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J. Weston Lewis. Victoria Neumark on Robert Graves

Goodbye to All What?

Lately I’ve been rereading books that impressed me in my youth. Some still impress, some no longer do, and some raise questions I would never have thought of when I took everything I read as simple truth.

Now I found myself asking: what was Robert Graves saying ‘goodbye’ to? When he published Goodbye to All That (1929), his startling memoir of his youth and his experiences on the Western Front in the First World War, he was 34. Most of the book recalls events that had ended a decade earlier. He says: ‘I had by the age of 23, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled, learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame and been killed.’ Are these life events to which one can bid adieu?

Graves’s bestseller broke fresh ground and turned the genre of the war memoir (previously the province of glory-hunting military men) on its head. He told how the daily terror of extinction, amid incessant noise and mud and dysentery, ground personal existence down to intensely vivid and interminably dull moments. In matter-of-fact prose, hardly altered from diaries and letters, Graves’s stiff upper lip scarcely trembles. Even when wounded and near death at the Battle of Mametz Wood, he does not weep and wail. This restraint gives the book an enduring – and endearing – solidity. As the poet Wilfred Owen famously wrote, ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’

Incidents are described with hellish clarity. After the Battle of Loos, the clear-up party finds a dead officer who, only a few hours before, had been an inspiring leader. With seventeen wounds, he had died with his fist crammed into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting the attention of the enemy, having first sent a message apologizing for groaning. As such scenes unfold, the relentless recurrence of death deadens the living. Months later, Graves goes for a stroll and finds the bloated, stinking corpse of a German soldier, eyeglasses still on nose. He is upset, not by the sight, but because he realizes there is ‘no excitement left . . . no horror in the experience of death’.

Graves is possibly the first writer to record how boredom as much as heroism forces men into crazy heroics. That, and the vileness of

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Lately I’ve been rereading books that impressed me in my youth. Some still impress, some no longer do, and some raise questions I would never have thought of when I took everything I read as simple truth.

