Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That
By: Steve Newman Writer
Tags: Literature, Writers Life, History, Biography, Books

Robert Graves: Good-bye to All That

An Autobiography

A young Graves. Image: Evening Standard

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.

The 2014 facsimile cover of the original paperback Ist edition

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.

Hemingway’s traumatic experiences and injuries in Italy in 1918, as dreadful as they were, were also relatively short lived. For Graves the somewhat longer time spent in the trenches of France, and the very serious injuries suffered during the Battle of the Somme, created the man who wrote one of the finest pieces of First World literature. That both Graves and Hemingway were damaged mentally by their experiences is not in doubt.

Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is a masterpiece, no question of that, but a masterpiece tempered for the most part by a love story that, only in the last few pages, turns into a tragedy. Graves autobiography is very different. At first reading it does seem very critical of most things, and as poet Andrew Motion writes:

“…and so he is in many obvious respects. But his comic manner has a stylistic counterpart that gives the book a different and associated power. This derives from its passion for plain-dealing and plain-speaking. For finding a way to record material that is in itself so horrible, anything fancy or ornamental would seem a kind of betrayal…”

Graves is keen to get started on his war experiences, but as he writes:

“ As a proof of my readiness to accept biographical convention, let me at once record my two earliest recollections. The first is being held up to the window to watch a carnival procession for the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 (this was at Wimbledon, where I had been born on 24th July 1895). The second, an earlier recollection still, is looking up with a sort of despondent terror at a cupboard in the nursery, which stood accidentally open and which was filled to the ceiling with octavo volumes of Shakespeare. My father was organizer of a Shakespeare reading circle. I did not know until long afterwards that it was the Shakespeare cupboard, but I, apparently, had then a strong instinct against drawing room activities. It is only recently that I have overcome my education and gone back to this early intuitional spontaneousness…”

The above is from page seven, and by page eighty-eight Graves is, in the spring of 1914, climbing mountains in North Wales with the legendary George Mallory (who died climbing Everest in 1924), and had, soon after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany on August 4th 1914, enlisted in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and was almost immediatley sent to France.

Graves was born into a well off middle-class family, and was the third of five children. His father Alfred Perceval Graves, “… was the sixth child and second son of Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Aghadoe…” and worked as a school inspector, he was also a Gaelic and Shakespearean scholar, and the author of the lyrics of the song, ‘Father O’Flynn’. Grave’s mother was his father’s second wife, Amalie Elisabeth Sophie von Ranke, the niece of the historian Leopold von Ranke, and the daughter of a doctor, Heinrich von Ranke who, as a student, and a follower of Karl Marx, became involved in the political disturbances of 1848, and, like Marx, had to flee Germany, finally settling in London where he finished his medical studies. In 1859 he joined the British Army as a regimental surgeon, seeing active service during the Crimean War. On his return to London he met and married Graves’ grandmother (described by Graves as a “ Schleswig-Dane…the daughter of [John?]Tiarkis, the Greenwich astronomer…”), with the couple then returning to Germany where Heinrich set himself up as a village doctor and dairy farmer, the latter to ensure the villagers had fresh milk.

Graves’ part German heritage did cause him a few problems when serving in France, as he writes:

“ When I was in the trenches…I happened to belong to a company mess in which four of us young officers out of five had, by a coincidence, either German mothers or naturalized German fathers. One of them said: ‘Of course I’m glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it off for a month or two they’d have accused me of being a German spy. As it is I have an uncle interned at Alexandra Palace, and my father’s only been allowed to retain the membership of his golf club because he has two sons in the trenches.’ I said: ‘Well, I have three or four uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins too. One of my uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them I only advertise the uncle who is a British admiral…”

The above not only shows how preposterous war can sometimes seem, not least when you have relations on the enemy side, which has been the case in all wars, and once you are in the ‘trenches’ it becomes simply a job that has to be done.

There was also no room for patriotism, “…it was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.”

Graves’ descriptions of trench warfare are done with great observation and skill, building up a kind of cinematic momentum that becomes almost unbearable in its chaotic confusion. It is writer as a sublime witness to men at war: of individuals who had seemed utterly useless becoming utterly heroic, although that word would never have crossed anyone’s mind in that particular moment; with patriotism buried alongside it in the mud.

And it is in the prose that Robert Graves the poet sufaces. This is the committed writer off-loading (unconciously for the most) the weight of his experience, using it to create art, to turn the negative into some kind of positive. To enable life to go on.

