Max Egremont
Picador, £20
Siegfried Sassoon starts as a cliché, turns into a contradiction, and ends up a Catholic. Some might feel inclined to add another word beginning with C to this alliterative introduction to the man who shaped so many of our thoughts about the Great War. That’s the problem with Sassoon. He can come across on paper as a thoroughly dislikeable character, but by all accounts people of both sexes were never done falling in love with him. He must have been far more appealing in life than in black and white.
The favourite son of a doting mother, Sassoon spent his privileged childhood horse-riding and collecting fine volumes for his library. Although ostensibly a delicate child, as well as an animal lover, he soon discovered what was to be a lifelong passion for foxhunting, during which young Englishmen “could prove their manhood to each other . . . In the British army, it was thought to be useful preparation for war and did not count as leave.”
From then on Sassoon’s life is punctuated by a roll call of binary oppositions: Jewish anti-Semite, married homosexual, snobbish socialist, chaste man prone to ‘sex fevers’. There’s ‘Mad Jack’ storming a German trench single-handedly, scattering bombs and shouting ‘View Halloa!’ versus Siegfried the pacifist, facing a potential court martial for his “‘act of wilful defiance’” against a “‘war of aggression and conquest’”.
Not least of these contradictions is the fact that Sassoon is a writer whose work is not necessarily the prime source of interest. However much we admire “Counter Attack” and respect his angry satire, we know that Wilfred Owen was the better war poet, and the relentless Englishness of Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man can grate on readers of a less bucolic bent. Sassoon was outmoded relatively early on in his writing career, and remained stubbornly resistant to the Modernists despite being surrounded by the Bright Young Things immortalised by Waugh.
The war might have been the worst thing that happened to Sassoon as a man, but it made him as a poet. Almost all of his best work was written at this time, and his most popular books were thinly fictionalised and heavily censored memoirs. His war experience was not without its compensations either. Power over his masculine company fed his narcissism, “He enjoyed the effect on them of his kindness: the sexual thrill, for instance of Jim Laithwaite breaking down in tears when Sassoon had given him an emotional but severe warning on drunkenness”. More importantly, becoming an officer gave his life purpose. Here, according to his public-school ideal, was his chance to atone by showing his men how to die, “a debt payable for inherited advantages, an absolution for privilege”. A noble sentiment, except that he was wounded rather than killed. Instead, his statement of protest at the sacrifice of young soldiers in a war “‘deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’” thrust him into the public eye. His subsequent treatment at Craiglockhart by the psychologist W H R Rivers - who gave him fatherly validation as well as the mental strength to go back to the Front - formed the basis of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.
Access to diaries and papers unseen by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, as well as the full cooperation of Sassoon’s son George, make this the most enlightening biography of Siegfried Sassoon yet. Egremont is a meticulously subtle writer, slipping into the shadows as narrator, allowing his frustrating, complicated subject free rein, and then ever so gently removing any rose-tinted reading specs with sharp social observations or parenthetical asides. Part of his skill is his novelist’s knack for telling detail: the family crest clipped out on the back of Sassoon’s aunt Rachel Beer’s black poodle, Sassoon practising the organ alone in the school chapel at
In tracing Sassoon’s life and loves, Egremont also paints a fascinating portrait of the higher echelons of the gay scene in the early parts of last century. He brings a documentary maker’s eye to the juiciest details of Sassoon’s love affair with Stephen Tennant, a strikingly effeminate aristocrat said to have been the model for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. This odd couple – “the craggy war hero and precious, shrieking aesthete” - often provoked scorn in friends as well as homophobic abuse in the streets, but Egremont portrays their tempestuous relationship perfectly, in a way that is at once tender and astute, a tragic literary love to rival Vita and Violet or Wilde and Bosie. Little wonder that Sassoon’s later marriage to Hester Gatty was doomed to failure.
Did I feel the urge to shout expletives at the page, decrying Sassoon as a misogynist and hypocrite? Sometimes, but I also found his constant striving towards a kind of masculinity that encompassed his homosexuality profoundly moving. Sadder still is the niggling hint at a truly exceptional life not lived to its full potential. As a child, Sassoon once announced “‘I am going to take a leap into the future’”, jumped out a tree and promptly knocked himself out. As an adult, one of his most attractive qualities was his tendency to throw himself wholeheartedly, if naively and often ill-fatedly, into everything from No Man’s Land to fatherhood. Yet he seems to have suffered a perennial sense of dissatisfaction, perhaps rooted in survivor’s guilt, or maybe in the knowledge that he didn’t ever become the poet of his dreams, a poet as good as his protégé Owen. His conversion to Roman Catholicism offered solace in his final solitary years, but I can’t help being glad that he didn’t live to see the ban on hunting with dogs.
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