In Our Time - Siegfried Sassoon

Episode Date: June 7, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. In 1916 the Military Cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers for "conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches". The citation noted that he had braved "rifle and bomb fire" and that "owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in". The hero in question was the poet, Siegfried Sassoon. And yet a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which he had fought so well.Although famous for his bitter, satirical verses and his denunciation of the conduct of the war which landed him in Craiglockhart mental hospital there is much more to this man of contradictions. A mentor to Wilfred Owen, arch enemy of T.S. Eliot and the Modernist movement, his life included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage, a religious conversion and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends. Notably Robert Graves. He was also an obsessive diarist and writer of autobiography and he continued to write poetry until his death, from cancer, in 1967. But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon, what version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, homosexual cricket lover invent for himself and how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane ferocity?With Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Lecturer in English at Birkbeck, University of London and a biographer of Sassoon; Fran Brearton, Reader in English and Assistant Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University of Belfast; Max Egremont, a biographer of Siegfried Sassoon

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1916, the military cross was awarded to a captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers for conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches. The citation noted that he had braved, rifle and bomb fire,

and that, owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in. The hero in question was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. And a year later, and at great personal risk, Sassoon publicly denounced the conduct of the war in which he fought so well. Sassoon had a long and eventful life after surviving the trenches. It included a string of homosexual affairs, a failed marriage,

a religious conversion, and several tumultuous arguments with literary friends. He continued to write poetry until his death from cancer in 1960. But how significant a poet is Siegfried Sassoon? What version of Englishness did this half-Jewish, fox-hunting, homosexual, cricket lover invent for himself? And how do you explain the mind of a man who bitterly opposed the First World War, yet fought in it with an almost insane courage? With me to discuss Siegfried Sassoon, a Jean Moorpewil, Wilson,

lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a biographer of Sassoon, Fran Breerton, reader in English, an assistant director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at the University. University of Belfast and Mac's Egremant, also a biographer of Secret Sassoon. Jean Milcroft-Wilson, can you give us a sense of Sassoon's family background and what sort of an upbringing he had? Well, it's an unusually interesting background

because not only were both families very distinguished, but they were also very different, and I think this contributes massively to how contradictory Susson's own nature was. The Sussons were, they were merchant princes, they went back to the courts of the Persian courts. One of his ancestors, his great-great-grandfather was a prince of the captivity. And his great-grandfather, the one he was most conscious of later on, was David, David Sussuon, the great patriarch whom he admired enormously.

His own grandfather was the first of David's first sons to come to, eight sons, to come to England. and David's grandson was Sassoon's father and that was Alfred. So they started in Baghdad. They'd been pushed out as it were to Bombay where they did great action, including many philanthropic actions,

then one of them came to England. Absolutely. And, well, all of them came to England subsequently. But Sassoon's grandfather, who was called Sussoon, David Sassoon, just to confuse us, was actually in the first to arrive. And what about his mother?

side? His mother's side were Thornycrofts and engineers and sculptors. Sculptors to start off with. Farmers originally, farmers from Cheshire, farmers from Norfolk. The mother, who was his grandmother was a Thornicroft and she was the daughter of another well-known Victorian sculptor called Francis. Thomas Thornichroft is the man who, whom we know is the sculptor of the statue of Berdesir on the the Westminster Bridge just outside the houses of Parliament. Siegfried's uncle, Hamo, who stood in a relation really as father to him because his own Sassoon father had left home just before he was five, run off with his mother's best friend, apparently.

A very sad story and affected Sassoon deeply. So his uncle became an effect kind of father figure. I think all his life he was looking for that father figure to replace him. I hope that doesn't sound too cod. Well, so there's this father and mother. He had two brothers, and his father run away when he was five. His father died when he was nine. His father died just before he was nine.

And it was then that he became conscious, only then, that he became conscious of his Jewishness. His father had been cut off from the family, banished from the family, because he'd married out of the Jewish faith. His mother was rather bitter about the Sussudence. So Siegfried grew up very, very conscious of being English. a Thornycroft. And he was much encouraged by his mother, as I understand it, to write poetry, to be an artistic person,

to write notebooks and diaries to her. Well, so he said, he said that he thought she had intended him to be a poet, because for his third birthday, she gave him the Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare, so he decided that this would be his sign to be a poet. He was a heavy hint, really. Something of a heavy hint.

