Good-Bye to All That

When I got back to France, ‘The Actor’, a regular officer in ‘A’ Company, asked me: ‘Had a good time on leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go to many dances?’

‘Not one.’

‘What shows did you go to?’

‘I didn’t go to any shows.’

‘Hunt?’

‘No.’

‘Slept with any nice girls?’

‘No, I didn’t. Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘What the hell did you do, then?’

‘Oh, I just walked about on some hills.’

‘Good God,’ he said, ‘chaps like you don’t deserve leave!’

The first distinguished writer I remember meeting after Swinburne was P. G. Wodehouse, a friend of my brother Perceval. Wodehouse was then in his early twenties, on the staff of The Globe, and writing school-stories for The Captain magazine. He gave me a penny, advising me to get marshmallows with it. Though too shy to express my gratitude at the time, I have never since permitted myself to be critical about his work.

My passport gives my nationality as ‘British subject’. Here I might parody Marcus Aurelius, who begins his Golden Book with the various ancestors and relatives to whom he owes the virtues of a worthy Roman Emperor: explaining why I am not a Roman Emperor or even, except on occasions, an English gentleman.

Nancy and I eventually got divorced. I married again, have had four more children, enjoy good health, travel as little as possible, and continue to write books. What else can I say, unless that my best friend is still the waste-paper basket?

I made several attempts during these years to rid myself of the poison of war memories by finishing my novel, but had to abandon it – ashamed at having distorted my material with a plot, and yet not sure enough of myself to turn it back into undisguised history, as here.

Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.

My last memory is the headmaster’s parting shot: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves, and remember that your best friend is the waste-paper basket.’ This has proved good advice, though not perhaps in the sense he intended: few writers seem to send their work through as many drafts as I do.

In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.

Though much harder on my relatives, and much more careful of associating with them than I am with strangers, I can admire my father and mother: my father for his simplicity and persistence, and my mother for her seriousness and strength. Both for their generosity. They never bullied me, and were grieved rather than angered by my default from formal religion.

THOUGH often asked to publish a continuation of this autobiography, which I wrote in 1929 at the age of thirty-three, I am always glad to report that little of outstanding autobiographical interest has happened since. The proofs of Goodbye to All That reached me in Majorca, where I had gone to live as soon as I finished the writing, and which is still my home.

The remainder of this story, from 1926 until today, is dramatic but unpublishable. Health and money both improved, marriage wore thin. New characters appeared on the stage. Nancy and I said unforgivable things to each other. We parted on May 6th, 1929. She, of course, insisted on keeping the children. So I went abroad, resolved never to make England my home again; which explains the ‘Goodbye to All That’ of this title.

Pallas told me that in another twenty years the women of Egypt would control everything. The feminist movement had just started, and since the woman were by far the most active and intelligent part of the population, great changes might be expected. Neither she nor her sisters would stand her father’s attempt to keep them in their places.

Lawrence had written to me:

Egypt, being so near Europe, is not a savage country. The Egyptians… you need not dwell among. Indeed, it will be a miracle if an Englishman can get to know them.

I got the appointment. The indirect proceeds from poem-writing can be enormously higher than the direct ones.