"A Very Perfect, Gentle Knight"

No sooner had we received the news, in June, of the death of Dennis Silk, one of Siegfried Sassoon's greatest friends, who for the past ten years had been President of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, than obituaries, reminiscences and photographs were flooding the web. It was hard to find anything useful to say in this blog on the subject of Dennis and his reputation. Having just returned from attending his memorial service at Southwark Cathedral, I have realised how much more there is to say about him.

Dennis was a multi-talented man who excelled in many things. Few sportsmen can claim to be intellectuals, but he was both an exceptional cricketer (as well as a useful rugby player) and a great scholar. His thirty-five-year career as a schoolmaster, much of it as Warden of Radley College, won him many friends and admirers; I've lost count of the number of men who have spoken with pride of their time as one of his pupils. One doesn't need to approve of the public school system to be able to recognise that Dennis's motivation throughout his career came from what he saw as the opportunity to give boys the advantages of the good education his missionary father had managed to obtain for him despite lack of funds. Radley is considered by many to be "different" from the other boarding schools at the top end of the market, and much of this can be attributed to his personal influence.

I first met Dennis in 2000, when he spoke at the famous "Marlborough Day", as a result of which the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship was founded, but it was some years before I got to know him well and realised what a charming and accomplished man he was. His great contribution to Sassoon studies was that he managed to persuade the elderly Sassoon to record some of his poems on tape during the 1960s. Since the few recordings Sassoon made for radio no longer exist, Dennis's private tapes are unique and invaluable. Through Dennis we heard funny stories about Sassoon, and these have been recorded by the biographers when they might otherwise have been lost to posterity.

At his memorial service on 19th November, over a thousand people filled Southwark's relatively small cathedral to share their memories of Dennis, and Radley's school choir provided most of the musical inspiration - I can't omit to mention that a jazz sextet from Christ's Hospital (the school Dennis himself attended) played us out with a Glenn Miller tune. In addition, there were teachers and pupils from Marlborough College, another school where Dennis taught. Because of the numbers present, big screens were used to ensure that the whole congregation had a view of what was going on at the front, as well as displaying old photos of Dennis - as a schoolboy, as a young man going out to bat, enjoying quiet moments with his wife Diana, and of course on special occasions. In almost all of these, he was grinning broadly in the way we all remember. An anonymous caricature of him in his Radley days adorned the back of the order of service, emphasising the prominent chin that was most of his most distinctive physical features.

As one might expect, everyone who spoke or read - family, friends, former colleagues and teammates - did so with warmth and admiration, but some of the most moving tributes were readings from literature. Sassoon's poem "Dreamers" was a great favourite of Dennis's, and was read with feeling by his son Tom, but perhaps even more touching was the reading by the actress Jill Freud, wife of Dennis's late friend Sir Clement Freud, who commented that Geoffrey Chaucer, when writing the preface to the Knight's Tale, "didn't know at the time that he was talking about Dennis". I think that it is apt to include the whole quotation here, as a way of summing up what Dennis means to us.

A knight there was, and that a worthy man
Who from the day on which he first began
To ride abroad had followed chivalry,
Truth, honour, generousness and courtesy.
He was of sovereign value in all eyes,
And though so much distinguished, he was wise
And in his bearing modest as a maid.
He never yet a boorish thing had said
In all his life to any, come what might.
He was a very perfect, gentle knight.

"Mad Jack": a Wednesday Play

In Britain, The Wednesday Play was a series of original dramas broadcast by the BBC on - you've guessed it - Wednesday nights, between 1964 and 1970. At home, it usually signalled the turning off of the TV, and for many years that was my bedtime. The Wednesday Play and its successor, Play for Today (which was on a Thursday) were usually deemed "unsuitable for children" because they contained references to sex or worse. Some of them, such as the famous "Cathy Come Home", dealt with social issues; another, "The War Game", dealt so realistically with the threat of nuclear war that it was not broadcast on television until 1985. More often, the plays were simply what my mother used to call "way out".

I do not think my parents watched "Mad Jack", the play about Siegfried Sassoon that was broadcast in 1970, only three years after the death of the man himself. They would certainly not have thought it suitable for children, although I was fifteen by then and would probably have been allowed to watch it had I expressed a wish to do so. But I didn't, either because I didn't know what it was about or because I simply wasn't interested.

The play was written by a moderately successful screenwriter called Tom Clarke, who died in 1993. Clarke was born a few days before the end of the First World War, which may well explain his interest in the subject. In the Second World War, he had served in both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Artillery. His obituary suggests that he was something of a "character" and perhaps had a few personality traits in common with Sassoon. I doubt that they ever met.

In this production, the role of Sassoon is played by Michael Jayston, who at the time was an up-and-coming TV actor of 35. He spends much of the action staring into the middle distance on a beach, listening to the voice in his head, and the effect of this is oddly moving. Jayston has done great things in his career, but I would never have thought of him for Sassoon - he has a kind of gravitas that I suspect did not come naturally to the real Siegfried, though no doubt he was able to put it on when required, just as he could assume a false jollity in the company of his wartime comrades - which we also witness in the play. In the scenes where he approaches other hotel guests talking random nonsense summoned up by his nightmares, we see the more excitable, neurotic side of the character and we begin to understand the reasons why he was sent to Craiglockhart, but there is no denouement as such. We never get to meet Rivers or find out what happened next.

Nor do we ever get under the skin of Robert Graves, played by Michael Pennington (a former pupil of Dennis Silk and now a patron of the SSF). Pennington was then 27 but looked considerably younger, like the overgrown schoolboy Graves was in real life. Since Graves himself was still living, the character is disguised under the name "Geoffrey Cromlech". Cromlech spends his time observing the other officers with a mildly cynical air, and only comes into his own in the later scenes when he arrives to persuade Sassoon to go before a medical board. His motivation remains unclear.

