Perspectives

As so often happens with this blog, several strands have come together in my mind (while I was gardening) and once again it leads around to war art.  Although this was initially prompted by the Perspectives programme on British TV the other night, in which Eddie Redmayne, currently flavour of the month because of his recent Oscar win, presented his thoughts on the topic, there have been other contributory factors.  I'll come to those later.

Redmayne, it turns out, is not without qualifications for his role as presenter, having studied art history at Cambridge.  Although he perhaps not as fluent a presenter as, say, Alistair Sooke, he is more eloquent than most, and the programme was consequently much better than I'd been expecting. The art does, of course, speak for itself to a certain extent.  You can admire and appreciate the work of Paul Nash, C R W Nevinson, Stanley Spencer and David Bomberg (Redmayne's "favourite") without having a degree in art history.  Colour television certainly helps with that; perhaps it's ironic that the general public in 1914-1918 would not have had much opportunity to see some of these works in their full glory.

David Bomberg - "Sappers at Work"

Apart from the omission (again) of Isaac Rosenberg, who is presumably disregarded partly because he was a poet and has thus been pigeonholed to be dealt with in TV programmes about poetry, another war artist who rarely gets a mention is Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959).  A notable painter of horses, Munnings was the man who captured Major-General Jack Seely and his horse Warrior in oils, as I recently learned from Brough Scott's book Galloper Jack.  The painting is now in the National Gallery of Canada, in recognition of Seely's service as commander of the Canadian cavalry during the war, and Munnings seems to have had as hard a time as almost anyone, at times working a short matter of yards from the front line. 

Another of his paintings, Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron, depicts one of the last cavalry charges of the war, one which came to be regarded as a success and won Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew a posthumous VC.  Brough Scott's book, making a valiant effort to be unbiased in dealing with the exploits of his grandfather, Jack Seely, suggests that it achieved little and was less than critical to the final outcome of the war.  Munnings could not have captured the action "live", as a photographer might, but he did paint it the year it happened and personally knew the participants.  His skilled depiction of the horses' suffering may, however, be the key to the painting's success.  (Flowerdew, incidentally, was saddled with one of the same personal disadvantages in life as Siegfried Sassoon; his middle name was "Muriel".)

The other strand in my thinking about war art this week is the painting at the centre of the Danish drama series, 1864, a work which again strives for neutrality by depicting the Danes as the (albeit unwitting) aggressors in the Second Schleswig War.  I gather that it's about as historically accurate as The Tudors, but that's not really relevant to my subject.  In an English-language scene, James Fox as Lord Palmerston admits that "Only three men in Europe have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question: the Prince Consort, who is dead; a German professor, who has gone mad; and I, who have forgotten all about it." 

The painting, which a rebellious present-day teenager finds in the attic of the mysterious old "Baron" for whom she is working as a carer, also appears in the opening credits of each episode.  Whether it is a real contemporary painting or a plot device created specifically for the series I have not yet discovered, but it sends the girl into a hallucinatory episode where she begins to notice the presence of other 19th century artefacts (a pistol, a sword) around the place, and becomes frightened by the idea of the war.  In other scenes it is suggested that the present generation has little comprehension of what it meant to fight, just like the two main characters, the brothers Peter and Laust, who go cheerfully off to soldier at the behest of the "Baron" of their own time.  (Naturally, one is put in mind of Sassoon's poem "Memorial Tablet".)

Although the early episodes don't fully illustrate the horrors that are no doubt coming to the two boys, the first scenes featuring the Baron's son returning as a war hero (in fact, his father has bribed officialdom to conceal the evidence of his cowardice) give us a pretty good idea of the potential psychological damage, as Baron junior begins a reign of terror over the estate workers.  He will, of course, have to go back, and he's not looking forward to it.  

I don't have a snappy conclusion to this blog.  I merely observe how visual depictions of war can combine with the written word to build up a picture that may or may not be accurate.  Say "the Western Front" and most people will immediately visualise desperate-looking, dirty, hungry men in trenches, closely followed by a desolate landscape of murdered trees.   Is that how it really was?

Poetry and Polymaths

I was listening to Classic FM the other day, when the name of Stephen Hough came up.  Hough is best known as a classical pianist, one of the world's most successful in that field.  However, radio presenters often mention the fact that Hough is a "polymath".  Without wishing to be condescending, I feel I should start with a definition of the term, which is not exactly in common use, partly because there are relatively few polymaths around.