He wrote from the age of about, nine onwards, a series of a very lovely little childhood notebooks, lavishly illustrate it, though the illustrations Peter out towards the end. But stop writing at 12 and then went back to it. He was educated

at home largely, and he went to prep school when most people were leaving it at the age of 13, because his mother was so protective of her three sons. He was the middle son. And he went to Cambridge, and he's writing poetry then, and has high hopes for himself even when he's at Cambridge, doesn't he?

Yes, and he hasn't high hopes for himself as a scholar. He's a fairly indifferent kind of scholar, starts off with law, decides he can't bear the heavy books, thinks he'll take the easy option of medieval history, and then discovers he's got to learn medieval French, and since he hasn't got a head for languages, he really doesn't get very far with that. But he says, if I win the Chancellor's Medal for poetry at Cambridge,

I will continue at Cambridge, and then, of course, doesn't get it. And in 1907, January, having heard he hasn't got the Chancellor's Medal, or the Chancellor's muddle, as his mother very kindly calls it, he decides not to go back to Cambridge. And for the next seven years lives the life of a country gentleman, an English country gentleman. Thank you. Max Egerman, as has been said, he went back home to live.

Can you tell us about that life over now seven years? He's determined still to continue to be a writer, isn't he? Even though he's failed to get this great medal. I think one would have to say that this was a difficult time in Siegfried's life. There was one thing that was always there. There was one constancy, and I think this applies to the whole of his life. He had absolutely no doubt that he wanted to be a poet. He felt, I think, certainty that he could be a great poet.

So that was always there. But the trouble about this time, from the time that he left Cambridge to the beginning of the first. World War is that there was an enormous gap between the expectation and the sort of stuff that he was writing. The sort of stuff that he was writing was still going back to the 1890s, very much influenced by people like Walter Pater, Swinburne, going back even earlier to the great Victorians, Tennyson, Browning. There was a bit of a breakthrough in 1911, 1912, when he published a parody of John Mayes. field called the Daffodil

murderer. Now this was quite a success in a very small circle but the great thing was that it was in the Georgian style. The Georgian poets a new new style, a new movement

much more realistic in its use of language, frequent use of direct speech, far more contemporary. And the daffodil murderer he sent the daffodil murder to his early poetic mentor, Goss.

And Goss said, this is good, but I'm too old-fashioned, I don't think I can really judge it for myself. You should send it to Edward Marsh, who was the great patron of the Georgian poets. So he did, and he got a very encouraging letter from Edward Marsh, and Edward Marsh encouraged him to come up to London, and things really started moving in the right direction. But I think it's probably fair to say

that until the war, the poetry slightly disappointed him, I think one can say that. Can you give us your assessment of the life he was leading in those seven years? He was at home. He was fox hunting, of which he wrote in my view famously, a fox hunting man. I remember reading it being absolutely rubbish by it. I never done any fox hunting in my life.

He was playing cricket. There he was leading the life of an Edwardian country gentleman. Can you just, what was that about, as it were, to? I'm sorry, the crudeness of the question. No, I think it's a very fair question. I think there were two problems at this time. First of all, there was a problem about the poetry. He didn't feel that it was as good as it should have been.

And also there was a problem about the personal life. There was a problem about the unresolved sexuality. There was a problem about the sort of people that he was seeing. He liked these people from the sporting world, the people who were in the hunt, the people who we met playing golf, people we met playing cricket. He liked them. But of course they thought it pretty odd to be a poet.

And so there was a confusion here, I think. content to be with these people, but he recognised that it was not the world that he ought to be in. And I think this led to confusion. I think the great thing was the war solved everything in a way. It's very difficult for us now to imagine this. But when war broke out in August 1914, throughout the whole of Europe, not the whole of Europe, but the countries that were taking part into the world, there was huge outburst of enthusiasm.

