The title of Robert Graves’ memoir of his service in WWI is an indication of the overarching theme. Goodbye to All That can be read both literally and figuratively. Not too much long after returning back to England from the horrors of the war, Graves would say goodbye to his homeland and take up residences in Majorca and the United States.
On a level that conflates the literal and the metaphorical, the brutal honesty that Graves displays in his memoir would wind up being a way of saying goodbye to many of his friends. In particular, the poet Siegfried Sassoon would become a casualty of the honesty of Graves. Sassoon was one of the many British poets who established their reputation early with equally brutal descriptions of the horrors of war. Brutally realistic those poems may be, Graves is honest with them from a different perspective, suggesting that even in their ugliness, they served the purpose of glorifying war. Sassoon would become perhaps the most notable collateral damage caused by the explosive reception of Goodbye to All That.
The autobiography really excels on the metaphorical level, however. Goodbye to All That is more than an eyewitness account to history. For Graves to have written a soldier’s memoir in the traditional sense would have been no different from the poetry of Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen that—while unquestionably not romantic—nevertheless suffers the ultimate fate of all poetry: becoming romanticized by its readers. The memoir casts the bloody and bruising reality of warfare within a larger socio-political context and, just as importantly, within the context of art and aesthetics.
What Graves is really saying goodbye to is the England he knew before the war. And England that was just as much gone forever as if they had lost the war against the Germans. Death on a massive scale, the political upheaval in Europe which led to outbreak of war, the economic cost of paying for everything and aesthetic sensibility engendered into the more poetic souls who fought in the trenches essentially meant that nothing was ever going to be the same for England. For his own part in that transformation, the reaction to Graves’ book was equally significant.
The Germans are not the only villains. The brutal honesty with which Graves depicts the Great War is not reserved simply for bullets and blood. Graves is unwilling to overlook or discount the hypocrisy on the winning side. Among the sub-themes which Graves touches upon as being agents of forcible change in British society brought about the attack from across the Channel is the rise of feminism, the decency of pacifism, the indecency of jingoistic patriotism and tragic dimension of misplaced nostalgia.
With the assurance of someone who has looked into the abyss and seen the future, Graves scored with Goodbye to All That what is still today considered one of the definitive works of literature inspired by one of the most wasteful and useless demonstrations of mankind’s ability to destroy for no good reason. Who wouldn’t wish to say goodbye to all that?
