Reader Reviews for Good-Bye to All That : An Autobiography:
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Summary: Good-bye to all that is the best British memoir written on World War I
Comment: Robert Graves (1895-1985) is best known as a poet and the author of "I Claudius" and "Claudius the God." He lived most of his life in Majorca, was twice married and sired eight children. Graves was a member of the lost generation in which the British Empire saw nearly one million of her sons die on the battlefields during World War I.
Good-bye to All That is Graves memoir of his early years. He came from an upper middle class family. His father was a school inspector and minor poet. His mother came from a German family the Von Rankes. Graves was well educated but did not receive his degree in English Literature from Oxford until he returned to civilian life following service with the Royal Welch Regiment in the war.
Good-bye to All That's best section deals with Graves service in the war. We experience with him the hell of combat in the French trenches. Trenches filled with rats, insects and body parts floating in water. Men gassed and murdered with impunity by large shells. Stupid donkey officers leading lion hearted men to certain death in suicidal charges over the cursed territority of No Man's Land. This was the hellacioius landscape, the Dantean inferno which swept Graves and his generation into a maelstrom of suffering and death.
During his military service Graves became a friend of the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He, Sassoon and Wilfred Owen wrote poetry expressing the angst and horror of warfare.
Graves married his first wife living on the money received from both of their families. He met Thomas Hardy and T.S. Eliot and members of the Bloombsbury Group. Graves was a good friend of the famous T.H. Lawrence of "Lawrence of Arabia" fame. He said goodbye to....
postwar England and civilian's inability to understand the reality of warfare in the trenches
the rigid British class system
the hypocrisy and greed of modern industrial life.
Graves taught English in a Cairo university, traveled widely and became a respected man of letters. He writes in a plain, unadorned reportial style telling us what he saw and felt during his baptism of fire on the front lines. Good-bye to All That is one of the finest first person accounts of modern warfare ever published. It is a classic which should be included in classes on World War I joining its fictional counterpart Eric Marie Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front" as an essential in World War I literature.
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Summary: Robert Graves memoir
Comment: I have been a student of military history my entire life, and feel that this is one of the most powerful and well-written soldier memoirs that I've ever encountered.
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Summary: Very good memoir of World War I
Comment: There's not a lot I can add to what other reviewers have already said about Graves's memoir, so I'll dispense with a summary and say briefly what I liked and did not like about it. Take it or leave it.
First of all, Graves knows how to write--this memoir is just as entertaining and fun to read as any of his novels. His literacy and narrative ability immediately set him apart from many of the other World War I memoirists--whose books are often clunky and poorly written--as do his wit and his eye for the significant detail. The book is very funny in many places and deeply moving in others. His descriptions of trench life are suitably depressing, as are his tales of the randomness of World War I violence and even the suicidal tendencies of some of the soldiers.
The only things I disliked about Good-bye to All That were Graves's obvious bitterness and the lackluster final third. Graves, of course, is entitled to be bitter about the war--it was a terrible experience for thousands of people--but his view of the war as expressed here is imbalanced. His narrative is significantly skewed and rather self-pitying in places. Also, the strength of his narrative peters out near the end, when he spends some time teaching in Cairo. The last few chapters read more like notable miscellany than a coherent memoir.
Those two misgivings aside, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Not only was it a good memoir, it was a remarkably good source (I read this for a graduate seminar in World War I) for the attitudes and ideals of the "sensitive artistic types" following World War I. If you're interested in comparing this memoir with a vastly different perspective, I recommend reading it along with Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel.
Recommended.
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Summary: Good-Bye to all That
Comment: The beginning of the book was slow as it covered his school years prior to the war, the middle of the book was exciting with the war stories and the end of the book was slow covering his life after the war. The portion of the book that covered the war was very insightful.
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Summary: It's Not All That
Comment: It strikes me as interesting and perhaps a bit sad that Robert Graves is better known today for his Augustan era historical novels (I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 (Vintage International) and Claudius the God: And His Wife Messalina) and this memoir than he is for his poetry. Not that I am a fan of his or other poets (The Complete Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)) - I don't read poetry, never have liked it, and have next to no interest in it (my loss, I'm sure), but Graves' poetry was clearly vitally important to his self definition.
In this volume, Graves relates the story of his life up to about to 1928. The chapters about his upbringing and life in an English public school hold the reader's interest, but the only real reason to read this book are the chapters that recount his experiences in World War One. In Graves' telling the trench warfare was every bit as horrific as you have probably read elsewhere. He provides insights into the way the class structure carried over to the army. Graves also explains (or at least demonstrates) the sense of duty that not only kept men in the trenches, but kept them willing to fight as well, when refusal and mutiny seem the only rational response.
His life after the war bears some interest for literary historians, but not much for anyone else. The book soon begins to wonder across the page before finally drifting into pointlessness. Worse, Graves' is not entirely honest because he omits to mention his extramarital relationship with the poet Laura Riding; not that I care about the affair, but if he was going to burden the reader with a description of his period in Cairo, he ought not to have omitted the interesting bits. The omission is odd inasmuch as he did not shy away from a description of the public school as a virtually mandatory course in homosexuality.
The Anchor edition has an introduction by Paul Fussell that adds considerable value to the volume. The tone of my review is probably more negative than strictly necessary. I certainly highly recommend the book, but the quality is uneven. If you begin to lose interest after Graves' begins to readjust to postwar life, you can safely put the book down and know that you aren't missing much. Graves wrote `Goodbye to All That' primarily to make ends meet (after first failing to write the story as a novel) and at times it is a slapdash affair. Nonetheless, the worthwhile parts make the book mandatory reading for anyone with an interest in World War One.
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