Very difficult for us to imagine this now because we all know that the war was a terrible tragedy. There was this great outburst of enthusiasm and Secrets Assoon very much took part in this and he joined up immediately, joined up as a trooper. He was commissioned in May 1915 and he also fell in love. He fell in love with another officer, David Thomas,

who was his contemporary. they went out to France together at the end of 1915 and then of course he met the reality he met the reality of war Can we just pause Fran Bruton for a moment about the start of war? He joined up two days before war was declared and he had a Rupert, an easy short-hander, just to say, a Rupert Brookview didn't he?

War is our scourge, yet war has made us wise and fighting for our freedom, we are free. What, Max Sacramento has led us in this direction, but what impact did the war have on his poetry? Because there's no question of rereading. There was a tremendous shift. He'd got the instruments, but the tremendous shift in the content and the intensity.

There is a massive shift. I think there's probably more consistency in Sassoon than is generally recognized, so that that idea of absolution that something can be solved, that one can be redeemed, I think is continuous throughout the war writing. But he changes his focus.

on where the redemption lies and from being the nature of the war itself it becomes his capacity to plead for the suffering of his men. One of his great terms is the Redeemer, isn't it? Of course, yes, which is the first one where he deliberately, I think, deflates that kind of Rupert-Brook

rhetoric earlier on. And as Max has said, it is coming up against the reality. I think it's a convergence of factors late in 1915. One, of course, is the death of his brother in Gallipoli. And the other, I think, the very significant encounter with Robert Graves in France in November 1915 and that engagement

and debate about poetry and about what war poetry should be like. Sassoon was not writing in a realistic mode. If we're to believe Robert Graves, I'm not necessarily saying we should, but if we're to believe Graves, he said to Sassoon, you will soon change your style when you meet the reality of war and that we must address it in this realistic way so that Graves does for Sassoon in 1915 what Sassoon was later to do for Wilfred Owen in 1917. And so by early 1916 you see that new style in Sassoon

a stripped down style getting rid of some of that early over-emotional sentimental rhetoric, something much more drawing on the satire of the early Mays field, the direct speech, speaking for the experience of others rather than that slightly self-indulgent

sacrificial mode of 1914. Far less abstract, much more particular, much harder on the incident, much more harder on the detail. Yes. I mean, if you look at Sassoon in 1916, he is hammering home monosyllabic direct poems, relentless rhythms that are driven home to the reader in a way that is a light years away, I think, from that early Georgian style. Now, I think he runs both simultaneously so that interspersed through the war years, you will still see the sentimental 1914 idea. And I think that's to do with the early soon.

Sassoon being such a contradictory personality, the sportsman and the poet. And I'm not sure that contradictions in Sassoon are ever reconciled, but that brings about the much more interesting tension in the work. It is powerful, isn't it? Because when I did the trail for this programme, I read the general, Good Morning, Good Morning. And it's very simple in a way, and yet the punch in it, is it the intensity and what he is talking about. It's the subject, is it, in a sense, that sorted out his poetry.

It's the subject allied with, I think, yes, the use of those traditional rhythms. so you have a nice jaunty triple rhythm in that poem and of course the killer blow in the last line that undercuts everything that's gone before it and he brings in, which is what war poetry does anyway, it confronts for the first time the shock of the new so he'll bring in advertising, jingles, popular song, he'll bring in all those elements into the poem

and present it as looking conventional but actually in terms of content being utterly subversive. Briefly, before we move on to the declaration, and Mike Sagram. Can you give us your view of how, we begin to talk about a contrary to the man we can square this poet who was

writing anti-war poetry and this man of quite extraordinary courage, magic, going into no man's land when he needn't have done, all that sort of thing. What's your view? How? Well, I think it's very difficult to bring the two together, but I think

one can in a way because I think he was very keen to prove himself He wanted to prove that he was courageous. He knew, I think, already that he could do it, essentially. Because of the fox hunting, he'd been very brave, he'd been a brave steeple chaser, he'd been a brave writer. So I think he had an idea that he could do it. But I think there was an enormous sense of exhilaration to, he suddenly found that he had this immense courage. He was very angry, too.