Broadly speaking, a polymath is a person who is skilled or knowledgeable in a number of diverse subjects.  "Renaissance man" is another term often used for a person of this kind (for some reason, I never hear the phrase "Renaissance woman", though there were undoubtedly many women around during the Renaissance who fitted the bill).  Leonardo da Vinci is the most celebrated Renaissance man - not only an artist and philosopher, but a scientist and inventor.  Henry VIII is often mentioned in the same breath; Henry became king by an accident of birth, but he was also a sportsman, a musician and composer, a writer and a philosopher of sorts.

Stephen Hough's claim to be a polymath rests on his achievements as a teacher, writer, composer, painter and theologian.   On reading more about Hough, I discovered that he has an awful lot in common with Siegfried Sassoon.  He is, among other things, gay, a Catholic convert, and a poet.  That's leaving aside Hough's musical ability, and we know that Sassoon, despite his habitual self-deprecation, was no mean pianist.  Hough, not surprisingly, has a blog, in which he doubtless displays greater erudition than I am capable of.  Sassoon, were he alive now, would certainly be blogging as well as, or instead of, keeping a written diary.

I have never heard Siegfried Sassoon described as a Renaissance man, but I thought it would be interesting to examine his claims to the title of polymath.  For a start, he was an all-round sportsman - a rider, a cricketer, a golfer.  Sport isn't an area we tend to think of as "knowledge" but it unquestionably involves skill and tactics as well as physical prowess.  He was also an effective soldier who, although often impetuous, showed outstanding leadership qualities.  He received the kind of education we tend to associate with the Renaissance.  In his case, he excelled in the arts, being a talented sketcher and painter as well as a musician, but of course it was in literature that his main interest lay, and that from his earliest years.  

Children in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, if they were fortunate enough to be in full-time education, had greater intellectual expectations thrust on them than we tend to burden the present generation of youngsters with.  Sassoon was reading Thomas Hardy's novels at an age where most modern teenagers would have difficulty following the basic plot, let alone appreciating the language or understanding the message.  The children's literature of the time, though often powerful and imaginative (Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame spring immediately to mind), was mostly designed to please parents rather than to entertain children.

It was in this cultural environment that Siegfried Sassoon grew up and received his schooling. Although he did not do particularly well at school, and dropped out of university, it is worth examining what he did learn, formally and informally, and how it affected his writing.  Several speakers at our conferences and other events have referred to the classical education received by public schoolboys of the period, and have demonstrated how this spilled over into the poetry of the First World War.  Siegfried benefited from that classical education, although he led a relatively sheltered life in rural Kent and was not widely-travelled before his military service.  His lively and enquiring mind caused him to start collecting books, attempting to extract the maximum value from each one. It is true that in some cases the binding appealed to him as much as the content, but perhaps that was just one more aspect of his varied interests.

When it came to war poetry, however, Sassoon was closer to some of the less well-educated poets than to other Oxbridge-educated Renaissance men such as Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke.  He found his niche in the literary world when he began to write poems that appealed to the general public and didn't require access to a classical dictionary in order to understand the references.  So, whilst he can hardly be denied the title of "thinker", he demanded little of his audience.  Reading one of Sassoon's short satirical war poems is almost like listening to a joke and appreciating the punchline.

Now that I come to think about it, I've often noticed how many of today's most popular comedians are well-educated.  Oxbridge graduates include Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, Al Murray and David Baddiel, Sandi Toksvig and Sue Perkins.  Most of these could also lay claim to the title of "satirist".  The genre of satire was forged in the classical world of Greece and Rome, among people who were equally well-educated with an equally wide field of interests and skills.

I don't think any of us needs to worry about not being a polymath.  If it wasn't relatively unusual, they wouldn't need such an obscure word for it.  At the same time, I don't think there can be much doubt that Siegfried Sassoon qualifies, and it is the secret of the broadness of his appeal.  He could talk to the troops under his command as comfortably as he could to a Cabinet minister and he wrote for the man in the street as much as he did for his friends.  Many of us have a wide range of interests without necessarily having an in-depth knowledge of any one subject, and perhaps this is why Sassoon speaks to us as individuals; one reader may appreciate him as a sportsman, another may admire his political ideals, still others will simply love the way he uses language in his poetry and prose.  Yet perhaps the most appealing thing about this (sometimes rather vain) man is his humility, his ability to look back on his past self as naive and crass, and his apparent lack of any sense of merit on his own part for any of his very real achievements.  