Knowing as much as we do, from Sassoon's own account, about the real events behind the action, we might have expected more from the play, but the author may have been restricted by the sensibilities of Sassoon's family and friends. The performances of the two lead actors are difficult to fault, and several of the poems are worked neatly into the action. The play is currently available on Youtube. How long the BBC will allow it to stay there is anyone's guess. Make the most of the opportunity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5ZZ134kjnY

The Joy of Podcasts

Whenever we have a long car journey ahead of us, my husband usually gets out his iPod (or whatever you call it) and connects it to the in-car power supply so that we can listen to his huge collection of podcasts en route. Our interests don't exactly coincide so we sometimes begin with an argument about which one to listen to.

On one recent occasion, I favoured "Bess of Hardwick" but Husband liked the sound of "Indians in World War I". Was he surprised when, on hearing the speaker's voice, I immediately said "That sounds like Santanu Das"! As the podcast continued, he was discomfited to find Santanu's talk, focusing on the experiences of Indians who fought in, or were affected by, the First World War, veering away from the subject of military history into the realms of social history and even, dare I say it, literature.

Santanu Das is, of course, an old friend of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship. His book, India, Empire and First World War Culture, was published in 2018, and you can actually still hear the podcast we listened to by going to https://www.historyextra.com/period/first-world-war/indians-in-world-war-one/  (you have to get past a short advert first). If you do, you will understand why I found it so fascinating and what makes Santanu such a valued member of the war poetry community of scholars.

The experiences of the Indian sepoys are in many ways typical of First World War infantrymen as a whole, but there are important differences. Without going into too much detail, one important difference is the way they were looked on by their white commanding officers and comrades, often with a kind of condescending affection, much like the feelings recorded by junior officers like Sassoon about the working-class soldiers under their command. It is easy for the mind of an educated 21st century reader to be disapproving of some of their comments and attitudes, but to forgive Sassoon and his generation, we have to understand something of the world they lived in.

Jared Diamond is an American historian and anthropologist you may not have heard of. His contribution to the set of podcasts describes his approach to analysing historical events through psychology, but his best-known work is 1997's Guns, Germs and Steel, a trans-disciplinary work which won a Pulitzer Prize. In it, Diamond explained why certain civilisations have dominated and survived where others have failed. Diamond's analyses of the influences that cause societies around the world to react differently to crises are well worth examining.

Also interesting, and in some ways a natural progression from Santanu Das and Jared Diamond, was a podcast recorded some time ago by former politician and soldier, the late Paddy Ashdown, who had at the time just published his last book, Nein!: Standing Up to Hitler 1935-1944, which dealt with the numerous failed attempts to unseat the Fascist dictator before he could destroy the future of Europe.

Lord Ashdown's credentials as a warrior were second to none; perhaps it was because of this that he understood the political landscape, both international and domestic, better than most. Having been born in British India and spent part of his childhood in Northern Ireland, he recognised the colonial mindset and its inevitable consequences. Nevertheless, it came as a bit of a surprise to hear him say that, had he grown up as a Roman Catholic in the province during the 1950s and 1960s, he might well have become a member of the IRA; he understood the circumstances that led to the Troubles.

Siegfried was acquainted with an earlier Ireland, one that was beset by its own troubles and heading towards the long-denied independence, but he did not become a rebel until 1917. It was not in his nature to defy authority unless he was moved to do so by personal experience, and the losses of so many friends, combined with what we would now call PTSD, pushed him into his protest. Who can say whether, under other circumstances, he might ever have considered more drastic action?

A Classic Re-telling

Until recently I had not heard of the British novelist John Harris, although I had heard of his novel The Sea Shall Not Have Them, which became a famous film starring Michael Redgrave and Dirk Bogarde. There will be many reading this who have a better knowledge of his literary output than I have. In the early 1960s, when Harris wrote his novel about the Battle of the Somme, Covenant with Death, the public was still coming to terms with the knowledge that poor planning and inept actions on the part of some commanding officers had resulted in rather a lot of unnecessary deaths during the First World War. 

Harris was not born until 1916, the year of the Somme debacle, so he could not have witnessed the carnage at first hand (though he did serve in the RAF during the Second World War), but his telling of the story of a "Pals" battalion consisting of local newspaper reporters from a Yorkshire city puts the reader absolutely on the spot, which is why it has been called one of the five best novels about warfare ever written.. Perhaps his own background, as a reporter on a paper in the Rotherham area, helped him get under the skin of the men who sign up eagerly at the start of the war and, like Siegfried Sassoon, spend many months being trained and drilled, impatient to get to where the action is, only to find themselves abandoned to a fate their skills and bravado cannot change, however determined they may be.  

I often wonder how many of today's young men would have agreed to go into battle against an enemy under such conditions. It is one thing to have the odds stacked against you, but quite another to know that the battle is already lost because those in authority lacked the foresight and/or intelligence to muster their resources sensibly and humanely, still less the moral courage to call it off when it became clear that failure was inevitable. It could all have turned out so differently at the Somme, a campaign that could have been won quickly and easily if more attention had been paid to the evidence of their own eyes and less to traditional beliefs and methods.

Men are no longer shot for desertion; regardless of that, I cannot imagine that the better-educated youths of the 21st century, who have almost lost their awareness of the class distinction that prevailed a hundred years ago, would have obeyed their commanding officers so unquestioningly. They may be willing to take risks, but those risks are nowadays calculated and understood much better than they were in times when poor communications between the top and bottom of the hierarchy meant that those leading the campaign had little appreciation of front-line conditions. Siegfried Sassoon was not one of those who were called upon to go over the top. His duties on the first day of the Somme were barely dangerous, let alone suicidal. Perhaps it was worse for him, having to watch it all without being able to make a difference. It took a year, but eventually he felt he had to try to put a stop to it all. After his protests were ignored, he agreed to return to duty, not because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because it gave him a degree of power to help his comrades which he could not have as long as he stayed at Craiglockhart.

