Graves and Goddesses

Robert Graves is in many ways the most British of poets, but Britain has never fully warmed to him. In spite of his stoutly traditional meters and his gruff military demeanor, Graves has always been thought of as a bit unsound. It is not just that he chooses to live on a Spanish island, or that he has been thoroughly beastly about Auden. Nor is it simply a hangover from the 1930s when he and Laura Riding used to mount almost weekly guerrilla strikes against the bosses of the British poetry scene. No, the real suspicion is that throughout a rather well-constructed literary career, Graves has carried with him a faint whiff of the bogus. His famous intransigence and aloofness have often seemed to have their roots in an eager-to-be-wounded vanity. His White Goddess theories (although hugely popular with hard-line feminists) are mad enough to be seen as a pious concealment of pensionable lusts. And his dictums on the subject of inspiration (he believes that poets can only write decently if they are in a state of trance) have sometimes looked like the wish fulfillment of a poet whose most “passionate” work is essentially cold-hearted and literary.

In Britain, Graves’s reputation reached its peak in the early to mid-1960s. This was a period when there was much head-scratching about the destiny of modernism. It was quite common in those days for poets to be told that they must trace their bloodlines back to Eliot and Pound or risk being written off as insular, reactionary, tame. In response to this (and to the Anglo-Americanism that went with it), a number of British poets began looking for an alternative ancestry, for an unbroken native line that—brushing aside modernism on the way—connected the “traditional” virtues of the stronger Georgians with the metrical common sense of recent figures like Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Graves, as probably the only bona fide Georgian still practicing, was thought by such patriots to exemplify a sturdy British self-reliance. (It was forgotten that he would once have seen himself as a key if lonely modernist, and that he had done much to push the work of e.e. cummings and Gertrude Stein.)

A disciple of Graves, James Reeves, put together a Penguin Book of Georgian Verse, which aimed to show that it was not all tea and muffins on those sunlit lawns, and a resurgence of interest in the poets of the First World War (1964-1968 being the fiftieth anniversary) made much of Wilfred Owen’s very “modern” use of assonance. Captain Graves, the old soldier and author of Goodbye to All That, was for a time promoted to the rank of a Major Poet.

Since the 1960s, Graves seems to have slowly drifted back to the marginal/eccentric niche that he had occupied since the days of Laura Riding, although he still does have his ardent champions. (Graves’s champions, it must be said, have always been ardent, not to say bellicose.)

In 1975, Graves stopped writing altogether. Instead, he began devoting his time to long chats with Martin Seymour-Smith. Seymour-Smith is a Graves acolyte of long standing (since ca. 1943) and, in the effortful debunkery of his own critical writing, has aped many of his master’s attitudes and mannerisms. Not surprisingly, this biography leans heavily on its subject’s interpretation of the way things were. Seymour-Smith is sometimes rough with Graves, in the manner of an exasperated friend, but he invariably gives him the benefit of the doubt in matters of importance, and is utterly unshakable in his admiration for his work. Seymour-Smith regards Graves as “the foremost English-language love poet of this century—and probably of the two preceding ones, too.”

Love poet. The category is insisted on by Seymour-Smith throughout, as is the “foremost” and the “of this century.” The insistence seems politic, since Seymour-Smith has some fairly unpleasant things to reveal about the love poet’s conduct in the field. His book begins with this uncompromising diagnosis:

One of the keys to Graves’s personality, and therefore to his poetry, lies in the fact that he is in a continual state of terror; he relieved this, challenged it, by an increasingly sophisticated romanticism—but a romanticism that is wilfully designed to punish him for his pride, which prevents his loving wholly….

According to Seymour-Smith, Graves’s “continual state of terror” began (where else?) at his English public school. The boy Graves, it seems, was a fearful prude and prig. From his German mother he had inherited a moralistic, cautious streak; from his father, an element of Celtic turbulence. At first the mother’s influence prevailed and the virtuous young R. von Ranke Graves was to be seen in fierce pursuit of “purity,” of flesh-transcending moral excellence. This was not, alas, a posture all that easy to maintain in English public schools in 1910, and before long Graves found himself sneaking shy glances at one of his more comely fellow students.

