Songs of War

A little while ago I wrote about the music of the First World War, and hinted that I would do so again at a future date.  What prompts me to choose this moment is the memory of the wonderful concert I attended last Friday night at  the Holywell Music Room.  It is perhaps a little ironic that an audience who were in Oxford specifically to attend a conference on the poetry of the war should have gone away from the concert full of superlatives about the music.

It is not such a strange phenomenon when you consider that the songs performed by Roderick Williams to the able piano accompaniment of Gary Matthewman were all poems set to music.  Not the ones you might expect, though, especially if you are unfamiliar with the work of Gerald Finzi, George Butterworth, Ralph Vaughan Williams and others of their generation. Butterworth’s musical settings of poems from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad give us a strangely prophetic vision of the devastating changes inflicted on the rural life of the Welsh Borders by war.  “The lads in their hundreds” is the most obvious example, but, having heard a longer extract from the cycle sung by Roderick Williams recently in a BBC Prom, I can testify to the general impression.  That the poems were set to music by a composer who would himself become one of those “lads who will never be old” simply adds to the pathos.

Several of the songs at the concert had previously been performed (and in one case, premiered) at the “Songs of War” concert organised by SSF stalwart Sam Gray at St James’s, Piccadilly, in 2009. Ian Venables, a composer whose work was featured in the programme and also at that earlier concert, gave an introduction to the programme Roderick Williams had devised for the centenary, including some detailed commentary on the individual poems and settings.  Another composer, Elaine Hugh-Jones, was also present in person to hear her interpretation of Owen's "Futility"; thus the settings covered a hundred years of music, showing that war poetry has not lost its ability to inspire.

It was of course disappointing that there was no Sassoon included in the programme.  We could perhaps have enjoyed one of the many settings by Siegfried’s friend Cyril Rootham. But Williams and Venables avoided the obvious, including few of the major war poets and poems - Charles Ives' setting of “In Flanders Fields” being a notable exception.   Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier", in a setting by John Ireland, was another no-brainer.   William Denis Browne’s "To Gratiana, singing and dancing", is almost an elegy for Brooke even though the words were written in the seventeenth century by Richard Lovelace.

Ivor Gurney cannot, of course, be excluded from any such programme, in view of his almost unique achievement in successfully straddling the worlds of poetry and music, both during and after the war; his setting of Wilfrid Gibson's "Black Stitchel" set the scene beautifully, and Gurney's own “Pain”, in a setting by Venables himself, was both agonising to hear and a particular highlight of the programme.  A lighter moment was the rousing rendition of "Captain Stratton's Fancy", Gurney's setting of a poem by Masefield (not, as the programme wrongly stated, by F W Harvey; Harvey was, however, represented in the form of his poem "In Flanders", again set by Gurney).

Roderick Williams himself, a charming and impressive figure dressed in black, perfectly conveyed the emotion of the songs in his rich, powerful baritone, holding the audience captivated throughout, and it was the eminent poet Michael Longley who was first to his feet for the well-deserved standing ovation.

From the Edinburgh Festival

Cynthia Greenwood goes to the Edinburgh Festival every year, and lets us know if she finds anything likely to be of interest to Sassoon enthusiasts.  She has just sent us this report:

I’ve recently got back from the Edinburgh Festival and, though you might think World War One would not get much of a look in there, especially at a time when Scottish Nationalism is the big subject of debate, I did visit one impressive piece of theatre on the subject of the First World War. This was Forever Young, performed by the Yvonne Arnaud Youth Theatre.  It was billed as “a celebration , protest and a tribute to those who lived, loved, died and wrote through 1914-1919”. Personal testimonies, letters, poetry and diary extracts were punctuated by popular songs from the era.

The piece was performed on a small stage with little in the way of props except a trunk, part of an old ladder and a soldier’s tin hat. but everything was used to maximum effect. For example, the tin helmet, a simple protection for the soldier’s head, became a silent and potent symbol for all the dead. I was highly impressed by the amazing sensitivity and conviction of the young actors. They seemed to register every nuance of excitement, fear and despair on their faces. 