The drawback of writing about historical events is that the reader knows, from the beginning, how things turn out. The moment Mark Fenner joins up, in the early chapters of Covenant with Death, we can anticipate the deaths of most of his comrades; the only thing we don't know is which few will survive. When watching old films about the Second World War, we instinctively know that the boy who lied about his age and the one that keeps talking about his girl back home are going to be among the casualties, but somehow the First World War generates a different kind of guessing game. I particularly liked the ending, or non-ending, of John Harris's novel, which holds back from the usual sentimental reunion of the survivor with his loving family. This is a cut above the average formulaic war story. If you can find a copy, read it.

Review - Richard Aldington 1930-1962 by Vivien Whelpton

Richard Aldington seems to have missed out in the First World War centenary bonanza that certain other writers have been enjoying in the past five years. Not exactly a household name to begin with, he is about as well-known now as he was when Vivien Whelpton began her two-volume biography in 2014. This is strange: Aldington, in his time, was a highly-regarded poet and novelist, yet now I can't find anyone outside war poetry circles who has even heard of him. What went wrong?

This second volume of what is and will continue to be the definitive biography, Richard Aldington: Novelist, Biographer and Exile, follows Aldington from 1930, and it does assume, from the start, an acquaintance with his life up to and including the publication of Death of a Hero in 1929. There is little concession to the casual reader: people who figured in the writer's earlier life are mostly mentioned only by surname and the index is not as comprehensive as I would have liked. On the other hand, the Introduction does cover all the salient events of volume 1, and the writing as a whole is tighter than in that first volume.

By 1930, Aldington was living with Brigit Patmore, who comes across as a curiously colourless character here. It can hardly be denied that Aldington himself was colourful enough for both of them. Vivien Whelpton, despite her obvious admiration for her subject's work, both poetry and prose, does not shrink from describing his many faults as fully as she does his virtues. The amount of research that went into this comprehensive biography is both staggering and highly commendable, putting it on a par with Jean Moorcroft Wilson's spectacularly successful two-volume biography of Sassoon.

One thing I don't find helpful is the decision to separate aspects of the subject's life into separate, overlapping chapters; I would have liked to understand the effects of Aldington's private life on his work, and vice versa, as it happened. It is not until Chapter 8, having gone over their (many) travels in the 1930s and then over Aldington's publishing history during those years, that we begin to get under the skin of his relationship with Brigit Patmore and discover that, despite the protestations of undying love in his letters, he was never actually faithful to her. He enjoyed receiving flirty fan letters from female readers, two of whom subsequently became his lovers. Patmore's devotion to her two grown-up sons, Derek and Michael, meant that the couple did not spend as much time together as they might otherwise have done, and it is clear that Aldington was sometimes exasperated by the young men's behaviour. One cannot help speculating how much of his womanising was the outcome of feeling neglected by his partner, who, like all mothers, tended to prioritise her children's welfare.

Patmore must have been particularly hurt when Aldington chose her daughter-in-law, Netta, for his lover, not long after Netta and Michael had got married, and even more so when he managed to get Netta pregnant. Aldington's homophobic tendencies sometimes creep out in his letters, and his belief that Michael was a "pansy" evidently coloured his desire to run off with Michael's wife Netta. It was just as well that Michael's mother had turned down Aldington's offer of marriage, for by 1938 he was married to the already heavily pregnant Netta, after achieving a last-minute divorce from his first wife, the American poet H.D. His ambivalent relationship with H.D. continued throughout his lifetime, but Netta would eventually leave him.

Although she does not merit much mention in this second part of Aldington's biography, his own mother's emotional neglect of him, coupled with her licentious personal conduct, ensured that he was permanently resentful of her, and it was not until 1930 that he claimed to have recovered from the traumas of his earlier life. If anyone ever suffered from war neurosis, it was Aldington, but he used the consequent emotions in his writing in a very different way from Sassoon. Revenge literature never works well, and can easily ruin a novelist's otherwise magnificent work. We see what Aldington was capable of in a poem like "Life Quest":

I saw the rag-clothed skeletons of Loos

I saw my own body lying white and helpless 

Belly turned to the sun. 

His books, despite their variable quality, were extremely popular and were well thought-of by critics such as Edmund Blunden, with whom he exchanged favourable reviews.

One of the delights of a book about the literary scene of this period is finding out more about the subject's social circle, and Whelpton does not disappoint, treating us to a literary "Who's Who" of the mid-20th century, with names like Elizabeth von Arnim, Richard Church, C P Snow, Henry Williamson and Alec Waugh representing just a small cross-section of Aldington's contacts. One character that sparkles from the page is the woman who is, I understand, going to be the subject of her next biography. Bryher, a wealthy heiress and novelist, became H.D.'s life companion, but in later life she would be a good friend to the ailing Aldington, supporting him financially and showing no resentment for his earlier conduct towards both women.

Aldington's most successful relationship seems to have been with his daughter, Catha. It seems highly likely that part of the motivation for his decision to marry Netta instead of her mother-in-law was his "almost pitiful desire for a child". Later, Catha, like so many teenagers, would play her parents off against one another and would temporarily reject her mother's company in favour of her father's. There would, however, be a rapprochement with Netta towards the end of his life (somewhat as Hester Sassoon came back into her husband's life in his latter days).

It seems bizarre to me that Aldington's path and Sassoon's should not have crossed, especially when they shared friends such as Blunden, Robert Graves and Osbert Sitwell. This was a period when many writers (including Sassoon) were allowing petty slights and jealousies to facilitate "satirical" works, and Aldington continued his thinly-veiled caricaturing of former friends like Ezra Pound for many years after the Great War. When I checked the contents of the Viking Book of Poetry, which Aldington edited in 1947, it was with some relief that I found Sassoon listed alongside Blunden, Owen and Graves.

The Second World War sent Aldington into a spiral of depression; like Sassoon, he had not dreamed that history would repeat itself so soon. One therefore has to admire his prolific output all the more, particularly when one considers the amount of travelling he did, for he produced not just poetry and novels, but biographies of subjects as diverse as D H Lawrence (who had been a personal friend) and the Duke of Wellington (who had not).