Now I found myself asking: what was Robert Graves saying ‘goodbye’ to? When he published Goodbye to All That (1929), his startling memoir of his youth and his experiences on the Western Front in the First World War, he was 34. Most of the book recalls events that had ended a decade earlier. He says: ‘I had by the age of 23, been born, initiated into a formal religion, travelled, learned to lie, loved unhappily, been married, gone to the war, taken life, procreated my kind, rejected formal religion, won fame and been killed.’ Are these life events to which one can bid adieu? Graves’s bestseller broke fresh ground and turned the genre of the war memoir (previously the province of glory-hunting military men) on its head. He told how the daily terror of extinction, amid incessant noise and mud and dysentery, ground personal existence down to intensely vivid and interminably dull moments. In matter-of-fact prose, hardly altered from diaries and letters, Graves’s stiff upper lip scarcely trembles. Even when wounded and near death at the Battle of Mametz Wood, he does not weep and wail. This restraint gives the book an enduring – and endearing – solidity. As the poet Wilfred Owen famously wrote, ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’ Incidents are described with hellish clarity. After the Battle of Loos, the clear-up party finds a dead officer who, only a few hours before, had been an inspiring leader. With seventeen wounds, he had died with his fist crammed into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting the attention of the enemy, having first sent a message apologizing for groaning. As such scenes unfold, the relentless recurrence of death deadens the living. Months later, Graves goes for a stroll and finds the bloated, stinking corpse of a German soldier, eyeglasses still on nose. He is upset, not by the sight, but because he realizes there is ‘no excitement left . . . no horror in the experience of death’. Graves is possibly the first writer to record how boredom as much as heroism forces men into crazy heroics. That, and the vileness of the trenches. At first the trenches were a novelty, so that people put up with paddling about in water. But as the years wore on, disgust overwhelmed soldiers. Sewage, rotting body parts and belligerent rats were ever-present companions. Despite the battering of enemy fire, the dehumanizing filth and the widespread lack of faith in the war itself, men could still display their better natures. Some of the book’s most poignant scenes tell of such step-changes: a Welsh fusilier playing a hand-harp when the shelling pauses, a kindly adjutant finding two unripe greengages for the wounded Graves. In this way, the book is by no means an artless account of events unfolding but a closely shaped narrative. War experiences form only the middle section of Goodbye to All That, which is told in three parts. The first covers Graves’s childhood and youth, coloured and contoured by the rigid class distinctions of late Victorian and Edwardian England. And the final third takes up the story after the war, his marriage and efforts to make sense of civilian life, with an epilogue to the poet Laura Riding (added to a revised edition published in 1957). His father, an inspector of schools who struggled in the shadow of a long line of Anglo-Irish bishops, was also a poet and songwriter of distinction. He wrote a popular hit called ‘Father O’Flynn’, of which Graves mordantly remarks that he ‘sold the complete rights for a guinea. The publisher made thousands.’ Robert’s mother, who came from a long-established Bavarian family, had married his widowed father to help with five motherless children and went on to bear him five more. She was a softer but more insistent presence, instilling in her children an intense Protestant religiosity, a deep prudishness and a fear of sin. Theirs was a Victorian household, with funds stretched to keep up appearances, so that the children were pushed to gain scholarships. Bitterly, Graves observes that his inability to conjugate irregular Greek verbs dictated his going to Charterhouse rather than Winchester, since Charterhouse did not demand Greek. Though he does acknowledge his parents’ generosity (they bailed him out repeatedly until his late twenties), this first part of the book is shot through with resentment. ‘I paid so heavily for the 14 years of my gentleman’s education,’ he says. How he paid is painfully spelled out. Forced to do mental arithmetic at the age of 6, he wet himself. At 7, he was removed from one prep school for using ‘naughty words’, which he understood as little as the Latin he was forced to recite. As he got older, he says, his character became fixed: ‘I began playing games seriously, was quarrelsome, boastful and talkative, won prizes and collected things.’ It’s a sharp-eyed character sketch; yet Graves does not question, as I did in my rereading, why childhood injustices sting more sharply than war wounds in his memory. What does this say about the class system which is still so entrenched in British life? We haven’t said goodbye to that, either. Boys and masters at his schools were mostly insensitive and overbearing. He was beaten and his romantic but entirely non-sexual friendships were interpreted as ‘beastliness’; his poetry was mocked as ‘filthy’; and education was reduced to mechanical exercises, largely in Latin and Greek grammar. His salvation came when he discovered a talent for boxing, winning respect as well as a savage satisfaction. And he was introduced to climbing by one of the young masters, George Mallory, who was to die on his third attempt to climb Mount Everest. Graves brings this vanished world to life, the backdrop to his decision to join up in 1914 – to avoid the grind of reading classics at Oxford, he claims. But really, as his near-contemporary Rupert Brooke was to claim, the war seemed to all these young men torn between the harsh and simple pieties with which their education had imbued them and their yearning for a ‘cleaner’ world, an answer and an escape at one fell swoop. It was not, of course, the sort of show such very young men imagined – over by Christmas and full of fine deeds – and yet so few rebelled. At least one in three of Graves’s contemporaries at Charterhouse were killed. Even the poet Siegfried Sassoon, with whom Graves had a passionate, antagonistic friendship during the war and after, refused to avoid fighting, although he had condemned the war in an open letter to The Times. Overall, nearly 20 per cent of the officer class were killed in action, compared to 12 per cent of ordinary soldiers. As Owen wrote, they died for their belief in ‘The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.’ In these first two sections, Graves’s voice rings true. He explains how the war changed him, as it did many others, from a self-confessed snob into a socialist. During his first command, he winced at the miners’ coarse language and despaired at their limited horizons and sexual frankness. Yet these feelings wore away in the shared experiences of battle. The third section of the book tells a less sympathetic story. His first wife, Nancy, sister of the painter Ben Nicholson, was an ardent feminist, who nearly refused to marry him when she discovered that the wedding service still contained the bride’s promise to ‘obey’. Thereafter, despite having four children, the couple were often at odds: Nancy needed her own life as an artist and illustrator; they disagreed over childcare; they failed to earn money in any of their ill-thought-out schemes, which included running a village shop and a school; they relied on a steady drip-drip of ‘loans’ from Graves’s parents to keep up their bohemian lifestyle. Graves attempted to complete his Oxford degree in the normal way but could not take the routine. He describes 1918–26 as a period of gradual disintegration. While achieving his first success as a writer with his biography of his friend T. E. Lawrence, his marriage was foundering. Although the couple had vowed that he need never get a job, he felt forced by poverty and by Nancy’s ill-health to accept a handsome salary as Professor of English Literature at the newly founded Royal Egyptian University in Cairo. And here the story takes its strangest turn. On a whim, Graves wrote to the young American poet Laura Riding, whose work had impressed him. She turned up at the docks, accompanied the family to Egypt and back again, became part of a ménage à trois – and then dispossessed Nancy. Graves glosses over these events. He ends the book claiming to have ‘learned to tell the truth – mainly’; but by this time his words feel decidedly slippery. Graves spent the years 1929–40 with Laura Riding, to whom he addresses his epilogue, describing her there as having the ‘true quality of one living invisibly, against kind, as dead, beyond event’ – a mind-boggling and somewhat mystifying claim. It was a fraught relationship, during the course of which, in a fit of jealousy, Laura threw herself out of a fourth-floor window. Graves ran downstairs, but was unable to reach her in time, and threw himself out of a third-floor window after her. Both survived, but Laura sustained spinal injuries while Graves got away with bruises. ‘After which . . .’ Graves elliptically concludes. After which, in fact, he earned a good living and fame while Riding, to her fury, faded into obscurity. Although Graves was grateful to her for shutting the door on the nightmares of his past, I closed the book reflecting that the nightmares of our past are not so quickly dismissed. As Faulkner wrote, in Requiem for a Nun, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Wars are not done with, even now in Europe. Graves’s tremendous account reminds us that we have said goodbye to none of that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 51 © Victoria Neumark 2016


About the contributor

Victoria Neumark has spent more of her life than seems feasible reading, but only recently bought into the joys of rereading. As well as Robert Graves, she can recommend In the Night Kitchen and The Very Hungry Crocodile, which she is enjoying with her young granddaughter.

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