As a proof of my readiness to accept autobiographical convention, let me at once record my two earliest memories.
The opening line sets the stage for what this book is: an autobiography. In the real sense. Meaning that the person who actually lived the life is the person who is writing about it. Unfortunately, in today’s literary universe, most autobiographies are actually just biographies ghost-written by someone else with the name of the subject slapped on. This book is a true autobiography in every sense. The man who lived it wrote it. And the man who wrote it set out with the intent of recording as much from memory as possible. Which is why some sections will fly by while others will drag. But rest assured that no matter whether bored or intensely focused, you are reading the reality of life as it was lived.
Though I have asked many of my acquaintances at what stage in their childhood or adolescence they became class-conscious none has ever given me a satisfactory answer. I remember how it happened to me.
Robert Graves was part of the first generation of British citizens to really begin to seriously question the validity of the class system. Not coincidentally, that generation—the post-Victorian generation coming of age during World War I made famous in Downton Abbey—was also the first to experience the shrinking of empire and dwindling of influence by England. The memoir of Graves may, indeed, have been one of the first by a British writer to ever seriously consider the issue of addressing the question of class consciousness by those not born to the lower class. Though, it must be noted, he was not exactly born into the nobility of the aristocracy, either. The 20th century was a period in which the entire concept of being British came under scrutiny, but not all at once so it is hardly surprising that other acquaintances might not have been as class consciously aware.
In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion.
The brutal honesty with which Graves attacks his subject—his own life history—is nowhere put on a more open display than his account of schooling within the boys-only prep school atmosphere of England. That the potential for homosexual explorations has long been a running theme of fictional tales set in these schools is hardly open for debate. That sexuality of this nature is so directly addressed in the world of autobiographical memories is usually skirted over entirely or only addressed allusively is equally. Graves does not shy away from the truth, but neither does he linger over it. Above all else, his work cannot be dismissed as a lurid tell-all.
Bumford and Burford were both sent to the base; but neither escaped the war. Bumford grew old enough by 1917 to be sent back to the battalion, and was killed that summer; Burford died in a bombing accident at the base-camp. Or so I was told – the fate of hundreds of my comrades in France came to me merely as hearsay.
The story of two soldiers named Bumford and Burford have been identified by critics as examples of the occasionally introduction of satirical fiction—tall tales, if you will—introduced by Graves into the otherwise factual narrative as a means of making a point which could not be made otherwise. Graves depicts the horrors of the Great War as well as the horrific monotony of it and if by chance the names Bumford and Burford are too similar and too funny-sounding to be real, the point is made in the final lines drawing the tale—whether tall or short—to a close.
