Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet - A Biography 1886-1918 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson Duckworth 600pp, £25 in UK
At the end of Philip Ziegler's recently published biography of Osbert Sitwell, the author speculates whether his subject has been worthy of so much attention. The same question might now be asked of Siegfried Sassoon, about whom two books are to appear in 1998, this being the first. It is unquestionably a competent and meticulous work, sympathetic to the man and well-informed about his milieu. But like so many other biographies now appearing, the reader remains quite unengaged through six hundred pages due to the plethora of facts, footnotes and quotations under which the individual at the heart of the book becomes hopelessly buried. Furthermore, the period covered here could scarcely be considered uncharted territory; Sassoon himself went over the ground very thoroughly in his own writings and in addition it has been endlessly explored by biographers of his contemporaries - looking back over a few such recent publications, one finds him turning up so consistently at lunches, teas and dinner parties that it is hard to reconcile the supposedly shy recluse with a man whose social circle was of dauntingly substantial proportions. Admittedly, in semi-fictional and autobiographical work alike, he always took a highly selective approach to himself. This is the first time his estate has permitted access to certain material, giving Wilson an obvious advantage over her predecessors. Nonetheless, the question remains: does Sassoon merit the scrutiny of a two-volume biography, its successor not due for another two years? The man always took himself sufficiently seriously to believe he was worthy of attention. James LeesMilne, in his final volume of diaries, correctly notes Sassoon's "underlying vanity, his sense of superiority beneath the ostensible humility". The gap between how he viewed himself and how he was seen by others now looks unbridgeable.
However, Sassoon always managed to inspire exceptional devotion among his friends, particularly during the crisis of 1917 when he threw his Military Cross ribbon into the Mersey and was sent to Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in Scotland. This is the period examined by novelist Pat Barker in her first World War trilogy, the first volume of which, Regeneration, appeared as a film last spring. Sassoon is treated by both Barker and Wilson more sympathetically than perhaps he deserves. After all, other protestors against the war were jailed whereas, after making his grand gesture, he was protected by equally grand friends from its consequences. Wilson insists that, rather than staying for the summer at Craiglockhart - where, when not writing, he honed his skills at golf - Sassoon would much rather have been back at the front with his men. If this were the case, why did he not do so? At such a great distance of time and experience, judgment should be passed only cautiously. Still, Sassoon's behaviour often looks erratic, wilful and inconsiderate at a moment when, as he persistently pointed out, thousands of soldiers were dying needlessly across the English Channel. In "Banishment" he wrote, "Love drove me to rebel", but was this love of others or himself?
It was through poetry that Sassoon attempted to sort out confusions - about the war primarily, but also about his own character. Today, much of the verse so admired when it first appeared seems crude and bombastic in its sermonising. His satires, such as "The General" and "Fight to a Finish" certainly shocked once but now strike the reader as distinctly wanting in subtlety. As for the rest of the war poetry, at the time, Charles Scott Moncrieff described one piece, "The RearGuard", as "an amazing piece of War photography", which accurately summarises all such work. In another review, Virginia Woolf referred to the "raw stuff" in his poems. Sassoon was a literalist, determined to convey to the reader exactly what he saw and felt, unwilling to permit another imagination to participate in the process. Occasionally, he managed to suppress the desire to lecture and produced intuitively effective poems - "Happiness", with its address to "My brave brown companions", and "Everyone Sang", Sassoon's response to the close of the war. The obvious comparison here is with the more lyrical poetry of Wilfrid Owen, the Keats of the first World War, who met Sassoon when both were at Craiglockhart. Owen's "The Show" is just one example of his writing which manages to give a more vivid, if less explicit, impression of trench life than anything produced by Sassoon. Owen worshipped the older man, even though these feelings were not reciprocated. "Have you met Wilfrid Owen, my little friend?" Sassoon wrote to Osbert Sitwell, condescendingly adding: "He is so nice, and shy, and fervent about poetry, which he is quite good at and will do very well one day." When Sassoon was asked years later by Stephen Spender what Owen was like at first acquaintance, he loftily answered, "He was embarrassing. He had a Grammar School accent."
Sassoon the grandee, as noted by Lees-Milne, was definitely not an attractive character. The muddle of his personality was so great that self-effacement jostled with the desire to be noticed, just as he desperately longed for personal happiness and yet shunned any opportunity he was offered. As his pre-war poetry makes clear, Sassoon's intense romanticism was of the well-established English and escapist variety. The anger of his war verse could be considered as much a reaction against this grotesquely distorted personal vision as hostility to what was happening at the front. But shaking off the romantic strait-jacket took a long time; as this book ends, with the conclusion of the war, Sassoon at the age of thirty-two had still never experienced a physical relationship. It was only in the following years that he attempted, admittedly without great success, to construct an alternative persona for himself. He never could escape from the first World War, defined by the poems he had written during that period and the memories mined thereafter for prose work. As Wilson says, "It might be argued that the War both made and unmade Sassoon." He lived for another half century but was forever defined, in his own eyes and those of others, by a mere four and a half years.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times columnist