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.