Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon, Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend: A Life In One Volume
Jean Moorcroft Wilson
c. 2014.

From the inside back jacket:

Jean Moorcroft Wilson lectures in English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is married to Leonard and Virginia Woolf's nephew, with whom she runs a publishing house. Her previous books include two other biographies of First World War poets, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Isaac Rosenberg, and she is currently working on a biography of Edward Thomas. She is considered the foremost expert on Siegfried Sassoon.

Sassoon:

• more than any other figure from that period, with the possible exception of Rupert Brooke, Sassoon has become the prototype of the brave young soldier-poet, a serving officer who entered the war ready to lay down his life for his men and country
• his courageous public protest about the handling of the conflict, once he encountered it at first hand, does not quite fit the stereotype, but his qualifications for the role in almost every other respect are impeccable:
• he came from the right social background: though half-Jewish, his paternal relatives were wealthy merchant princes, who hobnobbed with Kind Edward VII
• his maternal relatives were well-known sculptors, painters, and engineers
• he had received the "correct" education at Marlborough and Cambridge, though he did poorly at both
• he was an officer adored by his men
• moreover, he was a conspicuously brave officer, awarded an M.C. for bringing in his wounded Corporal under intense fire in May, 1916, and
• involved in several other daring raids
• finally, like Brooke who died before he could qualify fully for the role, Sassoon was extremely handsome, and inestimable advantage for iconhood
• the one condition Sassoon failed to satisfy was that he did not die in the war, though he told Charles Causeley as late as 1952 that "most people" thought he had

Yet his life after 1918 is as interesting, if not more so, than before it, and not just in personal terms.

Page 5: he threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey; must have been in 1918 before the war was over; frustrated that the war dragged on. Says the M. C. meant as much to him as his "point-to-point cups." "Point-to-point" is steeplechase horse racing. "Cup," of course, is the "trophy" as in "world cup."

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Siegfried Sassoon

Family History

Paternal history: Jewish

• his father's family, the Sassoons, often referred to as the Rothschilds of the East
• almost completely Oriental in outlook, manners and dress until the arrival of Siegfried's grandfather in England in 1858
• this made their rapid acclimatization to Europe within one generation all the more remarkable
• they claimed to trace their ancestry back to King David himself, but it is not until the birth of Sason ben Saleh in 1750 that any reliable documentary evidence exists
• by the time the family had settle in Baghdad, Mesopotamia (moder day Iraq), among the first Jews to do so
• Sason ben Saleh was the last in line to serve as "Nasi" (prince of captivity) to the Caliph's court in Baghdad
• his eldest surviving son, born in 1792, was forced to flee Baghdad (under siege by the Ottoman Empire) in 1817 (or thereabouts)
• by 1830 David had started a small export trade from Basra to India an din 1832 settled in Bombay
• the trading venture mushroomed, refounding the Sassoon dynasty
• to his great-grandson Siegfried Sassoon the story of "old David's starting the enormous merchant business" from scratch was the main interest of his father's family
• David's third son, Sassoon David ("S.D.") Sassoon, the first child of his second marriage was sent to London to open a small branch, 1858
• [Siegfried, the grandson, inherited physical and emotional qualities from his grandfather and not from his father, Alfred Ezra
• S.D. set out for London in 1858; his young wife Fahra (anglicized to Flora) and their two children, 3-y/o Joseph and baby Rachel, would follow
• S.D.'s next to youngest child, Alfred (Siegfried's father) was the first Sassoon to be born in England, in 1861
• the Sassoon family became increasingly bound up with England
• with their wealth, eventually turned to the arts

Maternal history, quite the opposite, the Thornycrofts

• this family had been dedicated to art, for three generations in some cases by the time Siegfried was born
• his mother's maternal grandfather, John Francis (1780 - 1861) had begun life as a farmer at Thornham on the Norfolk coast but had become a sculptor

Thornycrofts, continued:

• Siegfried's maternal grandfather, similar impulse to sculpt: Thomas Thornycroft (Siegfried's maternal grandfather, as noted) gave up farming in 1835 to become a London sculptor apprenticed to John Francis -- fell in love with Francis's sculptor daughter, Mary, whom he married in 1840

