Читать книгу Siegfried Sassoon - The First Complete Biography of One of Our Greatest War Poets - John S Roberts - Страница 12

Sassoon at 21 began to settle into the life of poet, sportsman and country gentleman with an income of £400 a year. He took possession of the upstairs floor of the Studio where his father had once played the violin, painted and browsed through his library. Sassoon’s own library was begun during his frequent absences from Marlborough College. It was to be ‘a real library – in which one went up a ladder and pulled out a dusty volume, to discover with delight that it was a first edition of somebody like Bunyan’. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than a good edition with a fine binding. A single volume or an author’s complete works would be ordered from a favoured bookseller, usually in part exchange for one of his father’s books, which the Bookseller’s Chronicle informed him was being sought by some other bibliophile. The opening transaction involved a first edition of Gissing’s New Grub Street:

Heard from Brownish Bros. They are willing to give £1. 5s in cash for Gissing or £1. 15s in books. Have decided to accept the latter alternative, so wrote immediately for the The Works of Samuel Johnson, 12 vols., calf, 1801, 15s; Sir Dudley Digges’s State Letters, folio, old calf, 1665, 6s; Paul and Virginia, 12 mo., calf, 1779, 2s.; Potter’s Euripides, 2 vols., calf, 1814, 5s. 6d.; and the Life of Queen Elizabeth, 4to., panelled calf, 1738, 3s 6d. This leaves 3s. to my account.

These were the first of the thousands of volumes Sassoon collected during his lifetime and which he neatly arranged to show their bindings to best effect. Neatness and order were, he declared, ‘a craving’. In his memoirs Sassoon creates the impression that he was, like his father, a browser. ‘Most of my serious reading was undoubtedly done with my watch on the table, and my thoughts may have wandered away to the golf links over at Sevenoaks.’ That is the confession of his youthful years; the mature Sassoon ‘knew his books so well that he could spring up and pull one down and open it at the very page to make his point’.

Taking possession of the Studio in that September of 1907 had emotional resonances:

If only the Studio could write reminiscences of its grown-up childhood how interesting they would be! My mother seldom spoke of those times, but the Studio had seen the happiness that came before those sad events which had so impressed themselves on my mind; and I would have liked to hear more about my father as he was at his best. The Studio must often have heard him playing his Stradivarius with that gipsy wildness which was the special quality of his fiddling. It had heard the light-hearted voices talking of the future without foreboding. The past had filled the Studio with vibrations that were one with my own history. For a moment I felt as if my father were in the room. So real had my meditations made him that I could almost smell his cigar smoke. But it was only the imagination of a moment.

For the next six years Weirleigh was the centre of Sassoon’s life, from whence he ventured into the surrounding countryside of Kent and Sussex. There were trips to London, sometimes with Theresa to concerts or exhibitions and on to the old family home at Melbury Road. There were also visits to stock up with hunting gear. The six years have a dual theme: emerging poet and enthusiastic sportsman. His days were lived on two levels – the public life, as in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and the internal, tranquil self of his second volume of autobiography, The Weald of Youth. These were also the years in which he formed a new friendship and strengthened an existing one. Both arose from Sassoon’s love of hunting and point-to-pointing.

Stephen Gordon Harbord (known as Gordon) was born in 1890, the son of the Revd Harry Harbord, rector of East Hoathly, near Lewes in Sussex. Sassoon introduces him in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In April 1911, Sherston goes as a spectator to a point-to-point meeting at Dumborough in Sussex. The racing card informs him that one of the riders is a Mr S. Colwood: ‘It can’t be Stephen Colwood, can it? I thought, visualising a quiet, slender boy with very large hands and feet, who had come to my House at Ballboro’ about two years after I went there. Now I came to think of it, his father had been a parson somewhere in Sussex, but this did not seem to make it any likelier that he should be riding in a race.’ In fact S. Colwood is G. Harbord, and the passage is a good example of how Sassoon mingles circumstances, changes names and dates. Dumborough is the alias for Eridge; Colwood was the name of the Harbords’ family home and it was Gordon’s brother Kenneth Blair Harbord who was Sassoon’s contemporary at Marlborough, but the experiences shared and the people portrayed are authentic, if at times heightened for effect.

