I am fortunate to have a friend and colleague who is deeply in love with the life of work and Robert Graves, "in love" in the sense of understanding the depth of human being, and cherishing the consequences, and trials, and adventures incurred in immersing one's self in the exploration of those depths and where they lead to. Like Monkey in the underground river. (Unless that was another Chinese tale).
Which means I have finally climbed the hill of reluctance and reservation to read a work by Graves, and have read "Goodbye to all that", in a Folio Society edition from 1981. The words "Goodbye to all that" came first, after hearing of the plan to break up and disperse the collections of the Archive, which includes specialist libraries, museum objects and furniture, and audio-video oral history and oral archiving recordings. "It's a book you feel you have read", as another friend said. Reading it came next. One is taken through layers of oral and local history into places one didn't expect to be, including the space where childhood heroes live, like T.E. Lawrence, among one's self among the tangled Oxford reeds and countless little ringing bells of familiarity and association.
Single lines that leapt out at me (or out of me) as I read:
p89 "Or so I was told - the fate of hundreds of my comrades in France came to me merely as hearsay."
As an archivist for 30 years in a place created for people to discover and play among their belonging, adding their being to the place; being loved in the present and future via oral history, and/or in correspondence, and via files; and/or objects and artworks they had carried through their lives and contributed, or in some way appeared in or been touched by, which had given them (the person and the thing) meaning. And via memory.
p154 "It has taken some ten years for my blood to recover."
p175 "A crump was a German five-point-nine shell, and 'the last crump' would be the end of the war."
nb Fiddler Crump, in the English Mummer's play.
p199: "News like this was far more upsetting than in France."
p199: "England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language, and it was a newspaper language."
Yes
p216 "Earp had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years - as president and sole member, he said, of some seventeen undergrauate social and literary societies. In 1919, still in residence, he handed over the minute-books to the returning university. Most of the societies were then re-formed."
Yes.
p233 "Since 1916, the fear of gas obsessed me; any unusual smell, even a sudden strong scent of flowers in a garden, was enough to send me trembling."
Yes.
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