Siegfried Sassoon A Life

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility. In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialistDaily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the artistocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism. From his famous war poems to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls, and this work and its complex author are brilliantly illuminated in Max Egremont's definitive biography. Max Egremontwas born in 1948 and studied modern history at Oxford University. In addition to four novels, he is the author of three biographies, most recentlyUnder Two Flags:The Life of Major General Sir Edward Spears.Egremont is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in Kent, and began writing verses as a boy. While a brave young officer, he confronted the terrible realities of the First World War on the battlefield, in verse, and, finally, by announcing his opposition to the war in 1917, showing that physical courage could exist alongside humanity and sensibility. In 1918, Sassoon found himself one of the most famous young writers of the time, a mentor to Wilfred Owen, and admired by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. He joined the Labour Party, became literary editor of the socialistDaily Herald, and began close friendships with Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster, while trying to adapt his poetry to peacetime. Then Sassoon fell in love with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, who led him into his group of Bright Young Things who inspired the early novels of Evelyn Waugh. At the demise of his passionate and fraught relationship with Tennant, Sassoon suddenly married the beautiful Hester Gatty in 1933 and retreated to a quiet country life until their eventual estrangement and Sassoon's subsequent conversion to Catholicism. Throughout the course of this turbulent life, Sassoon produced a body of work unequaled by his contemporaries. From his famous war poems, which have never ceased to resonate, to the gentler vision of his prose, Sassoon wrote masterfully of war and lost idylls. This work and its complex author are illuminated in Max Egremont's biography, which draws with unprecedented access on Sassoon's complete papers. "Egremont is extremely good on the war years, which are, after all, why we care about Sassoon. And he demonstrates, firmly but sympathetically, that Sassoon's famous letter renouncing the war was muddled and naive, the product of manipulation by Bertrand Russell and other Bloomsbury pacifists . . . Some people, like the critic and translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, thought Sassoon a ridiculous and outmoded figure, but in Lord Egremont's telling he emerges as an immensely touching and sympathetic one--a man not entirely at home in his own skin, let alone in the world he was born to, but who plumbed the great trauma of his generation, the horrors of World War I, and unlike so many,

Max Egremont was born in 1948 and studied modern history at Oxford University. In addition to four novels, he is the author of three biographies, most recently Under Two Flags: The Life of Major General Sir Edward Spears. Egremont is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Preface

ix

The purchasing power of the pound

xv

`The daybreak world'

1

(22)

`Try to be more sensible'

23

(14)

The weald of youth

37

(27)

`Grief can be beautiful'

64

(34)

`I am sure I shall get blown to shreds'

98

(35)

`The heroics of pacifism'

133

(26)

`Dottyville'

159

(24)

`I must be strong'

183

(12)

`Threshold of the dark'

195

(29)

Love and politics

224

(19)

Byron in America

243

(16)

`Why can't I create something?'

259

(18)

`The unknown want'

277

(17)

The fox-hunting man

294

(17)

Stephen: love and anger

311

(22)

`I ask for nothing but to be near him always'

333

(24)

Elected silence

357

(26)

Hester: `A flower has opened in my heart'

383

(21)

`A bullying barbarian of a world'

404

(14)

`In George I seem to live my life again'

418

(15)

The hardened heart

433

(14)

Heytesbury's solitary squire

447

(16)

The search

463

(13)

`At the end of all wrong roads I came'

476

(16)

`Trying to be like Our Lord'

492

(15)

`My final test of endurance'

507

(12)

Epilogue

519

(6)

Notes

525

(60)

Bibliography

585

(14)

Index

599

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