20th Century Goodbye To All That (Twentieth Century Classics) by Robert Graves (1989-10-03)

I ordered a LARGE PRINT book and received a regular print paperback. I returned the paperback, and received another regular print paperback (the exact style I had just returned). I gave the regular print paperback to my Grandfather because it was Father's Day, and now, I'm not sure he can read it because the print is too small.

Needless to say, I am disgusted that my first order AND my second order were NOT correct. What a waste of time and money.

Chosen by my book club along with Regeneration, so period over laps. But for a classic, Goodbye to All That tells you more than you ever wanted to know about the moment by moment events in Graves's life. I skimmed through it and only stopped when I saw something or someone I wanted to learn more about.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) was an English poet, historical novelist, critic, and classicist. He published more than 140 works. He is famous for many of them, such as “I, Claudius” and “The Golden Ass.” He composed this autobiography in 1929 when he was thirty-three. It is about his early life, with most of it about his experiences during World War I, when he served in France as a British officer. Graves is an excellent writer and this book is easy to read and very informative. Many reviewers consider it one of the best depictions of life in the trenches during the war.
Graves tells readers about his bad experiences at a high class British school, his infatuation there with a boy Dick who was younger than him, and how he remained a virgin, as did his first wife, an underage girl of 17, until their marriage. One in three fellow students at his school were killed during the war. The average life expectancy during the four and a half years of war on the Western Front was three months, by which time soldiers would be either wounded or killed. He was wounded when a shell went through his left thigh near his groin. As unfortunately happens all too often, his family was told that he had been killed. Because of his alleged death, the government stopped paying him.
He tells us how many English men, women, and children who had lived at peace in England for many years were interned because they had German names. They were told, “You are safer inside than out.” He tells us about soldiers who receive notices that their wives are sleeping with other men, and he had such a notice about Dick, and about soldiers who hated their sergeants so much that they shot them.
Readers will learn much about the war in Graves book and will not be surprised to learn that he was so traumatized by the war that he gave up religion.

A stream of thought type memoir about mostly WWI but with an odd little blurb about the moral decay of the British boarding school system at the start. There are probably ten thousand reviews for this book on the internet if not more, most of which hail it as a masterpiece of writing. I, personally, found the book interesting and informative but not a literary masterpiece. Considering the book was written when Graves was still young that isn't terribly surprising. If you would like insight into how the first world war changed Europe then this will certainly offer it. Just don't be expecting a piece of classic literature or a memoir focused expressly on WWI.

As for the "Everyman's Library" edition it is an excellent little book. Nice hard cover with a dust jacket and a ribbon to mark you pages. The size makes it easy to carry around in a bag or the like but isn't so small as to be difficult to read. If you want a book that will look nice sitting on a shelf when you're done with it then this is a good buy, otherwise you can find it in paperback format for much less.

It's also a portrait of the world entering, surprisingly innocently, into the war, and a little on how the war made the men and the world they survive into after the war. This is memoir at its most straightforward, beautifully written, but clear, matter-of-fact, and willing to break taboos. Without a doubt one of the great works of literature from the Great War. But you probably knew that, so let me review this edition. The text is from the 1950s re-editing of the book by Graves with some omissions to spare the feelings of people still alive. But the differences aren't so dramatic, and you can google the full set of changes. This Everyman's Library edition should probably have talked more about the variations in the text I think. Otherwise it's an excellent presentation, a solid hardcover of good quality, on good paper, and with useful introductory material by Graves' biographer.

This autobiography tells briefly of Graves' early life, in depth about his experiences in World War I, and then quickly covers the ten years following the War, when he wrote the book. He writes frankly about the War, sharing the tragedies, stupidities, and horrors of trench warfare. His prose is engaging, drawing the reader into the events. While the War episodes are the most absorbing, it was still interesting to read about the before and after years. It will appeal most to those researching WWI, but the average reader will also find it fascinating as the documentation of the formative years of a famous author.

Note: This edition was updated by Graves in 1957, and according to the Introduction, some changes were made.

Graves' autobiography is an important contribution to the body of work expressing astonishment at the excesses of, and disillusionment toward, the forces behind the UK's prosecution of World War I. Wanting to read the original and unsure which of the modern editions features it, I solicited and received a gift of an early edition. I'm a bit disappointed in my brother though, as it arrived with the cover unglued from the spine. Still, the worn version made this fun; I need my Kindle but I love a vintage book.

As for the text itself, I gather Graves took liberties in his treatment of events, weaving battlefield mythology into it. That said, his disdain and his emotional scarring make the book what it is--not the anecdotes from the trenches. And, of course, his writing is beyond reproach.

His privileged upbringing, in addition to the associated education that sets Graves up for a career in letters, fade in importance somewhat as the war takes center stage. However, they remain touchstones, rendering coherent the literary thread winding through the book. They also inform Graves' vital descriptions of the geographic and socioeconomic tensions between the various ranks and fighting units.

Graves' erudition and literary bent, combined with the book's vast disillusionment, bring Goodbye To All That squarely into the corpus examined decades later by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory. Perhaps the former's influence on Catch-22 and Gravity's Rainbow (among others, I'm sure) is obvious, but Fussell's remarkable book makes the connections formidably clear. This book should lead to the others.

Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That is a fine piece of WWI literature, where the humdrum brutality and incessant misery of war concludes with the different type of tedium that Graves and his wife find in a grocery shop they open in rural England. Graves writes his memoirs that are strikingly frank, not only with respect to others, including fellow writers like Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. But while he captures the ruthless bloodthirst that infects even proclaimed pacifists like Sassoon, he recalls Ford Maddox Ford who conveys the maddening routine of war, including the artillery barrages and the constant rebuilding of trench defences.