The two were soon firm friends, in the Boys Own Paper manner. Nothing “happened,” but for Graves that was not the point: the seeker after purity had discovered in himself the worm of sexual guilt. He became, says Seymour-Smith, “convinced that underlying his idealization of Dick there was desire. His notion that this desire existed hurt his immense pride. It was a terrible bogey in the ever-fearful back of his mind.” And it remained so, for the next sixty years of Graves’s life. From these first stirrings, the Graves story develops into a saga of sexual timidity—a saga with ingredients both comic and sad, and always with Graves in the role of abject swain—ready and willing to be trampled on by the Strong Woman he could never quite be worthy of.

Seymour-Smith does much brooding on the Dick incident (as Graves himself does in Goodbye to All That). We learn that after Graves had left school to join the army, Dick became involved in a minor homosexual scandal. When Graves heard of this, he was appalled: if Dick was queer, did it not follow that Graves, who had harbored a pure but powerful love for him, must be similarly afflicted? Seymour-Smith would have us regard Graves’s nervousness with women as having to do with his deep fear that he really preferred men. Of course, he didn’t prefer men; Seymour-Smith somehow contrives to be quite certain on this point. But we should never forget that he was frightened that he might.

Graves’s first marriage was to Nancy Nicholson, who was something of a pioneering feminist, it seems. Graves met her while he was still serving in the army; indeed, while he was recovering from wounds and shell shock. Nancy, however, was not impressed by her new husband’s scars. She “would tell him that his experiences in war were as nothing compared to the general sufferings of women at the hands of men.” Although Martin Seymour-Smith believes that Nancy was “not, perhaps, a very interesting person,” it is unlikely that he would have dared to say this to her face. As a sex warrior, she was about fifty years ahead of her time and thus of extreme “interest” to the guiltridden Graves. She loathed her wedding service, she refused to take her husband’s name, and she “maintained an attitude of constant fury at the way men behaved, both at an international and a personal level—and she warned her husband that he would have to be ‘careful’ in the way he spoke of women.” Graves was happy to oblige, and his biographer has no difficulty in relating this compliance to the poet’s lingering Dicktrauma (if one might so put it): “Her unquiet nature and propensity to criticize was something that Graves was no doubt unconsciously seeking out.”

Graves himself has described his early married life with Nancy in Goodbye to All That: he glumly records there that “although my love for Nancy made me respect her views,” it often seemed a bit unfair that he should be included in her tirades against men:

…male stupidity and callousness became such an obsession with her that she began to include me in her universal condemnation of men. Soon she could not bear a newspaper in the house, for fear of reading some paragraph that would horrify her—about the necessity of keeping up the population; or about women’s limited intelligence; or about the shameless, flat-chested modern girl; or anything at all about women written by clergymen.

Graves was by this time a “mature student” at Oxford University, living on Boars Hill with a Georgian anthology of neighbors: Robert Bridges, John Masefield, Edmund Blunden, and Robert Nichols. He had published one book of verse and was working on another. With Nancy’s shrewishness gathering strength, Graves toiled in both life and art to fathom the true “meaning of lust.” Although he and Nancy had four children between 1919 and 1925 their marriage did not permit much scope for passion. Seymour-Smith describes the poet’s predicament at this point in breezy biographese:

The only eventuality upon which he did not then reckon was that his exploration of the meaning of lust would have, for a considerable period, to be conducted in the absence of the exercise of it.

In Seymour-Smith’s diagnosis, Graves would probably have put up with this state of affairs if Nancy had been a truly tyrannical She-Goddess. Her feminism, though, was essentially “milk-and-water,” “mannered rather than powerful.” Graves, it is made clear, yearned for sharper humiliations, and in 1926 his dreams came true.

Graves had for some time been corresponding with the American poet Laura Riding Gottschalk. Riding was connected with the Fugitive group of poets, and had for a time enjoyed the gentlemanly encouragement of Allen Tate (who, gentleman to the last, spoke of her fifty years later as “All right from the neck down”; “Unforgivable terseness,” comments Seymour-Smith). She was quick to accept Graves’s suggestion that she might some time visit him in England. She didn’t just visit him; she moved in. Riding arrived in England on January 2, 1926, just as Graves and his family were about to set off for Cairo, where Graves had taken a professorial appointment. When the Graves’s ship set sail on January 9, Riding was on it—and already, it appears, one of the family.