The readings were filled with total conviction and were organised to achieve striking contrasts. At one moment we were caught up totally in a young wife’s anguish on hearing her husband had been killed, next we heard a popular song of the time, then powerful work by the war poets. The poems were read with great depth of feeling and a keen appreciation of the meaning. In Sassoon’s “Does It Matter?” the force and irony of the piece were strongly conveyed. Hearing Wilfred Owen’s “The Last Laugh” I noticed how the perceptive reading could emphasise the modernity of Owen’s approach. The broken-up lines and strange images, “the bullets chirped”, “the bayonets’ long teeth grinned” were emphasised by the reader so that they were almost cries of pain.

The fact that the young cast were about sixteen to eighteen in age, around the age many of the young soldiers would have been, made the whole piece more poignant.

For details of the company go to www.yvonne-arnaud.co.uk

Hardy in Corton

I have just co-invented (I think) a new phrase for use by Thomas Hardy Society members - "a Wessie bag". Wessex was of course the Hardys' pet dog and well-known to Siegfried Sassoon when he visited the elderly writer who had become such a dear friend.  So naturally, when I asked for a doggie bag in which to take home a piece of the delicious cake we had been offered for tea by our hostess, Barbara Saunt, it was quickly re-christened.

Barbara is a member of one of the Hardy Society's regional groups.  In this case, they are informally led by the redoubtable Mervyn Scamell, who brings them together several times a year, normally in one another's homes or some other congenial location such as a pub or restaurant, and their next meeting will be their 100th.  I was thrilled to be invited to speak to them about Siegfried Sassoon, although I had to think of a different slant on the Sassoon-Hardy relationship from the short talk I gave at Dorchester only a few weeks ago.  Before the meeting, we were given a delicious lunch by Barbara and her husband Alex, who had very kindly put me up in their house the previous night.  The icing on the cake, if you'll forgive the pun, was the discovery that Alex's father was the first cousin of Hester Gatty, Siegfried's wife!

Alex had not known of the relationship until after he and Barbara moved to Corton (a charming village about two miles from Heytesbury) in the 1990s.  At that time, George Sassoon was still resident at Heytesbury House, but one of his favourite watering-holes was The Dove, which is almost next door to the Saunts' home.  Thus, when Alex exchanged pleasantries with George in the bar, neither of them ever realised that they were related.

One thing I feel sure of is that Sassoon became attracted to the rolling Wiltshire landscape through his visits to Hardy and Lawrence, and this was the reason for his decision to settle at Heytesbury House in 1934. Despite his preference for solitude, he would become an active and respected member of the local community and never seems to have considered leaving it, even after the break-up of his marriage.

As I researched this talk, new insights into the Sassoon-Hardy relationship came to light.  In particular, I noted how Siegfried became protective of Hardy as he aged.  The older man was already in his seventies when they first met in 1918.  Siegfried paid him a visit at Max Gate, initially to take him a copy of The Old Huntsman, which was dedicated to Hardy.  They met again at J M Barrie's home in London shortly afterwards (coincidentally, another of Barrie's London homes was 23 Campden Hill Square, where Sassoon would later reside with the Turners), and it was in relation to this occasion that the Sassoon memoirs first note Hardy's remarkable vigour and energy for a man of his age, qualities that inevitably began to wane during the following decade.

Thomas Hardy's funeral - or, to be more accurate, his two funerals - distressed Siegfried Sassoon considerably, as indeed it upset many of Hardy's friends.  Barrie, together with Sydney Cockerell, a mutual friend, were determined that he would be buried in Westminster Abbey, which was not the quiet resting-place his family had in mind.  Another of Sassoon's friends, T E Lawrence, felt that the Establishment was getting its own back on Hardy, saying that he "was too great to be suffered as an enemy to their faith; so he must be redeemed".  Hardy's friend Alfred Noyes described it as an occasion of "bleak irony".

