skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (soldier boy)
[personal profile] skygiants
Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That is one of the foundational texts of "here is what WWI was like; it sucked." And I knew that going in, it's the reason I read it, which is why I was kind of surprised to find it starting out like any other autobiography.

The thing is that Robert Graves spends several chapters describing his family, his ancestors, his summer vacations, his school, his poetry magazine, his desperate crush on an underclassman, his adolescent flailings about the future, and then he's in the army and having hijinks training his soldiers, who mostly "joined the Army just before the War started as a cheap way of getting a training camp holiday," and you sort of don't realize it's happening until he's in the middle of the trenches and receiving consistently suicidal orders and everyone you meet one chapter is going to be dead the next.

And it's all absurd and terrible, all the way through, is the thing; the startling part is that the tone really doesn't change. From the absurdity of school to the absurdity of coming home from the front, where all his friends are dying, and finding out that his parents expect him not only to show up promptly for church but to carry his father there in a sedan chair -- it's all part and parcel of the same thing. It's just, you know, the war is deadlier.

Anyway. Well worth reading, but that isn't news. What is news, to me: guys, did you know there was an episode of TV where INDIANA JONES hung out with Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon and talked earnestly about poetry? Because I DID NOT until a chance youtube search told me so. CHECK IT:



I love these four minutes of early nineties TV totally unironically. Hot Young Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon swoop in, Deliver A Two-Minute Summary Of Their Famous Opinions About The War, and swoop out while Indy is clearly meant to be thinking "wow, war is complicated!" but actually mostly looks like he is thinking "dang, I never knew the trenches would be so full of hot poets." IT'S AMAZING.

(Speaking of, does anyone happen to have like a two-minute summary Dead Author Gossip version of why Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon eventually fell out? Because, you know, I would have thought it would be over the 'I got you declared mentally unstable without your permisson so as to make sure none of the high command sees your epic denunciation of the war! SHUT UP SIEGFRIED, ROBERT KNOWS BEST' but that doesn't seem to have been what did it . . )

Date: 2012-07-18 05:00 pm (UTC)
ceitfianna: (poppies)
From: [personal profile] ceitfianna
I have such love for Young Indiana Jones and Robert Graves. This book is on my to read list. Have you read his Homer's Daughter?

I read it years ago and need to reread as its basically the Phoenician princess saying, oh yes, I wrote the Odyssey.

Date: 2012-07-18 05:06 pm (UTC)
rymenhild: Vanyel looks stressed. Yfandes looks irritated. (cheer up emo Vanyel)
From: [personal profile] rymenhild
Hilariously, the Internet thinks it has solved this question. I have my doubts -- the article linked in the answer does not have nearly enough footnotes! Or, you know, any footnotes.

Also, if you Google "robert graves siegfried sassoon" and scroll down far enough, you get an AO3 link to Regeneration fic. Of course. I'm only surprised that the fic isn't slashier than it is. I mean, Regeneration is 97% manly homosexual implications in the first place.

Date: 2012-07-18 06:04 pm (UTC)
rymenhild: A small toddler puppet carrying a bright red letter. (Uzura has a LETTER)
From: [personal profile] rymenhild
It really happened. I was imagining how hilarious it would be if Fakir, German soldier in the Great War, encountered Siegfried Sassoon at the other side of a trench.

Date: 2012-07-18 06:25 pm (UTC)
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
From: [personal profile] kate_nepveu
Fakir, German soldier in the Great War.

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!
Edited (clarity, more exclamation marks) Date: 2012-07-18 06:25 pm (UTC)

*borrows your icon*

Date: 2012-07-18 06:42 pm (UTC)
rymenhild: gears from anime series Princess Tutu (The gears of the story)
From: [personal profile] rymenhild


But is that how you really feel, Siegfried?

(In other irresistible crossovers: Dr. Rivers meets Princess Tutu.)

Date: 2012-07-18 05:09 pm (UTC)
gramarye1971: stack of old leatherbound books with the text 'Bibliophile' (Books)
From: [personal profile] gramarye1971
I seem to recall reading that Sassoon objected to several of the passages in the original drafts of Goodbye to All That -- it may have had something to do with correspondence or other war writing that he (Sassoon) didn't want to see put in print. But it also had something to do with Graves' constant financial troubles and his inability to pay back loans, many of which came from Sassoon and others in their circle of writer-friends.

(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong; this is only a vague recollection of bits and pieces I've read over the years.)

Date: 2012-07-18 05:09 pm (UTC)
rymenhild: Manuscript page from British Library MS Harley 913 (Default)
From: [personal profile] rymenhild
I just found a link saying pretty much the exact same thing you did -- see above.

Date: 2012-07-18 05:12 pm (UTC)
gramarye1971: a lone figure in silhouette against a blaze of white light (Default)
From: [personal profile] gramarye1971
I think I read about their spat in a London Review of Books essay-review some time ago, so I'm glad to hear my memory served me rightly. . ^_^

Date: 2012-07-18 05:36 pm (UTC)
katta: Photo of Diane from Jake 2.0 with Jake's face showing on the computer monitor behind her, and the text Talk geeky to me. (Default)
From: [personal profile] katta
Ah, Young Indiana Jones... I remember the ep in which the ten-year-old version asked love advice from Freud. And SPF will forever hold my respect for actually managing to speak Swedish lines in a way that was semi-understandable, which is more than you can say about many actors pretending to be Swedish.

Date: 2012-07-18 06:48 pm (UTC)
ceitfianna: (Tom on the banister)
From: [personal profile] ceitfianna
That's the joy of the show, which historical adventure will he have next?

Date: 2012-07-18 07:10 pm (UTC)
katta: Photo of Diane from Jake 2.0 with Jake's face showing on the computer monitor behind her, and the text Talk geeky to me. (Default)
From: [personal profile] katta
I never realized there were so many Historical Caricature Lolz in Young Indiana Jones!

I think that was pretty much every episode... though I may have just forgotten all the other episodes.

Date: 2012-07-19 09:07 am (UTC)
cyphomandra: vale from brotown celebrating (woo hoo!)
From: [personal profile] cyphomandra
I love Goodbye to All That. We'd done WWI poetry at school, and I'd read Pat Barker's trilogy, and Goodbye to All That still managed to get to me in ways I wasn't expecting. The tone, as you say, and just the realisation about how it must have been for him - a third of his year at school dead at the front, and the constant bureaucratic bungles making it all so much more farcical.

I am intrigued by the Young Indiana Jones clip! I had no idea Young Indiana Jones was so slashy, for a start, nor did I realise it was basically name-dropping and historical escapades. If only they'd done more of that rather than that awful 4th adult movie.

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