Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That

An Autobiography

A young Graves. Image: Evening Standard

I remember the elderly poet and novelist Robert Graves being interiewed on television by, I think, Michael Parkinson, sometime in the late 1970s. He’d come over from his home in Majorca to attend to some business, probably the television adaptation of his I Claudius novels. His wonderful Edwardian voice was a delight as he reminiscied about the past: his time at Oxford, then London, about his loves and losses, his poetry, and his time in the Army during World War One, and his autobiography, Good-bye to All That. He represented a time that was quickly passing.

The 2014 facsimile cover of the original paperback Ist edition

His book was first published in the UK by Jonathan Cape in 1929, as was Ernest Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms, with the two books thereafter linked as the first anti-war books to come out of the war to end wars. Both authors denied their books were anti-war, with Hemingway describing his as just a novel, a love story that happened to be set during a war, and nothing more. Graves would only say that his autobiography was just a way for him of getting his experiences down in writing so they could be forgotten; oh, and the money would come in handy.

Hemingway’s traumatic experiences and injuries in Italy in 1918, as dreadful as they were, were also relatively short lived. For Graves the somewhat longer time spent in the trenches of France, and the very serious injuries suffered during the Battle of the Somme, created the man who wrote one of the finest pieces of First World literature. That both Graves and Hemingway were damaged mentally by their experiences is not in doubt.

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a masterpiece, no question of that, but a masterpiece tempered for the most part by a love story that, only in the last few pages, turns into a tragedy. Graves autobiography is very different. At first reading it does seem very critical of most things, and as poet Andrew Motion writes:

“…and so he is in many obvious respects. But his comic manner has a stylistic counterpart that gives the book a different and associated power. This derives from its passion for plain-dealing and plain-speaking. For finding a way…