But it was not the art that separated the two families

• Sassoon: urban
• Thornycrofts: rural

• Thornycrofts, comfortable but not as rich as the Sassoons
• Thornycrofts: dominance of women in family history, unlike the Sassoons
• Jewish Sassoons: matriarchal bias, but produced no significant example of female influence
• Thornycrofts: marked by its strong women, from Siegried's great grandmother, Ann Cheetham; many of the Thornycroft women, from Cheetham on down, made significant contributions to England; one became an engineer in her own right
• All that to say this: Siegfried, in early and middle life, said he felt more like a Thornycroft than a Sassoon.
• His mother was antagonistic toward the Sassoons, who had rejected her for many years.
• Age 8: his father dies; he meets the rest of the Sassoon family and notes their "foreignness"
• At that age, began to romanticize about his Oriental genealogy.
• He always placed his Sassoon family in Persia in his romanticism, even though two generations of Sassoons had lived in India.
• Upset with Sassoon's attitude toward money, though by his seventies, his feelings had mellowed.
• When writing poety, he talked about a mystic role in his poetry.
• He omitted his Jewish side from his thinly veiled autobiographical novel, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, 1928; talked about his love for his country (England)
• So, associated himself with rural, artsy-craftsy English Thornycrofts.
• Also, inherited the frugality of the Thorncrofts. By the time he inherited money in 1927, he hardly knew what to do with it.
• Inherited industriousness, honesty, and ingenuity from both sides of his family.
• "The daemon in me is Jewish." [If he using 'daemon' in sense it appears, then he is writing, "my muse is Jewish." Daemon in this context means "muse."]
• His most direct link with his family's past came through his maternal grandmother, Mary Thorncroft, who died just  have his eighth birthday (about very same time as his father died)
• She died at age 85, in the hard winter of 1894 to 1895
• Now the story moves to Siegfried's mother Theresa, b. 1853, youngest in her family; became a painter
• 1860s: Uncle Hamo (his mother's brother) had met Burne-Jones of the Pre-Raphaelites; discussion about the Pre-Raphaelites
• Theresa: a devout Christian all her life and brought Siegfried up accordingly
• Theresa: excellent horsewoman; passed that skill to Siegfried; he did not take up swimming, something his mother also loved

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• 1883: Theresa meets her future husband, Alfred Sassoon
• Theresa's mother had sculpted Alfred's parents in the early 1860s; that meeting reinforced by her brother Hamo's commission to make a half-size statue of Alfred's sister, Rachel, in 1882 -- Theresa became friendly with Rachel and the rest is history as they say.
• Alfred's father died when Alfred was six; his mother Flora spoiled him; Alfred died of tuberculosis. Siegfried's father was also a good horseman.
• Family conflict: Flora, brought up in strict Jewish orthodoxy, could not understand how her son could fall in love and speak of marriage to an eminently English and Christian Theresa
• But Alfred married outside the Jewish faith
• Married without knowledge of either mother knowing (remember: both fathers had died much earlier). Marriage particulars arranged by Uncle Hamo. Witnesses: Hamo, Eliza Perks, and Alfred's friend Edmund Gosse
• His Jewish mother essentially disowned Alfred; she declared her son officially dead, saing funeral prayers and even sitting the ritual period of mourning for him; persisted that way until she died; wrote him out of her will
• But Theresa and Alfred (Siegfried's parents happily in love)

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Chapter 2: Childhood in the Garden

1886 - 1895

• Siegfried Lorain Sassoon was the second of three sons to be born to Alfred and Theresa.
• Born: September 8, 1886
• 1886 - 1895, through his 9th birthday.

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Chapter 3: Lutes and Nightingales

1895 - 1900

• Age 9 through 14, comparable to US middle school and high school.

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Chapter 4: 'Harum-Scarum Schoolboy'

1900 - 1904

• Age 14 through 18, comparable to US high school; early college years; coming of age.

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Chapter 5: The Chancellor's Muddle

1904 - 1907

• Age 18 through 21; coming of age through young adulthood
• By 1907, 21st birthday, had spent nearly two-thirds of his with his mother at Weirleigh

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Chapter 6: Sporting Squire and Gentleman Writer

1907 - 1914

• Age 21 - 28; well-seasoned adult; war drums beating
• WWI: July 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918
• After spending nearly two-thirds of his life with his mother at Weirleigh, through his 21st birthday, he was now to pass another seven years at home, bringing the time spent there up to three-quarters of his young life -- although he felt he should leave, he was not ready to face the outside world on his own

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Chapter 7: 'Big London where Poets Live'

May - July 1914

• 1914: he was 28 years old; war was declared July 28, 1914
• Bloomsbury group and Virginia Woolf

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Chapter 8: The Happy Warrior