Siegfried was doomed to lose all his father figures in the course of his long life.  Fortunately, he also finally grew out of the need to adopt surrogate sons (like Stephen Tennant?) through having a son of his own. Younger friends like Dennis Silk came, I think, to occupy a more comfortable place in his huge circle of acquaintance.

To return, just for a moment, to the subject of my talk at Corton, I found the questions from the Hardy group leading me down varied and interesting paths, and it struck me that a study of Sassoon's life and work is like doing a kind of jigsaw puzzle, symmetrical, intricate and satisfying in its conclusion - not that I would claim to have concluded mine as yet.

"Oh, it's all gone quiet over there..."

Actually, it’s a football chant, but you can imagine the same taunt being used by soldiers of the Great War during any period of let-up from the shelling of their trenches.  I feel like saying it now, about a number of things – the Wimbledon final, the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games, the (brief) hiatus between the end of our “Arcadia, Armageddon, Aftermath” at Heytesbury and our next SSF event, but most of all the lull following the frantic activity of 4^thAugust, when politicians, actresses, historians and journalists vied with one another to see who could find the most to say on the subject of the outbreak of the First World War.  

Some people are probably breathing a sigh of relief as well.  Thank goodness, they may be thinking.  No more press coverage of the centenary for another four years or so.  Others, however, will have revelled in the events of recent days (and weeks and months).  Having reluctantly removed the candles from their windows on Monday night, they may be waiting eagerly for another opportunity to commemorate.  I feel sure they will not have to wait long.  They could, for example, come along to the English Association’s major conference on British Poetry of the First World War at Oxford on the first weekend of September.  I suspect there are places left, since it is not exactly competitively priced at over £100 for the cheapest one-day ticket (in case you’re wondering, panel speakers have to pay for themselves and there is no remuneration).

There are many more economical events to choose from.  You could, for example, go along to the Fashion Museum in Bath to hear an expert talk about what people were wearing in 1914.  At Preston Manor in Brighton, you can go on a guided tour of "the 1914 house".  Finborough Theatre in London is putting on a music-drama, The Immortal Hour (first performed at the inaugural Glastonbury Festival in August 1914), and, if you fancy something more quirky, Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust in Bristol is offering a "Great War Iconography Stone-Carving Workshop".  For poetry-lovers, the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Edinburgh is staging Forever Young, in which a troupe of music hall performers create a show out of letters, memoirs, war poetry and songs.

For no charge at all, you can go to Leicester’s New Walk Museum and see an exhibition on Life in the Front Line.  St John's House Museum at Warwick has a free exhibition on Warwickshire at War, and Worcester Cathedral is offering "World War I tours" this coming weekend, while Reading Museum hosts the First World War Family History Roadshow.   

At the same time as you are enjoying these events and activities, and thinking how lucky we are to live in a Europe at peace, spare a thought for the people of Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, and other countries where the Western powers have intervened on the basis of the uninformed opinion that they are better-placed to know what government those countries should have than the people who live there and have to take the consequences of our interference.

In a 1939 letter to Edmund Blunden, Siegfried wrote, “Is there such a thing as human progress?  I begin to doubt it.”  He certainly knew what he was talking about.

Mr Hardy's War

The Thomas Hardy Festival is held every other year in his home town of Dorchester.  I'm told that local residents have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Hardy.  You certainly wouldn't know it when you drive through the centre of the town, where the Casterbridge guest house rubs shoulders with the Trumpet Major pub.  It also seems to have more museums per square inch than any other town in Britain I can think of.

Since I was old enough to read Thomas Hardy's work for the first time, I have been of the opinion that he is the greatest novelist in the English language, but I have never fully explored his poetry.  My own ignorance on the subject of his life and times was shown up, to myself, as I read up on the subject for the purpose of delivering a short talk on the subject of his relationship with Sassoon, as part of a miscellany entitled "Mr Hardy's War", which was presented at the Festival in this last week of July.  

