As seen on screen

Things are not getting any easier for literary societies in lockdown, but at least we are becoming wiser to the possibilities of electronic communication. We've simply had to.

    There is a lot to be said for making our activities available online. Many members, even those of an advanced age, have begun using tools like Zoom and Facebook in a way they would never have dreamed of attempting a year ago. Much as we may prefer the written word to a screen adaptation, the appetite for recorded and/or streamed content is increasing almost daily. Perhaps you, too, have found yourself unable to attend an interesting live seminar on your computer because you were already booked for another live seminar at the same time. With luck, you will have been able to access a recording of the one you missed.

    Many societies have been slow to adapt to "new technology" in the twenty or thirty years it's been available. I've come across many speakers at local meetings who prefer slide projectors to Powerpoint and I've even seen some, in recent years, struggling with OHP projectors, which - let's face it - were never very user-friendly even when there was no alternative. Sometimes this is just a practical matter: buying new electronic equipment costs money.

    It doesn't necessarily work, anyway. This blog, for example, has been in existence for about eight years, and in that time the readership has shrunk rather than grown. The same goes for our Facebook group - regularly used and contributed to by many people, but only around a quarter of those who are members of the group (many of whom are not actually members of the Sassoon Fellowship) ever actually look at the posts, and still fewer join in the discussions. Hence we have held back from attempting to expand into other areas such as Twitter and Instagram; it's not economical of effort.

    Nevertheless, the cancellation of so many live events has led to the societies I'm involved with having been obliged to hold AGMs and other events online, and most of us got off to a shaky start. Even joining a Zoom meeting requires a certain amount of skill, let alone hosting one, as I've been forced to do many times now. For me, however, the revelation has been YouTube. Not that I was unfamiliar with YouTube before last February. I've been using it for years to look for songs I couldn't remember, music I couldn't listen to because I don't have a working CD player in the house, ancient TV programmes that I thought I would never see again, and so on.

    The YouTube landscape has also changed in the past year, however, and for a while even the owners of YouTube could not cope with the sudden upturn in demand. Until the autumn, I didn't even know that you could livestream a Zoom meeting straight to YouTube to enable you to reach a bigger audience without having to pay extra for a Zoom upgrade; it was only when I saw an academic institution doing it that I realised. In September, thanks to my daughter who already know much (but not all) of this, I sat in a small bedroom surrounded by microphones and computers and hosted the AGM of the Barbara Pym Society, followed by a one hour "mini-conference", attended by delegates from all over Europe and the United States as well as the UK. (See my earlier post on this subject.) In doing so, I learned a lot about what NOT to do, as well as what worked well. 

    From there it was a short hop to participating in the "lockdown reading" of a classic novel, and this has spurred on the Sassoon Fellowship to attempt comparable feats, although we are a long way from fulfilling our ambitions yet. We have, however, uploaded two recorded interviews to our new YouTube "channel" (see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1wV-qorFfCLDaWhmIK6Adw/videos ) for the benefit of our members and others who are interested in Sassoon and his work. The Wilfred Owen Association has held live seminars on individual poems by Owen. Even the small local history society of which I'm a member has managed to hold regular monthly meetings on Zoom.

    One of the most interesting things about this trend is that we are attracting a whole new audience. Elderly and disabled people who always found it a chore to attend meetings in person are catching on quickly. Others who were unable to attend events because of transport difficulties, cost, or simply the time involved, are able to access us on the small screen and sometimes to participate actively.  Don't forget, when you are viewing or joining in, that there may be substantial effort involved in setting up these events and the organisers (although we often feel more like the "disorganised") may not be able to keep it up indefinitely. But for the time being, enjoy them, appreciate them, and - best of all - offer constructive feedback. At the time of writing, no one really knows what the future has in store.

When Biggles met Lawrence of Arabia

   I make no apology for another post that begins with an episode from the life of Siegfried Sassoon's beloved and extraordinary friend, T E Lawrence, "Eternal T.E." as Sassoon christened him in a poem written after Lawrence's death. Lawrence remains a legendary figure, and the more one learns about him, the most astonished one is.

    After the war and the failure of his diplomatic efforts to procure a satisfactory outcome to the troubles of the Middle East, exacerbated as they were by British and French imperial ambitions, Lawrence saw nothing for it but to retreat from the world, and his method of doing so was not something most people would even have considered. His career as a guerrilla fighter, living the daily life of a Bedouin with its attendant disadvantages and flirting with danger at every opportunity, show that he was not afraid of physical discomfort; indeed, he seems to have relished it. Nevertheless, he was unprepared for life as a newly-recruited serviceman in the RAF.

