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Siegfried Sassoon
Published by Good Press, 2021
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‘Know him?’ he replied. ‘Of course I do! Lived in Tunbridge Wells till a few years ago and came here quite often. Used to buy his potatoes from me too. Great traveller, Doughty—knows the Near East as well as the palm of his hand!’
Jogging on up the hill, I marvelled at the smallness of a world wherein the author of the Dawn in B. had been putting the finishing touches to it within seven miles of our house and driving over to have luncheon with the Major at Mascalls. But when I had seen the frontispiece photograph of him in the abridged edition of Arabia Deserta (published about two months afterwards) I decided that Doughty was just the sort of delightful bearded old buffer one would expect to meet at Mascalls—the Major being a man who had somehow collected an admirable assortment of fine-flavoured cronies, aristocratic, unconventional, and connoisseurish. Over and above all that, the wonderful opening paragraph of the Travels took me by the arm and made me follow the narrator wherever he went on his immortal pilgrimage. ‘A new voice hailed me of an old friend’ ... Those are his first words; and thuswise, in a sense, it happened with me. The epic poem had been a voice which sometimes sent my mind to sleep. To the Arabian traveller I listened with close attentiveness, accepting from the outset those quaint quixotries of style which are essential to his idiom. Here and there I found sentences of such memorable loveliness that I transcribed them in my manuscript book of favourite poems; and it was one of these that I had taken as the motto for my Verses. ‘In the first evening hour there is some merrymake of drum-beating and soft fluting, and Arcadian sweetness of the Persians singing in the tents about us; in others they chant together some piece of their devotion.’ The connexion between these words and my Verses will have been, I take it, that my supposed Persian ancestry qualified me to claim that I was singing in my tent, and that some of my pieces were devotional. (I may even have remembered my tent on the lawn during childhood recovery from an illness, when I sniffed the phial which had formerly contained attar of roses.)
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