The Harbords were a large family. In all there were nine offspring, of whom Gordon was the sixth and the third son. The father was regarded as a conscientious priest with a lively social ministry. He and his five boys were sometimes referred to as ‘the Vicar and his sporting sons’. They were keen cricketers and accomplished riders. A family photograph taken about 1903 catches them in pensive rather than sporting mood, and Mrs Harbord looks careworn. In fact, the family was a happy and jovial one, with the boys exhibiting all the rumbustiousness of youth. Sassoon first met Gordon in 1908, after which Colwood Park became a second home for him and Gordon, whom Theresa liked, was a regular visitor to Weirleigh. Gordon was not academically inclined any more than Sassoon but he was conscientious and obtained a degree at London University. Also, and unlike Sassoon, he was practically gifted, with a bent for engineering, like Michael and Hamo. The common factor which drew Gordon and Sassoon together was sport, particularly horses and cricket. They also shared a quirky sense of humour, which colours their letters to each other but makes them unintelligible to the outsider.

Humour was not the outstanding characteristic of the person who exercised the greatest influence on Sassoon, the horseman and golfer, in the pre-war years. Although they had been together at Henley House and afterwards at Cambridge, Norman Loder was somewhat in the background up to 1907 but then he persuaded Sassoon to make a more serious commitment to riding and to golf. ‘He knew that in most ways we were totally unlike, and was only dimly aware of my literary ambitions. If I had not been keen on golf and hunting our friendship could never have existed. On that basis he accepted me for what I was, just as I accepted him.’

He and Sassoon were virtually inseparable during the hunting and steeplechase season and, more often than not, Gordon Harbord made it a trio of enthusiasts. Weirleigh was a little too far from the meets frequented by Loder to make it a day’s journey, so Sassoon would stay with the Harbords or with Loder. The friendship with the latter, whose prowess at hunting and matters equestrian was acknowledged and admired, brought out the adventurous, derring-do in Sassoon’s character. His love of heightened excitement is obvious in the memoirs, as is the delight he took in the characters and the conventions of riding to hounds and point-to-pointing. Loder had no interests outside these things, not much humour and a plodding intellect. Sassoon, however, relied on him for companionship as well as instruction. He also admired his qualities. ‘He was one of those people whose strength is in their consistent simplicity and directness, and who send out natural wisdom through their mental limitations and avoidance of nimble ideas. He was kind, decent, and thorough, never aiming at anything beyond plain commonsense and practical ability.’

With his other friend Henry ‘Tommy’ Thompson, the summers were filled with visits to golf courses, but not even golf was allowed to impinge upon Sassoon’s commitment to cricket. He was proud of being a member of the Blue Mantles, who played their home matches on the county ground at Tunbridge Wells. It was a well-respected cricket club and Sassoon’s inclusion on an almost regular basis is a pointer to his talent at club level. He fancied himself as a club player, both as batsman and as bowler, and the local teams of Matfield and Brenchley were glad to take advantage of his ability. Sassoon was very much an outdoor person, and having returned to Weirleigh he was keen to be out and about on a horse, on the golf course or enjoying the activity of a fine day’s cricket. Walking and bicycling were activities he enjoyed for their own sake and could pursue alone. He exulted in the freedom of the open road and the natural world, which marks him out as a disciple of the author and poet George Meredith, whose books lined the shelves of his library and whose praises were extolled by Wirgie and Theresa. Since childhood Sassoon had been able to identify birds and plants, nursing a special enthusiasm for butterflies, Shelley’s ‘winged flowers’. The lanes and fields of Kent, the oasthouses, the orchards, the hedgerows and the gardens, were inspirational to him and his descriptions of his peregrinations bring colour and atmosphere to every facet of his work. It was a world which appealed to his aesthetic delight, his curiosity as well as his spirit of adventure. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, The Old Century and The Weald of Youth catch the essence of Sassoon’s musings in 1909:

The setting sun was behind me. To the left of the high ground along which I was driving, the Weald lay in all its green contentedness. I was feeling fine, and had played quite a decent little innings in the match. But when I came to the cross-roads a mile and a half from home and caught that favourite glimpse of Kentish distance above the foreground apple orchards of King’s Toll farm, the low-hilled blue horizon seemed luring me toward my heart’s desire, which was that I might some day be a really good poet.

