Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon, 1916
Born	September 8 1886(1886-09-08) Matfield, Kent, England
Died	1 September 1967 (aged 80) Heytesbury, Wiltshire
Occupation	Poet, Diarist, Memoirist
Nationality	British
Writing period	Early twentieth century
Genres	Poetry, Fiction, Biography
Notable work(s)	The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
Influences	E. M. Forster
Influenced	Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE MC (September 8, 1886 – September 1, 1967) was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I. He helped to discover another war poet, Wilfried Owen, and later won acclaim for his prose work. "His later poetry was increasingly devotional."

Unlike many of the poets who had memorialized the great achievements of the British Empire in their war poetry, Sassoon addressed the human dimension, the cost of war to the combatants in both physical and more profound, psychological torment. In poems such as "Suicide in the Trenches," Sassoon presents the anguish of combat from the soldier's perspective. The "War to End All Wars" was a gruesome affair, and the sense of the glory of war was replaced by a growing sense of despair, as many thousands of combatants gave their lives for, literally, a few square yards of territory. The sense of optimism of the Progressive era disappeared, giving way to a general malaise.

Life

Early life and education

Sassoon was born in a house named Weirleigh (which still stands) in the village of Matfield, Kent, to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother. His father, Alfred, one of the wealthy Indian Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon merchant family, was disinherited for marrying outside the faith. His mother, Theresa, belonged to the Thornycroft family, sculptors responsible for many of the best-known statues in London—her brother was Sir Hamo Thornycroft. There was no German ancestry in Sassoon's family; he owed his unusual first name to his mother's predilection for the operas of Wagner. His middle name was taken from the surname of a clergyman with whom she was friendly.

Sassoon was educated at The New Beacon Preparatory School, Kent, Marlborough College in Wiltshire, and at Clare College, Cambridge, (of which he was made an honorary fellow in 1953), where he studied both law and history from 1905 to 1907. However, he dropped out of university without a degree and spent the next few years hunting, playing cricket, and privately publishing a few volumes of not very highly acclaimed poetry. His income was just enough to prevent his having to seek work, but not enough to live extravagantly. His first real success was The Daffodil Murderer, a parody of The Everlasting Mercy by John Masefield, published in 1913, under the pseudonym of "Saul Kain."

War service

Motivated by patriotism, Sassoon joined the military just as the threat of World War I was realized and was in service with the Sussex Yeomanry on the day the United Kingdom declared war (August 4, 1914). He broke his arm badly in a riding accident and was put out of action before even leaving England, spending the spring of 1915 convalescing. At around this time his younger brother Hamo was killed at Gallipoli (Rupert Brooke, whom Siegfried had briefly met, died on the way there); Hamo's death hit Siegfried very hard. In May of that year, he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a commissioned officer and in November, he was sent to First Battalion in France. He was thus brought into contact with Robert Graves and they became close friends. United by their poetic vocation, they often read and discussed one another's work. Though this did not have much perceptible influence on Graves's poetry, his views on what may be called "gritty realism" profoundly affected Sassoon's concept of what constituted poetry. He soon became horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely. His early poems exhibit a Romantic dilettantish sweetness, but his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience hitherto lulled by patriotic propaganda. Details such as rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide are all trademarks of his work at this time, and this philosophy of "no truth unfitting" had a significant effect on the movement towards Modernist poetry.

Sassoon's periods of duty on the Western Front were marked by exceptionally brave actions, including the single-handed capture of a German trench in the Hindenburg Line. He often went out on night-raids and bombing patrols and demonstrated ruthless efficiency as a company commander. Deepening depression at the horror and misery the soldiers were forced to endure produced in Sassoon a paradoxically manic courage, and he was nicknamed "Mad Jack" by his men for his near-suicidal exploits. Despite having been decorated for bravery, he decided in 1917, to make a stand against the conduct of the war. One of the reasons for his violent anti-war feeling was the death of his friend, David Cuthbert Thomas (called "Dick Tiltwood" in the Sherston trilogy). He would spend years trying to overcome his grief.

