Astrologer'(1981) was a compromise title. The Parkers in 'The New Astrology'(1971) had already used the title 'The New Astrology' he would have preferred, since he was highlighting the use of what became known as 'harmonics' and many new techniques. But the personal imprint of the book is ultimately even more appropriate. 'The New Astrologer' is here a kind of Renaissance figure, a polymath invoking a huge range of other disciplines, proving adept mathematically, yet showing every reader with a series of illustrations (memorably a gnarled thumbnail on a pocket-calculator) how to follow every move.

The great strengths of Martin Seymour-Smith’s 'The New Astrologer' are its polymathic coverage of astrological history; its highly numerate yet easy-to-grasp stages towards an exposition of Harmonics and other sophisticated devices; and its anarchic sense of humour.

This often erupted when dealing with the sample ‘subject’ on p. 62. The native’s time of birth ‘was timed for an astrologer and two stop-watches were used.’ The last pages deal with a mugging. ‘Would he have listened to these predictions? Hardly. The native does not believe in astrology.’ The native was of course Seymour-Smith. Gnostically, he was pointing out that astrology was not a ‘belief’ but a methodology that opened up far more than positivism would countenance. His evidences for astrology, too, are impressively succinct and wide-ranging. Seymour-Smith, naturally, tended to the more scientifically inclined spectrum of astrological practitioners such as John Addey, Charles Harvey, and Michael Harding. But he also warned against the madness of those at the acute end who even believed that emotion could be quantified through the birth chart.

Seymour-Smith’s pre-eminence as a poet and critic is stamped through the highly individualistic readings of planet combinations (at this time, he tended to privilege the Moon over the Sun as the prime planet). Comments abound like ‘Fantastic grunts in the sensual sty while mouthed by adored adorers, sybaritic, thus tending to break into a dance; wants wealth and enjoys ease.’ This for Sun/Venus. The definition of Venus/Saturn reads: ‘Natives with this aspect often fear they are giving off foul smells in the direction of vivacious women, and they sometimes are… Difficulties can fade out early, giving place to great privately expressed warmth.’ Hardly anyone would know that this referred obliquely not just to Seymour-Smith, but Jonathan Swift whom he wrote so movingly about in Poets Through their Letters (1969). Or that the 'Cancerian' poet saying ‘never go back;’ was the very well-known James Reeves. His survey of the Houses suggest that 'open enemies in the Seventh' might include ‘if you are a criminal, the police.’ And not just if you were a criminal. Seymour-Smith elsewhere in the book advocated bank robbery ‘had we but the courage’. One of his statistical samples posits 7,169 Welsh tax inspectors convicted of larceny from their mothers’ purses. The New Astrologer is not for the po-faced.

His readings of sample horoscopes are justly renowned. Many moving portrayals of writers as different as Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Simenon and celebrities like Jim Clark, Henry Cooper, Billy Graham, Richard Nixon, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and various killers showed a remarkable range. He understood some of the subjects at first hand, too. Quite apart from his writing, he had in fact been a bantam weight boxer in the army, and written much about psychology in ‘Sex and Society’ (1975) for instance. Jung, whose brilliance he recognized, is memorably castigated for ‘transposing Freud’s ideas and placing them in a Grimm’s Brother’s fairy setting.’ Then Jung’s chart is anatomized even-handedly but with excoriating humour on occasion. That for Margaret Thatcher was a deadly riposte to everything she stood for as early as 1981. Seymour-Smith foresaw the problems facing monetarism as a belief system, and typically suggested Thatcher’s fantasy was of ‘lecturing a blank wall for disobedience… She has been a failure except in advancing her own career... As a steward on a shop floor she could have been respected, though not widely loved… Her 6H Chart would be fascinating in a creative artist, showing how they marshal their material; but in her case materials are other people, the public.’ He even chose the photograph. But by this time the reader would know what on earth a 6H chart was. Seymour-Smith's powers of exposition were formidable.

The book itself was packaged in the manner of the Parkers, attempting to provide a condensed ephemeris. In this it was too ambitious, and Sidgwick and Jackson felt perhaps overwhelmed by the range covered. Even the biography of Graves has a birth time based on rectification: 4.26am 24th July, 1895, is of course a correction for 4.30. This was typically subversive. Elsewhere, the Seymour-Smith habit of creating fake entries in compendiums of writers was known to a very few. Ian Hamilton’s 1994 Oxford ‘Twentieth Century Poets’ is secretly littered with fake poets, which he encouraged Seymour-Smith to enter. For these the latter might create a horoscope. By contrast, living ‘fake’ poets whom the two had no time for, were excluded. Many other insights of real writers were augmented through study of their charts. Some living ones, like Anthony Powell who used astrology extensively in his great ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ (1951-76), would ask as late as 1996 for their charts to be calculated.