My education continued when I discovered that not only was Siegfried's aunt, Agatha Thornycroft, the model for Tess Durbeyfield, but that a portrait of her hung at the top of the stairs in the very house where I was being put up for the night.  What is more, Dorset County Museum, where the event took place, houses a very fine bust of Hardy, the work of Agatha's husband Hamo.  Uncle Hamo and Hardy were friends long before Siegfried came on the scene, but one must assume that he heard Hardy's name from his uncle before he became an admirer of his novels and poetry.

Another friend Siegfried Sassoon had in common with Thomas Hardy was T E Lawrence, who was present at Max Gate (Hardy's house in Dorchester) when Siegfried visited in August 1924.  The Sassoon diaries mention seeing Lawrence's motorbike leaning against a wall when he arrived at the house and being pleased at the thought of seeing him again.  Hardy had, by this time, become another surrogate father-figure for Siegfried, following the loss of Rivers; Neil Brand captured their relationship perfectly in his 2001 radio play Between the Lines, which many of you will have seen performed on stage at our 2011 conference in Stratford.

"Mr Hardy's War" included varied contributions in the form of readings, songs and a short lecture on how the Great War affected the local area, from Chris Copson, curator of The Keep military museum; the museum comes highly recommended.  Dorset folk singer and musicologist Tim Laycock became the unwitting model for a soldier's uniform and pack, which all agreed was "very heavy" as well as "very uncomfortable".  Hardy's own words were read by the Dorchester town crier, Alistair Chisholm (who, unlike me, did not require a microphone).

Most touching was the story of the "lost heir", Thomas Hardy's second cousin, Frank George, to whom Hardy and his wife Florence had intended to leave everything, having no children of their own.  Hardy had been so taken with Frank that he had recommended him for a commission, which duly sent Lieutenant George on his way to a fatal wound at Gallipoli in 1915.  Hardy underplayed his distress at the news of Frank's death (as he did his sadness at the death of his own sister shortly afterwards).  He did, however, write an elegy for his cousin, entitled "Before Marching and After (In Memoriam F.W.G)", which appeared in the Fortnightly Review and eventually in a 1917 poetry collection.  It is certainly not Hardy's greatest poem, attempting as it does to find a silver lining to the dark cloud of his bereavement: "marching was done / For him who had joined in that game overseas / Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow / A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow."  What else was Hardy to say, having unwittingly contributed to his beloved cousin's fate?

The evening as a whole, however, went with a swing (thanks in no small measure to the community singing led by Tim Laycock), and left me with a picture of Hardy much as Sassoon portrayed him in "At Max Gate", the poem he wrote about a summer evening he spent with the old man in the 1920s.  My contribution?  Just a few minutes talking about the Sassoon-Hardy friendship, followed by Siegfried's voice reading from his own work.  As always, the audience was enchanted (by him, not me) and there was much interest.  The Hardy Society, like our own, is delightfully friendly and informal, and I already have ideas for possible future collaborations.  But I'd better get 2014 over with first!

A Misconceived Article

When we started up a Facebook group for the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, I knew that sooner or later a vicious argument would break out about some aspect or other of Sassoon’s life and work.  It’s happened on pretty much every other Facebook group I know of, from “I Love Strictly Come Dancing” to “Port Talbot Old and New”, subjects one might have thought it was impossible to argue about.  So it was almost bound to happen on a page relating to a soldier-poet of the First World War, and the only surprising thing is that it took so long.

This week’s heated discussion, however, was not really about Sassoon at all.  It stemmed from my assumption that others in the group would share my indignation about the way the war poets – specifically Sassoon and Wilfred Owen – were singled out for criticism by Professor David Reynolds, one of eleven historians who contributed to an article in August’s BBC History magazine on the subject “Great Misconceptions of the First World War”.  It is a badly misconceived article in general, since many of the “misconceptions” used to give the contributors the opportunity to be controversial are not actually believed by most people.

