Desultory review: Good-Bye to All That

In 1917, while Siegfried Sassoon was on on leave from the trenches, his "Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration," a letter objecting to the war and saying that he felt it was being unreasonably prolonged by those with the power to stop it, was published and read in the House of Lords. His heroic service record would not have forestalled a court-martial, but his friends successfully argued that he must be mentally incapacitated by shell shock. Rather than face a court-martial and an almost certain death sentence, Sassoon was invalided to Craiglockhart, a hospital for treating neurasthenic officers. His friends, while believing that he was no more unhinged than any other soldier with his experience, felt that a diagnosis of temporary insanity was preferable to death; they got poor thanks for it from him at the time.

Robert Graves, the author of I, Claudius, was one of the friends responsible for getting Sassoon medical leave, and that's almost all I knew about him. Graves' memoir, Good-Bye to All That, casts a little more light on him--quite a lot more in terms of dates and events, but rather less when it comes to personal matters. After a pleasant childhood, he ended up at Charterhouse, a public school that he reports loathing beyond measure but which was also where he met his first love, a younger male student. He does not describe their relationship in much depth, although he does mention that the other boy's letters were a comfort to him throughout the war and that he was devastated when the young man was arrested for soliciting, and he's not forthcoming about his first marriage, which ended unhappily, or his second, which seemed to go better. Was he gay or bi and unable to pursue that openly, or straight but conforming to social norms of the school and his social class? It's difficult to tell.

I had expected to see more about the war, given the title of the book, but there's almost as much about Graves's early family life and, after 1918, Ralph Vaughan Williams, T.E. Lawrence, and other famous figures Graves met or knew well. The descriptions of the war itself are wry and slightly dispassionate, touched with black humor and admiration for the men he commanded (he reserves his spleen for his commanders and politicians). Graves survived a number of "shows," the pushes toward enemy lines, and after receiving several minor wounds was shot through the lung; he was hurt so severely and field hospitals were so overwhelmed that his parents were officially notified that he had died. He later returned to the trenches, but not to the front lines. Graves's tone stays light throughout, even as he describes living in freezing mud and being surrounded by horror, but he admits that he suffered from nightmares and residual shell shock until 1928. Considering that he was also raising four children and struggling to get by as an untenured teacher and poet, it's hard not to think that he's drastically understating the case.

This review has stopped being desultory and is verging on verbose, so I'll give the short version: Good-Bye to All That is touching more for what is omitted than for what is shown, and it's sort of endearing in how open it is about working for sales (Graves admits to sitting down to figure out what would sell: sex, war, famous people), but it's worth reading. It's great at humanizing people we now think of as dustily famous figures, making the reader feel a part of the era, and painting a picture of what was lost with the Great War. It has also made me want to read Sassoon's memoirs and more of Wilfred Owen's poetry. If I need to be fished out of the slough of despond after too much WWI lit, hang a copy of the forthcoming Terry Pratchett book on founding a currency on a line. I'll grab.