It was one of these biographies that got him into the most trouble. During the 1940s Aldington was already complaining of being ostracised by the British literary establishment, including the BBC; how many of these slights were real and how many imagined is not clear. His expectations were high, and he may have overlooked the disadvantages of living abroad for so many years, at various times in Spain, France, Italy and the United States. At times his story gives us the impression he has no staying power: one moment New Mexico is the greatest place in the world, the next it is Florida, California, or Paris. As a critic, whilst he had a facility of appreciating the work of those who could reciprocate, he had made the common error of expecting other critics to review his work more favourably than he had reviewed theirs, and had thus turned people like T S Eliot and Stephen Spender against him. However, until the fateful decision to write a biography of T E Lawrence, there seems no firm evidence of any plot by his literary enemies to ruin his career.

In 1950, Aldington found himself in serious debt because of payments he had failed to make to his ex-lover, Brigit Patmore. Netta's response to this was to try to build herself a paying career in London as an artist - something for which Aldington judged she had no talent. His evident despair ("EVERYTHING has gone wrong", he wrote to a friend), combined with chronic illness, meant that he was not in the best frame of mind to begin a biography of "the legend". Before he had completed his research, he began referring to T E Lawrence as a "murderer" and a "warmonger". After reading The Mint, he claimed to be "converted", but admitted that he found it hard to get to the "real" T E. By the time he had finished writing, he was calling Lawrence a "little phoney". 

The biography was not even at the printer's when the criticisms began. The revelation of a fact not known to many at the time, that of Lawrence's illegitimate birth, was felt by the publishers to be dynamite, especially when Lawrence's mother was still alive; today it would be obvious that Aldington, once having discovered it, could not repress such a matter. However, Lawrence's statement that Churchill had offered him the position of High Commissioner of Egypt in succession to General Allenby was widely disbelieved and led to a violent controversy that does not seem to me to have been justified. We know from Sassoon's experience that Churchill, in the First World War period, was bombastic and indiscreet, and was ever ready to imply that he had preferments at his disposal.

Naturally, Aldington, an inveterate conspiracy theorist, believed that the rejection of any of his work must be due to the establishment's disapproval of him as a person. His hypersensitivity at any criticism of his novels contrasts with his willingness to ruthlessly satirize real, living people with whom he was acquainted. The relative failure of his last few works sounds like the result, rather than the cause, of his descent into despair and ill-health. The deaths of close friends like Roy Campbell and Frieda Lawrence (wife of D H) were an additional upset. The one bright spot was the popularity of his books in the Soviet Union, where his right-of-centre politics did not seem to be considered a problem. H.D.'s final decline and death were almost the last straw, but preceded a final triumph - Aldington's visit to Russia to celebrate his 70th birthday, just a few weeks before he died of a heart attack. 

By the end of the book I had not come to like Richard Aldington, but there is no doubt that many people genuinely did. The trauma and bitterness of his early years had mostly worn off. Posthumous tributes from acquaintances described him as kind and generous, with a great sense of humour. Taking his life as a whole, he was an accomplished writer, but a flawed man. Fred Crawford, speaking of the Lawrence  débâcle, claimed that Aldington's "passion for truth" drove him on, adding "Had he foreseen the high personal cost of his TEL book, he would have written it anyway."  Personally, I do not think he would have.

All This Reading!

"All this reading!" is actually a quotation from one of Barbara Pym's novels, its significance being - I think - that the heroine does not really "rate" reading as a pastime and rather despises herself for doing it. Time was that many people, especially women, felt that way. How dare they read when they could be doing the dusting! Things have not got a lot better in that regard. I once shared an office with a woman who was setting up a computer dating profile. When asked to state her hobbies, she put down "reading", which caused great hilarity among the rest of us, who had observed her addiction to the most scurrilous stories in Hello! and similar publications but knew that she had not picked up a book since her schooldays. At least when the characters in Pym novels mention reading, we can assume they are talking about poetry, novels, or learned non-fiction.

Issue number 36 of Siegfried's Journal will soon be "put to bed" after the usual frantic last-minute adjustments, and we know that our members love reading it. Siegfried himself was of course a considerable reader; even the word "voracious" seems somehow inadequate to describe the way he consumed books and the pleasure he got out of them. As a youth, he bought them, read them, and, when his money ran out, sold them to get the funds to buy more, recording the purchases meticulously in a notebook.

Public libraries at the turn of the twentieth century were not plentiful. The work of the Carnegie Trust began during the First World War, with a general aim of improving public well-being; its funds came from the Scottish-born entrepreneur, Andrew Carnegie. Say what you like about Carnegie's failures in the area of industrial relations, he recognised how learning could raise people out of the vicious circle of poverty, and he gave away millions of dollars to try to help others obtain an education. Carnegie himself, born in a one-roomed cottage in Dunfermline, had benefited from the existence of a Free School, founded in the town by a local philanthropist. His name is nowadays closely associated with the public library system in Britain.

In 2012, over 200 public libraries closed in the UK, and many others are now existing on a staff consisting largely of volunteers. Mobile libraries are almost a thing of the past, since it is assumed that everyone has a car and can go and visit their nearest branch - which may of course be many miles away. Book exchange has become a popular substitute, and of course e-readers are playing their part, both in the decline of library services and in the resurgence of reading as a hobby. (But on the London Underground, you will still see more people playing games on their phones than using their Kindle devices.) The way we read has changed subtly: there are more distractions and attention spans are becoming shorter. Schools and churches no longer award books as prizes; children would look askance if they were presented with a dictionary or a book of poems (though some might be satisfied at receiving the latest David Walliams or Philip Pullman).

I don't know if this is something to worry about. I think that Siegfried would have found it a concern. His work depended for its popularity on being read, in book form; he was never happy reading his poems to an audience, though many of his contemporaries did so. He sought out others who enjoyed reading as much as he did - men like Robert Graves, who later claimed to have spotted Sassoon because he owned a copy of the Essays of Lionel Johnson. As he pointed out, there would not be many young officers who would be anxious to read a book by an author like Johnson, a repressed homosexual, Catholic convert and a sympathiser with the Irish independence movement. Johnson was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, and this would have been an additional attraction for Sassoon and Graves.