A few years ago the SSF committee gave Dennis Silk, our President, a surprise gift of a set of cufflinks engraved with the logo of the Fellowship (an artist's impression of Sassoon's famous monogram). Afterwards, Dennis remarked that Siegfried would have been disbelieving.  "They gave you this?!" he would have said.  The implication was that "Sig" - as Dennis remembers him - would have been astounded to think that a whole society had grown up in his honour, and that Dennis had been rewarded for being a living reminder of the polymath that was Siegfried Sassoon.

Where All Roads Lead

Apologies for my lengthy absence from the blog page, which was due mainly to my recent holiday abroad.  As most of my friends will know, I went to Rome, a city whose name has a dual meaning in the context of Siegfried Sassoon's life.  I found it tourist-ridden and dirty, much less pleasant than the Rome I last explored in 1978, but probably much closer to the way it was in the first century AD when the Empire was at its height and ox-carts jostled slaves carrying litters in the narrow streets.

It didn't make much of an impression on Sassoon the first time he visited, in 1921, either.  He was desperate, in search of inspiration for some new work, but found nothing in Rome to inspire him. War poetry was old hat, but was the thing that had given Sassoon his impetus to write great poetry.  His Canadian friend, "Toronto" Prewett, suggested the trip to Rome, but, once there, Siegfried found himself distracted by "sex-cravings".  He claimed that "I am not interested in the Roman Empire, or the Renaissance, or Baroque effects".  Perhaps the vestiges of Imperial Rome reminded him too much of the rivalry between Britain and Germany as to who could build the biggest empire.

Prewett's sudden illness forced Sassoon into contact with the only other person he knew in Rome, Lord Berners (a former paying guest of Nellie Burton at Half Moon Street).  Berners introduced him to the charming young Prince Philipp of Hesse, and their relationship brought Sassoon great happiness in the days that followed.  So much so that, in a subsequent letter to Philipp, he seems to have forgotten his initial dislike of Rome, looking back fondly on the city, "with all its beauty, the murmuring of fountains...and all that happiness".  Only thirty years later would Rome begin to have a different meaning for him.

Barbara Pym often writes, in those comic novels I love, of characters who have "gone over to Rome" and are thereafter discussed, in hushed tones, as having done something slightly disgraceful.  She was writing in the 1950s, the period when Siegfried was considering his own religious principles.  There was something of a surge going on at the time, Sassoon being one of several high-profile converts; others included the actor Alec Guinness.  He was also, of course, following in the footsteps of the great Ronald Knox, whom he hoped to persuade to be his instructor in the Catholic faith; Knox was too ill, and the mantle fell on the shoulders of Dom Sebastian Moore, who died last year and about whom I've written previously.

I do not think that the city of Rome, or any happy memories he might have had of it (he remained friendly with Philipp despite the failure of their relationship), had any role to play in Siegfried's conversion, which resulted largely from a mystical experience in which the figure of a nun, whom he later recognised as Mother Margaret Mary McFarlin, led him to the Roman Catholic Church. Concerned about the possible reaction from his friends, he was eager to tell Glen Byam Shaw and Dennis Silk about his decision on his next visit to Stratford (actually at the Welcombe Hotel which we visited on SSF conference weekend 2011).  He was particularly worried that Dennis, as a clergyman's son, would be shocked; Dennis, though surprised, was perfectly accepting, as were most of Sassoon's other friends.

Not long after Siegfried's reception into the Catholic Church, Pope John XXIII replaced Pius XII in the Holy See.  From what I understand, Pius, though he became an outspoken critic of Fascism, was not particularly progressive in his views either.  John XXIII was a complete contrast, the architect of "Vatican II" and a committed peacemaker and international statesman who was canonized in 2014, along with the late Pope John Paul II.  It is noticeable that John XXIII and John Paul II are both now the subject of considerable adulation among visitors to St Peter's, and the atmosphere around that district of Rome has changed since I visited during the last days of the papacy of the somewhat reserved Pope Paul VI.  I put this down partly to the recent canonizations, but also to the popularity of the current Pope, Francis, whose appeal seems to be based on the simplicity and humility of his approach.  He is, I think, someone of whom Siegfried would have approved.

Election Fever

The present UK government is not the first coalition to have run the country, nor is it the first time that Conservatives and Liberals have been in alliance.  The 1922 general election was the British public’s opportunity to pronounce the verdict on the coalition government led by David Lloyd George, the “Welsh Wizard” (ironically born in Manchester), which had seen Britain through most of the war.