He was very angry about the death of David Thomas. And this, I think, moved. With whom he didn't have any sexual affairs. I think it was chaste, but it was a romantic relationship. And I think there was love there. I think there was no doubt about that at all, though there was love. And he was very angry that David had been killed. He wasn't so much angry against the Germans, I think.

He was angry against the war. And I think one can see the two things come together, perhaps, in this anger. Jean Moucrupu... Let's move to the Great Declaration. And I think it was a great... A soldier declaration, it was called. June 1917, the Times newspaper, published an extraordinary document from Siegfried Sassoon, saying, I'm making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority,

but I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those of the power to end it. It was an extraordinary document, all the more extraordinary, because he was a highly decorated soldier. What had driven him to that position? Well, my feeling is it wasn't just David Thomas he was angry about. He was also particularly angry about his men. He had a great relationship with his men, and he became increasingly good and impressive as an officer as he went on.

And he hated to see his men suffering like this. But there were a number of things. There were the friends killed. There were the people he knew. He knew Dent. He knew Robbie Ross. Dent was a musicologist at Cambridge, Robbie Ross, in London. and an art connoisseur,

and they're all of them angry about the war, all his friends, the Murrell's particularly, Lady Otterlin Murrell and her MP husband and the Garcington pacifist set. Including Bertrand Russell. And Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell actually helped him to complete the statement. How far was he used by that lot?

I don't think that you can blame them, really. People have said, oh well, they used him. He was ready to be used. He was ready to do something. He had been very, very angry about the death of his corporal, his dear bombing corporal, Corporal O'Brien, for which he won the MC. He was angry about David.

He was angry about all the officers in his own first and second Royal Wales Fusiliers who'd also been killed quite recently. He'd heard this from a friend at the front. So there were a number of reasons. Also, he was very, very angry with the complacent establishment. Don't forget he'd just come back from Convalescence Act. in Sussex with Lord and Lady Brassy and he couldn't stand their complacency

he couldn't stand their conservatism he couldn't stand their friends and he came back had lunch with That was one of his wounds He was wounded twice and said gone on the area Yes he came back home first with drench fever And then he was wounded in the shoulder In fact missed his jugular vein by a very very small fraction

And he came back and was convalescing And as he convalesed he became more and more aware of what was going on at the front. He felt when he was at the front that he was a soldier and that he had that exhilaration that Max talks about, the exhilaration of battle. He used to lie on his back in the battlefield, in no man's land, laughing with sheer exhilaration.

It was rather like fox hunting. He said it was like a steeplechase, actually. He said that himself. Can I bring in Fram Breton? Anybody you would have expected, that declaration comes up at the front page at the time, at the time when the war is, in a terrible state in the country's desperate.

He should have been, as it were, court-martialed, but he wasn't. He's partly to his friend, Robert Graves, who you've mentioned, a fellow officer, his tutor in, tutory got in many ways, got him to Craig Lockhart Hospital near Edinburgh and said he had shell shock, which he didn't, as soon said he didn't have shell shock, but he got him there to get him out, they wanted him out of the way. He was going to be too dangerous. what happened when he got there and when he got to this hospital? I think probably the most important encounters of his life,

which are respectively with Wilfredone and W.H.R. Rivers, one of the things that's interesting perhaps about the declaration is that I find it deeply confused about who to blame so that it doesn't protest against what he's blaming. About who is to blame for the war or what exactly one should be angry about. that he doesn't actually indict the conduct of the war, which is what we would tend to do now and say that the strategy was flawed.

He says it's about political insincerities but isn't clear on what they are. But significantly at the end of that, he also condemns the home front for a failure of imagination. They have not sufficient imagination to realize what's happening. There is, I think, an idea that poetry itself could render the home front capable of that imaginative realization. and that he's writing in the Craig Lockhart period some of the most anti-homefront poems of his career

where that anger is coming through all the time. And the influence of those poems on Wilford Owen is, of course, deeply significant for precipitating Owen into the mode of the great war poet. Because Owen is in the hospital very ill. He has not published yet. He idolises Sassoon. He's read Sassoon and idolises Sun. And Sue talks to him about poetry

and encourages him to write about the war. As you said earlier in the program, as Graves at Curry-Sussune, something like passing on a baton, isn't it really? Sussoon and Curry-Zoen. Yes, I think Sassoon is very much in the mentor role. I mean, Owen was at Craig Lockhart, I think, a month before Sasson. And Susson has been there a couple of weeks before he summons up the courage to tap on the door and take in a copy of the old Honsman

and say, please, could you sign this for me? And I think Sasson was deeply flattered. Yes, and saw Owen very much as the kind of junior, the poetic apprentice. and I think only towards the end of the stay at Craig Lockhart possibly suddenly realised that the apprentice was surpassing the master, which I think is undoubtedly the case, certainly by 1917. Max Agram, Fran mentioned WH. W.H. Rivers, his psychiatrist, I suppose, at Craig Lockhart,

with whom he established a strong relationship. What did he get, as it were? What did he get out of that? Well, I think, as Jean said earlier, I think there was always the quest for the father figure. and I think Dr. Rivers was able to fulfill this role with great intensity. I think Dr. Rivers was a very powerful personality. He was a very mesmeric personality. He was rather shy, quite emotional.

He contained his emotion. And I think Secret Sassoon fell completely under his spell. And Dr. Rivers was also, I think, quite a ruthless man. He saw that the way to cure Sassoon or to make Sassoon feel B. better about himself, was, paradoxically, to persuade him to go back to the front and perhaps to be killed. It was a rather a ruthless thing to do. And this was all a part of the course of treatment. And Sassoon became completely devoted to Dr. Rivers.

And when Dr. Rivers died quite soon after the war, it was a terrible gap in his life and a terrible blow to him and contributed to the difficulties that he had in the early 1920s. Gene Moorcraft-Wilson, to take up a point, word, that Michael Cagranton used there, the spell. He seems to, he's fallen under the spell of Graves, Robert Graves, who he meets first time, he deeply admires as a poet. He falls under the spell of, we imply,

I'm exaggerating, of the Gartington set, Russell, to, Bertrand Russell, and then Rivers is, what's going, He's obviously, and they're all, as it were, outside, a deeply implanted, perhaps faux English experience, or certainly his own English experience.

He's moving very quickly, isn't he, across areas in these two couple of years? He is, and, of course, it's partly the shock of the war, but it's partly that Sassoon was very, very immature. Don't forget, he was 28, which was a lot older than a lot of his contemporaries at the front when he went into the war. But he's been kept at home. He's not left home till he's 13.

He's gone back to his mother at Weirley, and he is very immature when he goes in. But he's excited, and his heart is in the right place. He says he was never an intellectual. He's emotional. And when he meets rivers whom he calls, incidentally, my fathering friend, he realizes that he's found somebody

who can give him the security. He's a very insecure young man, the security he needs. He doesn't find it in his relationships, because of his homosexuality and because of the law. I think he's not defiant like Ross and Dent. He's frightened of what society will say if he becomes a homosexual. But he does have that need to respond to people he loves.

He has the need for people to love. Can we just talk for a few minutes about this extraordinary poetry and you three know and immense about it? I'm sure people would like to know. What do you think is, is so good and powerful about it, starting with you. My preference, I think there are three different modes at work in Sassoon in the War poems. My preference would be for what I think he does best, which is the satire

and the very short and hard hitting. There are also some wonderful instances of, I suppose, what might call the equivalent in poetry of the drama documentary that's set out a scene. Something like counter-attack would be, I think, amongst the best in poems like that. The ones that tend to be most anthologised and read and most familiar to people nowadays are the shorter epigrammatic ones, base details, the general, which you mentioned. Perhaps more problematically, something like glory of women with its very questionable gender politics. When everyone thinks about the content of those poems, they are enormously and still enormously powerful

and they still have the capacity to shock. And I think it's because you see in them a distinctively modern idiom. There are lines by Sassoon that would not look out of place, they were written yesterday, and to set those against some of that Georgian mode is quite extraordinary, so that Sassoon's career, from my perspective, almost seems to travel in reverse, that he becomes less and less modern as he goes on. And the really hard-hitting the poems that speak to the immediate moment are the ones written in 1916 and 1917, so that he can finish, say, his letter to Robert Graves saying,

does this break your heart? What do I care? Which could be written yesterday in that sense. You know, that's not a poem that sounds like it exists from 90 years ago. Jean Moucalf-Wilson, what's liquidity of Sussune as far as you're concerned? I think he's better as a prose writer myself. I think his poetry is very effective as anti-war satire. And I think that the, as you say, and it's very memorable, isn't it, Fran? You know, you can actually remember lines from Sussune quite accurately.

