Notes from PhD Land: On truth — War Poet — A Canadian Forces Artist Project by Suzanne Steele

Notes from PhD Land: On truth — War Poet — A Canadian Forces Artist Project by Suzanne Steele
Excerpt:
Well, well, well, so up next we come to Robert Graves that fantastical storyteller, spinner of word and life webs, love poet, war poet, memoirist, warrior of curled hair and curled nose and curled lips.
How is it then that I choose in this quest for defining/understanding truth in the Great War narrative (and indeed all war narrative), to read “Dear Roberto” – as Sassoon addresses Graves in Letter to Robert Graves an epistolary poem from the American Red Cross Hospital in 1918? Graves was economical with the truth, and lavish with the fantastical.
Famously, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon combed Graves’s Goodbye To All That for factual errors and found plenty of whoppers embedded like land mines within the pages. Indeed Graves himself came to regret his hastily written memoir of the Great War, believing his stretched truth left scorched earth (it did).
Graves writes, that GTAT was “a reckless autobiography in which the war figured, but written with small consideration for anyone’s feelings.”
~Robert Graves on Goodbye To All That
(The Long Weekend, 216)
But as early as 1930, only months after publishing the memoir that would make him famous, Robert Graves comments on the semi-fictionalized memoir in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement:
Great latitude should therefore be allowed to a soldier who has since got his facts or dates mixed. I would even paradoxically say that the memoires of a man who went through some of the worst experiences are not truthful unless they contain a high proportion of falsities (TLS 1930)._
I remember sitting around the dinner table in the mess at Whistler during the Winter Olympics with the Commanding Officer of 3 VP. He asked me, “What’s the difference between a war story and a fairy tale?”
“A fairy tale begins, “Once upon a time…” and a war story begins, “Well there we were in the shit…”“.
Read on...