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In 1929 Robert Graves went to live abroad permanently, vowing 'never to make England my home again'. This is his superb account of his life up until that 'bitter leave-taking': from his childhood and desperately unhappy school days at Charterhouse, to his time serving as a young officer in the First World War that was to haunt him throughout his life.
It also contains memorable encounters with fellow writers and poets, including Siegfried Sassoon and Thomas Hardy, and covers his increasingly unhappy marriage to Nancy Nicholson. Goodbye to All That, with its vivid, harrowing descriptions of the Western Front, is a classic war document, and also has immense value as one of the most candid self-portraits of an artist ever written.
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As a proof of my readiness to accept autobiographical convention, let me at once record my two earliest memories. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
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A briliant place to start reading about the Great War and one you will return to again and again.
It is worth reading alone for the narrative structure and the demonstration of writing craft which is of a quality not found anywhere today.
Graves' life, from middle class public school, to an officer in the trenches of WWI, and then an impoverished radical poet in post-war Oxford, seems like another world. Seemingly trivial details now seem bizarre, and life in the trenches under enemy fire (or gas attack) is hell on earth. Graves takes a factual, analytical, almost objective approach, recording public opinion and sentiment, and giving well-argued reasons for what now seems like military madness. This has the effect of hiding his own personal drama from the reader, so his anti-war feelings and eventual nervous collapse come as something of a surprise.
The book is not without its weaknesses. His time after the war seems to consist largely of name-dropping famous poets and encounters with Lawrence of Arabia, but seventy five years on there is limited interest in these figures, and instead we yearn for more characters such as Daisy, the daughter of a down-and-out who the Graveses temporarily adopted and gives us an insight unto life at the other end of the social spectrum, and regret that Graves did not record more of the social consequences of the radical socialism and feminism he and his wife adopted in what was still a conservative and socially claustrophobic society.
Graves toyed with turning his experiences into a novel. Ford Madox Ford did just that with the Parades End series. Some may find this allows a more considered approach of the same period, and where Graves gives us anecdote Ford leaves the reader with a deeper understanding. None of this, however, challenges the status of Goodbye to all That as an outstanding historical document of life in another age.
Robert Graves writes with a real charm and gentle humour, belying an often quite scathing satirical leaning, and his account of his early home life and upbringing is beautiful, a real evocation of a time now lost forever. The fact that he's half-german heartbreakingly foreshadows later events, as he spends childhood holidays playing in fairytale German castles with German uncles and nephews, men he is destined one day to try to kill on the battlefields of France. It's a pertinent reminder of how close Britain and England were in the late 1800's, which makes the war all the more tragic.
The account of his time in France during the conflict, the greater part of the book, is simply brilliant - and considering what he goes through, it's hard to keep in mind that he was only in his early twenties, as I suppose so many of the soldiers were. The other reviews have covered this in more detail, so I'll skip on.
Once the war ends the book does lose drive and focus, but I get a sense that by this point Graves was simply weary of England and life in general - it must have been hard to find much that matched the passion and drama of the battlefield, where a generation faced things we can hardly imagine today. It does all evoke an interesting picture of how a country tries to adjust to life after such a war, however, before it starts becoming simply a list of which famous writers Graves met.
All in all, this is probably one of the best first-hand accounts of World War One that we're lucky enough to have - and if you have any interest at all in the subject, you simply owe it to yourself to read it at least once.
Oh, and I recommend reading it in conjunction with Seigfreid Sassoon's 'Memoirs of an Infantry Officer'. The stories overlap and parallel each other several times, and it's fascinating to read differing accounts of the same crucial events in the lives of these two men. Each book gives a whole new spin on the other - get the best of each by reading them together.
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