Goodbye to All That : History vs. “Stupid” Novel

I was not especially surprised that Graves began some version of his war memoir while he was in the war, nor was I surprised that he began this project as a novel. Yet I was intrigued by his flippant disregard of that first attempt, and I believe it informs the style and structure of this memoir. He writes in Chapter XII about beginning “an account” of his experiences in France starting in 1916, yet “having stupidly  written it as a novel, I have now to re-translate it into history” (90).

Again, as he is living in the Islip house after the war, Graves says “I made several attempts…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” (321). The older Graves seems to be deeply concerned about simultaneously flushing out those all-to-real memories and about accurately capturing them and recording them. While any “history” must be told through the perspective of the historian—who may not fully be able to escape his personal and historical context or be purely objective—Graves seems disdainful of his earlier project of putting on a second mask by transforming himself into a character in a novel.

I wonder what Graves’s novel might have looked like. Would it simply have been a thinly veiled version of this memoir? Perhaps he could not complete the novel, and now considers that effort stupid, because he personally could only recount the war through his own lens. He could only write about the war as Robert Graves experienced it, and to write it otherwise would not only seem personally inadequate, it would fail to be a credible “history” of those events. Thoughts?