Just Finished Reading: Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (FP: 1929)

It isn’t really surprising that he had little or no respect for those in authority. After his mother’s untimely death Robert was shuffled off, by his seemingly uncaring father, to Public (AKA ‘Private’) schools of varying unsuitability. Bullied and worse by other pupils and teachers alike he hated almost every moment of it. Fortunately Robert was both academically gifted as well as being a fair boxer – as his fellow pupils and one particularly obnoxious teacher found out to their costs. Robert was also very good at making lifelong friends including one teacher at Charterhouse – the climber George Herbert Leigh Mallory (who died on Everest in 1924 aged just 37) – who leant the young Graves books and took him climbing. His progression to Oxford was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War when he enlisted almost immediately. Eventually sent into action on the Western Front he met and befriended the fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon before being injured and sent back to England to recuperate. At the Battle of the Somme he was seriously wounded by a shell fragment and was told (as he lay on a stretcher awaiting the casualty train) that he wouldn’t make it home alive. Needless to say he proved them wrong. Spending the rest of the war in a training camp he tried to teach raw recruits the basics for survival in the trenches. But one thing he never lost in all his time in the army was contempt for the generals who sent ill-trained and ill-equipped young men to their deaths in the thousands with no real understanding of what they wanted or what they were asking of their troops. From his testimony throughout this often heart-wrenching narrative the level of incompetence and indifference amongst the British officer class was staggering. You can feel the anger and the distain between every line.

As biographies go this was raw indeed. Graves opens his life to examination without asking anything in return (except maybe understanding). His experiences are laid out before the reader warts and all. He tells of his darkest thoughts, his mistakes, his romantic encounters (with both sexes) and his no holds barred experiences during the Great War and all of the pointless death he encountered there. All in all it’s really quite something to behold. His schoolboy experiences felt oddly Dickensian to be honest, but I suppose that they were so far out of my own experiences in a State education system 50 years later that Dickens or “Tom Browne’s School Days” was the only imagery I could fall back on. I know for a fact that I would have hated the experience just as much as he did. The fact that he not only became friends with Mallory but that he took him climbing (!) took my breath away. Just IMAGINE! I did a little bit of climbing in my 20’s (mostly as the prompting of a friend who was manic on the whole thing!) and enjoyed it – not having any great fear of heights helped no doubt – but the thought of Leigh Mallory *asking* you to go climbing with him…… [gulp] Then, of course, bumping into Sassoon in France! [shakes head, laughs] That sort of thing did seem to happen to some people! It does make me laugh though how famous people always seem to move in the circles of other famous people.

Despite the sometimes painfully raw moments this was an astonishing biography and rightly deserves its place as a modern literature classic. Not only will you learn a great deal about the formative years of a great poet and novelist but you will also get an insight into the society that created him and a harrowing look at life in the Western trenches. Highly recommended.