Hello to All This

I'm not really one for war books of any kind. Like the holocaust and all the other horrors that humankind inflicts on itself, one has to know but I'd rather not make a study of it.

I can't now remember why I bought Goodbye to All That earlier this year. It has waited patiently on the top shelf for its turn and so deserved its chance before the library service deliver Dr. Zhivago. I thought the book of that might be better than the film because Julie Christie is too much of a distraction, among a starry, starry cast, and one's attention isn't always on the point of the story.

Robert Graves has possibly been a bit 'under the radar' of surveys of C20th poetry and certainly under mine. He's better known for other things he did, one of which is Goodbye to All That. He is a reader-friendly writer, the pleasure of reading his prose somehow disguising the horrors it describes. At halfway through, one is tempted to think his theme is simply the nightmare downside of human nature with exclusive reference to the masculine. If the inherent cruelty of the English public, or 'private', school wasn't bad enough, trench warfare in WW1 multiplies the insight into what is possible exponentially but something of the way that those involved were conditioned into it comes through in an account that almost makes light work of it compared to, say, Solzhenitsyn.

That's not a criticism. I don't want to hide away in poems about downbeat rented rooms, like Mr. Bleaney, all the time. Some people had more to complain about. I've run into what is mainly a war book by accident, though. Maybe I bought it because he meets Thomas Hardy (and Seigfried Sassonn). I haven't got to those bits yet. Other reports of meeting Hardy, which will be mentioned here early next year but are available in Claire Tomalin's tremendous biography, are underwhelming rather than horrific but I'd mostly prefer to be underwhelmed than horrified.

It will be worth looking again at the poems of Robert Graves in the light of this 'biography', written at the age of 33 to which he never provided a sequel. It's too soon for me to say but although it probably did give him reason to say Goodbye to All That, he could have emerged from it much more damaged than his writing seems to indicate he wasn't.