Good-bye to all that : An autobiography by Robert Graves
"Good-bye to all that : An autobiography" by Robert Graves is an autobiography written in the early 20th century. It charts Graves’s life from a precocious, book-filled childhood through elite English schooling and toward the disillusionments that frame his farewell to the society, institutions, and loyalties that shaped him, with war and literary life looming as central arenas of experience. The opening of this autobiography sets out Graves’s blunt aims—farewell, forgetfulness, and
money—before moving swiftly into vivid, unsentimental self-portraiture and family origins. He sketches early memories and a wry “passport” description of his body and temperament, then unfolds a double inheritance: a principled, learned German maternal line (von Ranke) and a wordy, clerical Anglo-Irish paternal line (Graves), each supplying traits and tensions he will struggle with. He recalls strict Protestant upbringing, class awareness sharpened in a fever hospital, and a household of servants bridged by a beloved nurse, alongside a developing horror of Catholic imagery and a long, crippling fear of sin and sex. Schooling dominates: a carousel of preparatory schools—from canings and scandal to first literary discipline—culminates in a scholarship to Charterhouse, where poverty, “von” in his name, and prudish innocence invite bullying amid a culture of games, romanticized homosociality, and cynicism. Counterbalancing this are luminous summers in Bavaria (castles, ghosts, rich food) and a deep attachment to the austere Welsh hills, where he trains himself out of fear. The section ends with his loathing for the public-school spirit, a postponed Oxford, and the turn to poetry as a private refuge. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
