With all the splendour that surrounded Weirleigh, Sassoon was over-flowing with celebratory and evocative verse, as was appropriate for a devotee of George Meredith. It was abundant but it was not focused. Uncle Hamo’s advice about keeping one’s eye on the object had not been taken. He worked on successive drafts of his poems and was still committed to the idea of small private editions. He also continued to send a selection to the editors of various literary magazines. One such was The Academy, whose editor immodestly but typically described it as ‘the liveliest of literary journals’. He was T. W. H. Crosland, a charlatan on the literary scene, and in the habit of moving from one periodical to the next with regularity. But he had an eye for a poem, especially by young, inexperienced poets. Crosland was also a critic and polemicist in literary matters, sparing no one, however famous. Theresa disliked his stance and taste – mainly on the grounds that he had been brutal to the work of Sir Walter Scott. As she was a confirmed devotee of the Pre-Raphaelites, this was heresy. When Sassoon sent Crosland some of his work he received not an invitation but a summons to his office in London. He did not take to Crosland when they met but innocently jumped at the offer of a guinea each for the nine sonnets. The poems were published but the money never arrived.
Sassoon’s most important contact with literary London was made in 1908 with Edmund Gosse. In that year he wrote and privately published Orpheus in Diloeryum, which he described as ‘an unactable one-act play which had never quite made up its mind whether to be satirical or serious. Sometimes I was pouring out my own imitative exuberances; sometimes I was parodying the precosities of contemporary minor poetry; on one page I parodied Swinburne, (crudely, but to me it sounded rather fine).’ When Uncle Hamo read the work he, one must say loyally, thought it showed potential and suggested his nephew send it to Gosse. This eminent littérateur had been Uncle Hamo’s friend since youth, just as Nellie his wife had been to Theresa, or ‘Trees’ as she called her. Gosse’s response was that of a man who felt obliged not to be discouraging:
It was very kind of you to send your delicate and accomplished masque Orpheus in Diloeryum, which I have read with pleasure and amusement. It reminds me of some of the strange entertainments of the early Renaissance and of Italian humanism generally. And I observe, with great satisfaction, your own richness of fancy and command of melodious verse. I hope you will make a prolonged study of the art of poetry, and advance from height to height.
Gosse could be pompous! Despite that and the reference to Italian humanism being ‘over his head’, Sassoon was encouraged by Gosse’s note and pursued the connection. Gosse’s real opinion is revealed in letters he exchanged with Uncle Hamo in May 1909. Hamo pressed the question first:
Just on our leaving the other day you almost told us what you thought of young Siegfried Sassoon’s attempts at verse. I am anxious that he should have any help and encouragement in this the difficult path he has chosen to follow. So if you can advise him, do please, if opportunity occurs. He is an interesting personage and spirit. I have been severely calling him to order lately for spending too much on hunting, golf, cricket and expensive editions of books, beyond what his income of £400 will stand.
Gosse responded within the week to say that Siegfried’s work ‘showed promise’ but the need was for ‘a distinct originality’:
Now I cannot truly say that I see as yet much evidence that Siegfried possesses this. So I think that to arrange his life from the point of view of his becoming a poet would be very rash. I think that if I was his Trustee, I should feel that he ought to have the chance of training for some other profession. Of course, if, in five or six years, he should feel his powers as a writer strengthening, and find that his vocation as a poet was irresistible, he could then retire and live on his modest fortune.
Sassoon was already finding his vocation ‘irresistible’. Between 29 May and 14 August 1909, the initials S.S. appeared seven times beneath an assortment of verse in The Academy. On 26 June it published his sonnet ‘The Travellers’. Sassoon was having a golden day, as on that day he also received a parcel from the Athenaeum Press containing copies of his latest venture, ‘thirty-five in stiff white cartridge-paper covers and three on hand made paper bound in black buckram’. This private edition comprised 34 poems, of which 18 were sonnets. The title, Sonnets and Verses, was as predictable as the contents – loose descriptions of nature, early mornings, shepherds and goblins. The whole collection resembles fingers going up and down the keyboard, producing sound but no recognisable melody.
Helen Wirgman came for her usual long summer holiday. She was given a copy of the poems and Sassoon waited for her opinion before distributing copies of this latest opus. Meeting her in the garden and anxious for a response, he was deflated when none came. He sensed disapproval and disappointment on Wirgie’s part. It was a reaction endorsed by his own opinion of the volume. Returning to the Studio, Sassoon was overcome with frustration and mounting annoyance with himself. The collection he now realised was immature and he was relieved that no one but Wirgie had seen the poems. Lighting a fire in the Studio grate, he burnt the entire edition, with the exception of the three buckram copies. ‘When I confessed to Wirgie what I had done, she gave me one of her slow, sad looks.’
All was not lost in the conflagration. Sassoon had second thoughts about his precipitate action. He determined to salvage what he thought were the best of the sonnets and decided on another private edition. In a letter of May 1922 to his friend Sydney Cockerell, Sassoon says: ‘I muddled along, making corrections; I had no one to whom I could show any poems in MS, and these little books were a sort of private hobby.’
Hobby is a strange description of an intensely felt vocation, highlighting the danger inherent in Sassoon’s dividing his time between country pursuits and the pursuit of the Muse. As Uncle Hamo pointed out to Gosse: ‘At present he is too much with the inferior country intellectuals and I should like him to meet literary men.’
Underlying Sassoon’s disappointment over Sonnets and Verses was the suspicion that he had lost the naturalness of some of his earlier work. He was poetising, moralising and intoxicated with word-sounds. Influenced by Swinburne, he continued to explore the possibilities of the sonnet. Technique was a major problem, as was the question which opens one of his poems from the destroyed collection: ‘What shall the Minstrel sing?’ ‘The question what exactly should I sing was one which I had not so far asked myself with any awareness of the circumstance that, like many minstrels of my age, I had nothing much to sing about.’ There was, however, much to think about.
Sassoon at 25 years of age was not the happy-go-lucky person of earlier years. The absence of focus in his latest volume of poetry reflected the lack of focus in his life. There was an increasing awareness that life for him was ‘an empty thing’. He was experiencing ‘great perplexity and unhappiness’. It was while in this state of mind that he struck up a friendship with a brilliant academic named Nevill Forbes, Reader in Russian at Oxford. Sassoon first heard of Forbes nearly a decade earlier, when Fräulein Stoy arrived at Weirleigh. Her previous post had been tutor to Forbes and his sister. The Fräulein made it clear that Nevill was a pupil of prodigious talent, a polymath and a polyglot. So effusive and constant was the praise that Sassoon took against Forbes and dismissed him as a ‘swot’. Forbes preceded Sassoon at New Beacon School and Marlborough College, after which he went up to Balliol, then to Leipzig, before returning to Oxford and an academic post. In addition to his facility with languages – of which he spoke 14 – he was also a brilliant pianist with a strong liking for the music of Debussy, Ravel and Chausson. Probably at the suggestion of Fräulein Stoy, Nevill Forbes was invited to Weirleigh. Despite his original dislike of him, when they met and spent time together, Sassoon reversed his opinion.
In June 1910 Forbes invited Sassoon to spend some days in Oxford. There is no record of their conversations but there is the strong probability that Sassoon shared with Forbes, albeit in a general way, his dissatisfaction with his latest volume of poetry, the lack of focus, the unhappiness which pervaded his life and his inability to settle. It is unlikely that Sassoon would have told Forbes that he attributed the cause to sexual frustration