    Lawrence chose this path hoping for anonymity, but used the pretext of wanting to write a book about the RAF to convince senior commanders of the desirability of allowing him to enter the service, physically unfit and temperamentally unsuited as he was (not to mention too old to join up). It is remarkable that they went along with his plan, and hardly surprising that he was found out within the year. Had things gone differently, however, he might never have made it past the recruiting sergeant.

    The sergeant whom Lawrence approached at the office in Henrietta Street, London, in August 1922, knew nothing of his true identity, and immediately recognised the scruffy, undersized individual as unsuitable. He referred the matter to a senior officer, one Flying Officer W E Johns, who shared his view that the man presenting himself as "Ross" was an undesirable and showed him the door. The two officers remained concerned that Ross might be a fugitive from the police. When, later, he returned with official documents to support his application, Johns was forced to accept him, but he was unimpressed with the subterfuge and never warmed to Lawrence.

    William Earl Johns, five years Lawrence's junior, had served throughout the war. In 1917 he had joined the Royal Flying Corps and trained as a fighter pilot. Despite several hair-raising adventures with planes, he was no ace, and late in 1918 was captured by the Germans and spent the last two months of the year as a prisoner of war. He continued in the RAF until 1931, when he began working as a journalist. He later founded a magazine called Popular Flying, and it was in this publication that perhaps the most famous fictional pilot of all time, Biggles, first appeared.

    Johns soon began to use the name "Captain W. E. Johns" for publishing his Biggles stories, and by the time he died in 1968 he had written nearly a hundred Biggles books, in addition to numerous other books, novels, serials and plays on other topics. During the Second World War, at the request of the War Office, he even created a female character, "Worrals", for propaganda purposes. 

    It will not surprise you to learn that there are two societies, the W E Johns Appreciation Society and "Biggles & Co", in existence, reflecting the popularity of Johns' writing. One great fan of Biggles is SSF founder member, Phil Carradice, who has spoken several times about how Johns inspired him to begin writing. To date Phil has published over 60 books, but I somehow doubt he will ever outdo the publishing record of his literary hero.

 

December Stillness

 December Stillness - a post by Meg Crane

 

December stillness, teach me through your trees
That loom along the west, one with the land,
The veiled evangel of your mysteries.

While nightfall, sad and spacious, on the down
Deepens, and dusk imbues me where I stand,
With grave diminishings of green and brown,

Speak roofless Nature, your instinctive words;
And let me learn your secret from the sky,
Following a flock of steadfast journeying birds
In lone remote migration beating by.

December stillness, crossed by twilight roads,
Teach me to travel far and bear my loads.

 

       Collected Poems p.211. Composed December 1930; published January 1934 in The Spectator.

 

 

According to Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Sassoon wrote this at Wilsford, Stephen Tennant's house in Wiltshire, on Christmas Eve 1930. Although the relationship would not come to a decisive end for more than another year, it was already evident to Sassoon that it was falling apart, and that he could hang on to what was left of it only by sacrificing his own needs and serving Stephen's errant wishes.

 

As so often, Sassoon pictures himself as a solitary figure enclosed by his own loneliness. If the melancholy landscape in the poem is that of Wiltshire, it is also strongly reminiscent of the Kentish setting of the much earlier poem 'Together' ('Splashing along the boggy woods all day …) – another poem written in response to a lost love. The winter landscape reflects the speaker's sadness, but prompts him in some way to give himself up to whatever Nature can teach him, some wisdom which he believes to exist but cannot yet understand. The bare trees reach upwards to the 'roofless' sky: the image suggests in the first place dereliction and ruin – but something which is 'roofless' may also be limitless. The 'steadfast journeying' birds are travelling out of sight with a purpose which the speaker recognises though he cannot yet share it. 

There are other characteristic elements, familiar from the war poems. One such is the image of a road. In 'The Road' (CP p.32) and 'The Last Meeting' (p.35) - yet another lost-love poem - the speaker is passing along, or watching others pass along, a road which must lead somewhere, but to a destination we never see. Like most middle-class children of his generation, Sassoon was brought up on The Pilgrim's Progress, with its absorbing myth of a journey which goes on through darkness, danger and incomprehension, but which in the end leads through every danger and past every obstacle to a promised haven.