It was the second general election in which British women were able to vote (the first having been in December 1918) but suffrage was still far from universal.  Even men had not all been given the vote until the end of the First World War.  Not until 1928 would women be allowed to vote on the same terms as men.

The Liberals were divided, however, between those who supported the coalition government - the so-called "National Liberals", led by Lloyd George, and those who did not, led by Herbert Asquith.  Even put together, they did not secure enough seats in the election to rival either the Conservatives or Labour (at that time led by J R Clynes, a former mill worker who helped the party almost treble its number of seats in Parliament).

Minority parties that won seats included the Scottish Prohibition Party (in Dundee), and the Communist Party, who won two seats.  The new MP for Motherwell was Walton Newbold, a Lancashire pacifist who had previously stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate.    His party colleague who won the seat at Battersea North was Shapurji Saklatvala, the third ethnic Indian to be elected to the British Parliament.  Other new MPs elected included such famous names as Clement Attlee (also a minor war poet), Sidney Webb and Manny Shinwell.

One prospective Labour candidate who ended up not running in the election was Siegfried Sassoon’s friend and mentor, W H R Rivers, who had agreed to stand because “the times are so ominous, the outlook for our own country and the world so black, that if others think I can be of service in political life, I cannot refuse”.  In June 1922, Rivers died suddenly of a strangulated hernia, a loss that bowled Sassoon over.   To say he was in despair would be inaccurate, as he wrote of his eternal gratitude to Rivers, describing his late hero's "glory of selfless wisdom and human service".

Sassoon liked to think of himself as a Socialist and had, under Rivers' influence, briefly considered a parliamentary career of his own.  Without Rivers to guide him, any such thoughts vanished. Rivers was replaced as Labour candidate for the University of London by none other than H G Wells, who, despite his fame (he had been nominated for Nobel Prize in the previous year), was unable to break the Conservatives’ hold on the seat and finished third behind the Liberals.  

What did Rivers mean about the outlook being black?  The British Empire was at its zenith, governing one in four of the world’s population, but there were many concerns about the situation in Ireland, where the Irish Free State was in the process of being established; the Irish held their own general election the same month that Rivers died.  Unionism was the political refuge of many who were anxious about what this meant (times have not changed all that much, it seems).  In London, less than three weeks after Rivers’ death, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, a veteran of several wars and a prominent opponent of the settlement, was assassinated by the IRA at his home in Belgravia.  Lloyd George’s government had been unstable for some time.

Perhaps the main reason for Rivers' comment was the industrial unrest which had gone on throughout the previous year and which had caused Sassoon to make his trip to Merthyr to cover the miners' strike; his sympathies were entirely with the working classes.  The situation would not get much better in the coming years, and would culminate in the General Strike of 1926.   

The split between the Conservatives and Liberals had been largely brought about by a speech made by Conservative leader, Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law; this was what had forced Lloyd George's resignation.  Tragically, 65-year-old Law was diagnosed with throat cancer and forced to resign as Prime Minister early in 1923.  He died less than a year after the general election.

Lawrence wrote to commiserate with one unsuccessful candidate, a man also known to Sassoon – Winston Churchill.  Churchill, who had been MP for Dundee since 1908, was taken ill with appendicitis during the election campaign, and lost his seat to the Prohibitionist MP Edwin Scrymgeour, a local man who had opposed Churchill at every election and would remain a Dundee MP for nine years.  Churchill was without a seat in Parliament until 1924, but subsequently re-joined the Conservatives, saying, with characteristic wit, "anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re-rat".

Madame Suggia and her Cello

I was reading an article about Northumberland recently.  It's a region of Britain I particularly love (if you haven't been there yet, do), and one of the best places to visit is Lindisfarne.  It's not just for the ancient Celtic monastery - though of course that is of interest.  It's not even for the seabirds or the white sand beaches or the fresh crab sandwiches.

No, my favourite thing is the castle.  It's a dinky little thing on the top of a rock, although as you walk along the foreshore towards it, it looks enormous.  From 1901 until 1921, it was the home of the publisher Edward Hudson, who employed none other than Sir Edwin Lutyens (later to be the architect of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, the Thiepval memorial in France, and many other war cemeteries and memorials) to refurbish what had originally been a 16th century fortification.  The result was a pleasant country house.  Hudson even got Gertrude Jekyll to create a walled garden nearby.