Graves is all the more credible because he is apolitical, without blaming according to any ideology. He even admits to the thrill of running amok. He accepts his part in the war without casting blame, or preaching or even regret.

At the same time, Graves is hardly unthinking, together with his fellow writers at the front. He talks of pacifism and how it is warranted by the futility of a war without any clear justification. The immediacy of his observations suggests he wrote the book from a journal, but with a perspective that enables him to be dispassionate and lucid.

Graves provides an objectivity that does not engage with the mythology and sentimentality that pervades the works of Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen. He is not wracked by guilt; nor does he glory in triumphalism. He lets the reader know that he was an acting lieutenant-colonel, or an officer commanding a regiment, before he was 23,but without any implication that he is proud of the abilities he must have demonstrated to hold this rank, no matter how briefly. But clearly, he was a conscientious leader who strove for the survival of his men.

Highlights of the book include his sketches of the lieutenant colonel in the officers' mess enraged because Graves wore insignia on his epaulettes instead of his cuffs. He wittily describes the behaviour of soldiers when off active duty, temporarily billeted in French towns before being drafted to the front, or enjoying a short, precious leave. The reader shares in the relief of the soldiers on leave, briefly released from the trenches to recover their spirits in the drawing room of a French chateau. These small pleasures were all the more precious for the soldiers who accepted that could die any time. Ironically, those who feared death the most were the ones most likely to die. Graves' memoir gives insights into a new normal, that including compatriots `going over the top' only to be mown down by German machine guns, to collapse and die writhing on barbed wire. But Graves still recalls that the German barbed wire, and the German cutters, and other military equipment, was superior to that issued to the British Tommy.

Graves' frankness and objectivity combined with a sense that the war was a dreadful phenomenon that had a life of its own makes Goodbye to all that a valuable historic document for anyone interested in the psychology of the soldier at war, and of the way that events can subsume not only individuals, but whole armies and nations.

Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography

I generally hate memoirs, and avoid the genre as much as possible -- so when my bookgroup picked this as the next selection, I was pretty crestfallen. But I held my nose and started reading it, and lo and behold, found myself drawn in right away. I certainly knew of the book's reputation as a classic account of World War I and kind of epitaph for a generation, but had no inkling that Graves would be able to write about his childhood and school years in such a compelling manner. Granted, it's only compelling to those who have an interest in how prewar English society operated, especially in the upper classes, but as a portrait of that particular time and place, it's certainly a fine example.

The book really picks up, however, when Graves enlists in the Army and heads off to war (interestingly, he enlists to postpone his higher education). I gather that what made his account so groundbreaking was his scathing honesty and apparent lack of embellishment in recounting the horrors and idiocy he witnessed (particularly memorable is his description of a bungled early attempt at using poison gas). Although the mind still reels at the carnage, it reels even further at the prospect that teenage academics such as Graves were suddenly thrust into positions where they commanded other men in a war zone. There's a lot of very interesting detail about daily life in the trenches, meals, equipment, and so forth. But plenty of drama too -- notably an episode in which Graves is left to die (and indeed his family is notified), only to eventually recover. I would assume that pretty much any contemporary reader of the book would be well aware of the catastrophic prosecution of WWI, but Graves's book provides a direct view into what that meant on a day-to-day basis.

The post-war years, on the other hand, feel very perfunctory and tacked on. They unspool as a series of episodes with very little connective tissue, and without the drama of youth or the larger import of the war, they largely fail to engage. As a series of name-dropping encounters with various eminent literary figures of the day, they work fine, but there's clearly much more drama to his failing marriage than he cares to disclose here. I gather from further reading that the memoir has been substantially revised since its initial publication, and that Graves may have embellished certain aspects in order to appeal to a broader readership. Whatever the case may be, it is a fairly interesting peek into a bygone era, with special appeal to those interested in World War I. I can't say I loved it, but I certainly enjoyed it much more than I expected to.

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.

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.

This highly dramatic (not wonderful) autobiography covers the first thirty years of the author's life, which were heavily marked by religion, public school and World War I.

Education, religion
Robert Graves was educated in a patriarchal system where he learned `to masquerade as a gentleman'.
The religion of his youth left him with lifelong psychological scars: `religion developed in me a great capacity for fear - I was perpetually tortured by the fear of hell - a superstitious conscience, and a sexual embarrassment.'

Public school
For him, public school was `a fundamental evil' with very few decent schoolmasters, while nearly all the time was spent at Latin and Greek. R. Graves felt painfully `the oppression of the spirit, like sitting in a chilly cellar'. Writing literature (poems) was considered as a strong proof of insanity.
He was permanently bullied, until he took boxing lessons. He also didn't like the gay atmosphere where `boys used each other as convenient sex-instruments.'

The WW I massacre
The war experience left him shell-shocked.
The average life expectancy of an infantry subaltern was at some stages of the war only about three months. Morale became so low that an officer had to shoot a man from his company `to get the rest out of the trench.'
All the soldiers wanted, was to be wounded and to be set free to leave this horrible war: `A bullet in his neck. I was delighted. David should now be away long enough to escape perhaps even the rest of the war. Then came the news that David was dead.'
The intellectual community understood perfectly what was happening: `We no longer saw the war as one between trade-rivals: its continuance seemed merely a sacrifice of the idealistic younger generation to the stupidity and self-protective alarm of the elder.'