Image: walkaboutbooks.com

Graves had done the same earlier with his Lawrence and the Arabs, first published by Cape in 1927, at the height of Lawrence’s attempts to get his Seven Pillars of Wisdom published, and Lowell Thomas’s hugely successful ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ lecture tour with slides and film, which was pulling in the crowds. It was a good publishing move on Cape’s part, and it paid off.

In many ways Lawrence and the Arabs is a good companion piece to Good-bye to All That, because its author came from a not dissimilair background to Lawrence, albeit without the stigma (as Lawrence saw it) of illegitimacy. Both had experienced the horrors of war, and knew how armies worked (or didn’t), and was an admirer of Lawrence, with Lawrence only seven years older than Graves.

The two men got on well at their first meeting, and contnued to do so subsequently, in person, and in their letters. They were also old style classicists, who were suffering both mental and physical instability. Graves handled it pretty well, Lawrence found it hard, very hard indeed and, in his case, by trying to avoid the spotlight of publicity, by changing his name and ‘hiding’ in the RAF and the Tank Corps, he found himself in the glare of those lights even more. Graves coped better when he moved to the island of Majorca, although his love life was a bit of a mess.

Graves biography of Lawrence is a masterpiece that deals with the intricasies of the Arab Campaign in a well judged, and beautifully written way:

“ On May the thirtieth they went forward again in company with the whole of the Abu Tayi; it was the first time that Lawrence had ever taken part in the march routine of a Bedouin tribe. There was no apparent order, but the caravan advanced simultaneously on a wide front, each family making a self-contained party. The men were on riding-camels; the black goathair tents and the howdahs in which the women were hidden were carried on the baggage-camels. Farraj and Daud were behaving with more than usual mischief in this care-free atmosphere…”

Robert Graves first met Lawrence two years after the war, and writes:

“ The first time I met him he was in full evening dress. This was in February or March 1920. It was a guest-night at All Souls [Oxford], where he had been awarded a seven-years’ Fellowship. The formality of evening dress, when everyone is wearing it, concentrates attention on eyes, and Lawrences’s eyes immediatley interested me. They were startlingly blue, even by artificial light, and glittered; also, they never met the eyes of the person he was addressing but flickered up and down as if making an inventory of clothes and limbs…”

The above is taken from a long contributon by Graves for the commemorative book, T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, which goes into great detail about how, as a lowly undergraduate, he became facinated by Lawrence as the hero of Arabia gave the Regius Professor of Divinty a lecture on the influence of the Syrian Greek philosophers on early Christianity. When it was agreed that he would write Lawrence’s biography, Graves visited him often in his rooms where they would discuss poetry (including some of the new American poetry), the Arab Campaign, and the works of the Charles Doughty, principly, Arabia Deserta. Graves essay is essential reading to understanding both Lawrence and Graves.

Lawrence and the Arabs is a glorious book, deserving more credit than later biographers have given it, although they all use Graves source material quite freely.

Graves married his first wife, the painter and designer, Nancy Nicholson, in 1918, with whom he had four children. In 1919, Graves entered Oxford University to read English language and Literature. In 1926, still working on the Lawrence biography, he left for Cairo, with his wife and family, and his lover, the poet Laura Riding, to take up a professorship at the city’s university. He resigned six months later.

In 1929, after running away with Riding, Graves, Nicholson, and Riding created a ‘Trinity’ that was brought to an end when Riding jumped out of a bedroom window, followed by Graves in an attempt to save her. They both survived, and when recovered, fled to Majorca, where his sexuality and love life became very complicated indeed( which must have helped with the plots of his I Claudius novels.)

During the 1830s his writing blossomed and expanded in every direction.

In 1938 he met and fell in love with Beryl Hodge, whom he married in 1950 after his divorce from Nicholson came through. The couple had four children.

Robert Graves died in Majorca on the 7th of December 1985.

His literary legacy is vast and varied, with his poetry outshining many another English poet of the period, with the exception, for me, of the work of Edward Thomas.

Good-bye to All That is a work beyond compare.

Bibliography: Robert Graves — Good-bye to All That (Cape, London, 1929 & Penguin Classics 2014); Robert Graves — Lawrence and the Arabs ( Jonathan Cape, London, 1927); Lawrence by His Friends — Edited by A. W. Lawrence (Jonathan Cape, London, 1937);