fran brearton
to court martial me and that I should be treated as insane’, and so he gave way.
Butit was, he writes, a ‘successful lie. No doubt I should have done the same
for him if our positions had been reversed.’^53 Graves recalls it differently: ‘I made
it plain that his letter had not been given and would not be given the publicity
he intended; so, because he was ill, and knew it, he consented to appear before
the medical board.’^54 The particular instance seems of limited importance, but
the quarrel over the factuality, or otherwise, of the war memoirs was to bring the
friendship to an end. On 7 February 1930, Sassoon wrote to Graves protesting about
the numerous inaccuracies he found inGoodbye to All That: the ‘inaccuracies’, he
observes, ‘are not noticeable to ‘‘the general public’’, but they are significant to those
who shared your experiences’.^55 Graves’s reply, which counters the accusations,
also contains a comment, of sorts, on Sassoon’s most recent collection of poems,
The Heart’s Journey:
YourHeart’s Journeywhich I have not seen yet but only read in reviews and in already
published fragments, appears to...
no...no....^56
The acrimony continues through two further letters, and the correspondence ceases
thereafter. (There are some further letters in the spring of 1933, old wounds opened
by a request from Graves to Sassoon for money, after which all communication
ended. They were ‘reconciled’ at a meeting in Cambridge in 1954.)
In the breakdown in relations in 1930, three related issues are of particular
note: first, the fraught relation between public and private; second, the perception
of the war as a ‘shared experience’; third, the problem of perspective and rep-
resentation—as regards both literature and history. Even before the acrimonious
correspondence aboutGoodbye to All Thatbegan, Sassoon had insisted on alter-
ations to the text (necessitating the withdrawal and reissue of the first edition),
since Graves, without permission, had included Sassoon’s ‘Letter to Robert Graves’,
written during Sassoon’s convalescence in 1918. The poem was unpublished, and
Sassoon tried to retrieve it from Graves during a quarrel in 1922 (Graves returned
only a copy). But Graves did not merely quote the poem, he also edited it by
omitting several lines, including the following:
Yes, you can touch my banker when you need him.
Why keep a Jewish friend unless you bleed him?
·········
O Rivers please take me. And make me
Go back to the war till it break me.(^53) Sassoon,Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 512–13.
(^54) Graves,Goodbye to All That, 324.
(^55) Sassoon to Graves, 7 Feb. 1930, inIn Broken Images, 200.
(^56) Graves to Sassoon, 20 Feb. 1930, ibid. 203. ‘The dots’, O’Prey notes, ‘are not omission marks,
but Graves’s ‘‘comment’’ onThe Heart’s Journeybook of poems.’