Together with Henri Barbusse's `Under Fire', Robert Graves`s autobiography constitutes a truly realistic report on the senseless slaughtering of innocent youngsters during WW I. It stands in sharp contrast to the works on the same subject by the German author Ernst Jünger who used his huge literary talent to glorify (!) war and his war experience.
Robert Graves wrote an intensely emotional and bitter book which is a must read for all those interested in the history of WW I and of mankind.

I have been aware of this book with its' familiar title since childhood but I only recently read it. I feared it would be a dull dry-as-dirt retelling of war stories of forgotten dead men. I was pleasantly surprised. The book is not at all dull but
presents Graves war experience in an exciting fast pased way. I had to skim the first part about his childhood. Every biography has a dull childhood section dealing with the subject's juvenile trails and tribulations and conflicts with family members. I find these universally uninteresting.
Graves was 17 when the war started and volunteered for officer candidate school within days. He became a lieutenant in the Royal Welch Guards and eventually was promoted to captain in charge of his own company of infantry by age 21. Unlike
our present system where college is mandatory prerequisite for a young man seeking to become an officer, social standing determined that Graves would become an officer rather than an enlisted man.
Graves participates in several trench warfare battles. Trench warfare as Graves describes is a monotonous and dirty business. Rats are everywhere. Groundwater seeps relentlessly into living and fighting spaces. The men live in warrens of chambers cut into ground branching away from the main trenches. To break up
the monotony and to show that he's not a coward, Graves often volunteers for scout duty. He sneaks into no mans land at night to assess the enemy. On occasion the senior officers order suicidal attacks in which every man of the company must go over the top and charge fortified machine gun positions. Graves
tells of one attack in which his company was ordered to take part. Three companies go before his and each is destroyed with 100% casualties wounded or killed. Graves and his men are crouching poised at the top step of their trench waiting for their turn to attack when the attack is suddenly called off. In a later attack Graves is wounded by shrapnel and left for dead for over 24 hours before receiving medical attention. He recovers fully from these wounds but is assigned to training duty after his recovery.
Later parts of the book deal with Graves' first marriage, his education at Oxford, a failed attempt at shopkeeping and a post war teaching position in Cairo. I found these of less interest than the war scenes. Graves lived to age 90 and went on the write the immensely entertaining I, Claudius and over a hundred other books.

I read Goodbye to All That primarily because of the material on the First World War, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Graves' description of his life up until the war was also very interesting. Reading about his life in private school and his conflicted feelings about belonging to the upper echelons of society provides gives you a sense of the world he lived in and a context for the war. Graves illustrates the behaviour and attitudes of the boys and men that would eventually become soldiers in one of the world's bloodiest wars.

About a third of the way through the book, war breaks out in Europe and Graves' academic career is put on hold. His descriptions of the battles are very detailed, describing troop movements, specific battles and awards handed out to soldiers. The author describes life in the trenches in great detail, relating how soldiers would heat water for their coffee by firing their machine guns until they got hot. It's little details like this that bring the story to life.

Toward the end, after Graves is injured and moves to Cairo, the action slows a bit, but is still very interesting. If you're interested in reading about life during wartime, this is definitely something you should pick up. As other reviewers have stated, be sure to get the latest edition of the book for an uncensored version of the events that includes names and locations.

GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT is about considerably more than just Graves's experiences in the trenches in WW I, but it is that section of the book that makes this memoir stand apart from most others. That, and the exceptional honesty of the book, which manages to be tell-all without being gossipy. There is also a sense of renunciation; instead of nostalgic longing to recover the past as one find in other memoirs, Graves is anxious to put the past aside for good, to have done with it entirely.
The best parts of the book are those dealing with his dreadful time in school, he time serving in the war, and his various friendships. Some of those friendships sneak up on you. He writes at length of a literature professor at school named George Mallory who profoundly molded his reading and literary sensibilities. He writes for page after page about "George," but it isn't until he begin a chapter with the words, "George Mallory did something better than lend me books: he too me climbing on Snowdon in the school vacation." It wasn't until that moment that I realized that George Mallory the literature instructor was THAT George Mallory, the famous mountain climber who attempted Everest (and perhaps conquered it) "because it is there." George becomes one of Graves's greatest friends, and even serves as best man in his wedding. The other friendship I found fascinating, perhaps because the man himself remains one of the most mystifying characters of the 20th century, was T. E. Lawrence. As Lawrence removed himself from the public eye more and more in the 1920s and 1930s, being in 1920 perhaps one of the most famous individuals in the British Empire, he changed personas from Lawrence of Arabia to Private Shaw, reenlisting in the Army as an auto mechanic. Graves remained a good friend of his throughout the entire period, and wrote one of the first serious biographies of Lawrence. I enjoyed one passage where he is in Lawrence's quarters at (I think) Cambridge, eyeing the manuscript of Lawrence's own war memoirs, what would eventually become THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM (Graves would be one of a select few to receive a copy of the first privately printed edition, which remains one of the great published books of the 20th century, with expensively reproduced drawings and illustrations--subsequent editions remove most of the illustrations).

But the heart of the book is the account of his experiences at the front. Although this war produced a disproportionate amount of great literature, I personally believe that the two greatest literary monuments to the Great War (unless one also includes Lawrence's THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM) are Graves's memoir and the poetry of Wilfrid Owen. The sections of the book dealing with the war seem to alternate between the startling everyday to the nightmarish. In many sections the mood seems to be straight out of Dante's PURGATORIO, at the worst his INFERNO. But throughout, the story is carried forward by Graves's relentlessly honest pen. Although Graves's wrote an absolutely stunning number of books, in particular the two Claudius novels, this fine volume just might be his greatest work.

