Die Laughing

Robert Graves, poet, novelist, critic, essayist, translator and general man of letters, declared in 1955 that World War I “permanently changed my outlook on life.” The reasons are all in this brilliant book.

England declared war on Germany on Aug. 4, 1914. Eight days later, this enthusiastic, clumsy, 6-foot, 3-inch 19-year-old proudly enlisted for officer training with the regiment of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Like so many others, his motive was patriotic, but it was also escapist. He was about to enter St. John’s College, Oxford, but after seven years of what passed for education at Charterhouse School, he knew he’d had enough of that sort of thing, with its childish emphasis on class hierarchy, athletic coercion and meaningless privileges. How shocked he was to find in the army more of the same.

His middle name was von Ranke (from his mother’s side), and at a moment when dachshunds were stoned in the streets and everything German was automatically despised, his uncle Robert von Ranke’s having been the hastily repatriated German consul in London did him no good. People who detested Graves (and most of his army acquaintances did) considered him dangerously unique, perhaps even a spy. Wasn’t one of his relatives actually a general in the German army? It was his outspokenness and his refusal to fit obediently into group life that gave him a hard time, first at school, where he was severely bullied until he learned to box, and in the army, where he tactlessly corrected others and uttered his eccentric opinions freely. One fellow officer reported, “I actually heard him say that Homer was a woman. Can you beat that?” “A fad-ridden crank” he seemed to even one of his few friends, poet Siegfried Sassoon; and another of his defenders had to admit that “Graves had reputedly the largest feet in the army and a genius for putting both of them in everything.” When others in his training camp were being conveyed to France to do their bit for the war effort, for some time he was forced to remain behind. The reason was less his ungoverned mouth than difficulty in wearing his uniform and equipment neatly and remembering military data he considered trivial. But despised as he was by many middle-class officers, who thought him a bounder and a cad, his working-class men considered him, as one said, “a capital officer,” respected for his loyalty to them and, later, for his courage in combat.

This courage proved costly. During the Battle of the Somme, an enemy eight-inch shell went off close to him, and his body was penetrated with deadly steel fragments. One pierced his lung. The visible damage was such that it was assumed he had died, and he recovered to general astonishment.

Ten years after the Armistice, distinguished memoirs by literary ex-officers began appearing. One of the earliest was Edmund Blunden’s “Undertones of War” (1928). Graves’ “Good-bye to All That” followed in 1929 (revised in 1957), and Sassoon’s “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer” in 1930. Fiction as well fed the public hunger for testimony about the war: Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1928) and Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” (1928) became best sellers, and both inadvertently served Graves’ cause by helping to blur the line formerly distinguishing fiction from nonfiction. In writing his memoirs in 1929, Graves considered the problem of “truthfulness” and concluded:

“The memoirs of a man who went through some of the worst experiences of trench warfare are not truthful if they do not contain a high proportion of falsities. High-explosive barrages will make a temporary liar or visionary of anyone; the old trench-mind is at work in all overestimation of casualties, ‘unnecessary’ dwelling on horrors, mixing of dates and confusion between trench rumors and scenes actually witnessed.”

That understood, we have been warned. In fact, one thing that makes “Good-bye to All That” so permanently readable is its happy management of the literal by imposing on it such devices of fiction as suspense, surprise and irony.

One of Graves’ discoveries during his time in the trenches was the intense theatricality of warfare. Since a sensitive junior officer in combat cannot believe that he actually is in so murderous and preposterous a situation, he is tempted to regard his predicament as a form of theater, with himself as an ill-prepared actor. 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.

Ben Jonson was one of the great Renaissance practitioners of this sort of comic theater, and there is a lot of Ben Jonson in Graves--tough-mindedness, a virile sense of the funny, a tendency to disbelieve public truths and to ridicule them, as well as an unerring eye for phonies and a powerful impulse to laugh at them. The army, Graves discovered, is a perfect setting for seeing things in terms of the Comedy of Humors: The characters it offers are obsessed with their roles, and personality traits are externalized and standardized (an angry colonel here is like an angry colonel there). The army has little patience with ambiguity or subtlety, and its conventional ranks and duties seem to require conventional “lines” and gestures. Randall Jarrell once brilliantly observed that “Graves is the true heir of Ben Jonson.” Type-characters are Jonson’s and Graves’ stock-in-trade. “There is a fat boy in every school (even if he is not really very fat),” Graves once said, “and a funny-man in every barracks room (even if he is not really very funny).” And speaking of funny, it would be hard not to notice how much of “Good-bye to All That” is willing to sacrifice everything to the funny. That is what has kept it enjoyable for 70 years. Sassoon’s objection to Graves that “there are no understatements in your book” does more credit to Sassoon’s high-mindedness than to his literary understanding.

Isolated from the literary world on the island of Majorca and needing “a lump of money” quickly, Graves dashed off “Good-bye” in 11 weeks. Sensing that his book had to score a popular success, he considered the materials indispensable to current literary popularity:

“I . . . deliberately mixed in all the ingredients that I know are mixed into other popular books. For instance, while I was writing, I reminded myself that people like reading about food and drink, so I searched my memory for the meals that have had significance in my life and put them down. And they like reading about murders, so I was careful not to leave out any of the six or seven that I could tell about. Ghosts, of course. There must, in every book of this sort, be at least one ghost story with a possible explanation, and one without any explanation, except that it was a ghost. I put in three or four ghosts that I remembered.

“And kings. . . . People also like reading about other people’s mothers. . . . And they like hearing about T.E. Lawrence, because he is supposed to be a mystery man. . . . And of course the Prince of Wales.

