MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
(1928-1998)
Martin Seymour-Smith was a British literary critic, biographer, editor, poet and astrologer who wrote more than 40 books. Martin died of a heart attack at his home in England at the age of 70. In 1981, he had been a student of astrology for more than twenty-five years when he published his only astrology book, “The New Astrologer.” The Library Journal is quoted on its back cover, “One of the most detailed and intelligent handbooks available...”
Martin was born in London in 1928 and was the son of a poet. He graduated from Oxford University and later became a tutor to the poet Robert Graves’s children. His friendship with Graves lasted until Graves’s death and led to Martin’s scholarly biography, “Robert Graves: His Life and Work” in 1982.
Although Martin was well-known for his poetry and literary criticisms he was best known for his thorough study of 20th-century poetry, drama and fiction entitled “Guide to Modern World Literature,” that was published in 1973.
SIMON JENNER WRITES:
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, 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 was a compromise title. The Parkers had already used the title The New Astrology he would have preferred, since he was highlighting the use of 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.
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. Martin Seymour-Smith intended a collaboration with me, but we were diverted into other, literary areas. Inevitably, the phone would ring at 1am, and Rilke’s 5H chart would be discussed. 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 Martin 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; my Mac was used as we added the harmonics. We remained close friends till Martin’s death.
BIRTH AND DEATH DATA: According to England & Wales, Death Index: 1984-2004 Record, Martin Seymour-Smith was born on April 24, 1928, London, England, Time Unknown. His Obituary in the New York Times states that he died of a heart attack at his home in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, England, on July 1, 1998.
WRITINGS: The list of books written by Martin Seymour-Smith are to numerous to include in this writing, but most can be found on the Internet. One such site is:
http://www.biblio.com/author_biographies/2003896/Martin_SeymourSmith.html
Martin’s “The New Astrologer” can be found at used bookstores on the Internet or at Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/.
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