By the end of his life, Sassoon owned an enormous library so presumably he didn't need to go out and borrow books. It is well attested that he could tell a visitor exactly where on his many shelves to find a particular title and describe it in detail. Many trained librarians get to know their stock well enough to be able to do the same, but the skill is in decline.

By coincidence, I have just learned about the existence of a new magazine called "Chapter Catcher", which contains serendipitously-collected chapters and other short pieces from a number of sources, in order to encourage less dedicated readers to go on and find the original work. To quote the founder, "the idea is to get people to read wider and deeper. It is taking people on a journey." Anything's worth a try.

Icons

The title of this post was also the title of a recent TV series, but the makers of the latter never tried to define what they meant by "icon". It's such an overused word nowadays that everyone thinks they understand its significance, and I'm not even counting the use of the word to refer to the little pictures on our computers and phones that guide us through the range of menu options. In reality, few people think about or care what "icon" really means. The Greek word actually translates as "image" or "representation". How can a person be an image? The answer, I think, is that the person in question represents something greater than his or her self. So, for example, a picture of Albert Einstein might represent genius, Marilyn Monroe might represent sex appeal, Muhammad Ali might represent either sport, or perhaps a certain kind of courage - those are the concepts that enter our thoughts when we look at a picture of them.

The adjective "iconic" is even more widely and ignorantly used than the corresponding noun these days. The covers of several Beatles albums have been described as "iconic". What does that mean? Does it mean that we immediately think of the Beatles when we see them? And if so, what's so significant about that? It's their album cover, after all - you'd expect it to represent them. Sometimes the term is wrongly used, but sometimes it might be used to say "this represents the 1960s" or "this represents a certain type of music".

On holiday in Bulgaria recently, I was in an Orthodox church while several visitors entered and reverently kissed the various icons that were on display around me. That was when I really started to think about the meaning and purpose of an icon. Later, I asked our guide whether the imagery in the decoration of both the interior and the exterior of the building (completed in the 19th century) was an attempt to recapture that of the medieval church that previously stood at the monastery's centre. No, he explained, the images had a significance entrenched in religious tradition. If you want to represent the Virgin Mary, that's what she looks like. If you want to paint a certain saint or apostle, that's how they look. Anything else might confuse the faithful.

Modern icons are thus often misnamed, when in fact their significance may be transitory; but make no mistake, some will last a lot longer than we anticipate. However, the image has to be immediately recognisable. Alan Turing was chosen by the public out of those featured in the Icons series as "the greatest person of the 20th century". Well, he may be that, but would the average person even recognise his name, let alone a picture of him? So perhaps Turing is not - at least, not yet - an icon.

I have so far been unsuccessful in finding any on-line references to Sassoon as an icon. Certainly not many people would recognise him from a photograph. Wilfred Owen is far more recognisable simply because there are fewer images of him; he remains forever young, captured in the "iconic" image used as the frontispiece of the 1920 collection of his poems. He is certainly revered by many of his fans in exactly the way traditional icons are. If Owen is an icon, what does he represent? It's not just poetic genius. It's not just the First World War. It's not just courage. Perhaps it's all three, plus the tragedy of premature death.

Sassoon's status as an icon - if he has one - is even harder to define. Both he and Owen have been called "gay icons", but that simply means that they are considered examples of men who could not acknowledge their sexuality because of the social restrictions of their times; I don't think it means that they are seen by most of the public as representative of the LGBT community. Sassoon's poetry and prose have gathered him many admirers, but I don't think that is the key to his status either. Increasingly he is looked at as a man who stood up for what he believed in, regardless of the possible consequences, thus, as with Muhammad Ali, his iconic qualities are intangible and may change with the times.

None of this is important to most of us. I happen to belong to a society that aims to encourage an interest in Sassoon and his work, but, like most members, I also belong to other societies reflecting my other interests. I don't "worship" Sassoon and I don't see him as a representation of something divine. Nevertheless, I do see him as an example for the 21st century, a proponent of peace, both physical and spiritual, and someone I admire despite his many flaws. I know that many others feel the same.

A Sense of Community

Whenever the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship holds an event - such as the one on Saturday last, jointly hosted with the Wilfred Owen Association - I inevitably get comments from new members about what a "friendly" occasion it is. I do like to think of the SSF as a community, and one that has fostered individual friendships among its members as well as the pleasure of seeing familiar faces at events. One of our members has a theory that the warmth and friendliness of the SSF is a direct result of Sassoon himself being a more likeable person than certain other writers. I'm not sure I subscribe to that, but I like the theory. It's rare to find anyone with a bad word to say for him; even A E Housman, who was unhappy about what he felt was Sassoon's over-representation in an anthology of the early 1930s (as Peter Parker told us on Saturday), doesn't actually say that he disliked Sassoon, or indeed his poetry.

Communities come in many different shapes and sizes. Usually they have something to do with geographical location, as does the small community that looks after St Bride's Church in Llansantffraed, which Sassoon himself visited in 1924. The church is effectively separated from its natural congregation by a busy main road, with not even an underpass or a footbridge to assist them in getting there. The group that keeps the church functioning and ensures that the grave of Henry Vaughan is cared for consists partly of local people and partly of supporters from all over the country - in fact, from all around the world. The Friends of Llansantffraed Church was formed in 2015 and has helped to arrange the hosting of additional events at the church, such as concerts and special visits. Mervyn Bramley is one of the most energetic people I know, and was as usual on hand at Sunday's Henry Vaughan memorial service to welcome visitors like myself and Phil Carradice, this year's SSF representatives.

The Friends are now gearing up for the 400th anniversary of Vaughan's birth in 1621, and it would be wonderful if Sassoonites could be part of the anniversary celebrations. Vaughan's poetry meant a great deal to Sassoon, and was an important factor in his spiritual development. At the service, the choir of Abergavenny Priory mingled with enthusiasts from as far away as the United States, while members of the congregation served tea and cakes after the service. Phil was even reunited with an old school friend!

To return to the subject of our SSF community, Saturday afternoon's event in the somewhat "snug" basement room at the Poetry Cafe in London was the usual mix of laughter, conversation and learning, with Peter Parker's wonderful talk on Housman ably followed up by Robert John Fanshawe, who filled us in on the events of the Battle of the Sambre, where Wilfred Owen was killed. Little has been said and written about this incident which, though flawed in its execution, was actually a major factor in bringing about the end of the war. Robert, like a number of our members, speaks from personal experience of the armed forces.

Someone made the point on Saturday that Sassoon himself sometimes wasn't very sociable, particularly at Craiglockhart. This is true, of course, and we must remember his somewhat solitary upbringing, not even going to school until he was in his teens, not to mention his determination to separate himself from the residents of "Dottyville" - Owen and Rivers excepted. I get the impression when reading his work that the strongest sense of community he ever felt was among his fellow officers and men in the trenches, even though many of them may have been very different from him in terms of interests and family background. In later life, he was a valued member of the Heytesbury community even after he stopped participating in cricket and other local events, but perhaps he would have seen himself more as a member of a community of the mind, since he never stopped corresponding or receiving visits from friends like Edmund Blunden and Dennis Silk. And there is no question about whether the SSF is a community in the truest sense of the word.

Breakfast in Boston

The local TV news told us there was a storm coming. It also relayed the far more interesting information that the bar at Boston Public Library was now serving literary-themed cocktails. Accordingly, the following afternoon found me knocking back a "Tequila Mockingbird". This was the barman's error, as I had actually ordered a "Catcher in the Rye", but I am a novice in alcoholic terms and couldn't tell the difference between the flavour of tequila and that of rye whisky.

Siegfried Sassoon's visit to Boston, in April 1920 - 99 years before my first visit to the city - found him in an unhappy mood. His lecture tour of the United States was not going according to plan. The Pond Bureau, the organisation that had booked him, had gone bankrupt and he was left to find his own engagements. Being the diffident man he was, he had little idea how to go about getting these, and relied mainly on his circle of friends to point him in the right direction.

His time in Boston began with a recital at Wellesley College, the famous women's educational institution located in Greater Boston. This was followed by a meeting at the Harvard University Poetry Club, elsewhere in the city.  His host in Boston was Harold Laski, a British political economist who was lecturing at Harvard. At Laski's house in the suburb of Cambridge, according to a history of Harvard, could be heard some of the best conversation in the city, perhaps partly because he and his wife often entertained their students, a habit that was highly unusual at the time. 

I don't know whether Harvard students in our day spend much time with their lecturers outside classes, but it was of great interest to me to be attending a conference in the prestigious surroundings of the Harvard Law School, and having pointed out to me a framed photograph of the professor who inspired the 1970 novel The Paper Chase, later a successful film and television series. The title could have summed up Sassoon's opinion of academia, since he had tried and failed, at both Oxford and Cambridge, to achieve any qualification at all.

If academic study seemed like hard work, reading his poetry in front of audiences turned out to be an equally great challenge. Before his appearance at Harvard, Sassoon was forced to spend a day in bed, so worn out did he feel after putting himself in the limelight in New York and Chicago. Chairing his meeting next day at the Harvard Union was the redoubtable Amy Lowell, a cigar-smoking poet, then in her forties, who had never had a college education because her parents felt it was inappropriate for a woman. Sassoon wrote that she was "by no means in agreement with my opinions" but was nevertheless a "generous admirer" of his writing.

Sassoon has little else to say in his memoirs about his experiences in Boston. For my part, I was impressed by Harvard but found the atmosphere very different from Oxford or Cambridge, with the university buildings laid out in a spacious area. The conference organiser had told me to look for a "Romanesque" building, which puzzled me somewhat until I saw it - the pseudo-Norman arches and heavily-decorated facade made an impression that was not at all ecclesiastical but might well cause any student to feel privileged at being allowed entry.

The conference, of course, had nothing whatever to do with Sassoon. I have the impression that, by the time he visited Boston, he was weary of North America and looking forward very much to returning to a more familiar environment. I was fortunate enough to find my time in the city both interesting and invigorating. The people I met there might not have been of the same stature as Harold Laski and Amy Lowell, but they were friendly and appreciative, and I hope to be able to return next year for a repeat experience.

Eternal T.E.: Another View

Way back in March 2015 (when I was doubtful how long I would be able to continue to find enough material for blog posts) I wrote about Siegfried Sassoon's friendship with T E Lawrence and the undoubted influence it had on Sassoon. Just to illustrate that there is always more to be known about almost every aspect of Siegfried's life, Steve Chell of the T E Lawrence Society has recently added to the research on this subject, with an article in that society's Journal that must have taken him months to research.

Steve has found no fewer than five poems about Lawrence in the archives at the University of Cambridge, and acknowledges in his article that the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship gave him some assistance in deciphering Siegfried's handwriting in order that he could make out some of the wording! It's very clear from these poems that Sassoon had difficulty putting his feelings about Lawrence into words; the latter's death in May 1935 was one of the most moving events he had experienced since the end of the First World War, and one which changed his life - not only because he lost a great friend but because he became convinced that T.E. had sent him a message from beyond the grave, and this was the true beginning of his religious conversion. Just to underline this, one of the poems is titled "A Prayer".

Four of the five poems were written in the year Lawrence died, and the other in 1938. Some of the manuscript poems show the kind of crossings-out and additions that we are used to seeing (for example, in the original manuscript of Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth"); others are completely struck through. In view of the trouble Sassoon took in searching for the "mot juste", I have no doubt that there were other attempts and perhaps unfinished drafts that lie somewhere undiscovered or were destroyed. Sassoon was frustrated by hearing other talk of his late friend in "regurgitating torrents" and resented their presumption in thinking they knew anything of Lawrence the man.

In "A Prayer", Sassoon sees Lawrence as someone who was unhappy with fame and tried to avoid it wherever possible. As Chell puts it, he "was raised to the heights of fame but sought anonymity". Sassoon himself did not suffer from this affliction; on the contrary, although he was naturally diffident, he enjoyed being recognised and having his work praised. He was particularly irritated when, not long after he first met Lawrence, a society hostess approached him only to ask if he could manage to persuade his new acquaintance to attend one of her parties. However, he generally kept himself at arm's length from his most gushing admirers.

In his long years of seclusion at Heytesbury House, after the Second World War, Sassoon received many visitors but did little to encourage cold callers. Perhaps he was only too conscious of the differences between himself and Lawrence, knowing that he could not have tolerated the kind of hardships that Lawrence voluntarily inflicted on himself. It was all very well to put up with being in the trenches during wartime, but Sassoon could never have been satisfied with the tiny retreat that Lawrence made for himself at Clouds Hill, any more than Lawrence would have felt comfortable living in an enormous house like Heytesbury.

Chell quotes Dennis Silk as recognising that Sassoon hero-worshipped Lawrence whilst simultaneously feeling protective of him; certainly he was jealous of the friendship that grew up between Lawrence and the brash Robert Graves. The more confident Graves was always ready to adopt Sassoon's friends as "finds" of his own (as he did with Owen). As Philip Neale, Chair of the T E Lawrence Society, made clear in his talk at our AGM, Lawrence's abiding doubts as to his own worth as a writer continued until his death, and Sassoon recognised this feeling because of his own self-doubt. It may have been gratifying to him to have Lawrence ask his opinion about the literary value of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but Sassoon may equally well have envied his skills as a prose writer. In one of the unpublished poems, he speaks of Lawrence's "one intense tremendous book" as being his lasting memorial.

A Simpleton's Progress

There is a gap in Siegfried Sassoon's published diaries between 1918 and 1920, but of course we know what he was doing during that period. Jean Moorcroft Wilson's biography is always my first port of call when I want to find out details of Siegfried's activities at a specific time, such as February 1919, when he was beginning to fall out of love with Gabriel Atkin and was wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his own life. His respected mentor, W H R Rivers, had suggested that he study political economy, but Sassoon's character was not apt to submit itself to the self-discipline of a course of "independent study" at Oxford, the location he had chosen largely because of the proximity of his friends, Robert Graves, Frank Prewett and Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Although the sojourn in Oxford was fleeting, it introduced him to another literary circle, for the nearby village of Boars Hill was already becoming known as "Parnassus" because of the number of poets who had settled there. Since he was already confused about his own political views, his attempt at the academic study of politics and philosophy was almost doomed to failure, despite his best efforts. Far more interesting to him were the individuals he met in and around the city. The arrival of Robert Graves to take up the undergraduate place he had been obliged to forego when he joined the armed forces was eagerly anticipated, despite the fact that Graves had married Nancy Nicholson the previous year, much against Sassoon's wishes. By the time Graves arrived, the couple were the parents of a daughter.

Early in February, Sassoon set off to visit one of the most notable members of the Boars Hill community, John Masefield, who had been a hospital orderly in France and now spent his spare time keeping bees, goats and chickens. Masefield had his own theatre, designed for him by local architect Thomas Rayson, for which both Graves and Sassoon were encouraged to write plays, though it does not appear they ever did. The Graves family soon settled near Masefield.

Sassoon's other Oxford friend, Prewett, introduced him to the young William Walton, who had come up to Christ Church as an undergraduate at the unprecedentedly early age of sixteen but would be sent down in 1920. Sassoon's love of music is well known, and he would become a patron of Walton, who dedicated a later piece to him. He in turn introduced Walton to the Sitwell brothers, already friends of Sassoon's, and they returned the favour by introducing Sassoon to the novelist Ronald Firbank, who was more or less the same age but behaved so eccentrically that even the Sitwells - never noted for their conventionality - were nonplussed. Beverley Nichols, a fellow undergraduate of Sacheverell Sitwell, was twelve years Sassoon's junior, but they formed a brief relationship based on mutual attraction. Jean Moorcroft Wilson astutely points out that Sassoon's probable one-night-stand with Nichols was an indication of his increasing acceptance of his own sexuality.

Although Sassoon was becoming concerned that his poetic inspiration was drying up, one of his most famous poems, "Aftermath", comes from this period; this on its own may be considered to have made his stay in Oxford worth while. In mid-March, only a few days after writing it, he was offered a job by the Daily Herald, and this caused him to take the decision to leave Oxford, where he had realised he was never going to fit in. But the time he had spent there was far from wasted.

Meet The Ancestors

If there is one popular activity that has become even more popular as a result of the First World War centenary, it is genealogy or the tracing of one's family connections. Innumerable people have been spurred into the investigation of their connections with individual members of the armed forces. Finding out what Granddad did in the Great War is a pastime that has led many to the battlefields and cemeteries of the Western Front and, in some cases, has indirectly led to valuable historical research being carried out.

Take the case of Walter Parkin, a Yorkshire miner, one of seven children whose father deserted the family when Walter was twelve years old. Walter went on to serve with distinction at Passchendaele, but arrived home in 1918, severely wounded and a shadow of his former self; he died in 1933, aged only 45. In 2014, Walter's great-grandson Richard wrote about his experience of tracing the soldier's career and how it had led to the discovery of the truth behind the family legend that "the bullets just bounced off him" when he came across a 1915 newspaper article describing how his grandfather had been saved from certain death by a uniform button which had taken the brunt of the bullet's impact; both items had been temporarily on display to the public in a local shop window!

The interest doesn't stop at ancestors, either. Those whose grandparents and great-grandparents came back in one piece, or who were in the wrong age group to participate actively in the war, have generally found that they had other relations who were involved and whose history can be traced. Others - school pupils, for example - have been encouraged to follow the lives and deaths of individuals who would otherwise perhaps have had no one to mourn them.
I'm not just talking about the war poets, or people of some notability such as artists and composers, but ordinary soldiers and sailors. Sometimes, in a corner of a foreign field, you will come across little notes attached to individual graves by schoolchildren who have found out a little of that particular man's history and written to "thank" him for his contribution, occasionally with a little poem attached.

Sometimes, in the course of their investigations, people uncover less palatable facts about the lives of their ancestors. As I've probably mentioned before, my father was delighted when he discovered that his own father had spent some time in a military prison - okay, it was only for gambling. That's because the authorities didn't realise that he and his friend had stolen armed forces' property and sold it to Italian householders in order to make the money to purchase a Crown & Anchor board, which soon brought the cash rolling in. No wonder they were jumped one night, on their way home from a local drinking establishment, by locals who resented the amount of money they had taken from them earlier in the evening!

If you're wondering why my father was pleased, it was because the documentation which proved that his father had been incarcerated in early 1919, as well as the report describing the mugging in Italy, demonstrated that his father had not been telling tall tales when he described these incidents to his family. It was all true! There was some good luck involved, as many military records from the period were lost in a fire in 1940, ironically caused by Second World War bombing. I've often wondered what my grandmother thought of her husband's anecdotes; being the daughter of a chapel elder, she probably hoped against hope that their marriage had turned him into a reformed character.

I never met my grandfather as he died before my parents got married. I always assumed that this was from natural causes, as indeed it was, but sometimes I wonder how much his First World War service might have contributed to his poor health. Many men saw the war through only to die from the after-effects of gas or shrapnel wounds like the ones my grandfather had (although it is difficult, for example, to discount the effects of smoking and other factors as causes of the premature deaths of former servicemen in the post-war period).

Just recently the pension records of First World War veterans were released. Knowing that my grandfather had one, I checked it, and discovered that his mother was living in a place called Choppington. I am assuming this to be the place of that name near Newcastle-upon-Tyne; my father was unaware of any connection with.north-east England, and it is also a mystery why my great-grandmother should have been using our family surname when we know for certain that she had remarried and was using a different name in the 1911 census. Will we ever find out?

It seems to me that the interest in ancestors and what they went through is, broadly speaking, a positive phenomenon. There is nothing that brings home historical truths to an individual like their personal effects on one's family. The knowledge of what many suffered sometimes even brings about a sea-change in the attitude of their descendants towards war.

A Hogmanay Tragedy

On the morning of Wednesday, 1st January, 1919, householders in the Hebridean island of Lewis were looking forward with eager anticipation to the imminent arrival home of many of their menfolk, who had been serving with Britain's armed forces overseas in the effort to win the First World War. The fighting was behind them now, and the men themselves looked forward to returning to their homes and crofts and catching up with family life. 283 sailors were travelling home to Stornoway on the Iolaire, and at around two in the morning, they were within a few hundred yards of their home port.

The Iolaire was a yacht launched thirty-seven years earlier. It was privately owned but had been requisitioned by the Admiralty, and had been pressed into service on this occasion because there were not enough suitable vessels available to ferry home the latest band of troops returning to Scotland from active service. One man, 27-year-old Kenneth Macphail, had served throughout the war, including a stint at Gallipoli. In 1917, his ship had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean and he had survived by clinging to wreckage; he spent 34 hours in the water before being rescued, almost the only survivor. The experience was so traumatic that Kenneth, who had completed his recuperation only six months earlier, told his brother Angus that, were he ever in the same situation, he would prefer not to go through the ordeal again and would resign himself to his fate. That was why, when Kenneth's body was recovered from the sea a few days later, his hands were placed firmly in his pockets.

It is hard for most of us to imagine a person not wanting to save his or her own life, but such feelings were not uncommon among servicemen during the First World War. Kenneth Macphail was nevertheless unusual; when the Iolaire struck a rock, within sight of Stornaway harbour, and quickly sank, many of the passengers showed great heroism in trying to escape and help those around them. 201 men - more than two thirds of those aboard - died that night, but John Finlay Macleod, a 30-year-old seaman, had the knowledge of how to ride the crest of a wave to take himself safely onto the rocks, from where he set up a rescue line to bring others safely to dry land. Another survivor, Donald Morrison, actually went down with the ship but managed to climb a mast and cling to it until daylight came and he was rescued.

The causes of the Iolaire disaster were never officially stated, but there were many contributing factors: there were gale-force winds, the ship was not designed to carry so many men, and the crew had never sailed into Stornoway after dark before, and did not have adequate lookouts. The men aboard were weighed down by their uniforms and equipment. Rumours quickly spread that some of the crew had been drunk, which would not have been surprising given that it was Hogmanay and the troops were celebrating their return home. Local people held the Admiralty mainly to blame, but no one was ever disciplined for the failure to bring the men back safely.

Some called the Iolaire's sinking "the crowning sorrow of the war". Women who had been airing the civilian clothes of their husbands and sons in front of their fires found themselves bereaved and in many cases destitute. If Siegfried Sassoon thought that those at home could have no comprehension of what he and his comrades had suffered, he would have been anguished to see the impact on the small communities whose people came down to the shore to find the drowned bodies of their loved ones lined up for identification.

Afterwards, like many of those who had served at the Western Front, the people of Lewis made a point of not talking about the Iolaire disaster. They simply could not cope with the grief. In the recent BBC documentary on the subject, a psychologist pointed out that silence was the way of dealing with such emotions in those days; the islanders never had the benefit of treatment by someone like Dr William Rivers, who might have helped them talk through their thoughts and feelings in order to assuage their grief and stop them sinking into depression (the fate of some of the survivors as well as the bereaved).

Only a hundred years later, now that all those who remember it are dead and gone, has the local community felt free to acknowledge the impact of the events of 1st January 1919. On 1st January this year, Prince Charles - as Duke of Rothesay - and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon attended a memorial service at the monument to those who lost their lives on that tragic night. As a more lasting tribute, local artist Margaret Ferguson painted portraits of a hundred of the sailors, while composer Iain Morrison, the great-grandson of one of the victims, was commissioned to write a piece in memory of the events. Morrison said that he struggled with the task because he found it difficult to create anything that did not carry a sense of reflection and a message of hope. You can see part of the documentary and hear an extract from the piece on Youtube by following this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-PpKyjWseQ