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 but it is clear that he told him enough for Forbes to guess the nature of Sassoon’s difficulties because he suggested that he read the works of Edward Carpenter, whom Forbes knew and admired. During the autumn of 1910, Sassoon read Carpenter’s pioneering work on sexuality, The Intermediate Sex, and his volume of poems published in 1883, Towards Democracy, part of which appeared under the title ‘Who Shall Command the Heart?’ Carpenter propounded the theory that masculine and feminine sexuality occupied different ends of a line. Moving towards the centre these absolutes lessen until at the midway point masculinity and femininity coalesce – each person is somewhere on that line, as opposed to the then held view that there was only unalloyed feminine and masculine sexuality. But there was more to Carpenter than theories on human sexuality. According to E. M. Forster, he was a socialist in the mould of Shelley and Blake, ‘who saw from afar the New Jerusalem from the ignoble slough of his century’. Ordained into the priesthood, he afterwards found that he could not subscribe to the articles of faith and went to live among the working class in the north of England. The Socialist aspect in Carpenter’s books did not engage Sassoon at that point but he was affected by his thoughts on homosexuality.

In May 1911 Sassoon went again to Oxford and stayed with Forbes. They made a sentimental journey to Marlborough and, no doubt, exchanged confidences, with Sassoon expressing gratitude for the introduction to Carpenter’s work. Whether Forbes urged him to contact Carpenter is not clear but on 11 July a letter went to him from Weirleigh:

Dear Edward Carpenter,

… It was not until October last year, when I was just 24, that, by an accident, I read your Intermediate Sex, and have since read Towards Democracy and Who shall command the heart? I am afraid I have not studied socialism sufficiently to be in sympathy with what I know of it; but your words have shown me all that I was blind to before, and have opened up the new life for me, after a time of great perplexity and unhappiness. Until I read The Intermediate Sex, I knew absolutely nothing of that subject, (and was entirely unspotted, as I am now), but life was an empty thing, and what idea I had about homosexuality was absolutely prejudiced, and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be, and the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathy for women a mystery to me. It was only by chance that I found my brother (a year younger) was exactly the same. I cannot say what it has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on, though of course the misunderstanding and injustice is a bitter agony sometimes. But having found out all about it, I am old enough to realise the better and nobler way, and to avoid the mire which might have snared me had I known 5 years ago. I write to you as the leader and the prophet.

The note of effusive thanks and admiration is followed by some details of Sassoon’s life in the country, his love of music, commitment to poetry. He then, probably out of deference to Carpenter’s Socialism, distances himself from the ‘plutocratic’ Sassoons and follows this with a quite extraordinary reference to his father who, he tells Carpenter, ‘was intensely musical and I think had a strong vein of the homosexual nature in him’. Did Sassoon believe that showing intensity in the arts was a sign of homosexuality? What we know of Alfred Sassoon leaves little doubt that he bore no sexual antipathy to women. The letter ends with Sassoon in unctuous mood: ‘May your reward be in the generations to come, as I pray mine may be. I am not religious but I try to believe that our immortality is to be, (in those immortals whom our better lives may lead to, and whose immortal ways are marred and kept back by the grossness of unworthy souls). I take as my watchword those words of yours – strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.’

Carpenter must have worked hard to get any meaning from those florid final sentences, but he wrote appreciatively of the sonnets Sassoon had enclosed. Writing to him on 2 August, Sassoon suggested he might travel north to meet Carpenter, but in the event he stayed at Weirleigh and revised his poetry.

In November he sent a copy of the revised sonnets to Edmund Gosse and received, some three weeks later, a reply which opened on a note of encouragement and ended with a word of advice:

You show a firm advance beyond all verse of yours which I had previously read. You have the sonnet-spirit and something of the sonnet-touch. The picturesqueness of ‘Autumn’ and the tender melancholy of ‘Evening in the Mountains’ leave nothing to be desired. They achieve a rare beauty. You must, however, be careful to resist a mere misty or foggy allusiveness. The danger which lies before the poet who endeavours in a sonnet to capture one of those volatile and capricious moods of emotion which are particularly fitted for the sonnet is to resign himself to its haziness. Your sonnets are not firmly enough drawn.

