Good-Bye to All That is an autobiography by Robert Graves which first appeared in 1929, when the author was 34 years old. "It was my bitter leave-taking of England," he wrote in a prologue to the revised second edition of 1957, "where I had recently broken a good many conventions". The title may also point to the passing of an old order following the cataclysm of the First World War; the supposed inadequacies of patriotism, the interest of some in atheism, feminism, socialism and pacifism, the changes to traditional married life, and not least the emergence of new styles of literary expression, are all treated in the work, bearing as they did directly on Graves's life. The unsentimental and frequently comic treatment of the banalities and intensities of the life of a British army officer in the First World War gave Graves fame, Graves, in a 1969 interview, claimed that he "entirely rewrote" the book—"every single sentence"—when it was reissued in the 1950s, suggesting that the process of co-writing The Reader Over Your Shoulder had made him more conscious of, and determined to rectify, deficiencies in his own style.

Pre-war life

Graves undertook climbing, stating "the sport made all others seem trivial." His first climb was Crib y Ddysgl, followed by climbs on Crib Goch and Y Lliwedd.

Reputed atrocities

Graves also discussed atrocities committed during the war in Good-Bye to All That. He wrote that among his fellow troops, Allied atrocity propaganda, such as reports of the rape of Belgium, was widely disbelieved (defining "atrocities" in the book as wartime sexual violence, mutilation and torture instead of summary executions). Graves also noted that if "the atrocity-list had to include the accidental-on-purpose bombing or machine-gunning of civilians from the air, the Allies were now committing as many atrocities as the Germans." Observing French and Belgian civilians showing British soldiers body parts allegedly mutilated by German troops, he argued that these were more likely the result of indiscriminate shelling.

According to Graves, "My particular disability was neurasthenia." He went on to say, "Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight ... strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends who had been killed." Offered a chance to rejoin George Mallory in climbing, Graves declined, "I could never again now deliberately take chances with my life."

Critical responses

Siegfried Sassoon and his friend Edmund Blunden (whose First World War service had been in a different regiment) took umbrage at the contents of the book. Sassoon's complaints mostly related to Graves's depiction of him and his family, whereas Blunden had read the memoirs of J. C. Dunn and found them at odds with Graves in some places. The two men took Blunden's copy of Good-Bye to All That and made marginal notes contradicting some of the text. That copy survives and is held by the New York Public Library. Graves's father, Alfred Perceval Graves, also incensed at some aspects of Graves's book, wrote a riposte to it titled To Return to All That.

It was included in Robert McCrum's Guide to the 100 greatest nonfiction books in English published by The Guardian.

References

  • Good-Bye to All That at Internet Archive