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Loading... Goodbye to All That (original 1929; edition 1971)by Robert Graves
Work InformationGood-Bye to All That: An Autobiography by Robert Graves (1929)
  
» 28 more Top Five Books of 2013 (344) THE WAR ROOM (44) War Literature (26) Folio Society (349) 1920s (19) 20th Century Literature (626) World War I Fiction (64) World War I books (20) Books Read in 2019 (3,539) No current Talk conversations about this book.  anzlitlovers | Jan 9, 2024 |    ) Castinet | Dec 11, 2022 | Some of the book's messages that will remain with me are: 1. Respirators. Graves says, "the first respirator issued in France was a gauze-pad filled with chemically treated cotton waste, for tying across the mouth and nose. Reputedly it could not keep out the German gas…a week or two later came the 'smoke helmet,' a greasy gry-felt bag with a talc window to look through, but no mouthpiece, certainly ineffective against gas." (p. 95) 2. Two young miners disliked their sergeant and reported to their Adjutant: "'We've come to report, Sir, that we're very sorry, but we've shot our company sergeant-major.' The Adjutant said, 'Good heavens, how did that happen?' 'It was an accident, Sir.' 'What do you mean, you damn fools? Did you mistake him for a spy?' "No, Sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.'" They were both court-martialled and shot by a firing squad of their own company. (p.109) 3. Graves was treated with reserve since he had a German name and was suspected of being a spy. Incredible! 4. Local French peasants didn't care whether the soldiers were on the German or British side of the line. They had no use for foreign soldiers. Wow! 5. Self-medication with alcohol and drugs was common—probably a survival mechanism. 6. Prose and poetry were critical during wartime and afterward. ( )1  LindaLoretz | Nov 15, 2022 |  ) Ghost_Boy | Aug 25, 2022 | The entire fourth season of Black Adder seems to be based on observations made in this book: the boorish New Army recruits gradually replacing the mannered regimentals, the captains eating muck in the trenches while the colonel dines on filet mignon a few hundred yards away, the officer with a German consul for an uncle who just might be passing classified material to the enemy. The book's weakness lay in its not clearly distinguishing between a poet's supra-logical thought processes and the supra-logical process of the common psychopath.(  ) mkfs | Aug 13, 2022 |
 Writing "Good-bye to All That," Graves seized numerous opportunities to render the literal truth of the trenches in theatrical terms. And Graves was by no means alone in this: Just before the attack at Loos, a typical officer is recorded as experiencing "a feeling of unreality, as if I were acting on a stage." Seeking theatrical metaphors for the trench war, some journalists invoked the idea of tragedy. Graves will have none of such pretentiousness: To him, events at the front are more likely to resemble melodrama, comedy, farce or music hall. Or even that once-stylish English dramatic form, the Comedy of Humors, in which stock eccentric characters ("Humors") reveal their crazy obsessions and generally muddle things up. Robert Graves's superbly sardonic account of his childhood, schooling, the great war and his first marriage was written in just four months in 1929, when he was 33. It was his attempt at "a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that". By then he had separated from his wife and was living with the American poet Laura Riding. The idea of a farewell to the past was hers. Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inContainsHas as a student's study guideNotable Lists
On the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of one of the best and most famous memoirs of the conflict. Good-bye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had ended, and England and the modern world would never be the same. In Graves's portrayal of the dehumanizing misery of the trenches, his grief over lost friends, and the surreal absurdity of government bureaucracy, Graves uses broad comedy to make the most serious points about life and death. No library descriptions found. |
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https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/11/11/sensational-snippets-goodbye-to-all-that-192... (