Gosse’s reply endorsed the advice Helen Wirgman had already given him in that summer of 1910, after she had read the revised work. Coming up to his study with the manuscript in hand, she said that this new edition was really no improvement on the original. In Gosse’s words it was all ‘haziness’. Wirgie described the weakness as a lack of physicality, of sharpness and definition:

Wirgie had given me the clue that I needed, though I was unconscious of it at the time. She meant, as I now see it, that the feeling I put into my poetry was derived from delight in word-music and not from observation and experience of what I wrote about. She saw that my verbal imagery was becoming exclusively literary, while the opportunity for writing poetry was waiting for me all the time, as it were, in that view across the Weald from our garden. The vaguely instinctive nature-worship which I had sometimes tried to put into words needed to be expressed in a definite form.

Reading those poems now is to confirm Gosse’s and Wirgie’s assessment, and the poems which followed show the same deficiencies. Sassoon was slow learning the lesson and even slower in applying the advice. He continued, however, to be published in The Academy and in the more highly regarded Westminster Gazette, achieving 11 poems in print in 1911. In that same year, having revised many of the 1909 sonnets, and with some new additions, he ordered another private edition entitled Twelve Sonnets.

But his assiduity in working and re-working his verses and adding to their number did not find reward in solving the problem of the lack of concreteness. He remained sure of his vocation. Gosse continued to receive the fruits of Sassoon’s endeavours and encouraged him to go on writing, despite the seemingly intractable nature of the problem, though Gosse’s last sentence may suggest he was running out of kind things to say: ‘I see progress. Try your hand at some objective theme. You must not spend all your life among moonbeams and half-tones. Better than all the listening to advice – go on writing hard and reading the old masters.’ That letter from Gosse, dated 30 June 1912, came in response to Sassoon’s latest effort entitled Melodies, a collection of 15 poems. It is difficult to see where exactly is the progress mentioned by Gosse. The Swinburnian inscription:

The silence thrills with the whisper of secret streams

That well from the heart of the woodland

sounds a warning note that what follows is still fanciful, disconnected and, as one observer noted of his earlier efforts, ‘musical, grandiloquent and mindless’.

He was doing much better at cricket for his club, the Blue Mantles. His golf was also coming along, although here, as in his poetry, a lack of technique marred the possibilities of a good round. Theresa’s busy social activity and the flow of guests through Weirleigh filled the summer. Autumn and winter brought the point-to-point and hunting, with time to enjoy the Harbords’ liveliness at Colwood Park, the company of Norman Loder, country-house parties and dances. Here was the seemingly immutable rural England of cricket on the village green, church on Sunday, the cottage-garden, country lanes along which Sassoon would walk and enjoy his ‘localised existence’, where as he admits, the great affairs of the world seemed hardly to intrude. It was a world he evoked in later years, a partial world, romantic, sentimental and deeply loved.

There arose, however, doubts in Sassoon’s mind about this rural existence and its value to him as an aspiring poet: ‘Although I had always regarded the writing of poetry as a thing which needed to be kept to oneself, I now began to feel that it would be to my advantage if I were a little less remote from the literary world. I often wished that I could make friends with some other poets, but I never seemed to get any nearer to knowing any of them.’ His most immediate connection with that world was Edmund Gosse and his wife Nellie. Gosse’s most enduring work, Father and Son, had been published in 1907; he was a successful lecturer and arbiter of literary taste, who had introduced the work of Ibsen to English audiences. Returning with Theresa from London to Weirleigh after a visit to the home of the Gosses in Hanover Terrace, Sassoon was unsettled. ‘To me it had been a tantalising glimpse which made the journey back to Kent not unlike an exodus from Eden.’ He wanted recognition and was confident, given the right stimulus and a conducive environment, it would only be a matter of time before he ‘stormed the heights of Hanover Terrace with a prodigious poem’. This aspiration reveals his ambition to be a poet of note rather than dissatisfaction with Weirleigh and the Weald; but the first signs are there that the rural idyll might have to be sacrificed for the goal to be achieved.

