It landed “like a Zeppelin bomb”. Such was Siegfried Sassoon’s response to the appearance, in November 1929, of Robert Graves’s memoir of the first world war, Good-bye to All That. Sassoon did not intend the remark as a compliment. Reading Graves’s work had made him feel that his sometime friend had “rushed into the room and kicked [his] writing table over, thrown open all the windows” and “let in a big draught”. Sassoon’s friend and fellow poet Edmund Blunden concurred: Graves had gone about the business of recollecting his wartime experience with a bewildering disregard for accuracy and with all the delicacy of a “bull in a china shop”.
It is reasonably well known that Sassoon and Blunden responded to Graves’s assault by marking an edition of his book with a series of corrective annotations. What is less well known is that Sassoon kept a personal copy, which contained more vituperative asides: “rot”, “fiction”, faked”, “skite”.
Related: The 100 best nonfiction books: No 44 – Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
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