Margins of Error: Edmund Blunden Annotates Good-bye to All That

Abstract:

In 1929 Edmund Blunden, outraged by (what he perceived to be) the crudeness and historical inaccuracy of Robert Graves's World War 1 memoir Goodbye to All That, set out to correct the record. For Blunden, the most historically consequential and personally devastating form of retaliation was to make manuscript notes, drawn from multiple sources, in the margins of Good-bye to All That, and to deposit this in the British Museum. With Siegfried Sassoon's help, Blunden harnessed the book's physical properties to offer a comprehensive and lasting indictment of Graves's memoir. Blunden's marginalia materially instantiate the processes through which war writers, and their readers, undertook the work of personal and collective remembrance.