August 1914 - November 1915

• Age 28 to age 29; slightly old for a brand new recruit by today's standards (for enlisted; not for an officer)
• the chapter begins: he returns to Weirleigh in the third week of July, 1914; the outbreak of WWI was August 4, 1915 (note: wiki says July 28, 1914; the Austrian duke was assassinated June 28, 1914; the "July Crisis"; July 29: Russia declares a partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary; August 4, the general mobilization of Austria-Hungary
• poetry: uses words associated with Christianity, though he was moving away from Catholicism 
• Siegfried eager to go to war; enlists as a private ("trooper") but soon learned that was a mistake; his peers sought officer positions; he remained a private but had to sell his horse to the squadron commander to save his horse from being weighed down with gear; officer's horses carried very little and were always very well-groomed and attended to
• author mentions the author's horse, Cockbird, a hunter. For a description of "hunters" vs "jumpers," see this link. Sassoon had two other hunters, Jim Murphy and Golumpus; also, a groom, Tom Richardson
• breaks his arm in a fall while riding; during the 3-week convalescence decides to leave the cavalry, feeling that the cavalry would unlikely be sent overseas to fight in a predominantly infantry war
• battles of the Meuse, Mons, Marne, Ypres; Germans fell back at the Battle of the Marne but quickly returned to the offensive just over a month later, at Ypres; by Christmas, 1915 - a line barely 20 miles wide from Belgium coast to Switzerland -- that lasted for the next four years
• after recovery from broken arm, through a Special Reserve commission becomes an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers; station: Litherland, just north of Liverpool; at the mouth of the Mersey; was in 3rd Battalion
• meets Edward Dent; music; Dent comfortable with his homosexuality; Sassoon still coming to terms with his homosexuality; 
• Gabriel Atkin: greatest effect, at this time, on Sassoon's feelings about his homosexuality
• fell in love again; this time with Robert Hanmer; can't have physical relationship with Robert; proposes to Robert's sister to stay close to Robert but relationship with sister does not work out;
• Sassoon's younger brother Hamo serving in Gallipoli with the Royal Engineers
• "last leave" before departing for France with Marsh, Dent and Gosse in London (not with his mother) -- and there he met Robbie Ross, 17 years senior to Sassoon
• Ross was known to have had a relationship with Oscar Wilde; may or may not have been involved with Wilde from the mid-1880s but Ross stood by Wilde's trails through 1895
• like Sassoon, Ross had left Cambridge without a degree; since war broke out, he worked to get official status for War Artists, an initiative which eventually led to the founding of the Imperial War Museum
• Ross: anti-war; more than anyone else helped bring about the distinctive change in Sassoon's war poetry during 1916 -- but that all lay in the future

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Chapter 9: 'Goodbye to Galahad'

November 1915 - March 1916

29 years old

The chapter begins: "Remarkable though it may seem, Sassoon, who was in the army from the day war broke out to the day it ended and had the reputation of being a fire-eater, spent barely a month out of a possible fifty-one in the Front Line. There were a number of reasons to account for this and chance also played a part. His early riding accident in the Sussex Yeomanry and subsequent change of regiment, for instance, delayed his active service for well over a year. Then, largely because of his late arrival at the Front, he maintained his 'happy warrior' outlook for at least eighteen months after war began."

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Chapter 10: 'At the Edge of the World'

March - July 1916

• 30 years old in a few months
• these are the four months following David Thomas's death
• Siegfried's mood very volatile
• Seemed reckless; seemed like he was trying to get himself killed in the trenches
• re-directed his anger of the Germans toward those in authority on his own side
• as the reality of his brother Hamo's loss grew on him and first-hand experience of the trenches brought home the random destructiveness of war

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Chapter 11: 'My Killed Friends Are With Me Where I Go'

August 1916 - January 1917

• 31 years old 
• Siegfried arrives back in England at the beginning of August, 1916; at No 3 Southern General Hospital; Somerville College; Oxford
• the battle of the Somme was still raging and would do so until November
• in the space of four months, the 400,000 dead and wounded Brits; limited gains
• Siegfried questioned the war further
• in August, 1916, he was not seriously disaffected
• he was simply happy to be back in England, and not even wounded
• the so-called "spots" on his lungs which had helped bring about this miracle, had either quickly disappeared or had been misdiagnosed in the first place
• trench fever abating; his more long-standing anemia improving
• delivered from his one great fear in battle, that of being blinded, he feasted on the beauty of his surroundings

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Chapter 12: The Wounded Hero

February - April 1917

• 31 years old
• left for France on February 15, 1917 after a week's leave divided equally between Weirleigh (his mother's home) and Half Moon Street (first mentioned in chapter 9; a new poetry mentor, Robbie Ross, 40 Half Moon Street, just off Piccadilly; far more hostile to the war than other mentors)
• frantic socializing in London had exhausted him

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Chapter 13: 'Love Drove Me to Rebel'

April - July 1917

• 31 years old
• Sassoon's immediate reaction on being told that he was destined for England in April, 1917, was extreme relief (must have sustained an injury)
• 4th London Hospital at Denmark Hill
• self-absorption gave way to thoughts of those he left behind
• he knew things were going badly at Arras, and all the subsequent new from the 2nd RWF was to confirm his sense of lives wasted in a pointless exercise

