Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That
An Autobiography
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.
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.
