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Good-Bye to All That | Introduction

There were many fine, powerful memoirs published about the First World War, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That is considered to be one of the most honest and insightful. The descriptions of battle are horrifying, and the descriptions of military bungling and pomposity are darkly amusing. Graves' factual tone makes the remarkable seem unremarkable and the ordinary seem well worth examining. The book was published in 1929, more than ten years after the war's end, at a time when, like many writers who had lived through the war, Graves was still suffering from the trauma of fighting and was angry about the whole concept of war. His suffering shows in the disjointed methods he used—combining excerpts from letters, poems by himself and others, army commands and ramblings— to create a sense of the disorder he had felt since his time in battle.

Graves revised Good-Bye to All That in 1957 at the request of an American publisher. While revision usually leads to improvement, many critics believe that the cuts he chose to make actually detracted from the book and made the book a less honest work, taking away some of the immediacy and confusion that made the original version ring so authentic. A major change in the 1957 edition, for example, is the removal of information about Laura Riding, a poet with whom Graves was deeply involved in 1929. Looking back almost thirty years later, their affair might have seemed unimportant to him, but the material that is in the earlier edition tells much about the author that should be taken into account when reading this autobiography.

Good-Bye to All That Summary

Childhood
Good-Bye to All That begins with Robert Graves giving a brief account of his earliest memories, followed by a brief summary of what he is like at the time of writing: "My height is given as six feet two inches, my eyes as gray, and my hair as black.’’ With those staples of ‘‘biographical convention,’’ as he puts it, out of the way, Graves starts into the background of his family on both his mother's and father's sides, which is important information for showing the privileged class from which he came. His mother's German family is credited with being ‘‘a family of Saxon country pastors, not anciently noble'' but educated and thoughtful people. From his father's Irish family, he sees an inherited gift for conversation. His father was an amateur poet but mostly a school-board official, and he was widowed with five daughters when he married Graves' mother. He was their third child together, born in 1895, when his mother was forty and his father forty-nine. Due to this great age difference, his father had little to do with the young Graves' childhood and is hardly mentioned in the book.

Unique memories of his childhood include the time he realized that he and the servants who worked for the family were of different classes; another, his ‘‘horror of Catholicism,’’ which he learned growing up in a strictly Protestant household. In subsequent chapters, he explains that when he was not away at school, he was with his family at their house in Wimbledon or traveling, particularly to visit relatives in Germany.

School
Graves' childhood was spent moving from one preparatory school to another: his father disapproved of one, he was thrown out of another for using bad language, and he attended another for just one semester, ‘‘for my health.’’ From the earliest schools, he remembers traumatic sexual encounters with girls. The daughter of one headmaster tried, with her friend, to find out about male anatomy by peeking down his shirt front, and, in what he calls ‘‘another frightening experience from this part of my life,'' he once had to go to his sister's school and wait for her, with dozens of girls walking past and staring at him. ‘‘[F]or months and even years afterwards my worst nightmares were of this girls' school,’’ he explains, summarizing his fear as being ‘‘'Very Freudian,' as we say now.’’

The final prep school that he goes to, Charterhouse, is the one at which he spends the most time and the one that he dislikes the most. In his second year, he writes to his parents, listing the improper things that go on so that they will let him leave... » Complete Good-Bye to All That Summary