To know myself – this fragment of today
To pluck the unconscious causes of unrest
From self-deceiving nature.
This was a hard road but it led to the inner harmony and peace of his last decade. Sassoon took himself seriously, too seriously sometimes, yet no writer was quicker at catching himself out in a pose and impishly laughing at his pretensions and piousness. Considering his abhorrence of intrusion and public display, it is remarkable how he offers so much of himself to his reader – remarkable but also deceptive. Although always truthful, Sassoon was not always candid.
During the last 20 years much has been revealed about Sassoon, which he and others might have preferred to remain unsaid, in particular his homosexuality and unhappy marriage. Discretion is more palatable sometimes than openness. Faithfulness to his memory has included preserving unsullied the picture of him as the innocent boy in the Weald of Kent, the sporting youth, the fox-hunting man, the brave warrior, the conscientious protestor, the amiable host and friend. He was all those things but he is not diminished by the more complex picture of him which is now emerging.
Sassoon’s reputation as a poet rests in the main on the poetry he wrote during the First World War – but that is a fraction of his output. To understand what happened to him after the war one must read the poetry of personal exploration published in the 1930s and 1950s. Without these, any attempt at understanding his life would be incomplete. ‘My real biography is my poetry. All the sequence of my development is there.’ Sassoon is not one of the great poets but he is a significant one. Obviously the war poems and his influence on other poets have secured his reputation but so too ought his last three volumes of poetry, which were combined to form the single volume Sequences. They are reflections on his personal pilgrimage yet encompass universal longings and aspirations. Written during the Second World War and the years when the shadow of the atom bomb lay heavily across the path of the world, they have a prophetic quality and a timelessness. The rediscovery of these poems will, I hope, be one of the fruits of this biography.
His prose work has fared better than his poetry. His six volumes of autobiography, which, for convenience, I call the Sherston Trilogy and the Siegfried Trilogy, are not explanations of major world events or ideologies but rather an exploration of an internal universe through the experience of the writer. Sassoon’s alter ego, George Sherston, tells his readers: ‘Remembering that I had a bath may not be of interest to anyone, but it was a good bath, and it is my own story that I am trying to tell, and as such it must be received; those who expect a universalization of the Great War must look for it elsewhere. Here they will only find an attempt to show its effect on a somewhat solitary-minded young man.’ Sassoon’s subject was always Sassoon.
The personal nature of his work caused its decline in critical, though not in popular esteem. Pasternak’s chilling phrase in Dr Zhivago, ‘the personal life is dead – history has killed it’, could well be applied to the years when Sassoon was at his most productive as a writer. He feared for the individual life in an orgy of collectivism and relativism. In his final years he was concerned that the scientific age would create a world which had no room for what de la Mare called ‘the imagination of the heart’. Another friend, E. M. Forster, was equally engaged in the battle against busybodies, agencies and philosophies which threatened individual freedom and artistic expression. It is a pity that Sassoon is often thought of as a purveyor of nostalgia – there was so much more to him and his work than that. It has been written that one could ‘condemn the whole of the twentieth century out of the mouth of Sassoon’; a large claim. A lesser but more sustainable one is that this century is better understood by studying his life, his work and his searchings. He was suspicious of the word ‘progress’ – ‘modernisation’ was another – when used as a general description. With wry humour he stated that he liked the horse because it was impossible to modernise.
Sassoon was also a tireless diarist. With few lapses he chronicled his life between 1905 and 1956. Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, who has edited and published three volumes up to 1925, gave me access to the fine copies of the diaries housed in his collection at the Cambridge University Library. Sassoon is here in all his moods – prickly, generous, taciturn, gossipy, juvenile and avuncular. Every life is complicated, riven with inconsistencies, but Sassoon’s unevenness, as these diaries reveal, was extraordinary. Turning their pages and lost in the narrative one can hear his bass-baritone voice as clearly as though listening to the 1956 BBC recording of him. Unlike his published prose, the style and use of language are at times convoluted, especially when attempting to analyse his behaviour and attitude towards others. There are dramatic moments too when, recording an incident, a description or a conversation, the narrative is terminated with an abrupt tearing of the page. Affairs of the heart frequently fall prey to this treatment but there still remain many declarations of sexual confusion and of fulfilment.
Sassoon’s correspondence, unlike his diaries, is housed in disparate collections, private and public. However, the letters share with the diaries an intimate, conversational quality conveyed in small, firm handwriting, occasionally illustrated with cartoons, well-rehearsed puns and schoolboy limericks. To sit in the New York Public Library handling a letter written by Sassoon from the Western Front to his mentor, Edward Marsh, is for a moment to sense the desperation and exhilaration of that awful place.
I was privileged to have access to a private collection of Sassoon’s letters written to Dame Felicitas Corrigan OSB between 1959 and 1967. Although composed in the last decade of his life, the contents reach back to his ‘earliest rememberings’ and move poignantly through the troubled years to ‘the faith that blest his pilgrim path begun’. These letters are his retrospective on the journey and form the basis of Dame Felicitas’ 1973 book, Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet’s Pilgrimage.
Sassoon’s range of friends and correspondents was wide and he was a copious letter-writer. On occasions a sense of déjà vu comes over the reader: Sassoon was given to much repetition between diaries, letters and his autobiographies. From the major collections one turns to meet him in the single letter addressed to an admirer or in response to an enquiry, some old soldier or a schoolboy or a class of schoolgirls studying one of his books each receiving a considered and appreciative reply, which sometimes ended with the invitation ‘If ever you’re this way do look me up.’ Despite his protestations to the contrary, nobody enjoyed fan mail more than Sassoon.
To this wealth of written material must be added the reminiscences and anecdotes of those whose lives were touched by Sassoon. I am grateful to those who shared their memories of him, occasionally with reluctance but always with a sense of pride and happiness for having known ‘good old Sig’. In particular I am indebted to Doms Philip Jebb, Sebastian Moore, Martin Salmon and Aelred Watkin of Downside – monks have a gift for anecdote! So too did Miss Muriel Galsworthy of Warminster, who was the epitome of Aunt Evelyn in the Sherston Trilogy and whose stories of Sassoon’s eccentricities and foibles were garnered from the afternoons she spent with him at Heytesbury. It is a matter of deep regret to me that she did not live to see the completion of this biography to which she gave so much encouragement and insight.
During his address at the unveiling ceremony in St Paul’s, Sassoon imagined being asked three questions about de la Mare: ‘Did you know him? What sort of writer was he? What was he like?’ The poetry, the prose, the letters and the personal recollections have opened the way for me to come to know the man. But we know in part and relate in part. This is a personal response but I hope not a stereotype. So often the only Sassoon people know is the fox hunting man or the soldier poet forever frozen in the days before and during the Great War. This is a portrait of the person who went on to live for 50 years after that brutal catastrophe. It is a story which has not been told before.
John Stuart Roberts