Robert Graves, poet and author of "I, Claudius", was also an infantry officer in the Great War. Here he has written a war memoir which ranks in the same league as Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia".
Honest and open to a fault, he chronicles his upbringing in the English public schools system and his dislike of hypocrisy. This antagonism he will carry with him throughout his period in the trenches.
Graves' vivid portrayal of life in the trenches is second to none. He recounts the endless routine of trench life with its boredom and the terror of attack and German shelling. Held up to special scorn is the sheer stupidity of the higher command and its insistence on wasting the lives of officers and men.
Graves successful attempt at convincing a military board to go easy on his friend and writer Siegfried Sassoon is an amazing segment in itself (Sassoon wrote a pacifist tract while at the same time leading his infantry company with- by all accounts- great courage).
His description of the effects of life in the trenches is well written. Neurosthania (shell-shock) was the 19th century term before post-traumatic disorder was coined. The portrayal of it is vivid, not in a clinical way, but in the way Graves writes about himself and his comrades as they adjust to civilian life.
Everything before Graves life seems a prologue to the war, and everything after an epilogue. What an great and important book this is.

This historically important novel has stood the test of time – it is still eminently readable. Although I found Sigrid Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’ perhaps more engrossing. Grave’s account of trench warfare drags on somewhat at first, but the increasing horror and carnage does finally grip one. The soldier’s only hope of escape was, short of getting killed, to get injured to get some respite back home. Graves writes that about one in three of his contemporaries at Charterhouse, his public school, was a fatality. Graves himself doesn’t emerge unscathed, injured from bullet wounds in the throat in 1915. Worse, he suffered from shell shock – neurasthenia – which lasted for about ten years. After the war, hardly able to cope, he is for a while short of money, and contemplates an ordinary teaching job – his lowest point. But suddenly his fortune changes because, even by then, enough people are aware of his literary talents, and he lands a job as Professor of Literature at Cairo University (succeeded later by Malcolm Muggeridge)
Graves was clearly a very brave and competent soldier and at a very early age –early twenties – was a senior commander. He came under the sway of Sigfried Sassoon, in the same regiment – Royal Welch Fusiliers – in questioning the continuing of the war. Neither could be accused of cowardice – Sassoon, in fact, according to Graves, having a much higher strike rate when it came to shooting the enemy. The author helps to get Sassoon hospitalized shortly following his public letter opposing the war. The establishment then was in a quandary – they didn’t want one of their own class being charged with high treason for opposing the war. Treating him as insane was the easy way out ! Was this the reason why Sassoon fell out with Graves when this book was published ?
The author at no time is anti-German in this book, which is understandable considering his mother’s side of the family is German. He depicts the German soldier as being as courageous as his own side and criticizes as propaganda reports of German atrocities, particularly against the Belgians. He is certainly anti-French and states at one point that many people felt they were fighting the wrong enemy – it should have been the French, who would surely be the enemy again some time in the future. Objectively, though, he should have recognized German militarism at the time as being responsible for the war and all the suffering that ensued.
Nor is he very favourably disposed towards the Irish, despite his father’s side being Irish, albeit Anglo-Irish (or ‘WestBrit’). His father was an authority on Gaelic Literature, and best remembered for the song ‘Father O’Flynn’. He said he ‘broke the geographical link with Ireland for which I cannot be to grateful to him’. Indeed ! He is not too flattering about the Irish soldiers’ prowess in battle – almost every episode related portray them in rather a poor light.
Its good to know this book is kept alive by being on college/university sylabii – I see lots of references to study notes on the book while searching for it on the store.

Robert Graves truly meant it when he named his blistering attack Good-bye to All That. This is him saying 'to hell with everything [he] ever knew' and 'to all of the intolerable people [he] had to endure throughout his formative years.

It is not as though Graves were asking for sympathy, for some sort of 'poor me' crocodile tear from his readers. He is also a part of his general scorn of a time, a nation, an era. Graves had some experiences in the first world war (or at least as his fancy choses to remember them) that made him see the absurdity of man ever trying to come to terms with the idea of 'peace'. He saw the primal instinct of men in danger and under stress and he recognized how poorly most people know how to cope with discouragement.

Graves gives us a great study of man, a "comedy of evil" as another critic once described the author's Claudius books, that serves to shatter the myth forever of the nobility of men at war.

Robert Graves simply and elegantly recounts his experiences as a young, (initally) idealistic officer in the British Army. A friend of Sigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owens, Graves, in my opinion, is the better writer of the lot. His writing is so lucid, we feel the impulsiveness as he enlists (and receives a comission, as was his due to his place in Edwardian society), and we also gradually come to understand the pointlessness of the carnage and the horrors of the war.
The book is at its most moving, however, as Graves re-tells of his leave back to England - the comparisons to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front are erie - I was particularly moved by part where Graves remembers the family of a deceased friend he was visiting, the mother pacing the house at all hours of the night ... it really made the human costs of the war feel suddenly very personal.
As other reviewers have mentioned, it is an excellent memoir of the war, and in my opinion, the best first - hand account of the war in the west.