Early in December 1912, Sassoon’s eyes wandered along the rows of books in his Studio and he randomly selected a copy of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield. Published in 1911, this long narrative poem was the first of its kind since Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. Its language was earthy and quite unlike the exalted expressions of High Victorian poetry. It created shock-waves with its realism and use of ‘common and vulgar expressions’. Writing of the poem in The Poetry Review on 12 January 1912, Arundel del Re stated: ‘Mr John Masefield is a revolutionary. His latest work is an assault upon cherished principles and venerable conventions. Its value lies not so much in sheer audacity, though this indeed had peculiar interest, as in the influence it may have on contemporary poets.’

Sassoon, who possessed a good ear for dialect, decided to amuse himself ‘by scribbling a few pages of parody’. The result of this whimsical exercise was radical:

Having rapidly resolved to impersonate a Sussex farmhand awaiting trial for accidental homicide of the barman of the village ale-house, I began his story in the crudest imitation of Masefield’s manner. After the first fifty lines, or so, I dropped the pretence that I was improvising an exuberant skit. While continuing to burlesque Masefield for all I was worth, I was really feeling what I wrote – and doing it not only with abundant delight but a sense of descriptive energy quite unlike anything I had experienced before. Never before had I been able to imbue commonplace details with warmth of poetic emotion. Wholly derivative from The Mercy though it remained, my narrative did at any rate express that rural Sussex which I had absorbed through following the Southdown hounds and associating with the supporters of the hunt. In other words I was at last doing what had been suggested by Wirgie in 1911 – writing physically. Far into the night I kept up my spate of productiveness, and next day I went on with unabated intensity. By the evening I had finished it. Reading it through again, I did not ask myself what use there could be in writing a poem so extravagantly unoriginal. Nothing mattered except the mental invigoration it had brought me. I felt that in the last twenty-four hours, I had found a new pair of poetic legs.’

The Daffodil Murderer, as the poem was subsequently named, relates the story of an altercation in a village pub. The narrator and his friend Ted are ejected after someone called Bill takes them by the scruff of the neck. They wait in hiding to give Bill his deserts:

Bill seem’d hours and hours a-comin’;

‘Home Bill Bailey,’ he was hummin’;

Kicking flints up with his toes,

Back from his evening’s work he goes –

I wonder now what Bill was thinking;

Belike ‘twas nowt, for he’d been drinking,

And blokes that stumble home from boosing,

They haven’t got no thoughts worth losing;

He pass’d me by, all strain’d and ready;

Thump went my heart, but I was steady;

I’d got the pluck as wants no bracing;

I tripp’d him up and kick’d his face in –

Bill blinked his eyes and gave a guggle,

And lay there stiff without a struggle;

‘Here, Ted,’ said I, ‘I’ve clumped ‘im fair,’ –

Looked round, but Ted, he wasn’t there.

Ted never had the guts to do it;

I done the job and got to rue it.

The style was a clear departure from the work he produced earlier that year, ‘An Ode for Music’:

Angels of God and multitudes of Heaven

And every servant of the soul’s aspiring,

Be with me now, while to your influence bending

I strive to gain the summits of desiring;

Grant me in music’s name

Your symphonies of flame.

Sassoon was not inhibited by the obvious disparity in styles and sent both poems to T. W. H. Crosland, who had moved from The Academy and then the Athenaeum and started a periodical called The Antidote. He published ‘An Ode to Music’ on 1 February, and then on 10 February he published a thousand copies of The Daffodil Murderer as a 30-page booklet, priced sixpence. The front declared the contents to be ‘Brilliant Beyond Belief’. Sassoon’s name did not appear, but a pseudonym, Saul Kain. Crosland, under the guise of someone called William Butler, wrote a spoof preface, introducing the author: ‘Though a life-long abstainer, Mr Saul Kain is well acquainted with the insides of various public-houses.’ Only one paper reviewed the work, the Athenaeum, whose hatred of Crosland was reflected in a hostile review, which employed this acerbic comment: ‘The only conclusion we obtain from its perusal is that it is easy to write worse than Mr Masefield.’

Sassoon sent a copy of ‘An Ode for Music’ to Gosse but did not receive an immediate response. He sent him The Daffodil Murderer and waited. Three days after the publication of The Daffodil Murderer, Gosse wrote to Sassoon: ‘I have given a copy of the D[affodil] M[urderer] to Mr Edward Marsh. Mr Marsh is most curious to see what else you have written, and I would like you to make up a parcel of your pamphlets and send them to him. I should like you to get into friendly relations with Mr Marsh, who is a most charming man.’

