"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.