This historically important novel has stood the test of time – it is still eminently readable. Although I found Sigrid Sassoon’s ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’ perhaps more engrossing. Grave’s account of trench warfare drags on somewhat at first, but the increasing horror and carnage does finally grip one. The soldier’s only hope of escape was, short of getting killed, to get injured to get some respite back home. Graves writes that about one in three of his contemporaries at Charterhouse, his public school, was a fatality. Graves himself doesn’t emerge unscathed, injured from bullet wounds in the throat in 1915. Worse, he suffered from shell shock – neurasthenia – which lasted for about ten years. After the war, hardly able to cope, he is for a while short of money, and contemplates an ordinary teaching job – his lowest point. But suddenly his fortune changes because, even by then, enough people are aware of his literary talents, and he lands a job as Professor of Literature at Cairo University (succeeded later by Malcolm Muggeridge)
Graves was clearly a very brave and competent soldier and at a very early age –early twenties – was a senior commander. He came under the sway of Sigfried Sassoon, in the same regiment – Royal Welch Fusiliers – in questioning the continuing of the war. Neither could be accused of cowardice – Sassoon, in fact, according to Graves, having a much higher strike rate when it came to shooting the enemy. The author helps to get Sassoon hospitalized shortly following his public letter opposing the war. The establishment then was in a quandary – they didn’t want one of their own class being charged with high treason for opposing the war. Treating him as insane was the easy way out ! Was this the reason why Sassoon fell out with Graves when this book was published ?
The author at no time is anti-German in this book, which is understandable considering his mother’s side of the family is German. He depicts the German soldier as being as courageous as his own side and criticizes as propaganda reports of German atrocities, particularly against the Belgians. He is certainly anti-French and states at one point that many people felt they were fighting the wrong enemy – it should have been the French, who would surely be the enemy again some time in the future. Objectively, though, he should have recognized German militarism at the time as being responsible for the war and all the suffering that ensued.
Nor is he very favourably disposed towards the Irish, despite his father’s side being Irish, albeit Anglo-Irish (or ‘WestBrit’). His father was an authority on Gaelic Literature, and best remembered for the song ‘Father O’Flynn’. He said he ‘broke the geographical link with Ireland for which I cannot be to grateful to him’. Indeed ! He is not too flattering about the Irish soldiers’ prowess in battle – almost every episode related portray them in rather a poor light.
Its good to know this book is kept alive by being on college/university sylabii – I see lots of references to study notes on the book while searching for it on the store.

Robert Graves truly meant it when he named his blistering attack Good-bye to All That. This is him saying 'to hell with everything [he] ever knew' and 'to all of the intolerable people [he] had to endure throughout his formative years.

It is not as though Graves were asking for sympathy, for some sort of 'poor me' crocodile tear from his readers. He is also a part of his general scorn of a time, a nation, an era. Graves had some experiences in the first world war (or at least as his fancy choses to remember them) that made him see the absurdity of man ever trying to come to terms with the idea of 'peace'. He saw the primal instinct of men in danger and under stress and he recognized how poorly most people know how to cope with discouragement.

Graves gives us a great study of man, a "comedy of evil" as another critic once described the author's Claudius books, that serves to shatter the myth forever of the nobility of men at war.

Robert Graves simply and elegantly recounts his experiences as a young, (initally) idealistic officer in the British Army. A friend of Sigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owens, Graves, in my opinion, is the better writer of the lot. His writing is so lucid, we feel the impulsiveness as he enlists (and receives a comission, as was his due to his place in Edwardian society), and we also gradually come to understand the pointlessness of the carnage and the horrors of the war.
The book is at its most moving, however, as Graves re-tells of his leave back to England - the comparisons to Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front are erie - I was particularly moved by part where Graves remembers the family of a deceased friend he was visiting, the mother pacing the house at all hours of the night ... it really made the human costs of the war feel suddenly very personal.
As other reviewers have mentioned, it is an excellent memoir of the war, and in my opinion, the best first - hand account of the war in the west.

This is Robert Graves' tell all autobiography, or at least the "revised second edition" which doesn't quite tell all. At the time of writing Graves was only 33 yet already had about 30 publications to his name, mostly poetry collections & essays. He had rubbed shoulders with such writers as Edward Marsh, Robert Frost, Siegfried Sasson, T.E. Lawrence, Ezra Pound & Edith Sitwell. Graves had served as a Royal Welsh Fusiler for almost the entire duration of WW1 & been severely wounded, even pronounced dead, before being demobilized. After the war Graves went on to receive his B Litt. degree from Oxford & eventually found a position as the Professor of English Literature at the Royal Egyptian University in Cairo. All this & numerous other stories, events & anecdote are given here in full detail.
Goodbye To All That is most famous for it's graphic & realistic depiction of life in the trenches of WW1. Graves goes into all the details of his military experience. We aren't spared a single battle or a single death. He captures the horror & awe of the war with a roughness that made the book one of the most popular written accounts of WW1. We are presented with scenes of atrocities, suicides, murders & heroic rescues one after another until we can almost feel the emotional change that Graves himself felt as he went from innocent schoolboy to professional soldier. The physical & emotional damage caused by this change are themes that Graves would return to again & again for the remainder of his life.
Oddly enough the man who is most famous as a romantic poet talks very little of his poetry in his autobiography. Despite having several volumes of poetry published by this time, Graves turns away from this & spends more time dealing with the war & problems both on the front & at home in England. Poetry, romance & even love seemed to play a very little part in Graves' life during these years. He mentions his 1st wife Nancy only near the end of the book & offers us only a one dimensional image of her as the devout feminist whom he loved but whom he probably shouldn't have married. Laura Riding doesn't appear in the book at all despite the fact that Graves had known her for 3 years by the time he wrote Goodbye. Other writers or poets who do turn up tend to be there only fleetingly to provide a particular anecdote or to justify Graves' opinion of them. Graves seldom goes into any great depth about their works or their personalities.
Overall, Goodbye To All That is a odd book that sits on the fence between a typical war book & a biography of a literary man. It can't be placed neatly into either category & this is what makes it such interesting reading for the fans of either type. Graves stands out as one of the few literary men who could display his intelligence & education even while dishing out the most brutal scenes of warfare.