It was a propitious introduction to another of the leading names of literary life in London and a senior civil servant with access to Asquith, the Prime Minister; he was also Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill. Like Gosse he enjoyed the literary and political gossip of the day, but, more importantly, they were both great encouragers of emerging talent. To this end Marsh used a bequest he had inherited to support young artists, especially young poets: ‘I should be ashamed of being comparatively well-off if I couldn’t take advantage of it to help my friends who are younger and poorer and cleverer than I am.’ Generous with his money and time, Marsh was also prepared to put his extensive network of well-placed friends and acquaintances at the disposal of his protégés. But he was not universally liked or trusted. Despite his sensitive position in the Civil Service, he could be indiscreet. Alan Lascelles, a future Private Secretary to the sovereign, records in his diary: ‘Eddie Marsh chatted to me so indiscreetly about other people’s indiscretions that I could have wrung his neck. He told me the last thing I should want to hear. I know why some people think it worthwhile hating him.’

Marsh was, however, a considerable literary critic and a generous friend. He was also, together with Harold Monro and Rupert Brooke, one of the prime instigators of the new movement of Georgian poetry. Recalling the genesis of the movement, he wrote:

There was a general feeling among the younger poets that Modern English Poetry was very good, and sadly neglected by readers. Rupert announced that he had conceived a brilliant scheme. He would write a book of poetry, and publish it as a selection from the works of twelve different writers, six men and six women, all with the most convincing pseudonyms. That, he thought, must make them sit up. It occurred to me that as we both believed there were at least twelve flesh and blood poets whose work, if properly thrust under the public’s nose, had a chance of producing the effect he desired, it would be simpler to use material which was ready to hand. Next day we lunched in my room and started the plan of the book which was published in December 1912 under the name of Georgian Poetry.

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 Weirleigh, always at its most attractive in spring, Sassoon’s favourite season: ‘April in Kent has been quite lovely, orchards in blossom and sunlight.’ But even these attractions failed to diminish the staleness he felt, or the aimlessness of his rural existence and, as he admits:

I felt that I ought to set to work on a tremendous poem full of prophetic sublimity, spiritual aspiration, and human tragedy and that I needed to start my life all over again and give up everything except being noble and uplifting. I felt that my recent existence had been philistine and one-sided.

The move to London, he hoped, would provide the antidote. If his poetry was to achieve anything, then contact with the world beyond the ‘sentinel pines’ on the Weald’s horizon was crucial. As an earnest of this fresh start he left all his books behind, taking only his Oxford Dictionary. On arriving in London he bought a folio of Gray’s poems. The rooms, modest in size, were situated at the noisy end of Gray’s Inn. This intrusive rumbling of traffic along Theobald’s Road did not deter Sassoon, as he had made clear to Marsh: ‘I shall certainly take the rooms, noise and all, I hope there will be noise of poetry in my head which will drown all other sounds.’

Sincere, as he undoubtedly was, about making a fresh start, he failed to keep to a routine in his new surroundings which would facilitate the writing of vibrant verse. But it was a liberation. Theresa, though doubting the wisdom or necessity of the move, came to inspect the place. Her approval, if guarded, was another worry out of the way. Conscious of the need to be a man about town, Sassoon acquired the necessary symbols of rolled umbrella, a bowler and a top hat, together with full evening suit. The outward appearance, however, did little to rekindle the muse and, instead of being the poet, Sassoon became a tourist.

Riding on the top of a London bus or walking nonchalantly through the streets, he filled his days with diversions. He was lonely. Marsh, busy with his political duties during the day and his social round in the evening, was rarely available. The Gosses were abroad and the expected social connections were non-existent. Wandering around London Zoo, Sassoon came unexpectedly on Helen Wirgman, herself as lonely as he felt. Their mutual situation, though unexpressed, provided the opportunity to renew their friendship with occasional concert and theatre visits, as well as Wirgie coming to tea in Raymond Buildings. Such visits could be a strain, as Wirgie was easily upset by an incautious remark or even an innocent one, but he always felt indebted to her and distressed by her circumstances.