How many, for example, actually think that “Machine guns were the deadliest weapons on the western front”?  Surely the leading contenders for the title would be the tank, the flame-thrower, aerial bombardment and artillery?  The machine gun is touted only because it gives David Olusoga an opportunity to talk for a few paragraphs about developments in firearms technology.  And how many people believe that “German defeat  in the war was always an inevitability”?  Everyone I know is fully aware that Germany came very close to winning the war – both world wars, in fact.  Once again, it is an excuse for a historian, this time David Stevenson, to give a brief summary of the economic and political situation in western Europe.  Look more closely at the content of the contributions and you see that several of them admit that the "great misconceptions" about which they are writing are actually minority views put forward, relatively recently, by other historians.

I don’t know if the historians who contributed to the article were paid for doing so.  If they were, it was money for old rope, since all they had to do was trot out enough well-worn “facts” to fill a column or two, while being as controversial as they could manage.  Even Max Hastings manages to make his little piece on whether "the First World War was the most unpleasant war to fight" more interesting by throwing in a snide little mention of the war poets, whom he blames for peddling a misconception that isn’t really a misconception at all – or even a conception.  I simply don't believe that they were the first soldiers ever to be brought unawares to a battlefield and be shocked at what they saw; the difference between them and the volunteers and conscripts of earlier wars is that the general level of literacy had increased to the extent that a majority were capable of expressing themselves in writing.

Worst of all, however, and by quite a long way, is Professor Reynolds’ contribution.  How someone who has obviously read very little war poetry can be deemed qualified to dispel the “misconception” that “The 'soldier-poets' are the supreme interpreters of the First World War” is beyond me, and it is not surprising that he does the job so badly.  It’s not easy, I know, in 300 words, to summarise the significance of the war poets, but he would have done much better to concentrate on saying why he thinks their interpretation of the war is not supreme, rather than throwing in red herrings like the fact that there were lots of other writers around at the time (yes, we know that) and the suggestion that Owen and Sassoon were not representative because they were "young, unmarried officers... with complexes about their sexuality and courage" [my italics].  Apparently this last statement alone is enough to disqualify them from being taken seriously as interpreters of the war.  Far better to allow someone like Professor Reynolds himself, a middle-aged academic (presumably with no doubts about his own masculinity), who wasn’t born for another thirty-odd years after the war finished, to interpret it for us. 

His views are, however, supported by several members of the SSF Facebook group. (I should add that around 50% of the group are not actually members of the Fellowship, but we have never been elitist and we actively encourage friendly debate.)  Whether the “misconception” is actually widely believed I am not sure.  Whether it is, in fact, a misconception or the truth is another question, one that Professor Reynolds fails to address.  The words of the heading are so obscure that it is difficult to come to a decision on that one - what does "supreme interpreters" mean?  Does it mean the group of writers who explain the war most clearly and most accurately?  Or could it mean the writers who are the most successful in bringing the realities of war to the attention of today's reader?

Speaking for myself, I see no reason why the fact that poets write in verse should mean that their interpretation of events is less “true” than anyone else’s, particularly when you bear in mind the enormous range of topics and viewpoints covered in Sassoon’s war poetry alone, not to mention the varied output of the rest of the soldier-poets, people as diverse as Julian Grenfell and Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas and Richard Aldington.  The problem with giving a historian the job of making a qualitative assessment of their work is that he is not impartial, any more than a poetry-lover would be.  Naturally a historian thinks that he is better equipped to interpret a war that happened a century ago than the effeminate upper-class wimps who actually participated in it.  What the historian cannot change is the fact that it is the work of these poets that has captured the public imagination and explained the First World War more effectively to the general public than any 500-page history book could ever do.

