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Under the influence: Recollections of Robert Graves, Laura Riding, and friends
Good clean copy.
- GenresBiography
354 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 17, 2025
NOTE: This book was also issued in the US as Jacks or Better
This is a weird, frustrating and hypnotic book. It's a memoir that tells the stories of the author's early friends and relationships. He is, on the surface, a traditional, entitled and talented person who has a fatal attraction to obsessive and controlling personalities. They are fascinating in their intensity, probably mentally ill, but functional enough to bend others to their will.
The author describes them and his life with them in detail, apparently without ever coming to terms with them or their effect on him. He escapes, or they leave him, but his opinion of them doesn't seem to shift and their relationship continues to have value for him in a way I don't understand.
Amazingly, he becomes immensely successful professionally (editor of Time Magazine in the 40s) but never seems to internalize his success and sees himself as well as his friends as tragedies - people who were dealt substantially better hands than most but lived as failures. And one person who succeeds (the poet and novelist Robert Graves) he scorns as becoming an egomaniac as a result.
In parallel to all this, Matthews pursues an obsessive romantic life of his own - he first marries a woman he met as a girl and woos for seven years (she dies young), then a reckless, globe-trotting journalist, then a woman who was previously married to a dashing Russian adventurer. And he ends up in a small English village for his last 22 years, which is where I found him.
He is romantic, obsessive, ambitious, quasi-religious and full of doubt. He writes well and in great detail, so that there is a strange juxtaposition between the details of day to day life and the wild stories that they sum to. He writes more than one memoir - clearly trying to understand his own life but failing to do more than tell the story.
This is a weird, frustrating and hypnotic book. It's a memoir that tells the stories of the author's early friends and relationships. He is, on the surface, a traditional, entitled and talented person who has a fatal attraction to obsessive and controlling personalities. They are fascinating in their intensity, probably mentally ill, but functional enough to bend others to their will.
The author describes them and his life with them in detail, apparently without ever coming to terms with them or their effect on him. He escapes, or they leave him, but his opinion of them doesn't seem to shift and their relationship continues to have value for him in a way I don't understand.
Amazingly, he becomes immensely successful professionally (editor of Time Magazine in the 40s) but never seems to internalize his success and sees himself as well as his friends as tragedies - people who were dealt substantially better hands than most but lived as failures. And one person who succeeds (the poet and novelist Robert Graves) he scorns as becoming an egomaniac as a result.
In parallel to all this, Matthews pursues an obsessive romantic life of his own - he first marries a woman he met as a girl and woos for seven years (she dies young), then a reckless, globe-trotting journalist, then a woman who was previously married to a dashing Russian adventurer. And he ends up in a small English village for his last 22 years, which is where I found him.
He is romantic, obsessive, ambitious, quasi-religious and full of doubt. He writes well and in great detail, so that there is a strange juxtaposition between the details of day to day life and the wild stories that they sum to. He writes more than one memoir - clearly trying to understand his own life but failing to do more than tell the story.
December 19, 2015
What a strange book - not enough juicy gossip for what must have been very explosive situations and a full cast of eccentric characters, but hinting at tantalising stories behind the stories. In fact, it feels more like a puzzled self-analysis of an elderly man, wondering at the choices he and his friends made in life. A curiosity, but ultimately rather disappointing.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews