fran brearton
inRegeneration,or in Sassoon’s insistence on accuracy, may obscure the more
evident truth from debates surrounding war memoirs, letters, diaries, or poems:
that ‘shared experience’ is itself something of a myth. When Sassoon protests about
Graves’s inaccuracies, he claims to be ‘testing your book as a private matter between
you and me’;^61 yetitisanawarenessofpublicconsumptionthatcauseshimto
withdraw ‘Letter to Robert Graves’, an awareness of the dangers of leaving one
voice in narrative control of another, ofsharing, or transferring subjective material.
Graves closes the first edition ofGoodbye to All Thatwith the observation that he
‘learned to tell the truth—nearly’, a wry acknowledgement of the book’s fictional
qualities, in which he has ‘leading and subsidiary characters’, and which includes
‘most of the usual storybook things’.^62 So whilst Graves tends to suggest that ‘truth’
is fictional, Sassoon, in the Sherston memoirs, claims for his fiction a degree of
‘truth’ lacking in Graves’s work. The difference implied here reverberates in both
poets’ relations to modernism’s stylistic experiments in the post-war period. In an
illuminating discussion of the quarrel between Graves and Sassoon in 1930, Allyson
Booth exposes some of the inconsistencies in Sassoon’s position, since he ‘berate[s]
Graves for his perversion of factuality’, and yet in his ownMemoirs‘makes a point
of addressing the problems of producing an accurate account of the war’. In that
sense, both poets illustrate the validity of Booth’s argument that ‘The magnitude,
the violence, and the intensity of World War I made impossible the adoption of a
position from which anything like ‘‘factuality’’ might have been delineated.’ The
literary strategies which emerged in the 1920s respond to that impossibility. Yet, as
she also notes:
Modernists were committed to and exhilarated by that project of invention, the results of
which we now identify as a privileging of private and psychological facts over public and
concrete ones. But when the experiences in question are rapes or wars, the difficulty of
determining factuality is transformed from an interesting aesthetic problem into a heart-
breakingly physical one, and the elusiveness of factuality becomes deeply disturbing, both
emotionally and politically.^63
Graves, more than Sassoon, is exhilarated by the ‘staged’ and fictional qualities
ofGoodbye to All That; the first edition of the book delights in subversion of
official documents and records, and its lack of respect for ‘authority’ is in keeping
with its casual attitude towards the ‘facts’. Likewise, in the 1930s and 1940s, his
‘autobiography’ is told, he suggests, in his poems, and in a manner which also
privileges the private and psychological over the ‘facts’. As he writes in 1951: ‘A
volume of collected poems should form a sequence of the intenser moments of
the poet’s spiritual autobiography....Such an autobiography, by the way, does not
(^61) Sassoon to Graves, 7 Feb. 1930, inIn Broken Images, 200.
(^62) Graves,Goodbye to All That(1929), 439–41.
(^63) Allyson Booth,Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the
First World War(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 85 and 87.