How's a body to feel?

This week we have a guest post from SSF life member Jack Sturiano:

“Also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuances of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize”….

To any member of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship the above paragraph is easily recognizable. In the movie based on the book Regeneration by Pat Barker, Rivers says to Siegfried “You must have been in agony”, referring to the incident when he threw his Military Cross ribbon into the Mersey . Siegfried replies: “Agony is lying in no man’s land with your legs shot off.”

It’s all so confusing almost a hundred years later and with all the remembrances and commemorations; how’s a body to feel with all the opinions that have already been filling the papers and press?  As a veteran of a later conflict (Vietnam), I recently made the suggestion rather boorishly that the only true feeling should be anger.  I admit to being strongly influenced, even provoked, by stirring passages of battle scenes read aloud and the biographical life of a favoured author’s post-war agony - and that third glass which is always fatal at lunch to clarity, lucidity and courtesy.

I’d like to make the case, sober and unprovoked, that I still feel the only attitude is anger.   Siegfried is angry when he writes of the ”callous  complacency and lack of imagination” of those at home whose attitude continues the agonies.  I’m sure if he said that to someone in a pub whose son had died, he would risk a black eye, but he said it to a nation of mothers and fathers with dead sons, husbands and brothers. The declaration is still almost universally read, but no one sees or feels the anger.

His comments about the Menin Gate as a” sepulchre of crime” do not give pause to our Fellowship, who lay a wreath anyway “at that pile of peace-complacent stone”.  What would Siegfried have said? He said it in the poem, and very clearly I think.  Rivers could have said ”You must have been in agony when you wrote that”, but he’d been dead some years. Siegfried might have replied: “Agony is seeing the Menin Gate.”  Whatever he saw drove him away after twenty minutes (by his own account) and made him angry enough to write his angriest war poem since 1917 that night, in his Brussels hotel room.

The poem written in anger turns again to a nation of mothers and fathers and says what they all refuse to tell themselves and may not want to believe, those whose imaginations……

What are we to make of “Fight to the Finish”?

“The boys came back./Bands played and flags were flying./And Yellow-Pressmen thronged the sunlight street/To cheer the soldiers who’d refrained from dying.”

….

“Snapping their bayonets on to charge the mob,/Grim Fusiliers broke ranks with the glint of steel./At last the boys had found a cushy job.”

He wants to do what??? Read it again.  He is really angry.

Or “Blighters”:

“I’d like to see a tank come down the stalls/Lurching to ragtime tunes, or ‘Home, Sweet Home’/And there’d be no more jokes in music halls/To mock the riddled corpses round Baupame."

I’ll stop here because you all know his poetry as well as I do. You gentle folk of the Fellowship, whether you chose to focus on the anger or some other aspect, you can’t get away from the anger in his poetry. It informs every poem in some way. I made the point as well last year that Siegfried - if you read what he says literally - he’s telling you what emotions he felt, so maybe anger is how we should feel about the war as he saw it. I certainly feel it. It’s what attracted and still attracts me to his work.

I would also argue that no one has any lack of imagination anymore about World War I. We all know how bad it was, as well as World War II. If you think I’m picking on you fine English folk, well, no one I see in the USA acts any different. Even among my vet friends, you don’t see the anger much as I feel it and always have.  Siegfried never seemed angry in person or in reciting his poems that I’ve listened to, although the way he says “They snipe like hell. Oh Dickie don’t go out… And then he says “In the morning when I awoke he was dead / Pause/ Some slight wound lay upon the bed.” That’s as angry as it gets.

If you’re looking for good British anger at war, go to Youtube. Search for Richard Burton in a movie called The Medusa Touch, then click on the courtroom scene. It will take your breath away at the truth of everything he says about war, angrily.

Siegfried and I, as I said, shared a lot of war experiences but fifty years apart. He earned this name for something we didn’t share, but I’ll take the liberty of signing this as

“MAD JACK”