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Details
SASSOON, Siegfried (1886-1967) -- Robert GRAVES (1895-1985). Good-Bye to All That. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. 8vo. (198 x 130mm), original red cloth, lettered in gilt on spine. FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE (unexpurgated state). Higginson A32a. SIEGFRIED SASSOON'S COPY, annotated and embellished throughout with sardonic comments, newspaper cuttings and commercial illustrations, annotations to approx 85 pages, cuttings attached to approximately 40 pages (a few loose), also including (on verso of title) a letter to Sassoon from Jonathan Cape, 13 November 1929, 'After your call this afternoon I made arrangements for the cancel pages to be printed and to have them pasted into such copies ... as have not already left our premises. I am glad to say that the number of copies which have gone out from here is only a very small percentage of the edition', one page, 8vo, (some staining to outer margins, occasional discolouration from cuttings). Provenance: Siegfried Sassoon; and by descent.
THE END OF A FRIENDSHIP. Sassoon's annotations reflect his furious reaction to the many inaccuracies in Graves's autobiographical masterpiece, particularly where they concern themself, and many annotations simply note 'Rot!', 'fiction', etc, occasionally making more detailed factual corrections or disputing the origins or context of Graves's anecdotes, as when Graves claims that three out of five officers in the battalion were killed, 'an example of the way he makes the worst of everything so as to "increase the effect" of his book ... not more than 1 in 5 were killed', or where he describes a battalion as 'outflanked in a counter-attack' -- 'a meaningless statement, typically careless & inaccurate'; a reference to Wilfred Owen is described as 'an outrage'. Some have more satirical intent, as when a reference to a public baths is annotated 'rarely visited by the author', or elsewhere he notes 'Graves was disliked for his tactlessness, intelligence and dirty habits'. The well-placed cuttings and illustrations further this satirical intent -- as on the title page, where the words 'An Autobiography' are replaced by 'Mummy's bedtime story book'; an advertisement for 'The Central Cycle Riding School' and a number of other clippings relating to cycling undoubtedly allude to Graves's relationship with the American poet Laura Riding.
As the letter from Jonathan Cape included in the edition recalls, Sassoon's reaction to Good-Bye to All That was immediate: at his outraged insistence, pp.290 and 341-3 were replaced in all unissued copies -- the latter pages because they printed a verse letter from Sassoon to Graves without permission, the former because it describes, albeit without explicitly identifying her, Sassoon's mother's attempts to communicate with the spirit of her dead son, Siegfried's younger brother Hamo (see lot 106). Sassoon and Edmund Blunden worked meticulously through Blunden's copy of Good-Bye to All That (now in the Berg Collection at NYPL) with a similar, but even more profuse, mixture of factual correction and juvenile taunts; some of the embellishments to this, Sassoon's own copy, were carried out at Rapallo in November 1929 after an evening with Max Beerbohm (Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon (2005), pp.347-8).
THE END OF A FRIENDSHIP. Sassoon's annotations reflect his furious reaction to the many inaccuracies in Graves's autobiographical masterpiece, particularly where they concern themself, and many annotations simply note 'Rot!', 'fiction', etc, occasionally making more detailed factual corrections or disputing the origins or context of Graves's anecdotes, as when Graves claims that three out of five officers in the battalion were killed, 'an example of the way he makes the worst of everything so as to "increase the effect" of his book ... not more than 1 in 5 were killed', or where he describes a battalion as 'outflanked in a counter-attack' -- 'a meaningless statement, typically careless & inaccurate'; a reference to Wilfred Owen is described as 'an outrage'. Some have more satirical intent, as when a reference to a public baths is annotated 'rarely visited by the author', or elsewhere he notes 'Graves was disliked for his tactlessness, intelligence and dirty habits'. The well-placed cuttings and illustrations further this satirical intent -- as on the title page, where the words 'An Autobiography' are replaced by 'Mummy's bedtime story book'; an advertisement for 'The Central Cycle Riding School' and a number of other clippings relating to cycling undoubtedly allude to Graves's relationship with the American poet Laura Riding.
As the letter from Jonathan Cape included in the edition recalls, Sassoon's reaction to Good-Bye to All That was immediate: at his outraged insistence, pp.290 and 341-3 were replaced in all unissued copies -- the latter pages because they printed a verse letter from Sassoon to Graves without permission, the former because it describes, albeit without explicitly identifying her, Sassoon's mother's attempts to communicate with the spirit of her dead son, Siegfried's younger brother Hamo (see lot 106). Sassoon and Edmund Blunden worked meticulously through Blunden's copy of Good-Bye to All That (now in the Berg Collection at NYPL) with a similar, but even more profuse, mixture of factual correction and juvenile taunts; some of the embellishments to this, Sassoon's own copy, were carried out at Rapallo in November 1929 after an evening with Max Beerbohm (Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon (2005), pp.347-8).
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