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Chapter 14: Strange Meeting

July - November 1917

• 32nd birthday
• by the time Sassoon arrived at Craiglockhart on July 23, 1918, Haig was about to embark on what one historian has called 'the gloomiest drama in British military history', the 3rd Battle of Ypres, known otherwise as "Passchendaele"
• Gordon's death left an emotional void in Sassoon's life which made him particularly glad to welcome a new friend into it the same month, Wilfred Owen

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Chapter 15: 'Love Drives Me Back'

November 1917 - May 1918

• 32 years old
• apparently he has made a visible revolt in the last chapter
• feels embarrassed for letting down his fellow officers
• not at Litherland Dept, after four months of safety at Craiglockhart, now arriving "sheepishly"

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Chapter 16: The Good Soldier

May - July 1918

• 32 years old
• Sassoon's own army experience may not have been very eventful in the first half of 1918 but the War itself had entered is most crucial phase by time he arrived back in France in May
• the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty between Russia and Germany, signed March 3, 1918
• allowed Germany to move troops from the eastern front to the western front

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Chapter 17: 'A Loathsome Ending'

July - November 1918

• 33rd birthday
• Sassoon leaves France for the last time on July 18, 1918 (but, of course, he does not know it at the time); he planned to return; he did not want to abandon his men
• consigned to the American Red Cross Hospital No. 22 at Lancaster Gate, in London

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Chapter 18: 'Pilgrimages to Poets, 
Post-Armistice Parties and Other Diversions'

November - December 1918

• 33 years old
• the war is over
• his homosexuality is now fully in bloom; free of the military

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Chapter 19: 'A Simpleton's Progress'

January - March 1919

• 33 years old
• memories of the War would continue to dominate this period of Sassoon's life

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Chapter 20: 'Rootless Re-Beginnings'

April - December 1919

• 34th birthday
• becomes the literary editor of the Daily Herald
• he hopes this will give him a sense of liberation from the War
• apparently successful: his renewed joy in life sweeps all before it in flowing, irresistible lines

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Chapter 21: Broadway and Beyond

January - August 1920

• 34 years old; 37th birthday
• leaves England for America
• it looks like this is a publicity tour for him in the US

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Chapter 22: Tufton Street Blues

August 1920 - November 1925

• 34 - 39 years old
• Sassoon brings his published autobiography to a neat conclusion in August, 1920, with the assertion that his American trip had freed him from the war
• cursory look at his life in early 1920 suggests this was not so
• his main problem was his failure to find a "moral equivalent" for war

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Chapter 23: 'Love is the Test'

1921 - 1925

• 35 - 39 years old 
• staying with Frankie Schuster was only one of the reasons Sassoon gave for his difficulty in writing poetry during the Tufton Street years
• another reason: his "cursed complication of sex" which dominated this period

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Chapter 24: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man:
'The Testament of my Youth'

1925 - 1927

• 39 - 41 years old; entering mid-life
• no one was more surprised than Sassoon himself when Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, his nostalgic roman a clef so different from the grandiose prose work he had envisaged, became an instatne success
• so uncertain was he about the work, he initially published it anonymously
• won hi the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1928 and the Hawthornden Prize in 1929

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Chapter 25: 'The Old Earl and Little Lord Fauntleroy'

1927 - 1931

• 41 - 44 years old
• author continues to analyze Fox-Hunting Man
• now, Stephen Tennant

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Chapter 26: The Turn of the Screw

1931 - 1933

• 45 - 47 years old
• Memoirs of a Infantry Officer
• more of his personal life

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Chapter 27: 'O, Hester, You Must Redeem My Life'

1933 - 1938

• 47 - 52 years old
• more on Stephen
• introduces Edith Olivier and Hester Gatty
• gathering storm (again)

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Chapter 28: War Within an Without

1939 - 1945

• 53 years - 59 years; an older man
• war (again)
• The Old Country and Seven More Years was a direct result of the threat of war (at least in one sense)
• he wrote to an admirer about the book three days after Chamberlain returned from Munich in September, 1938

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Chapter 29: The Wilderness Years

1945 - 1950

• 59 - 64 years old; quite old now
• once Hester had been ejected from Heytesbury, Sassoon's life quickly reverted to its pre-marital routine
• his two main props were friends and work
• he was back in the round of daily rituals that had been his lifeline up to 1933

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Chapter 30: An Asking

1950 - 1956

• 64 - 70 years old; autumn of his life
• the cold War; the Korean War

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Chapter 31: 'It Has Been a Long Journey'

1957 - 1967

• 71 - 81 years old; the winter of his life
• Cold War continues but less threatening over time
• his return to the Roman Catholic Church, about August, 1957

Family Tree
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index