I spotted this remarkable book on ... Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the Century list. In "Good-bye to All That, " the British poet Robert Graves (1895-1985), best known to American readers as the author of the novel of ancient Rome, "I Claudius," writes the autobiography of his youth, justifiably famous for its eloquent but straight-forward depiction of the horrors of WWI, during which Graves spent years in the trenches of France as an army captain.
More than the war, however, Graves' topic is the passing of an era: the class-ridden and naïve culture of the Edwardian upper classes, a culture did not survive the war. Graves came from a landed family and received a classic boarding-school education. Even in the trenches officers like Graves had personal servants and took offense when they had to dine with officers of `the wrong sort' (promoted from the lower classes).
Graves' narrative itself barely survives the end of the war; the post-war chapters seem listless and shell-shocked, emotionally detached. The battles he survived are written about with precision, gravity, and emotional impact; but Graves' marriage and the birth of his children seem like newspaper reports. Surprisingly, he doesn't even talk of his poetry much. This, surely, is not a defect of the book but a genuine reflection of his feelings at the time: After the War, nothing meant much to him.
Graves' literary style is very matter-of-fact--the opposite of the imagistic, adjective-driven language one might expect of a poet. Instead, he had a gift for the right details: in only a sentence or two, by careful description, he can perfectly describe a fellow-soldier or give the exact sense of `being there' in battle. The book is a remarkable achievement worth reading even for those who may be glad the old days were left behind.

A sad commentary on our society that only the audio versions of this book are available. With the increase of interest in the First World War recently it is to this book that many people should turn for a gripping, factual account of life before, during and after the Great War. Mr Graves documents the pastoral quiet of England in the early part of the twentieth century and abruptly descends to recounting, in cold detail, the dreadful slaughter of the trenches. Through some of the most famous battles in history he survives, physically more or less intact but from the dry words; modest, English, reserved, we glimpse the true weight of the burden that such memories impose on their carriers and understand better the terrible toll that the War levied on all the nations of Europe.

GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT is about considerably more than just Graves's experiences in the trenches in WW I, but it is that section of the book that makes this memoir stand apart from most others. That, and the exceptional honesty of the book, which manages to be tell-all without being gossipy. There is also a sense of renunciation; instead of nostalgic longing to recover the past as one find in other memoirs, Graves is anxious to put the past aside for good, to have done with it entirely.
The best parts of the book are those dealing with his dreadful time in school, he time serving in the war, and his various friendships. Some of those friendships sneak up on you. He writes at length of a literature professor at school named George Mallory who profoundly molded his reading and literary sensibilities. He writes for page after page about "George," but it isn't until he begin a chapter with the words, "George Mallory did something better than lend me books: he too me climbing on Snowdon in the school vacation." It wasn't until that moment that I realized that George Mallory the literature instructor was THAT George Mallory, the famous mountain climber who attempted Everest (and perhaps conquered it) "because it is there." George becomes one of Graves's greatest friends, and even serves as best man in his wedding. The other friendship I found fascinating, perhaps because the man himself remains one of the most mystifying characters of the 20th century, was T. E. Lawrence. As Lawrence removed himself from the public eye more and more in the 1920s and 1930s, being in 1920 perhaps one of the most famous individuals in the British Empire, he changed personas from Lawrence of Arabia to Private Shaw, reenlisting in the Army as an auto mechanic. Graves remained a good friend of his throughout the entire period, and wrote one of the first serious biographies of Lawrence. I enjoyed one passage where he is in Lawrence's quarters at (I think) Cambridge, eyeing the manuscript of Lawrence's own war memoirs, what would eventually become THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM (Graves would be one of a select few to receive a copy of the first privately printed edition, which remains one of the great published books of the 20th century, with expensively reproduced drawings and illustrations--subsequent editions remove most of the illustrations).
But the heart of the book is the account of his experiences at the front. Although this war produced a disproportionate amount of great literature, I personally believe that the two greatest literary monuments to the Great War (unless one also includes Lawrence's THE SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM) are Graves's memoir and the poetry of Wilfrid Owen. The sections of the book dealing with the war seem to alternate between the startling everyday to the nightmarish. In many sections the mood seems to be straight out of Dante's PURGATORIO, at the worst his INFERNO. But throughout, the story is carried forward by Graves's relentlessly honest pen. Although Graves's wrote an absolutely stunning number of books, in particular the two Claudius novels, this fine volume just might be his greatest work.

I was really looking forward to reading this book and had, indeed, wanted to read it for years. I expected a bittersweet telling of how the author went from true believing to disillusionment with British society and British militarism.

What I saw instead was a rather flat telling of the author's life before and during the Great War that dwelt on the fact that he was in the British upper class, had an upperclass accent, went to an upper class school and was an officer in an elite regiment. He comes across as a terrible, unlikeable snob.

What a disappointment.

This is the autobiography of the poet and novelist Robert Graves (most famous for his "Claudius" duology), written about the first 34 years of his life.
It begins with his childhood and moves to his school years and then onto his experiences in World War I. This is where Graves' writing talent really shines as he describes his various horrid experiences in and out of the trenches, his marriage and his family's life, all with fluid writing and calm remembarance. It is probably the greatest World War I memoir in terms of depth and quality of writing and is chock full of interesting information for the amateur or serious historian, but also tells a very intersting and poignant story of one man's experiences in the defining event of the 20th-century.
Highly reccommended.

