Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

First published: 1929

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: The early twentieth century

Locale: The western front during World War I and England

Principal Personages:

• Robert Graves, the author, a young Englishman who fights for his country during the Great War and survives
• Nancy Nicholson, his wife
• Alfred Percival Graves, his father
• Amalie von Ranke Graves, his mother

Form and Content

Robert Graves wrote his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, in 1929, when he was only in his mid-thirties. Born in 1895 into a middle-class English family with many literary and intellectual connections, Graves in this work ostensibly rejects his own personal experiences as well as the history of his time in order to pursue a new life. His mid-life crisis resulted from numerous private and public actions and events which the author was sloughing off, as he indicated in his title.

In general form, Graves’s work is a traditional autobiography. Perhaps parodying many nineteenth century literary biographies, the book begins with his earliest memories: watching Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession in 1897 and being overwhelmed by the sight of a full edition of the works of William Shakespeare in the family nursery. His father, of Scots-Irish background, was a local supervisor of schools in London as well as a poet of orthodox verse. His mother, of German ancestry, was related to the famous historian Leopold von Ranke. Graves’s childhood was traditionally Victorian in upbringing: Protestant Christianity combined with intellectual endeavor. He was reared to be an English gentleman.

As was expected of one of his social class, Graves was educated at one of the exclusive public schools, Charterhouse. Like other twentieth century English writers, Graves stated that his school days were not particularly pleasant. His schoolmates often referred to his German antecedents, so Graves instead argued that he was Irish. He developed a crush on a younger schoolboy, typical in that all-male environment. Graves gained some respect and recognition after taking up boxing. In 1914 he was to enter the University of Oxford. Before that could occur, war broke out in Europe.

The assassination in the Balkans of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire soon evolved into the conflagration known as the Great War, or World War I. With many of his social class, Graves did what was expected. He enlisted as an officer in the British army and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers, a highly decorated and much-honored regiment. Graves had had no intention of making the military his career; nevertheless, he became both a competent and a conscientious officer. He served in the trenches on the western front, fought in no-man’s-land, was wounded seriously twice—he was reported dead on one occasion—and spent time recovering back in Great Britain. Emotionally, Graves also suffered from severe battle fatigue. Unlike many, however, he survived the war.

Before the war had ended Graves married Nancy Nicholson; after it was over, he went up to Oxford, only four years late. There he studied, wrote poetry, and became acquainted with many literary figures of the day. Graves and his wife were constantly short of ready money, the difficulty compounded by four children, but Graves finally finished his thesis. Because of his financial circumstances, and at his family’s urging, he accepted an appointment as professor of English literature at Cairo University. It was the only salaried position he ever held, and he remained in it for only three months. He returned to England in 1926. During the following three years his marriage began to fail, and he and his wife were separated permanently in the spring of 1929. Much against his family’s wishes Graves decided to become a full-time writer and at the same time move to the Mediterranean island of Majorca. Goodbye to All That was written in 1929 as a farewell to his past.

A year later, from Majorca, in “Postscript to ‘Good-bye to All That,”’ Graves wrote that he had needed money in order to leave England and thus deliberately wrote a work which would have wide popularity. He said he emphasized such readable topics as food, ghosts, kings and prime ministers, stories of writers and famous people, sports and travel, school life and love affairs, and battles. Although his autobiography covered the chronology of his life to his mid-thirties, the war is the dramatic centerpiece around which the other years revolve. Two-thirds of the volume concern the four years from 1914 through 1918 with the other third divided about equally between the years before and the years after the war. Nevertheless, many of Graves’s critics and biographers argue that whatever monetary motives the author had in writing Goodbye to All That, there were other causes and influences.

Graves had been badly injured in the war, and he continued to suffer from its physical and emotional effects during the 1920’s, as did many of his fellow combatants. As the sounds of war receded in the decade after the 1918 armistice, the results seemed to be much less substantial than many had hoped. The ten million dead were a disproportionate price to pay for a world which appeared to be less livable and humane than the prewar civilization. Even if there were other elements, some preceding the guns of 1914, which transformed the often-idealized nineteenth century world, for many it was the war itself which was the single revolutionary event. For the soldiers, no-man’s-land was both metaphorically and actually the crucible. The idealistic patriotism of the early years of the war, as exemplified in the war poetry of Rupert Brooke, gave way in the poems and prose of later writers to other, less exalted, feelings: fear and anger, stolid acceptance and resignation, fatalism, suicide and madness, and occasionally humor. The coincidence of a great many war memoirs appearing along with those of Graves in the latter years of the decade suggests something more than a mere common quest for money. Rather, it could be argued that individually and collectively both writers and readers were attempting to deal with the traumatic experience of the war. Graves was doubtless no exception. Additionally, for him there was his failed marriage, his dissatisfaction with his academic career, and his anger and antagonism toward English society and civilization generally. He wished to say, “good-bye to all that.”

Critical Context

Most obviously Graves’s Goodbye to All That belongs with that distinguished body of writing, both poetry and prose, which emerged from the maelstrom of the Great War. Siegfried Sassoon published his thinly disguised fictional account of his wartime experiences, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, in 1928 and 1930, followed by Sherston’s Progress in 1936; the three volumes were later collected and entitled The Memoirs of George Sherston (1937). Edmund Charles Blunden published Undertones of War in 1928 and on the German side, Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929) appeared in 1929. Graves also wrote poetry on his war experiences, although it was perhaps not as memorable as that of his fellow English writers, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg. All, with the exception of Brooke, left to posterity a horrific picture of twentieth century war.

Goodbye to All That can also be seen as a continuation of other literary themes and movements. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895), a naturalistic account, is in some ways a predecessor of Graves’s work, and the subject of war as literature can be traced at least as far back as the work of the Greek historian Herodotus. Some critics have argued that Graves is also in the romantic tradition of the nineteenth century in his portrayal of the solitary individual estranged from the civilized community. Both during the war and afterward Graves wrote of himself as the outsider. On the other hand, in his attempt to distance himself through the use of irony from his own personal feelings and in his literary transformation of his experiences into art Graves can be seen as a modernist writer, though it has been noted that he and the other war memoirists never were able to escape that overwhelming experience completely. T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound never faced no-man’s-land. Finally, Graves’s autobiography can also be placed in the twentieth century literary tradition of portraying war with black humor. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) is perhaps the most obvious comparison, although it could be claimed that Heller’s novel is much more a work of fiction than is Graves’s work.

Robert Graves was a unique literary figure in the twentieth century. His interest in religion and myth, as exemplified particularly in The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948); his estrangement from his native land in particular and urban-industrial civilization in general; his escape to Majorca, where he finally died in 1985; his successful historical novels, especially I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina (1934); and much of his poetry all suggest a writer often not in sympathy with the modern world and temper. Along with some of his poems, Graves’s account—satiric, ironic, and black—of his first thirty-five years in Goodbye to All That assured his lasting literary reputation.

Bibliography

Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight, 1965.

Cohen, J.M. Robert Graves, 1960.

DeBell, Diane. “Strategies of Survival: Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That, and David Jones, In Parenthesis,” in The First World War in Fiction, 1976. Edited by Holger Klein.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory, 1975.

Hildebidle, John. “Neither Worthy nor Capable: The War Memoirs of Graves, Blunden, and Sassoon,” in Modernism Reconsidered, 1983. Edited by Robert Kiely.

Keegan, John. The Face of Battle, 1976.

Kernowski, Frank L. The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons. 2002.

Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Work, 1982.

Snipes, Katherine. Robert Graves, 1979.