At the end of a period of convalescent leave, Sassoon declined to return to duty; instead, encouraged by pacifist friends such as Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell, he sent a letter to his commanding officer titled "A Soldier’s Declaration," which was forwarded to the press and read out in Parliament by a sympathetic Member of Parliament. Rather than court-martial Sassoon, the military authorities decided that he was unfit for service and sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was officially treated for neurasthenia ("shell shock"). Before declining to return to service he threw the ribbon from his Military Cross into the river Mersey; however, in May 2007, the medal itself turned up in an attic at the house in Mull where his son had lived. The medal has been bought by the Royal Welch Fusiliers for display at their museum in Caernarfon.

The novel Regeneration, by Pat Barker, is a fictionalized account of this period in Sassoon's life, and was made into a film starring Jonathan Pryce as W.H.R. Rivers, the psychiatrist responsible for Sassoon's treatment. Rivers became a kind of surrogate father to the troubled young man, and his sudden death, in 1922, was a major blow to Sassoon.

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, another poet who would eventually exceed him in fame. It was thanks to Sassoon that Owen persevered in his ambition to write better poetry. A manuscript copy of Owen's Anthem for Doomed Youth containing Sassoon's handwritten amendments survives as testimony to the extent of his influence. Sassoon became to Owen "Keats and Christ and Elijah;" surviving documents demonstrate clearly the depth of Owen's love and admiration for him. Both men returned to active service in France, but Owen was killed in 1918. Sassoon, having spent some time out of danger in Palestine, eventually returned to the Front and was almost immediately wounded again—by friendly fire, but this time in the head—and spent the remainder of the war in Britain. After the war, Sassoon was instrumental in bringing Owen's work to the attention of a wider audience. Their friendship is the subject of Stephen MacDonald's play, Not About Heroes.

Post-war

Green plaque on the site of Sassoon's former home in Tufton Street, Westminster, London.

The war had brought Sassoon into contact with men from less advantaged backgrounds, and he had developed Socialist sympathies. Having lived for a period at Oxford, where he spent more time visiting literary friends than studying, he dabbled briefly in the politics of the Labor movement, and in 1919, took up a post as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald. During his period at the Herald, Sassoon was responsible for employing several eminent names as reviewers, including E. M. Forster and Charlotte Mew, commissioning original material from "names" like Arnold Bennett and Osbert Sitwell. His artistic interests extended to music. While at Oxford, he was introduced to the young William Walton, whose friend and patron he became. Walton later dedicated his Portsmouth Point overture to Sassoon in recognition of his financial assistance and moral support.

Sassoon later embarked on a lecture tour of the U.S., as well as traveling in Europe and throughout Britain. He acquired a car, a gift from the publisher Frankie Schuster, and became renowned among his friends for his lack of driving skill, but this did not prevent him making full use of the mobility it gave him.

Works

Sassoon was a great admirer of the Welsh poet, Henry Vaughan. On a visit to Wales in 1923, he paid a pilgrimage to Vaughan's grave at Llansanffraid, Powys, and there wrote one of his best-known peacetime poems, At the Grave of Henry Vaughan. The deaths of three of his closest friends, Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, and Frankie Schuster (the publisher), within a short space of time, came as another serious setback to his personal happiness.

At the same time, Sassoon was preparing to take a new direction. While in America, he had experimented with a novel. In 1928, he branched out into prose, with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the anonymously-published first volume of a fictionalized autobiography, which was almost immediately accepted as a classic, bringing its author new fame as a humorous writer. The book won the 1928 James Tait Black Award for fiction. Sassoon followed it with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). In later years, he revisited his youth and early manhood with three volumes of genuine autobiography, which were also widely acclaimed. These were The Old Century, The Weald of Youth, and Siegfried's Journey.

Personal life

Siegfried Sassoon's gravestone in Mells churchyard.

After the war Sassoon engaged in a succession of love affairs with men, including the actor Ivor Novello; Novello's former lover, the actor Glen Byam Shaw; German aristocrat Prince Philipp of Hesse; the writer Beverley Nichols; and an effete aristocrat, the Hon. Stephen Tennant. Only the last of these made a permanent impression, though Shaw remained his close friend throughout his life. In December 1933, to many people's surprise, Sassoon married Hester Gatty, who was many years his junior; this led to the birth of a child, something which he had long craved. This child, their only child, George (1936-2006), became a noted scientist, linguist, and author, and was adored by Siegfried, who wrote several poems addressed to him. However, the marriage broke down after World War II, Sassoon apparently unable to find a compromise between the solitude he enjoyed and the companionship he craved.