“People like reading about poets. I put in a lot of poets. . . . Then, of course, Prime Ministers. . . . A little foreign travel is usually needed; I hadn’t done much of this, but I made the most of what I had. Sport is essential. . . . Other subjects of interest that could not be neglected were school episodes, love affairs (regular and irregular), wounds, weddings, religious doubts, methods of bringing up children, severe illnesses, suicides. But the best bet of all is battles, and I had been in two quite good ones. . . .

“So it was easy to write a book that would interest everybody. . . .”

Graves goes on to hint at his method of organization. The book would take the form of “a number of short stories, what readers call ‘situations,’ ” and what Graves calls “caricature scenes.”

Caricature scenes can be defined as brisk comic encounters between type-characters likely to be at cross-purposes--a colonel and an enlisted malefactor, say, as in the earnest inquiry into the source of the “nuisance” deposited on the parade ground in training camp. Another caricature scene is played before an audience of all the battalion officers, hastily called together in a deserted French schoolroom--normally a setting for the display of something like good sense. The colonel, after chewing out the whole assembly for such crimes as viewing without correction unbuttoned pocket flaps among the men, whom he has also noticed strolling about with hands in pockets, gets down to serious business. The most heinous crime the colonel leaves to the end of his discourse. He has observed a group of soldiers relaxing in the street. Among them was a corporal. He was shocked to hear one of the soldiers call this noncommissioned officer by his first name: “Jack!” The officer audience is obliged to listen respectfully to this absurd performance.

Among Graves’ ways of satirizing complacency and the human liability to error is by quoting a multitude of erroneous or fatuous public “texts” and documents, once credited with important truth but now clearly seen as quite mistaken, misleading or empty. One is the casualty list announcing his death, followed by his colonel’s letter of condolence to his mother. These errors Graves corrected himself once he was back in England convalescing. The London Times he now persuaded to print this pert notice:

“Captain Robert Graves, Royal Welch Fusiliers, officially reported died of wounds, wishes to inform his friends that he is recovering from his wounds at Queen Alexandra’s Hospital. . . .”

The word “officially” there carries some of the irony and skepticism he customarily applied to documents representing themselves as truthful. The war, one of the first to rely extensively on morale-boosting, mass-produced printed propaganda, offered Graves a field day for lettered satire.

Memorable is his ridicule of the news stories about the victim-priests of Antwerp, said to have been hung upside down by the Germans as human clappers in their own church bells. There is the preposterously optimistic Loos attack order, conveying the impression that obviously impossible missions will be achieved without trouble. The attack is to be assisted by “the accessory,” a code euphemism for cylinders of poison gas: “The attack,” says the order, “will be preceded by forty minutes discharge of the accessory, so that the two railway lines will be occupied without difficulty.” The assembled officers of Graves’ company constitute ad hoc literary critics of this nonsense: “We all laughed.”

The Somme affair produced even more erroneous documents, like Graves’ colonel’s letter to his mother:

“Dear Mrs Graves,

“I very much regret to have to write and tell you that your son has died of wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great loss.

“He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on his way down to the base.”

Thus, the world that the war taught Graves to see is a world of contingency and constant mistakes, not to mention outright fatuity. Hence, the farcical mistransmission in Morse code that sends a battalion assigned to York to Cork instead.

But the prize mad document in Graves’ collection is probably the Letter of the Little Mother, which first appeared in the London Morning Post and was then widely reprinted to loud acclaim. It was designed as “A Message to the Pacifists” agitating for negotiated peace. The Little Mother registers her pride in having supplied her only son to be killed. The testimonials earned by this famous letter suggest a society for which the only accurate term would be sick: “A Bereaved Mother” writes, “I have lost my two dear boys, but since I was shown the ‘Little Mother’s’ beautiful letter a resignation too perfect to describe has calmed all my aching sorrow, and I would now gladly give my sons twice over.”

The wide gulf separating Graves’ vision from that of the ordinary patriotic British citizen can be measured in one letter from an outraged reader of “Good-bye to All That”:

“You are a discredit to the Service, disloyal to your comrades and typical of that miserable breed which tries to gain notoriety by belittling others. Your language is just ‘water-closet,’ and evidently your regiment resented such an undesirable member. The only good page is that quoting the Little Mother, but even there you betray the degenerate mind by interleaving it between obscenities.”

Graves’ fellow officers in his regiment did not go quite so far, but many were furious at his levities and what they considered his disrespect to those fallen in a noble cause. Sassoon and Blunden were so outraged that they set to work annotating a copy of the book, entering more than 5,000 words of corrections on 250 pages. They planned to deposit this annotated copy in the British Museum but never did so. And the book appalled some readers not directly concerned with the dignity of the army. Graves had taken a broad aim, saying goodbye not just to militarism but--as he said--to stylish chatter about politics, religion and literature, as well as to such concerns of the empty-minded as drinking, dances and “fun.” Those are what “All That” encompasses.

Graves’ reliance on broad comedy to make very serious points about life and death seems to anticipate and illustrate Friedrich Durrenmatt’s post-World War II conviction that “comedy alone is suitable for us.” The reason? “Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility,” none of which we have got:

“In the Punch and Judy show of our century . . . there are no more guilty and, also, no responsible men. It is always, ‘We couldn’t help it’ and ‘We didn’t really want that to happen.’ And indeed, things happen without anyone in particular being responsible for them. Everything is dragged along and everyone gets caught somewhere in the sweep of events. We are all collectively guilty, collectively bogged down in the sins of our fathers and of our forefathers. . . . That is our misfortune, but not our guilt. . . . Comedy alone is suitable for us.”