Goodbye to All That: Introduction by Miranda Seymour

On the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of one of the best and most famous memoirs of the conflict. Good-bye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had ended, and England and the modern world would never be the same. In Graves's portrayal of the dehumanizing misery of the trenches, his grief over lost friends, and the surreal absurdity of government bureaucracy, Graves uses broad comedy to make the most serious points about life and death.

ldquo;The best memoir of the First World War.”
—Paul Fussell
 
“One of the classic accounts of the Western Front.”
—THE TIMES (London)
 
“From the moment of its first appearance an established classic.”
—THE OBSERVER (London)
 
“One of the most candid self-portraits of a poet . . . ever painted.”
—THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (London) 

"Goodbye to All That is among the finest books about war that has ever been written. The cool but burning lucidity with which Graves describes the ironies--the boredom; the terror; the vertiginous swings between extreme happiness and jangling nervousness--of serving both on the front line, and behind it, are perhaps best experienced by reading the author's own words from the trenches." --from the Introduction by Miranda Seymour

Autorentext

Robert Graves; Introduction by Miranda Seymour

Leseprobe
from the Introduction by Miranda Seymour
 
Paying homage to a great poet at the time of his death, aged 90, obituarists celebrated the author of the I, Claudius novels (written in the early Thirties and memorably filmed in 1975) and The White Goddess (praised to Graves himself by an admiring Ted Hughes in 1967 as 'the chief holy book of my poetic conscience').
 
Thirty-two years ago, Goodbye To All That commanded respect, but significantly less awe than The White Goddess. Part of the immense output of an exceptionally prolific career (Graves published 55 collections of poems, 43 works of non-fiction, ten translations, fifteen novels and one play), his only major work of autobiography was perceived as an admirable contribution to a majestic career. It was an impressionistic and candid document of record about a war that Graves was not alone in believing should never have happened. Nevertheless, the sense conveyed by obituary writers at the time of its author's death was not - as may be argued today - that Goodbye to All That had been his most significant prose achievement.
 
Back in July 1916, the month of his 21st birthday, The Times had published - no obituary was required for a young man whose mildly mischievous poems had been published only in school magazines - a brief announcement of the death of Robert Graves.
 
Graves's narrow escape from a premature demise at Bois de Fourneaux or High Wood (where some 8,000 men lost their lives) stands at the heart of Goodbye To All That, the eloquent, angry book which the thirty-three year old poet wrote - merely to raise funds, so he said at the time - on the verge of leaving England for a new life in Europe. Attracting a high degree both of censure and praise at the time of its first publication by Cape in 1929, Goodbye was republished by Cassell in 1957. Revising his youthful work at the height of his fame (he had recently delivered - in characteristically iconoclastic mode -  the Clark lectures at Cambridge and was about to undertake his first major American lecture tour), Robert Graves had already turned down Harold Macmillan's offer of a CBE. While demurely explaining that poets, as private persons, possess no need of public honours, Graves remained savvy enough to preserve from deletion his 1929 book's apparently superfluous record of a visit to Egypt. Graves, accompanied both by Laura Riding and his wife, Nancy Nicholson, had spent five months teaching English Literature in Cairo in 1926. In 1957, a year after the Crisis, Suez was still a hot topic. A marketing opportunity was not to be resisted.
 
Today, Goodbye has become a classic, a wartime memoir that is studied in schools, taught in colleges and read - as it has always been - for the sheer pleasure of hearing Graves's voice. (Graves, who later told a young writer to employ a tape recorder because 'The vox humana is a great help,' had himself dictated much of Goodbye to Jane Lye, a London neighbour whose husband designed the book's first wrapper. In the troubled and unpredictable world of the 21st century, Graves's autobiography feels more relevant either than the mythic questings of The White Goddess or the admirable but slightly dated Roman novels, best known now through the halting, meticulously created performance of Derek Jacobi as the Emperor Claudius and that of Sian Phillips as Livia, his shimmeringly unpleasant mother. (Mothers seldom emerge with credit in Graves's work. Sassoon was furious about Goodbye's tactless presentation of his own grief-stricken mamma as a seance-holding obsessive; Amy Graves's response to the monstrous presence who presides over The White Goddess remains unguessable.
 
Graves published Goodbye to All That at a time when several traumatised writers were feeling that the moment had come to take stock of the recent past. Ford Madox Ford had already published his great but flawed wartime tetralogy, Parade's End (1924-28). In 1929, Erich Maria Remarque produced All Quiet on the Western Front, while R.C. Sherriff's 1928 play Journey's End continued to shock audiences around the world (it was translated into seventeen languages in 1929). Like Graves himself, Ford, Remarque and Sherriff, all of whom had served at the front, viewed war as an essentially futile venture, in which exceptional acts of loyalty and courage became the norm.
 
Among all the works that emerged from a decade's musing upon a war that its most clear-sighted recorders believed to have been catastrophically conceived, managed and concluded, Goodbye survives as the most approachable, the most powerful and - reading it with all the bitter hindsights of a century of shabby acts and betrayals - the most applicable to our own times. On the verge of Britain's momentous break with Europe, we are uniquely placed to read a book replete with folly, written in a spirit of fierce regret.
                                                            
Although undeniably autobiographical, Goodbye to All That was written with an agenda and with more concern for effect than precise detail. ('My imagination is not that of a natural liar... but I am Irishman enough to coax stories into a better shape than I found them,' Graves would acknowledge in 1956.) Almost as if staging a school play, the author wanted light to fall most brightly wherever he chose to shine his torch. It troubled Graves far more in 1929 than it had in 1914 that England had taken up arms against a country to which he felt a powerful bond. Describing his early years in the opening chapters of Goodbye (the Graves family occupied homes in Wimbledon and in Wales, where his mother bought land and built a house near Harlech), Graves took care that his book should em…