“The place where I was living in 1929,” Robert Graves told an acquaintance in a skittish letter of the late Fifties, “was known as Free Love Corner.” But there wasn’t much love (in any of that word’s normally accepted senses) in evidence in the situation that began to develop in the vicinity of 19A St. Peter’s Square in spring 1929; and no freedom at all.
The affair, once notorious, is not completely explicable. It is unlikely that it could be, for it involves such enigmatic, trivial, and diverse factors as a relationship thought of by the participants as “the Four,” an almost fatal descent from a fourth-story window, another dangerous one from a third, the question of whose books really belong to whom, the break-up of a marriage, the issue of a writ, the rejection of England as a dwelling-place—and a unique mixture of anguish and farce. The emotion attending the matter was so intense and the hubris of one party so extreme that it never did make complete sense, although Laura Riding has seemed to insist on making much of it ever since.
Graves and Riding had first met in person on January 2, 1926. Both he and his wife Nancy had admired one of her poems published in the magazine of the Fugitive Movement, The Fugitive; at the instigation of John Crowe Ransom, the leading poet of the group and an admirer of the work of the young Graves, Riding had sent a
