35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
autobiography from the trenchs, September 14, 2007
This review is from: Goodbye to All That (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Possibley one of the best known autobiographies to be written from the trenchs of the First World war Robert Graves in later years would be a professional writer and in his autobiography he brings all his considerable skill to bear.
Born into privilage in Victorian England he was among the rush of young men who scrambled to enlist when war broke out in 1914. As a young gentleman of a proper education he is accepted as an officer in the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers a unit that produced some of the most proliffic writers of the entire war.
Graves coveres the prejudices of his age. Not just the us vs them of the war, but between classes in England, between officers and enlisted with in his own army, between different regiments in the army and between regulars and volunteers within his own officers' mess. For example when he is first commissioned, his commander is reluctant to send him overseas. He feels Graves is not sporting enough, because Graves did not ask for time off to go hunting.
As the book unveils, the glossy patina of 'joining the grand adventure' wears away in the horrors of the trench and frustrations with senior officers, and Graves takes the reader along with him. You start out shiny and hopeful and end feeling as if you too are caked with grime, not just mud but the blood spilled to no good end.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perhaps still the premiere war memoir in English, September 5, 2011
This review is from: Goodbye to All That (Penguin Modern Classics) (Paperback)
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.
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