A Trinity had been formed, with Robert and Nancy brought closer together (or, simply, made less irritable) by their joint regard for Riding. How all this was accomplished Seymour-Smith does not say, and Graves’s own amusing account of his short stay in Egypt (in Goodbye to All That) makes no reference to his new friend. At first Riding’s compatibility with Graves extended beyond literary criticism (they shared a simple, Gertrude Stein-ish view of this discipline—“the way to say it is to say it” and they also believed themselves to be the first on earth “to take a truly psychological approach to poetry”). They became lovers, with Nancy’s approval. At first, Riding managed to keep Graves happy “on the physical plane…without cutting him off from his needed unhappiness (that is, from his natural puritanism and delicacy about sex).”

Although, as Seymour-Smith confides, Graves’s “erotic performances towards her” were soon “undermined by his insistence on her superiority to him,” there does seem to have been a stretch of several months in which Riding, at any rate, was prepared to make do with simple adoration. The pair launched themselves as a literary team: they coauthored pamphlets, they set up a printing press, they wrote letters to the papers. On poetic matters they spoke always with a single voice, haughty and self-advancing. Riding’s repeated question was, “When will man grow up…become woman?” and Graves seems to have spent many a long hour trying to come up with the correct answer:

Neither Graves nor she desired to undergo a sex change; that was not what she meant at the time. What she meant was that she would initiate a programme of the education of men—starting with Graves.

On returning from Egypt, Graves and Riding set up house in Hammersmith (Graves’s bedroom was Riding’s workroom, we are told) and Nancy and the children were installed in a houseboat on the Thames nearby. The “strange Trinity of friendship and love” seems to have functioned for a time—Nancy genuinely admired the fierce Riding, she no longer had to cope with Graves’s timorous sexuality, and she was involved in a wonderfully “modern” arrangement which had already achieved the status of a small scandal: the Hammersmith setup was known as Free Love Corner. The whole thing came under strain, though, with the appearance of one Geoffrey Phibbs, an Anglo-Irish poetaster of “unstable” yet (some thought) “demonic” character. Phibbs had written to Graves that “Laura Ridings work has been getting more important for me thru the last 6 months.” Riding was intrigued by the prospect of a new disciple. She ordered Graves to “recruit” Phibbs, but to warn him in advance that if he truly wished to become her devotee he would have to learn to “shed” a great deal of his current self. It is a sad picture, Graves the procurer, but Seymour-Smith does his best to dignify it:

Graves carried out his task conscientiously but felt unhappy about forcing himself to conceal the contempt he could not help feeling for Phibbs as soon as he met him. But he indulged in his best hopes and wishes, as unfortunately he always does, and did his best.

Phibbs was recruited; the Trinity became the Four. That is to say, Graves and Nancy became Riding’s helpmates as she set about “re-educating” Phibbs. Graves was detailed to instruct Phibbs in the ways Riding should be loved. He seems not to have done too good a job. Phibbs, although he was beguiled by Riding’s wordy passion, had no wish to be eaten alive. He kept running away; and when he did, Graves would be dispatched to bring him back. Throughout all this, there was constant Riding-directed debate on how Phibbs might be made to see the light. It was never admitted that Riding was in a state of high infatuation, that Phibbs was terrified, that Graves was jealous. One simply didn’t talk that way to Laura Riding. The discussion was all to do with “instructing” Phibbs on the principles of good and evil, with the search for a “finality” (one of Riding’s favorite, never explained terms), with escape from “the tyranny of time,” of “the annihilation of matter,” and so on. This was a Laura Riding enterprise; no aspect of it could be short on cosmic weight.

The climax of the Phibbs episode has been variously described over the years, and variously distorted. Seymour-Smith has labored hard and well to set the record straight. In his account, the climax comes when Phibbs announces his determination to make a final break with Riding. This bold move was treated by Riding as a matter of high policy, and she convened a special meeting of the Four. As Graves later recorded: “The Four talked nearly all night trying to help him [Phibbs] to come to a clear decision, his reasons for staying away being uncertain and contradictory.” Phibbs, though, would not be budged, even though the Trinity kept at him until 9 AM the following morning. Seymour-Smith records the outcome:

At about 9 a.m. Phibbs repeated that he wanted no more of Riding, that he preferred Nancy and would go with her. Riding drank Lysol, but it had no effect. While Graves, Nancy and Phibbs watched, she said, “Goodbye, chaps!” and jumped from the window. Graves and Nancy were horrified. Phibbs took to his heels without waiting to find out whether she was dead or alive.