In the closing phrase 'bear my loads' we have another image of travelling and patient endurance, recalling the soldier-cum-Christ-figure in 'The Redeemer' ('Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear'). Although Sassoon's conversion still lay more than twenty years ahead, there is the religious imagery and vocabulary ('evangel' and 'mysteries' in line 3) and the invocation to some spiritual force, which recur in Sassoon's work all the way from 'Before Day' in 1908 ('Come in this hour to set my spirit free') to 'Prayer at Pentecost' in  1960 ('Spirit, who speak'st by silences, remake me'). As a soldier Sassoon was known for a courage of the reckless kind which earned him the nickname of 'Mad Jack' – but his poems more commonly celebrate the kind of courage which forces itself on in the belief, or hope, that there is some purpose and end to it all.

I am hoping to find other Sassoon poems which link to particular months of the year. This blog entry should have appeared last month, in December – my apologies, and I will try to move more synchronously next time!

In the Blood

    This is not a book review - I want to emphasize that. However, I have just finished reading Andrew Motion's childhood memoir, In the Blood, and I am struck by the resemblances between Motion's childhood and that of Siegfried Sassoon - and also by the many differences between them. I am not sure where I got my copy - I think I won it in a raffle, probably at the AGM of the Alliance of Literary Societies a few years ago - but it was only when I started to run out of reading matter during lockdown that I finally got around to opening it. I'm not sure what put me off previously, but, once begun, it proved to be compelling reading.

    Andrew Motion's parents, unlike Siegfried's, had a happy marriage. They were evidently well-off, not at all your typical family, but their individual personalities come through very distinctly in Motion's account. He and his brother Kit were rather different in character, for a start. That was probably also the case with Siegfried and his brothers, and it's no accident that, in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried chose to represent himself as an only child, and an orphan to boot. Whilst very good at drawing short character sketches of village personalities, it's noticeable that he does not try very hard explore the psyche of his close friends and immediate family. Andrew Motion, on the other hand, whilst dwelling on some "characters", such as the gardener and various schoolmasters, gets inside his close family with a few pen-strokes - the busy, reserved, often distracted father, the extrovert, dominant grandfather, and so on.

    Like the Sassoon boys, Motion I and II (as they became known at prep school) were taught to ride and hunt early on. Indeed, it was held up as a kind of life goal for them that they should not only practise such outdoor pursuits but should become skilled at them. It didn't come naturally to Andrew, who liked observing nature but was all fingers and thumbs when it came to controlling a recalcitrant pony or tickling a trout. 

    The prep school to which Motion was packed off, courtesy of his grandfather's money, at the age of eight, sounds not unlike Dickens's Dotheboys Hall. Any 21st-century parent would have been over there like a shot to remove him. In fact, if the facilities were as disgusting as he suggests and the punishments as extreme and unmerited, no self-respecting parent would have left him there in the first place. He survived mainly by discovering poetry and conversing with his sympathetic but somewhat ineffectual English teacher. Strangely, he seems to have been disappointed at not being put forward for Eton. Luckily, someone saw something in him that he did not, and Radley College proved much more congenial, particularly after a new headmaster, one Dennis Silk, arrived in 1968 and made the school "more like a family".  Any reader who knew Dennis in person will have no difficulty in believing this.

    By his mid-teens Motion was becoming a quiet rebel, rejecting the hunting, shooting and fishing aspect of his parents' lifestyle, but afraid to say so openly, mainly because of his affection for his frail mother. It was too unfortunate that it should have been his mother who suffered the riding accident from which she never fully recovered; the book spares us the full knowledge of the subsequent difficult years. This is where, I think, he differs most from Siegfried Sassoon, whose memoirs tend to gloss over any deep affection he may have felt towards close relatives. 

    And yet, taken as a whole, there are certainly resemblances between this book and MFHM, which is not surprising when you learn that Sassoon's fictionalised memoir was one of the first adult books Andrew Motion read and enjoyed. It was purchased for him - naturally - by his mother.

    

Conference time: the "New Normal"

     It was with great regret, tinged with a certain amount of relief, that we recently gave members of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship the news that we could not hold an AGM and conference this year. Many societies like ours have been faced with the dilemma of what to do about their commitment to an Annual General Meeting. Some have gone with the dreaded Zoom option - with varying success, whilst others have found alternative methods of dealing with members remotely.

    In our case, we pondered for some months before coming to the conclusion that it was not going to be easy to find a way to deal with the problem and it might be better to admit defeat. Having taken advice from the Charities Commission, we announced the decision on our website and in Siegfried's Journal and we continue to hope and pray that it will not be long before members can meet in person once again. 

    Conferences, we've found, are not just about listening to interesting talks, or even about the opportunity to discuss them afterwards. After all, our Journal, with its variety of content, is the envy of many societies and keeps members informed as effectively, albeit not as quickly, as social media can do. However, those who attend our events invariably contact us afterwards to say how much they have enjoyed meeting fellow members and how much they are looking forward to doing so again. Although the numbers attending have dropped off in the past couple of years, there is still a core of members who feel absolutely distraught if they find, for whatever reason, that they cannot attend in person.