Excellent,Odd circumstances,odd characters,odd practices , A First hand account of Graves service in WW1,One wonders what the average soldier thought of such idiosyncratic ,upper class ,not really competent officers, as a whole?The most interesting WW1 book I have read,Graves is an excellent story teller.
Covers his life before during and after WW1,

There is no other book that so completely expresses the creativity, the fear, the destruction or the hope, which characterized the generation of Englishmen who fought in the trenches of the First World War. A compelling read for any who questions the morality of armed conflict, the sacrifice of life for political cause, or the brutality of modern war. The young Graves, and many of his companions brought to life through his writing, show that the legacy left by the young men who experienced this calamitous war could be more profound and enduring by virtue of their words than by the guns and bullets which ended so many of their young lives. A true classic, this book ought never to go out of print.

Along with Sigfried Sassoon's "Memoirs of an Infantry Soldier" and Erich Maria Remarque's "All Quiet on the Western Front", Graves' personal account of poetic inspiration in a background of horror is World War I's best first-hand chronicle ever compiled. The realism and power behind this book are electrical. Graves' coolness in the trenches while composing sonnets and seeking a blissful state of mind is almost disturbing when contrasting it with the demonic state of destruction and death. His unnerving pace and tranquil descriptions seem to underline an innocence lost in years past.

Unfortunatly, I have to disagree with most of the other reviewers. As suggested in the title I found "Goodbye to all that" curiously unsatisfying. Maybe this is the case because I read the edited edition which gives the 1929, the 1959 edition and comments by Grave's contemporaries. Again and again these comments correct Graves who freely admited of fictionalizing events so as to make the book more interesting and to get more money out of the whole business. If he wanted to write a fictional account he clearly should not have called the book "an autobiography"! This deeply angered fellow war-writers such as Sassoon, who also accused Graves of overplaying his role in getting Sassoon a medical board. With this background the book looses much of its fascination. Rather contemptible is also Grave's treatment of the colonial troops which shows a good deal of racism.

Robert Graves' autobiography up to the 1920s. The best part of the book (and the lion's share) is taken up with his account with the Royal Welch in the Great War.

The autobiography itself is somewhat bitty. You get the impression of someone telling you a story over lunch - things come to mind in odd places. Some things remain unexplored and the whole flow of the book is slightly stream-of-conciousness. But the book is very interesting - primarily of historical interest. There are also a good number of amusing anecdotes and asides.

All in all I did enjoy the work, and you really cannot beat first hand accounts of great historical events, so this is a book to read. Highly recommended.

I came upon 'Goodbye to All That' relatively late in life. I had enjoyed his fictional biography of Claudius, but here was Graves, speaking to me of his own youth, across a gap of more than seventy years, with a candour one hardly dares hope for in contemporary autobiography. Yes, he had loved, both men and women, and he dared admit it. He writes, not just with courage but humility, of his harrowing years on the Western front, which saw the wholesale slaughter of most of his generation. Along with fellow poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, he gave the lie to the 'honourable death' for King and Country. Despite their valour, the friends he lost had been slaughtered like cattle led to an abbatoir, and he spares us nothing of their suffering. A truly courageous book in every sense. I can't speak for the audio rendering, but its disappearance from the bookshelf would be a tragic 'Goodbye to All That' indeed.

Graves describes in vivid detail his WWI experiences in the trenches, and an equally compelling value of the book is the picture it paints of British society before the war, and Graves' youth spent in great expectation. Not only does Graves bid goodbye to his own age of innocence, through this autobiography he bids goodbye to an age that is changed forever by the first world war. This book is a must read for students of the 20th century.

However sardonic, there's too much "stiff upper lip!" with little understanding of the terrible and unnecessary nature of war, reading almost like a pro-war whitewash, as if "life in the trenches" was a right-of-passage, rather than of one of the most senseless, gruesome, wasteful periods in human history, 1914-1918.

While he does matter-of-factly and well describe the misery, filth, carnage, humor, coincidences, and altered reality of "the front," I was appalled in his mentioning of war crimes the lack of perspective, of any sense of loss. One might forgive this in a young man, as he was, right out of high school, when he joined the war, and the book is about what he saw and experienced. But writing, as he did, some ten years later, why is the sense of waste and failure about WWI missing from this narrative?

As others have said, it is a strikingly vivid and detailed account of life in the trenches, but too matter-of-fact, again, for something written ten years later. Even in Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," about a party she is giving that evening, the narrative is suffused with the madness, futility and stupidity of this war, even though it is by then years in the past. In Fowles's "The Magus," every syllable, in some twenty pages about the war, describes it's utter horror, stupidity, waste, and degradation, with no attempt at portraying redeeming characteristics.

I miss, too, any acknowledgement that war itself, particularly a war like the first world war, fought for the ambitions of wealthy international Royals who were all cousins, is itself a travesty and an atrocity, visited on the 99% by the 1%.

I also am appalled that Graves apparently fails to understand the nature of atrocity itself -- after all, this is written some ten years later, and yet he persists in writing that the reported mass killings by German troops -- the enemy he was fighting against -- of Belgian civilians was justifiable, and calls the "rumors of atrocities" by the German military either understandable or over-hyped war propaganda. Barbara Tuchman, writing "Guns of August" in the late 1950's, carefully documents the veracity of such atrocities, which included murdering whole villages, and burning whole cities to the ground, including a library that housed priceless documents, some of the oldest in all of Europe!

Perhaps, Robert Graves, half-German himself, is an apologist? For the war, for England and for Germany? For the upper classes? I was terribly disappointed in this account that I had heard so much about, from the author of "I, Claudius." At least now I know where my most-respected high school History teacher got his notion that the Belgian atrocities were fictitious; he had read Graves and not Tuchman, a typical error for his generation.