Riding had dived from a fourth-floor window. Graves, ever conscious of his rank, jumped after her from the floor below. Nancy shrewdly decided to sit this one out. Riding’s spine was broken, Graves escaped unhurt; the Trinity, however, had finally come down to earth, and nothing was quite the same again. Graves nursed Riding back to health, carried a few more messages to Phibbs, and told Nancy that he wanted a real separation. Nancy took up with Phibbs. After a few months, there seems to have been a mutual, exhausted agreement that the comedy was done. In October 1929, Graves and Riding left England and settled in Majorca—where Graves has lived ever since.

The Phibbs affair has some moments of grand farce: it offers us high minds refusing to recognize low deeds, the bungling, humorless theatricality of intellectuals-at-play. By comparison, the next ten years of Graves’s life with Riding were sheer drudgery. The couple resumed their literary and financial partnership, but sexually the “marriage” was quite dead. The battered Riding had decided that “bodies have had their day,” and of Graves she commented: “No doubt his mind has its brutal lapses; they are not important, only psychologically interesting.”

Graves’s task in Majorca was twofold. He was to write potboilers for money, and he was to advance Riding’s international career as a poet. Goodbye to All That, Graves’s marvelously lucid, weary memoir of his life up to 1929, had made some money, and he was encouraged to believe that he could finance poetry with prose. (Eventually, he could and did.) He could also finance Riding, who was keen to set up a Majorcan “community”—a gathering of disciples who would ponder with her the “fundamental relation which has to be made…between the male mind and the female mind.” Applicants would have been well advised to note that “in this judgement the female mind is the judge, and the male mind the subject of judgement….”

As to her career as a poet, Graves genuinely believed that she had a talent superior to his own. She was a magician, a dispeller of darkness, and—through her—the “truth” would be “uncovered.” According to Seymour-Smith, Riding’s own belief that her verse would have world-altering significance, if understood, had carried her to “the very edge of sanity.” Visitors to Majorca during these years would depict Graves as being “like a small boy dancing attendance on a rich aunt of uncertain temper.” He was treated “like a dog.”

Yet Graves kept a tough-guy image in the literary world during the 1930s. Few of Graves’s fellow poets escaped his lash. Dylan Thomas was a “Welsh demagogic masturbator who failed to pay his bills,” Auden (whom Graves often accused of borrowing from Riding) was “the kind of man who borrowed a flat for the weekend and then left it in a filthy mess.” Notice in each case the voice of the tidy-minded house-husband. The most telling example of feebleness masquerading as high moral strength comes in an exchange Graves had with W.B. Yeats concerning Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Yeats wrote to Graves asking permission to include four poems in the anthology—and, as a cordial afterthought, suggested that he might visit Graves in Majorca later in the year. Graves wrote back that he was “rather surprised” by Yeats’s request. Surely he and Laura Riding had made their views clear on the subject of anthologies?

I do not know whether a letter from you to Laura Riding is on the way from some forwarding address. But if so, the answer for both of us, your anthology being what it seems to be (from the indication of those four poems of mine and from the absence of any awareness in you that we do not lend ourselves to any but cooperative activities), would have to be, I think, No.

As to Yeats’s proposed visit…well, one can imagine the doggy hopefulness with which Graves proposed to Riding that he (they?) should make the following reply:

We are both very watchful in our relations, whether in literature or in neighbour-ship: never casual, and least of all here in Majorca where we live permanently in hard-working privacy. With the many foreigners who visit the island we have, as a rule, nothing to do—unless they are friends of ours, who come here purposely to see us. Certainly we like to get to know people and especially those with whom there may be something in common; but we are not sure what there might be in common between you and L.R. (someone in a press-cutting a few months ago said that you and she had learned things from each other—but certainly L.R. does not go about “learning” from people) and between you and me; and we hate the mere literary-name fraternizing—but perhaps you feel the same about that.

