Цитаты из книги Goodbye to All That

When I got back to France, ‘The Actor’, a regular officer in ‘A’ Company, asked me: ‘Had a good time on leave?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Go to many dances?’ ‘Not one.’ ‘What shows did you go to?’ ‘I didn’t go to any shows.’ ‘Hunt?’ ‘No.’ ‘Slept with any nice girls?’ ‘No, I didn’t. Sorry to disappoint you.’ ‘What the hell did you do,…

The first distinguished writer I remember meeting after Swinburne was P. G. Wodehouse, a friend of my brother Perceval. Wodehouse was then in his early twenties, on the staff of The Globe, and writing school-stories for The Captain magazine. He gave me a penny, advising me to get marshmallows with it. Though too shy to…

My passport gives my nationality as ‘British subject’. Here I might parody Marcus Aurelius, who begins his Golden Book with the various ancestors and relatives to whom he owes the virtues of a worthy Roman Emperor: explaining why I am not a Roman Emperor or even, except on occasions, an English gentleman.

Nancy and I eventually got divorced. I married again, have had four more children, enjoy good health, travel as little as possible, and continue to write books. What else can I say, unless that my best friend is still the waste-paper basket?

I knew most of the poets then writing; they included Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells, and many more. I liked Davies because he came from South Wales and was afraid of the dark, and because once, I heard, he made out a list of poets and crossed them off one by one as he decided that they were not…

I made several attempts during these years 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.

Socialism with Nancy was a means to a single end: namely judicial equality between the sexes. She ascribed all the wrong in the world to male domination and narrowness, and would not see my experiences in the war as anything comparable with the sufferings that millions of working-class married women went through without…

Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.

At this time I was getting my first book of poems, Over the Brazier, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts in my pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He frowned and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way. In return, he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began: Return to…

My last memory is the headmaster’s parting shot: ‘Well, goodbye, Graves, and remember that your best friend is the waste-paper basket.’ This has proved good advice, though not perhaps in the sense he intended: few writers seem to send their work through as many drafts as I do.