And I do think, though, that he's not, when his books were reviewed, you know, the old huntsman and the second book, Counterattack in 1918, they had a great deal of attention. But many of the reviewers said that, but it's not poetry. Passive suffering, as Yates was to say in 1936, when he famously rejected war poetry from his anthology, passive suffering is not a subject for poetry. And Virginia Woolf actually preferred his more lyrical verse.

I, like Fran, I believe that the satires are the best. I like the satire's, but I think one thing that does come over is in a poem like counterattack, and I'm very glad that Fran brought that up, I think in a poem like counterattack you get a real feel of what it was like to be in the trenches. He evokes the mud, the dirt, the general sense of panic. It's very, very effective. One could say that it was more journalism in a way than poetry, but it still hits very, very hard today. I think he was a very significant. significant poet in this way, in that we really can have a strong sense of what it felt like to be there in the first war from his verse. Yes, it is. More so, I think.

The mud and the boots are stuck in the mud. I think almost more so, one sees the famous documentary that was made about the Battle of the Somme, and that's effective, of course, too. But I think more so than that, if you counterattack, it just makes you feel as if you were there. It's very strong, very strong stuff, violent, very powerful. Who would have thought? that this man who was writing this pre-1914 stuff, who would have thought that it could end up like this? Perhaps just to pick up on what you were saying, I think there's sometimes a difficulty surrounding the reception of First World War poetry that it is seen as journalistic, that this is not necessarily fit subject for poetry,

or its status as poetry is questionable. The First World War perhaps is the time where, as Edward Thomas said, anything may make a poem, that there are no barriers as to what does or does. doesn't constitute fit poetic material, and its journalistic quality comes to me secondary to its aesthetic accomplishment all the time, and that's why it survives as against so much First World War verse

that simply doesn't. I'm writing about Isaac Rosenberg at the moment, and it's very interesting to contrast the two. I believe that Rosenberg was more of what we regard as a poet. I don't believe that Sassoon was as much of what what survives as poetry. I think it survives partly because it's documentary, partly because it does,

it encapsulates, doesn't it, for many, many people, the first world. Not bad, though, I mean, it's nearly 100 years old, and it's still in the focus. Yes, oh, yes, please, I love it. I'm still reading it the last week feeling this is really good. This is really good.

Did it affect you as Shakespeare affects you? Oh, come on. What? I mean, come on. Be sensible. Nothing affects you like Shakespeare. Actually, but... I mean, does John Lennon affect me like Beethoven? No, but I like both of them.

Yes, yes, yes. But I just say that Owen said I'd rather read so soon than Shakespeare. Well, that's a young man. A young man idolising a person he's next to. You can completely understand that from him. He's a young man, he's probably Shell-shot young man, and he wants to be heard, he meets a living poet.

It must have been an extraordinary thing. I mean, the first time you meet writers who are really writers, you think, goodness me. But you wouldn't react like that if I said is Owen almost as good as Shakespeare? I don't think these comparisons matter very much to me at all. But I think the great achievement, perhaps, is that in almost any article

that you see about the First World War, there's almost always a mention of Sassoon in some way. He comes into it almost always, even if it's an article about grand strategy or Haig. There he is. You say, oh, the War of Secret Sassoon. war. He was enormously important, I think, in this way, in that he created a whole view of war.

After the war, he came back as a complicated figure. Some people thought he was a traitor. Some people thought it was a war hero. He thought throughout his life. He had the desperation that many, many writers, many, many artists have that he was never appreciated enough, and never would be appreciated enough. Others were pushing him over, and so, that was a big part of his life. Went on a tour of America a little. And then the modernists came in. I'm sorry to jump in this.