The Riding-Graves Majorca partnership lasted for ten years, and Seymour-Smith offers no evidence that the balance of power was ever altered. Nor is there any hint that Graves wanted things to change. The end came in 1939, and it was as absurd and messy as might be expected. In April 1939 Riding returned to America (with Graves), partly to gain support for a scheme she had devised that would “save the world from war”—she was collecting signatories for something called “The First Protocol of the Covenant of Literal Morality.” At Princeton, she met a dilettante literary figure called Schuyler Jackson, and immediately fell for him. Needless to say, this was not how it was presented. First of all, Riding and Jackson joined forces in a plan to “re-educate” Jackson’s wife. They subjected her to lengthy “inquisitions” and so wore her down that she, quite literally, “went mad.” Seymour-Smith does not give details of these inquisitions, but the outcome is not in dispute.

Graves disapproved of Jackson, as he had disapproved of Phibbs—on the other hand, Laura had chosen this man. Even when Riding and Jackson locked themselves in a bedroom for two days, Graves waited patiently outside the door. Riding eventually emerged with the pronouncement that bodies had not, after all, “had their day.”

But the real showdown came when Graves perceived that Riding was gradually “shedding” her tyrannical White Goddess role: she was becoming soft, submissive, the female to Jackson’s somewhat brutish male. As an observer exclaimed later: Riding was “being treated like dirt and liking it!” She was also protesting that the coarse Jackson might be a fit helpmate in the various grand schemes that she and Graves had been toiling on back in Majorca. (In addition to the peace protocol, there was a plan to issue a new dictionary—of “real meanings.”) Seymour-Smith sums up as follows:

He had been supplanted by Schuyler. He did not resent being supplanted as lover—though Riding’s lapse into crass vulgarity ill-disguised by high talk shocked him—but he did resent being supplanted as intellectual collaborator by an idiot. He could not accept that Jackson’s half-articulate obstinacy, and his roughness, were much more to Riding’s liking than his own self-confident literacy.

Martin Seymour-Smith devotes more than two hundred pages of his 500-page biography to Graves’s relationship with Riding—thirteen years of the poet’s eighty—and there can be little doubt that he has got the balance right. If Graves’s early life was a preparation for Riding then his life after the split can easily be seen as a long effort to recover from her and then to find a strong woman to replace her. Shortly after he broke with Riding, Graves married Beryl Hodge (formerly the wife of Alan Hodge, coauthor with Graves of The Long Weekend), and he enjoyed with her some ten years of equilibrium. He was in his mid-forties when Riding left him and at that point he declared that he had had “enough trouble” in his life. With Beryl’s agreeable, low-key companionship secured, Graves went back to Majorca and, quite simply, did a lot of work. He became a prolific writer of prose—I, Claudius, King Jesus, Wife to Mr. Milton: each of them intelligent and highly readable, and each nicely calculated to needle orthodox historians and academics.

Much of this middle period he also spent wrangling with agents, waiting for Hollywood producers to call back, soliciting advances from publishers, and so on. Interesting enough, but even a writer as devout as Seymour-Smith finds it hard to inject much vitality into this slice of the life. It was not until the Fifties that the old worm began to wriggle once again:

To love one woman, or to sit Always beneath the same tall tree
Argues a certain lack of wit Two steps from imbecility….

Graves had already evolved his theory of the White Goddess—the female Muse whose commands the poet must obey. The problem was that Beryl, his wife, was not Goddess material: for one thing, she was too nice to him.

Seymour-Smith is indulgent toward Graves’s restlessness, and toward its consequences. He talks solemnly of the poet’s “four post-Riding Muses” (i.e., the four young girls Graves fell chastely but theatrically in love with between 1950 and 1975), and he carefully explains that

Graves differs from most other men in his feeling that any sort of resistance to romantic love is in itself a kind of sin: a refusal of the Goddess, of what the Goddess means to him. But it is hard for those who know only the public Graves, bent on explaining his devotion to the Goddess (whose genuine manifestations he feels that he must under no circumstances ignore), to realize that although he has the compulsion to fall in love, he also hates to do so. He does not enjoy suffering more than anyone else. Moreover, so far is he from being a Don Juan that his fallings-in-love-with-a-Muse have presented him with the serious problem of reconciling them with his permanent love for his wife. He never convincingly worked this out in intellectual terms….

