Goodbye to All That - Robert Graves > Reviews (3)

It's said that even the best men tend to write fictional autobiographies. Robert Graves is, as far as I am concerned, certainly one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and this book, which he wrote in 1929 at the age of thirty-three before departing for Majorca, only helps to prove it - but the fact is that it is not, in truth, so much autobiography as a calculated attack on the English civilisation of the time. Graves rewrote his autobiography extensively in 1957, removing many of the later chapters, which dealt with his affair with the American poet Laura Riding, and with his subsequent arrest for manslaughter. This version of it begins with his first childhood memory, progresses through his time at Charterhouse School, and explores in detail his experiences in the Royal Welch Fusiliers as what he termed a 'schoolboy militant' during the First World War. Graves's writing is deft and amusing; he is one of those rare writers who seems to write directly to the reader, as if he were talking - this, no doubt, partly due to the fact that a large amount of the original book was dictated to a secretary. However, he shows an utter disregard for fact. Siegfried Sassoon, a close friend of Graves's during their time at war, reacted with dismay to some of the statements made about him in this book; and - as a word of warning to the sensitive - Graves is not one to hold back when he feels things ought to be said. Edmund Blunden, an earlier reviewer, remarked scathingly that Graves 'seems to have something of an obsession with homosexuality', which is certainly true of many of the early passages of the book.

Goodbye To All That is *not* entirely true, and it is *not* entirely accurate, but Graves is a skilful, compelling, attractive writer, and the story he weaves is absolute genius, and deserving entirely of its place in the annals of literature - as *literature*, not non-fiction. And as literature, it is difficult to find anything better on the subject of the First World War.