There we go. We know about the modernists. In 1922, T.S.L. at the waistline was published. And as it were, Sassoon and the way he wrote as much as... But the way he wrote was just pushed aside. And this had, Fran Britten, this had a sad effect on him. In the end, tragic, the great irony of that is that Sassoon preempts those achievements of modernism. if you look at something like the wasteland in the way it's playing with its Shakespearean rag,

it's all there in Sassoon in 1917. It's there in playing on the term sleepless exaspericide and that kind of linguistic play that you see in Sassoon. And yet he drops that mode and sees himself as sidelined by modernism and seems to me to believe increasingly through his life that had Owen survived, that we would have been able to revolutionise English poetry, the claim that Robert Graves made, this is what we're going to do after the war. And unfortunately, English poetry was revolutionised, but by Elliot and Pound, who didn't serve.

And I think that hurt as well, that the experience of war in some way had sidelined them from the mainstream literary tradition. And it didn't serve, so you think that's significant. The fact that Elliot and Pound had not been in the war was a significant factor in Sussune's disillusionment with what was going on in modern poetry. I think that's true for Sussune, possibly for Graves as well. Not Elliot's fault, of course, he wanted to, but there is that sense that while they were taking part in the great momentous historical event of the century, that T.S. Eliot was in a London cafe prepared to project this greater momentous literary change on the world. I think he thought in a way, I think there was soon thought in a way,

that here were these people, T.S. Eliot and Pound. They were creating a kind of chaos. He'd had chaos. He knew what chaos was like, and he wanted order. Can I, you want to be brief? Because I want to move on a moment. Absolutely, absolutely. I just want to say that modernist war poetry in the shape of David Jones and and Isaac Rosenberg doesn't succeed

in that period that was what I wanted to add to the modernist debate Max Aggrim, he had he began to practice homosexuality after the First World War and but he had not as it been as far as we know unconsumated romantic attachments until then through that

particularly with the young man called Stephen Tennant can you tell us a little bit about that, not being proved, but why that was significant. Well, I think he fell in love with Stephen Tennant. I think again it was love. I think it was lust as well. There were two things came together. And Stephen was rather an extraordinary personality.

To read about him, you'd think how could anybody be interested in this grotesque figure. He seems a complete flippity gibbet. But he had considerable artistic taste. He came from quite a grand background. There was a slightly snobbish side

to Sieg Fitzerssoon, and tenant appealed to this a bit. And they had this great romance. I think it was the greatest romance of Siegfried Sassoon's life. And it ended in discontentment. It ended in tenant saying that Sassoon was too possessive and he cut Sassoon out of his life. He was much, much younger than Sassoon.

He was 20 years younger. And it was after that that Siegfried decided to get married, which was not a success. You wanted to come in on that, do you? No, I didn't. I just think that... Something that Max said, caused you to open and close your mouth. Max and I differ.

Not sort of... And so I thought you might want to say something. Well, Max, forgive me. All right, if you're going to encourage me to say it. Yes, come on. I can... I am one of those people who cannot, as Max said. Imagine how attractive Stephen Tennant was anybody who took such a long time choosing pearls, which pearls they were going to wear for dinner.

any man I think I might just reject even as a man out of hand I'm sorry he seems to me entirely silly Gene I think if I may say so you're completely different to seek for it as soon as far as and I'm not wearing pearls

You're wearing a splendid hat You're the first person to worn a hat on in our time Oh I always wear a hat I don't know what we're going for right Fran Britton As Jean said earlier She preferred his prose now I first and gathered him through his process.

The memoirs of a fox on the human man, the memoirs of an infantry officer. Can you, and he wrote about six volumes, autobiographical fiction, fictional autobiography. What was he, why was he dwelling on himself so closely? Perpetual reinvention. It's actually a symptom of the First World War survivor. To be honest, Edmund Blondon says,

I must go over the ground again. Robert Graves is rewriting his autobiography perpetually through his life in different forms. So soon does it once in fictional terms in the Sherston memoirs and then feels compelled to do it again each time reinventing a version of his own past because I don't think he ever

fully reconciles elements of that past so that it's done once in the late 20s, early 30s in the Stephen Tennant period which I won't comment on his respective merits. And then it's done again in the Second World War when he's married and the marriage is failing.