The girls Graves fell in love with in his old age were all fairly ordinary girls—flattered a bit by the poet’s ardent protestations, irked a bit by his insistence that they live up to the Muse-like qualities with which he had chosen to invest them. There was never a sexual component—it was the Muse’s task to possess Graves and it was his task to obey. Even so, with each girl, Graves was plunged into a very public state of torment; his wife, his friends, the girls, the girls’ boyfriends, all were supposed to sympathize with the great man’s suffering. Letters poured out from Majorca, urgent meetings were arranged, crisis discussions were demanded. If one of the girls took up with another man, Graves would be outraged—how could a Goddess indulge a “secret passion” for “serpents…corpse-flesh…the sly, the barren and the damned.” Could Margot (or Judith, or Emile) not see where her high duty lay?

I don’t know if this helps, but this is how I see it. You sought me out and before I said anything about it identified yourself with the Love Goddess, throwing the remark over your shoulder one day…. You thus securely tied yourself to the most ancient theme in the world (which I wrote about in the White Goddess) and faithfully played the part of the Love Goddess and the twins….

As Randall Jarrell commented, Graves had become his own Laura Riding. Unluckily, he could not see this. If—aside from a handful of fond Darby and Joan poems to his wife—Graves’s love poems seem anonymous and unfocused, not written to anyone who might actually read them with a shock of recognition, then the explanation is on display in the later chapters of Seymour-Smith’s biography.

Graves’s best gifts as a poet, it seems to me, are for moralistic ballads and quirkily instructive fables: sometimes (as in the excellent “Welsh Incident”) he can be rather funny. The matter of love, though—or Love, as he would put it—brings out the regimental in him: we are very rarely allowed to hear the poet’s vulnerable human voice. Indeed, there is often a smug distancing in Graves’s habit of address: the antique diction, the mythological backcloths, the school-masterly delight in paradox and aphorism. There is always something offputtingly “expert” in Graves’s tone when he discourses on this topic:

Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-teum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
“I and you are both away.”

After when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that mine whose I was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.

For some, Seymour-Smith’s tale might contribute the edge of poignancy that Graves’s text so magisterially shuns. For others, knowing about Graves’s life will make such fluent and authoritative postures (“To the act again they go…”) seem all the more irritating and evasive.

And yet Graves has evidently co-operated in the telling of the tale, no doubt because he could trust Seymour-Smith to go along with his Goddess delusions. For much of the time, we are forced to keep a straight face because we know that the facts could not be offered differently. There is a similiar obligation in other chapters of the book, and all along we have to bear in mind that this is the Graves version of the Graves biography. Thus, when Graves is interviewed by the police after Riding’s suicidal leap, we learn that he “maintained an insolently aristocratic manner in face of the policemen’s persistent questions.” Since the book is not footnoted, we assume that Seymour-Smith did not interview the policemen. Should we therefore conjecture the following exchange between Graves and his biographer: “What was your manner when questioned?” “It was insolently aristocratic, as a matter of fact”?

There are some fifty instances of this sort, and several others where Seymour-Smith goes in for straightforward mind-reading: “He was aware etc., etc.,…but he hid this from himself,” “She could not forgive him for it, although she would never admit it—even to herself.” And on the matter of the Laura Riding saga, the biographer’s source is a mystery, even to himself.

I suppose I am grateful for a large bundle of material relating to Laura Riding—it includes photocopies of letters to and from her written over a period of forty years—but I do not know whom to thank. It arrived anonymously. I have made use of whatever was relevant to Graves, but not of the rest. Clearly it had been assembled by an assiduous collector with access to many files. Certainly it did not come from anyone I know well.

Finally, the book’s irregularities and mysteries have a sad charm that is somehow in keeping with the blundering, gullible, assiduous lives it mainly chronicles. And there is something touching—something almost Gravesian—in Seymour-Smith’s now bold, now nervous efforts to make the best sense of his subject’s bullied personality.

A companion volume to the biography, Paul O’Prey’s collection supplies some of the missing footnotes to Seymour-Smith’s text. The letters printed are chiefly on literary matters (often rather trifling literary matters) but O’Prey does include Graves’s lucidly bureaucratic summary of the Phibbs/Riding fiasco. Much can be learned about Graves from a comparison between the letter and the deed.