Separated from his wife in 1945, Sassoon lived in seclusion at Heytesbury in Wiltshire, although he maintained contact with a circle which included E.M. Forster and J.R. Ackerley. One of his closest friends was the young cricketer, Dennis Silk. He formed a close friendship with Vivien Hancock, headmistress of Greenways School at Ashton Gifford, which his son, George, attended. The relationship provoked Hester to make some strong accusations against Vivien Hancock, who responded with the threat of legal action. Towards the end of his long life, he was converted to Roman Catholicism, and was admitted to the faith at Downside Abbey, close to his home. He also paid regular visits to the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey, and the abbey press printed commemorative editions of some of his poems. He was, in one way, a Messiah-like figure; he turned the Slaughter into Rhyme.

He died 7 days before his 81st birthday, and is buried at St Andrew's Church, Mells, Somerset, close to Ronald Knox, a Roman Catholic priest and writer whom he admired.

Siegfried Sassoon's only child, George Sassoon, died of cancer in 2006. George had three children, two of whom were killed in a car crash in 1996.

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you’ll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

Poetry

• The Daffodil Murderer (John Richmond: 1913)
• The Old Huntsman (Heinemann: 1917)
  • They
• Glory of Women (written: 1917)
• The General (Denmark Hill Hospital, April 1917)
• Counter-Attack (Heinemann: 1918)
• Suicide in the Trenches
• The Hero [Henry Holt, 1918]
• Picture-Show (Heinemann: 1919)
• War Poems (Heinemann: 1919)
• Aftermath (Heinemann: 1920)
• Recreations (privately printed: 1923)
• Lingual Exercises for Advanced Vocabularians (privately printed: 1925)
• Selected Poems (Heinemann: 1925)
• Satirical Poems (Heinemann: 1926)
• The Heart's Journey (Heinemann: 1928)
• Poems by Pinchbeck Lyre (Duckworth: 1931)
• The Road to Ruin (Faber and Faber: 1933)
• Vigils (Heinemann: 1935)
• Rhymed Ruminations (Faber and Faber: 1940)
• Poems Newly Selected (Faber and Faber: 1940)
• Collected Poems (Faber and Faber: 1947)
• Common Chords (privately printed: 1950/1951)
• Emblems of Experience (privately printed: 1951)
• The Tasking (privately printed: 1954)
• Sequences (Faber and Faber: 1956)
• Lenten Illuminations (Downside Abbey: 1959)
• The Path to Peace (Stanbrook Abbey Press: 1960)
• Collected Poems 1908-1956 (Faber and Faber: 1961)
• The War Poems ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Faber and Faber: 1983)

Prose

• Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (Faber & Gwyer: 1928)
• Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (Faber and Faber: 1930)
• Sherston's Progress (Faber and Faber: 1936)
• Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Faber and Faber: 1937)
• The Old Century (Faber and Faber: 1938)
• On Poetry (University of Bristol Press: 1939)
• The Weald of Youth (Faber and Faber: 1942)
• Siegfried's Journey (Faber and Faber: 1945)
• Meredith (Constable: 1948)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Felicitas, Corrigan. Siegfried Sassoon: Poet's Pilgrimage. London, V. Gollancz, 1973. ISBN 9780575017214.
• Henry, John Max, and Scawen Wyndham. Siegfried Sassoon. 2005. ISBN 0-330-37526-1.
• Roberts, John Stuart. Siegfried Sassoon. 1999. ISBN 1-86066-151-3.
• Siegfried Sasson Fellowship, Siegfried's Journal. Retrieved July 20, 2008.
• Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-7156-2822-4.
• Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. London: Duckworth, 2003. ISBN 0-7156-2971-9.

External links

All links retrieved January 27, 2023.

• Works by Siegfried Sassoon. Project Gutenberg
• Poetry Archive: 151 poems of Siegfried Sassoon
• Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) War Poets Association

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