I am reading this because back in college, we had lectures on this book for a course entitled "English Culture in the Twentieth Century," though I chose to do my paper instead on Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia," a choice I have never regretted and one that changed my worldview overnight.

While I did enjoy the earlier parts about growing up middle-class in England, going to public (private) schools, skiing and rock climbing, and the after-the-war sections, I am appalled at his treatment of the war as "jolly good show!" So, I give this four stars because it is a well-written account by a toff of how the other 1% thinks and feels, though I find much of it highly offensive. Some will say that "they were just all like that back then," -- class-conscious, politically insensitive, racist, chauvinists -- but that is not true, as writers like Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell document so well.

Graves is a fascinating figure. I was drawn to this autobiography because of his other works and because of a reference made to it in a review of the BBC series "The Last Parade". This is a power work that fleshes out a generation sent to die because old men thought 'victory' could be won at the cost of millions of lives and their old order preserved. Graves, an author and poet, was the typical patriotic English officer (Welsh Fusiliers) drawn into this horror that was WWI. You meet his men, his regiment and mates all from the perspective of a man looking back at his own madness.

Robert Graves, the poet and author ("I, Claudius"), was contemporary and friend of the likes of Siegfried Sassoon or the famous "Lawrence of Arabia"-- but intimate with Robert Hardy ("Return of the Native").
His account of the British trenches, the gas, the artillery duels, the midnight patrols into no-man's land are harrowing. Better yet is his commentary of being a junior officer and "regular" in one of the top British Army Units. He pulls no punches in his appraisal of life in the British officer's mess.
The average life expectancy of a British line officer was only three months, and while he says he commits no acts of heroism, one can read between the lines of this book that this is a brilliant, talented and very brave young man that does his duty, and does it well, throughout four long years of boredom and terror. I couldn't put it down.

I purchased this book used but in very good shape and I fully expect I will enjoy the work once I find a different edition with larger text. Even now I am back on the store Books trying to get an inside glimpse of other editions. It simply is too difficult to read and having just had very successful cataract surgery, I'll be darned if I'm going to put on magnifiers again. So there it sits. With larger type I fully expect to come back and give a 5-star review, but not at this time. It's also a book I would have preferred to get on my Kindle but that too 'remains to be seen'.

Many consider this book the original basis for Blackadder Goes Forth, the landmark BBC series starring Rowan Atkinson, Tony Robinson, Hugh Laurie, and many others. The original, published in 1929 and dedicated, I believe, to Laura Riding, the author's lover at the time, was a blistering attack on the class system in England and on the war itself. Heavily expurgated in 1958 by a contrite Graves, the original 1929 edition is VERY difficult to come by, and a VERY worthwhile read.

The world of "Upstairs Downstairs" could not long survive the The Great War. This autobiography exposes the horrors of trench warfare, the ineptitude and calousness of the officers, and the blind willingness of the soldiers to obey their "betters". We are greatful that Robert Graves survived to bear witness and to fortell the end of an era.

Fantastic picture of life in the trenches - horrifying really. I only had somewhat glorified ideas about this until I read this book. Good history. Interesting man. Love his books I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Even though parts of the book read like therapy-writing, this is the only account of Graves by himself, and as such it should be highly valued. Enter Britain at the beginning of the century: Public Schools, Oxford and -preeminent in the narrative- World War I at the french front. Graves was courageous, shell-shocked and always artistic. Back at Oxford as a neurasthenic veteran he still had enough brains left to entertain T.E. Lawrence. I admire Graves deeply and I regret he decided not to continue his autobiography past his time as a Professor of Literature at the University of Cairo. Those interested in his years in Majorca could follow Graves to Deja with the biography written by his friend Seymour-Smith.

Before reading this book, I knew little about WWI. I saw it recommended somewhere and ordered it from our library. I'm not sure which issue it was. Anyway, it was very interesting and well written. I learned a lot about the way gas was used in WWI.

I found myself amazed that the author kept going back to the trenches when he could have avoided that duty. Actually, I got a little frustrated with him too!

About two-thirds of the way through it became a bit of a slog to finish, but overall, I highly recommend it.

This novel is a wonderful evocation of a past era, spanning the early decades of this century. It provides a telling insight into the attitudes and prejudices of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as well as an unforgettable account of life in the trenches in the frist World War. It tells us much about the author, his humanity, his insight, his undoubted inspirational courage, and his vanity. His was clearly a complex character, who although charged with socialist ideals, cherished his heritage, his military past and even his old school, although clearly against it's "system" as a whole. This is an intriguing and thoroughly readable book, full of humour, pathos and tales of umimaginable human endurance, almost too difficult to comprehend in this cossetted era of the century's end.

Robert Graves' autobiography is a classic. The text itself requires no further review from me. This audio version is based on the 1957 2nd edition of Graves' book. The reading by Sean Barrett is simply splendid. Very expressive without being overly demonstrative. Barrett's voice characterizations are good, but his range of accents is truly remarkable: not just English, but Welsh, Irish, Canadian, Australian. You will be impressed. There are no distracting special effects or music; the text stands on its own merits. I often hear mispronunciations when I listen to audiobooks. I heard none here, and there are 10 cassettes. I would not have anticipated a couple of Barrett's pronunciations, but I have acquired such a respect for his accuracy and reliability that I assume that I am the one whose pronunciation is incorrect. Highly recommended.

of a man's dissolusionment.

It is interesting that Graves' contemporary J.R.R. Tolkein had similar experiences in WW-I, but his reaction to them was so very different. Graves lost his faith, while Tolkein held fast to it, for one thing.