    This being the case, it's hard to offer an alternative that is likely to satisfy our membership in these times when fellowship and personal contact are most needed and most highly valued. On the other hand...

    I learned a lesson in July, when helping to judge a local poetry competition that normally takes place during the week of the village fete, in our local pub. So popular has the contest been in the past that, when we were selected for the semi-finals of Channel 4's "Village of the Year" in 2018, the presenter Patrick Grant came along to the pub to talk to some of the competitors, and even wrote his own original humorous verse in honour of the village. This year, things were different. Competitors had to make recordings of themselves reading their poems, and these were broadcast by our temporary local radio station on the day we would have held the fete. 

    The outcome was that we had about twice as many poems submitted as usual, and of a generally much higher standard. Admittedly, many of them concentrated on experiences of lockdown, but there was enough variety to enable us to pick out a few really original, accomplished pieces of work. As I came to realise, people who would not normally have participated in the competition when it was held in the pub - like the 89-year-old local farmer who won the "Poet Laureate" title - were only too ready to join in if they did not have to stand up in front of a room full of people to read their poem. Moreover, with time on their hands, many of them had been inspired by the current crisis to put pen to paper, and had found an outlet for feelings they might otherwise have found hard to express.

    The result of the competition was encouraging, but perhaps it was rash of me to agree to the idea of my "other" literary society, the Barbara Pym Society (about which I have previously written in this blog), putting on a one-hour Zoom "mini-conference" for the benefit of members around the world. There was little technical support available to us, and even the running order was not finally confirmed until after we had begun the meeting (owing to a live participant who was holidaying in Italy suddenly informing us that she had to go out to dinner instead!) Somehow we stumbled through the programme of talks and chat, and the many technical problems we experienced led me to assume that members were sitting at home thinking what a useless Chair I was and perhaps wishing they had not wasted an hour when they could have been watching TV.

    Not a bit of it. I'm sure there was some discontent on the part of a few individuals, but in general those watching expressed considerable appreciation for our efforts, one going so far as to say that it was "just what one would expect from a Pym event". Indeed, there is an episode in one of her novels where an incompetent bishop attempts to give a magic lantern show to a local audience and gets his slides upside-down. At times I felt very like that! What I realised, however, was that members wanted contact with other members, something to laugh about, something to replace the in-person meeting that they would otherwise have had, something to remind them of good times past and better things to come. And I think we managed to achieve that. I am sure we will be able to do better next time.

Britten, the pacifist

I wonder how many people, like me, bored with the cookery programmes, worthy dramas and so-called "reality TV", especially during lockdown, have found themselves reduced to scrolling down the alphabetical list of elderly BBC documentaries on iPlayer? One such search yielded a 2013 programme about the composer Benjamin Britten.

     I didn't even know about the informal performances given by Britten and his partner Peter Pears on the BBC in the 1960s, short interludes with Britten at the piano and Pears in a cardigan. Thus, although I remember the Dudley Moore (himself a highly talented musician) parody of these performances, I had no idea at the time what he was parodying. Apparently Pears - the chief victim of the parody - took it in good spirit, but Britten was very hurt. He had not been singled out by Moore, who also parodied Brecht and Weill and several other better-known classical composers, yet clearly he took his work seriously and did not respond well to being held up to ridicule.

    Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, were lifelong pacifists, both of whom applied for recognition as conscientious objectors during the Second World War. (Britten was not born until 1913, and claimed that his pacifism was an indirect result of the harsh regime he experienced at boarding school.)  Like Sassoon, he became a member of the inter-war Peace Pledge Union, on whose behalf he wrote a piece of music called Pacifist March. As a composer, he was still in the process of building his reputation, and the march was not a big hit in the run-up to the war. In the same year, 1937, there were two major events in his life: his mother died, and he met Peter Pears.

    Their pacifism was one of the reasons for Britten and Pears leaving the UK for Canada and later the United States, where they were less exposed to the hostility of what Sassoon called "jingo".  They returned to the UK before the end of the war and Britten agreed to work for the Ministry of Information.

    Yet in 2013, while preparing a film about Britten for the centenary of his birth, director Tony Palmer claimed that the Ministry of Defence had refused him permission to use a piece of training film when they found out he was working on material about Britten, on the grounds that the MOD could not be seen to deal with "cowards" and "deserters". The MOD denied any such motive, but it may be that Palmer had happened to come into contact with individuals who held such views, of which many can be found on your nearest high street.   

