One hundred years ago this weekend, the Times of London published an obituary of a young poet and army officer named Robert Graves. Among the many who read it was Graves himself, for although he was certainly not in good health, he was still breathing, and would remain so for a long time. The death notice appeared on his 21st birthday. He lived to be 90.
Twelve days after the bad news, at the prompting of the officially deceased (a voice from the Graves), the Times corrected the record. There was no harm done. "The joke contributed greatly to my recovery," said the poet. "The people with whom I had been on the worst terms during my life wrote the most enthusiastic condolences to my parents."
It was shrapnel wounds to the lung, suffered during the Battle of the Somme, that had nearly claimed Graves. Even the army doctor gave him “no chance”. But when sent home to convalesce, it wasn’t just physical wounds he was carrying.
Undiagnosed shell-shock meant that “the noise of a car back-firing would send me flat on my face, or running for cover”. Also, he became obsessed by fear of gas attack, to the point where any sudden, strong smell – even from flowers in a garden – set him “trembling”.
Towards the end of the war, still recovering, he and others from the Royal Welch regiment were sent to Limerick, where Graves’s grandfather had been an Anglican bishop. This posting had its risks too, in 1918.
Years later, the poet recalled playing his last rugby game there, as fullback, against a local team that included many Sinn Féin supporters: “We were all crocks and our opponents seemed bent on showing what fine fighting material England had lost by withholding Home Rule. How jovially they jumped on me, and rubbed my face in the mud!”
Another complication in Limerick was that the demobilisation now under way was deferred for troops in Ireland because of the Troubles. This became a more acute problem when Graves caught the infamous Spanish Flu which, on top of his existing lung problems, was a bigger threat than republican rugby players.
Having witnessed the horrendous poverty in Limerick, which looked “war-ravaged” even in peace, he was not willing to trust his lungs to a local hospital. So he “decided to make a run for it” and caught the last train out of the city before the demobilisation period ended.
This made him a deserter, until a chance meeting in a London taxi with the “Cork District Demobilisation Officer” gave him the documentation he needed. Safely back in England, he recovered from the 1918 flu, unlike millions of others.
During the prolific and extraordinarily diverse literary career that followed, Graves always considered himself a poet, first and last. “Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat,” was how he put it.
Despite this, and with the possible exception of I, Claudius, he remains best-known for his 1929 memoir, Goodbye to All That. The title had several layers of meaning, mostly referring to a way of life and system of beliefs swept away by the war. But it also marked his "bitter leave-taking of England". He spent most of the rest of his days in Majorca.
The book caused much controversy at home, not just for its conclusions, but also for some of its purported facts. Critics included the author's father, Dublin-born Alfred Percival Graves, who had been central the Irish literary revival and, late in life, wrote his own autobiography – To Return to All That – in response to his son's.
He blamed what he saw as the younger man’s misjudgements on his war experiences: “To these I impute his bitter and hasty criticism of people who never wished him harm.”
Graves snr is now probably best remembered for Father O'Flynn, a comic ballad eulogising a fictional Donegal priest. It may not be a coincidence, therefore, that in his his war memoir, Robert Graves also wrote admiringly of Catholic chaplains, at the expense of their Anglican counterparts.
Where the latter tended to avoid trouble, Graves claimed, the Catholics would go anywhere to administer last rites and were not averse to picking up rifles when required. A particular hero was “jovial Father Gleeson” of the Munster Fusiliers, who “when all the officers were killed or wounded at the first battle of Ypres, had stripped off black badges [religious insignia identifying him as a non-combatant], and taking command of the survivors, held the line.”