Siegfried Sassoon. John Stuart Roberts. Richard Cohen Books Limited. £20 UK HB.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Tribune)

The English poet and autobiographer Siegfried Sassoon is so much associated with the First World War, as one of that loose group known as the War Poets, that for many readers it will be surprising to be reminded that he continued to live and write both poetry and prose up to his death in 1967. That the war left a deep emotional scar on him, and that he never again reached the intensity of those poems from the front, there is little doubt, but, the quality of the later work aside, the eclipsing of the following almost half century of his writing life illustrates just how difficult is the relationship between writers and the causes they support.

John Stuart Robert's diligently researched and illuminating Siegfried Sassoon presents a not altogether sympathetic account of the life and work (early on Roberts admits Sassoon is 'not a great poet', which is true, but then neglects to show us why it is that he is important enough to warrant this major book). One of the things we are told helped in the writing was the publication in 1973 of a correspondence subtitled A Poet's Pilgrimage, but among the difficulties with the present volume is the seeming absence of not only pilgrimage but narrative. If Sassoon could be said to have floundered somewhat following the war, his life as told here appears quite without direction and, because of that, is by times difficult to stay with.

Born in 1886 to a father who was an English Sephardic Jew, but who married a gentile, Sassoon had a privileged upbringing though he suffered the absence of strong male role models (his father left his mother after five years of marriage, and his syphilitic uncle Frederick was too distant to command influence). The result was a lonely, often dreaming boy who had little in common with his two brothers and who, hearing Hebrew at his father's funeral in 1895, was frightened by its unfamiliar sound.

The poet who would later describe himself as 'fond of being alone/With music and my past' did not go to school until he was fourteen, which merely emphasised his feelings of difference, and only cricket, golf and horse-riding gave him any real sense of belonging. Early efforts at writing and self-publishing ended with his burning the entire edition of one selection of juvenile verse only to immediately attempt to write it again. Advice from such eminent writers as Edward Gosse, who told the young Sassoon to avoid 'mere misty or foggy allusiveness' and write with the world in view helped somewhat, but the dream was finally shattered by the war which would, paradoxically, make his name.

Having initially joined the ranks of the Royal Sussex Regiment, because he was allowed to bring his own horse, Sassoon later sought a commission with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and soon found himself in the trenches in Flanders 'in brilliant moonlight and iron frost' It was out here on the Western Front that he met Robert Graves, one of a number of figures including Bertrand Russell, who would encourage him to believe that the war was being 'deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it', a view that led to his most powerful anti-war poetry.

Sassoon's realisation (but lack of coming to terms with) his homosexuality attracted him to other male writers he met around this time (women, he said, were 'outside my philosophy'), including Wilfred Owen whom he befriended while recuperating from war wounds in Edinburgh. But if the meetings between such figures is undeniably interesting, the post-war round of dinner parties and salons with the shallow, posing Sitwells and others is deliciously irritating. Witness Sir George Sitwell's humble request: 'I must ask anyone entering the house never to contradict me or differ from me in any way, as it interferes with the functioning of the gastric juices and prevents me sleeping at night.'

The colour of this social scene, however, contrasts starkly with the greyness and doubt that were troubling Sassoon who fought with even his closest friends and confessed a sadistic desire to hurt his enemies that was not disentangled from the sexual. The appearance of modernism, of Eliot's The Wasteland in 1922, in particular, sounded the death knell for Sassoon's verse, though he had long been trying to escape the florid decoration that had typified so much poetry of the time. For the most part content to work on his 'prose masterpiece', he went on to produce a semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels and three volumes of childhood memoirs. His later volumes of poetry were spiritual in content, reflecting his becoming a Roman Catholic in 1957. However, as Stuart Roberts himself points out, Sassoon could never close his mind to what he had called 'the world's worst wound', and it is for his opposition to the machinery of the First World War that he will be, and deserves to be, remembered.

© copyright Pat Boran