Norman Loder and some friends from the Atherstone descended on London to sell horses at Tattersalls, including one of Sassoon’s, which saddened him. Sauntering in St James’s he met his old housemaster from Marlborough, Mr Gould. Such encounters did nothing to alleviate his sense of isolation which was deepened when, on attending the theatre or a performance by the Russian Ballet, he envied the exuberant friendships of the young people as they set off from the theatre to some dinner-party. Beyond the detail is the portrait of Sassoon the outsider, uncertain, awkward. He had reverted to the diffidence that marked his arrival into the world of the public school; at 28 years of age, he was still on the defensive.

Eddie Marsh invited him to breakfast with Rupert Brooke and W. H. Davies at Number 5, Raymond Buildings. Davies, loquacious but limited, was someone with whom Sassoon felt comfortable. His evocation of the countryside and gentle descriptions of the seasons were reminiscent of John Clare. Of the group of poets gathered under Eddie Marsh’s wing, Davies was the odd man out in terms of birth and breeding – Welsh, working-class and poor. In appearance he was dark, swarthy and unkempt, so different from the blond, blue-eyed Brooke, who dressed with studied casualness. Davies was flannel but Brooke was gossamer. Sassoon liked Davies; his admiration he reserved for the younger poet in whose presence he felt a sense of inadequacy and underachievement. He had read Brooke’s work without understanding it: ‘My unagile intellect was confused by his metaphysical cleverness.’ Brooke was a successful poet, confident of his talent and self-possessed. He had travelled, garnered experience, involved himself in politics, while Sassoon had buried himself in rural Kent and struggled. Brooke’s knowledge and assessment of other poets were expressed with assurance, while Sassoon had to grope around for something to say. Creating a right and good impression was all-important to Sassoon. On taking his leave, descending the staircase to the echo of the clicking lock, he knew what a feeble impression he had left on Brooke. ‘When bidding me goodbye his demeanour implied that as far as he was concerned there was no apparent reason why we should ever meet again. He may even have breathed a sigh of relief at having got rid of me at last.’

Walking the short distance to his own rooms, Sassoon contemplated another situation which he found difficult to handle – his financial affairs. The cost of renting and decorating the rooms, together with other impetuous expenditure, had resulted in a significant overdraft. Mr Lousada once again shook his head in both disapproval and refusal of further advances of the quarterly allowance. Sassoon, only halfway through the year, was reconsidering his man-about-town adventure. Dire though the situation was, it did not deter him from buying tickets to hear Chaliapin and the Russian Opera. He did make the concession of opting for the upper gallery, but on the two occasions Helen Wirgman accompanied him, he booked the grand circle. ‘These operas were a romantic discovery which appealed to my imagination more than any dramatic performance I had hitherto experienced.’ Thus he consoled himself as he took the enforced return journey to Weirleigh.

He was despondent that money, or the lack of it, had curtailed his new, if undirected existence. While he lived free of charge at Weirleigh, the financial position would recover but the recovery of poetic inspiration seemed a forlorn hope. Meanwhile he played the music of the Russian Opera on the piano and revelled in the memory. The reverie was only disturbed by the constant talk and newspaper reports of war with Germany. In the last days of July rumours strengthened and people prepared for mobilisation. If war came and if, as the reports said, volunteers would be needed to swell the ranks, Sassoon was prepared to enlist. Although only half-believing that war, even at that late stage, was a possibility, he took a medical test and waited. Returning from a cycling trip to Rye, he ruminated on the beauty of the Weald, the place of his childhood imaginings and sporting adventures. What did all this have to do with war, he pondered. And what kind of war would it be? Would the Germans come marching down the Hastings road as the Normans had done in 1066?

Lit by departing day was the length and breadth of the Weald, and the message of those friendly miles was a single chord of emotion vibrating backward across the years to my earliest rememberings. Uplifted by this awareness, I knew that here was something deeply loved, something which the unmeasurable timelessness of childhood had made my own. The years of my youth were going down for ever in the weltering, western gold, and the future would take me far from that sunset-embered horizon. Beyond the night was my new beginning. The Weald had been the world of my youngness, and while I gazed across it now I felt prepared to do whatever I could to defend it. And after all, dying for one’s native land was believed to be the most glorious thing one could possibly do!