The timing could not have been more providential for Sassoon, who wrote to Marsh as suggested:
Feb 14th 1913
Dear Sir,
Mr Edmund Gosse has asked me to send you my privately printed verses, and I have great pleasure in doing so.
Yours very truly,
Siegfried Sassoon
Marsh replied to this tersely diffident communication the following Monday with a long letter. Complimentary, perceptive and full of advice, it echoed the criticism given by Gosse and Helen Wirgman:
I think you have a lovely instrument to play upon and no end of beautiful tunes in your head, but that sometimes you write them down without getting enough meaning into them to satisfy the mind. I believe there is a good as well as a bad sense in which there must be fashions in poetry, and that a vein may be worked out, if only for a time. The vague iridescent ethereal kind had a long intermittent innings all through the 19th century, especially at the end, and Rossetti, Swinburne and Dowson could do things which it is no use trying now. It seems a necessity now to write either with one’s eye on an object or with one’s mind at grips with a more or less definite idea.
Sassoon agreed with the analysis and was encouraged by its tone. Here, at last, was someone who could help release him from the restrictive influences of the Victorians to ‘emerge into an individual style’ of his own. Sassoon wanted to discover that voice with which the younger English poets were speaking, especially the ones whose work appeared in the volumes of Georgian Poetry edited by Marsh and printed by Harold Monro at the Poetry Bookshop. But the thought came again: could he find that voice by remaining in rural Kent? Uncle Hamo had already expressed his doubts about the intellectual calibre of his nephew’s country circle. Gosse, too, recommended exposure to the wider world: ‘It would be useful to you, I think, as you lead so isolated a life, to get into relations with these people, who are of all schools, but represent what is most vivid in the latest poetical writings.’
Marsh and Sassoon met for the first time in London in March at the National Club in Whitehall. It was an affable beginning to their subsequent friendship. Marsh repeated his compliments about Sassoon’s work, including The Daffodil Murderer, even though he was not certain what to make of it. Sassoon, as was his tendency in new situations and in meeting strangers, began to chatter away for all he was worth and assailed Marsh with views on poetry and poems. His host was an indulgent listener. Marsh liked people, especially young men and particularly artistic young men. His closest friendship was with Rupert Brooke, towards whom he acted almost as a father, certainly as an indulgent uncle. Possibly homosexual but more than likely asexual, Marsh was the centre of an extensive social and literary network in London and a frequent guest at the most exclusive country-house parties. He was entirely the right person to guide Sassoon out of the provincialism that was hindering his progress as a poet.
Throughout the spring and summer Sassoon worked diligently at his poetry. He went up to London in June to a dinner-party given by Edmund Gosse at which one of the guests was Robert Ross. Like his host and Eddie Marsh, Ross was a patron of emerging actors, writers, painters and poets, but his notoriety sprang from his friendship with Oscar Wilde, his loyalty to his memory and the jealousy this engendered in Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s nemesis. No one sitting around Gosse’s table that evening would have been unaware of Ross’s battles through the courts against Douglas’s venom, to which was added the poisonous activities of Sassoon’s erstwhile publisher T. W. H. Crosland. Sassoon liked Ross and, since his own declaration to Carpenter, felt solidarity with him. Ross’s biographer writes, ‘Robbie was instinctively drawn to the idealistic poet, who so obviously fulfilled all the spiritual and cultural elements he desired in a friend.’ Despite this reciprocity of feeling, Ross made no effort to advance the aquaintance that evening.
Following his return to Weirleigh, Sassoon applied himself to his poetry, keeping Marsh informed of his progress or, more accurately, the lack of it. Theresa thought he should get more fresh air and he was inclined to agree with her. In September he forsook poetry and Kent for hunting and Warwickshire. Norman Loder had recently moved there to be Master of the Atherstone Hunt and Sassoon decided to scale the heights of his sporting ambition during the next six months. No one was happier with this move than Tom Richardson, who travelled north a month later in charge of Sassoon’s four hunters, the purchase of which had warmed the groom’s heart, thoroughly depressed Mr Lousada the trustee and placed a considerable strain on the combined resources of Theresa and her son. But Sassoon thought it all worthwhile as he breathed the morning air and in the evening played the pianola while Loder snoozed in a fireside chair. It was like the days they had spent together when Loder was Master of the Southdown Hunt in his native Sussex. ‘There was something almost idyllic about those first weeks.’
Almost idyllic – Sassoon felt pangs of hopelessness about his poetry. Writing on 9 October he told Marsh: ‘I don’t suppose I shall ever publish any poems, the stuff I wrote last summer was utterly hopeless. Perhaps I will begin fresh in the spring.’ But should that new start be in Kent? Marsh had already suggested not: ‘But why don’t you come and live in London? You can’t expect all the interesting things to come down and stay with you in Kent.’ Marsh was pushing on a half-open door.
Norman Loder had more than one reason for leaving Sussex for Warwickshire, as Sassoon discovered on his arrival. One of the prominent hunting families in the Midlands was the Fisher family of Amington Hall, Market Bosworth. One of the daughters, Phyllis, a keen and able horse-woman, had taken Loder’s fancy. Their engagement was imminent. Sassoon could be diffident and awkward when meeting new people, but he liked Phyllis from the moment they met. She and Norman were among the central figures in Sassoon’s life over the next decade, especially after the war when ‘good old Sig’ would move into their house for the hunting season.
It was during that 1913 season, the last before the war, that Sassoon formed another friendship which, on his part, awakened deep sexual passions. Robert Hugh Hanmer was born in 1895 and, like Gordon Harbord, was the son of a clergyman, the Revd Hugh Hanmer, sometime Rector of Market Bosworth and environs. The Hanmer family were landed gentry, whose estates were situated on the border between Flintshire and Cheshire. They, like the Harbords, were born into the world of the horse and the hound. Mrs Hanmer was a member of the Ethalston family in Sussex, who were prominent in the hunting fraternity there. She would certainly have been familiar with the Loders of Handcross and likely as not to have known the Harbords at Colwood Park. Through this network Robert and his sister Dorothy found themselves part of the Atherstone Hunt ‘which prided itself on being quite like a family party’. Sassoon was well aware of the nature of his feelings for Robert. Their repression was essential if the friendship was to develop, which it did over the next year, mainly through Dorothy keeping up a correspondence from the Hanmer side: Bobby was not the letter-writing kind.
The hunting season was drawing to its close and Sassoon was getting restless for London and the company of Eddie Marsh. He had also resolved the matter of leaving home. Early in February 1914 he wrote to Marsh: ‘I have quite made up my mind to live in London a good deal in the future. I shall never do any decent work buried alive among fox-hunters. So I want you to help me find somewhere to live and I don’t want to say anything about it to my people, (at present), as I know they would kick up a fuss and spoil the whole venture!’ In fact Sassoon had done some house-hunting during his occasional visits to the capital and, attracted to the idea of being near Marsh, had more or less decided on Number 1, Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Marsh lived in Number 5. He moved to his new rooms in May, having secured a housekeeper, Mrs Fretter, whom, he told Marsh in a letter from Weirleigh, ‘I engaged in spite of our first tremulous electric interview, [and who] appears to be economic’. Considering his sheltered upbringing, which hardly if ever called on him to engage with domestic concerns, Sassoon did well in organising the rooms, although he did run into difficulties with the upholsterers and also with the carpets: ‘too big or too small I forget which’. It had not been easy persuading Theresa that this was the right decision. She was still upset over the sudden death of Miriam, her maid. It was not the best time to forsake