and each time what he does is reinvent the wartime period where I think the contradictions are too much to handle in some way. So the compulsion to keep writing is also about being stuck, that he doesn't seem able to me to move on post First World War and that he keeps running on a permanent loop, which is seen very tragically in somebody like Ivergernie, but I think he's seen in a different way in other survivors as well. It's hardly surprising in some way, is it really, for anybody really,

after that sort of experience. No. I mean, everyone says, it isn't a, it isn't a, I'm sure you're not saying it as, but I'm just picking up the loop. It isn't a criticism. It's just that you've been down that abyss, and you, why can't you, how can you not stop returning to it? Yes, in our contemporary parlance, how do you move on from something like that?

I'm not sure that you ever can. You mentioned the marriage. That's a sort of strange moving on. It was not a sort of rebound from Stephen Tennant. Was that I want to get back to, because they had a son who turned out to be a brilliant young man and so on and so forth. Is that, let's go back to, what I had as an English gentleman. Yes, well, I think the marriage was an extraordinary development.

He was delighted to be married. Whether he actually fell in love with her or not is difficult to say. I think he felt he could help her that he could cure her. She was recovering from a nervous breakdown. She was much, much younger than he was. She was nearly 20 years younger. And I think there was something slightly narcissistic in all this, in that he was almost observing himself, helping her, observing himself fall in,

not, I don't think he felt it fell in love with her, but observing her falling in love with him. And I think he found this quite exciting, and they got married, and they went to live in the country, and he began to live the life of an English country gent, and then three years later they had this son, and everything seemed so perfect. But, of course, the difference is sexual, otherwise, very soon started to become apparent and the marriage turned into a terrible tragedy. To me it seems to have a profound effect on his creative life as well. So the Sherston memoirs, I think they kind of blaze with excitement. When you come to his autobiography, it's turgid.

The same with the poetry. Can we really say there is anything of great interest written after the late 1930s? I think we can. Yes, I think we can. I'm going to you. No, no, I know, but I do think you can. And I think that the same tension that is, that, that, that, that, lies behind the war poetry, which incidentally, Melvin, I do find very good indeed.

I'm not denigrating it. But I think that the tension of his spiritual searchings, his loneliness, his need for something in the 40s and early 50s, produce a kind of tension which I think results in poems that are not dismissable and which are very good. They are coming from the same kind of tension. Did his conversion to Catholicism and his involvement with Catholicism is late years? Do you think that brought something to his poetry? I think it did.

Unfortunately, I think it brought a certain level of reconciliation. And I understand that there's a spiritual journey going on. But to me, the tension is then missing. So it's back to the idea of absolution, which is where he began. But this time the absolution is coming from outside. And from God, in effect. And that resolves certain issues. But when the resolution occurs,

I'm talking about the period that leads up to the resolution. I think the 10 years or the seven years before he becomes a Catholic are interesting because they're full of conflict and tension. And those are the poems that I admire. I don't think that I agree with you entirely that afterwards the tension is absent. And the poetry is slack, isn't it? Yes.

Mike Sagram, do you think this is a late flowering or sort of meandering away into the sunset? Well, I think there's something very touching about the religious poems. I don't think I agree. with Fran here. I don't think they're very good poetry, perhaps, but when one looks at them, there is something very touching about them, and one feels here is a man who has found calm

at last, who has found peace. Although there are various contradictions still there in his life, they do give a feeling that certain things have at last been resolved. But that's the religious poetry afterwards. I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the poetry of searching. Yes, yes.

I was talking about the religious. pages after the conversion to the Catholicism which took place with you entirely that. It took place in 1957. I mean, there one George Herbert, of course, the most beautiful religious poetry and there's a touch of that in them but they're

not so beautiful. Unfortunately, George Herbert did it rather better. You did. You wonder what's the point of recycling in some ways and the risk of them is self-indulgence I think. Yes. Well, thank you all very much. I enjoyed that a lot. I'm sure.

I'll listen to it. Thank you very much, Fran Brut. Gene McRough-Wilson and Max Agreement. Next week we're going to be talking about Renaissance astrology. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.