    Britten's music can be something of an acquired taste, but that he was a remarkable talent is hardly open to debate. His setting of Wilfred Owen's "At a Calvary near the Ancre" was included in the concert, "Songs of War", organised by the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship in partnership with other war poets' societies at St James's Church, Piccadilly, in 2009. Really, though, this song is part of the War Requiem that Britten wrote in 1962 for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, a modern replacement constructed right next to the ancient building destroyed by German bombing in 1941. Many of us can clearly remember watching the opening on black-and-white television, though of course its significance was lost on a six-year-old child, as I then was.

    The War Requiem, generally regarded as Britten's masterpiece, included a substantial chunk of Wilfred Owen's poetry (including "Anthem for Doomed Youth", the poem Sassoon helped him write), and no doubt introduced Owen's work to a much wider audience. These texts are interspersed with the traditional sequences of the Latin requiem - "Kyrie Eleison", "Dies irae", "Libera me", etc. One great admirer of the work was the late Dom Sebastian Moore, who described to me in our 2007 interview how it had moved him.

    Britten's love of poetry was not limited to Owen and the war poets. He was a great admirer of the work of Thomas Hardy and William Blake, and was a close personal friend of W H Auden. Around 150 poets in total were given the Britten treatment, a staggering figure, but I can't find Sassoon among them; nor have I as yet found any clues as to Sassoon's opinions on Britten's music. Siegfried was very musical and would certainly have had a view. The two men were far apart in age, but not enough to have precluded them becoming friends, and they moved in the same circles and shared many ideas. It's impossible that they did not meet on occasions, and yet I can't find a direct link between them. Just another of the many remaining gaps in my knowledge of Siegfried Sassoon.

Book review: The Battle of Tsushima 1904

Phil Carradice describes himself as a "storyteller" rather than a historian. This may ring alarm bells with some who do not like his drama-documentary style of writing. However, to the best of my knowledge, there are no events in this book that did not happen. To quote one of the UK's greatest contemporary historians, Michael Wood, writing just this month in the BBC History magazine, "Stories are what history is about."

    Personally, I don't mind a little imagination being added to the descriptions, as happens almost on the first page of this book when Carradice describes the feelings of the future Czar Nicholas II on being confronted by a would-be assassin during what should have been a leisure trip to Japan. This incident, thirteen years before the battle took place, is considered key to Nicholas's subsequent attitude to Japan, and certainly much of the blame for the disastrous (for the Russians) battle which is the subject of this book rests at the czar's door. 

    In the first decade of the twentieth century, Russia was a massive empire largely governed by high-born incompetents and heading for trouble, whilst Japan was a small, mysterious nation emerging from centuries of isolation and not taken seriously by the western world. The czar's word was law, and Nicholas was no military tactician. After a series of defeats for his Pacific fleet, he insisted on a large force of unsuitable ships being sent out from the Baltic to Vladivostok to replace them, firmly believing that quantity was a substitute for quality.

    Throughout the narrative, we are treated to intriguing stories - stories about the admiral of the Russian fleet, Zinovy Petrovich "Mad Dog" Rozhestvensky, a man who did his best with the sub-standard raw materials allotted to him, threw his binoculars overboard whenever thwarted, and frequently retreated to his cabin to wallow in deep depression. It seems miraculous that he and his ships ever arrived in the Tsushima Strait, let alone put up any kind of fight against the better-equipped Japanese fleet, with its more highly-skilled and better-trained crews, and led by the enigmatic Admiral Togo. No wonder the battle ended with around 5000 Russian lives lost, compared with less than 200 Japanese.

    As one might expect in a book of this kind, there are many names - of ships, people and places - that are unfamiliar to an English-speaking reader and difficult to memorize. It is thus a major frustration that there is no index. As far as I can make out, most of Pen & Sword's excellent non-fiction works have one, and I can only assume that this is an oversight by the editors (who, sadly, don't seem to have expended much effort on proof-reading either).

    The major service this book does (and the reason I'm reviewing it here) is that it puts the Battle of Tsushima in its historical context. Phil Carradice ably shows how preceding events led up to it, and also how it led indirectly to Russia's involvement in the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Japan's subsequent rise to a position of world power that was not easy to control. Russia's opinion of herself, and Japan's growing confidence, were affected for many decades to come. Thus a battle that may, taken in isolation, seem unconnected with the world conflicts of the twentieth century, is shown to be very relevant and well worth writing and reading about.

Phil Carradice, The Battle of Tsushima. Pen & Sword, 2020. ISBN 978-1526743343