It was thus that Siegfried Sassoon found it when he visited the castle in September 1918, in the company of his Canadian friend and fellow poet, Frank "Toronto" Prewett.  Their purpose was to visit the publisher William Heinemann, who had been staying with Hudson and had invited them to call while they were in the area; Sassoon at the time was based at Lennel House, Coldstream, on the Scottish borders, where he was convalescing from the wound that had put him out of the war.  (This was where he was staying when he received his last letter from Wilfred Owen.)

On arrival at Lindisfarne Castle, they found that Heinemann and Hudson were both absent, having been forced to return to London on business, and the only person there to greet them was the famous cellist, Madame Suggia.  It seems to have been the first time they had met in person, though Sassoon, being a music lover and regular concert-goer, was quite familiar with her reputation.

Guilhermina Suggia, born in Portugal in 1885 and thus almost the same age as Sassoon, was already internationally known.  She had recently broken with her partner, another equally famous cellist, Pablo Casals.  She found Britain a welcoming place where she was not being constantly compared with Casals in terms of her talent.

She and Siegfried had much in common besides their age.  They shared a concern about the place of art, music and literature in the context of the ongoing conflict that, at the time, had no end in sight. Sassoon's wide interest in the arts drew him to composers (such as William Walton) and musicians, and he expresses his despair in the poem "Dead Musicians", included in his 1918 collection, Counter-Attack.

Whatever he may have made of the flamboyant Madame Suggia herself, the occasion was one he would treasure in his memory.  In Siegfried's Journey, he writes how they listened to her play "in the reverberant chamber of a lonely and historic castle - her 'cello's eloquence accompanied only by the beat and wash and murmur of waves breaking against the rocks below the windows".  He felt he had "arrived at the end of a pilgrimage, to find peace and absolution in an hour of incomparable music", which took him out of his general wartime mood of depression.

He sent Suggia a copy of Counter-Attack.  In return for the gift, she wrote from the castle to say that his poems were "the finest thing I read for a long time".  The original letter, dated 25 September 1918, is in the Sassoon archive at Cambridge University Library.  Evidently he kept it and treasured it as he did the memory of that wonderful afternoon at Lindisfarne.

A Friendship

Having mentioned T. E. Lawrence in my previous blog, I felt I had not done justice to his role in the life and literary development of Siegfried Sassoon, so I thought I might use this blog to make some amends for that.

Robin Lindsay (a nephew of Helen Waddell) told me that Lawrence was one of the subjects that came up in conversation when he visited Siegfried at Heytesbury in the early 1960s to give him the famous recording of one of Helen’s broadcasts.  This was because of the recent release of David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, which Sassoon must have been to the cinema to view.  He commented that the screen portrayal was “nothing like” the Lawrence he had known.  This is perhaps unsurprising: the slight, plain-looking man who was one of Siegfried's most valued friends from 1918 until his death in 1935 was not movie material - as was proven when the Korda brothers rejected Sassoon's proposals for the script of a film about him.  

Sassoon cannot be said to have cultivated Lawrence's friendship, at least not in the early days.  The latter owed much of his international fame to the efforts of an American journalist, Lowell Thomas, who arrived in Palestine during the First World War looking for a sensational story.  On his return to the USA in 1919, he began lecturing on the subject, with the assistance of a film show which no doubt explains the popularity he immediately enjoyed.  The film, entitled With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia, made Lawrence internationally famous, to the extent that the shy colonel sought to hide from the limelight by joining the RAF under the assumed name of John Hume Ross, later becoming T E Shaw and joining the Royal Tank Corps.  (When Sassoon visited Lawrence at home in 1924, Lawrence showed him a book he had been given by George Bernard Shaw, inscribed "To Private Shaw from Public Shaw".)

Thus, when Sassoon and Lawrence met for the first time towards the end of 1918, it was as near-equals. They were introduced, at Lawrence's instigation, by Edward Marsh.  Lawrence outranked Sassoon (who was two years older), but Sassoon knew something of Lawrence's wartime activities, and they hit it off straight away.  When Lawrence got around to publishing his own account of his time with the Arabs, under the title Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in 1922, Sassoon was one of the first people to be allowed to read it.  He was obliged to reassure Lawrence of the book's worth, referring to it as a "bloody masterpiece", in a letter which ended, "It is a GREAT BOOK, blast you!" 

Many have speculated on Lawrence's sexuality.  Like Sassoon, he felt an attraction to his fellow-servicemen, but this is far from conclusive.  I have never heard or seen any evidence that even suggests that he might have had a romantic or physical relationship with Siegfried.  It is, however, fairly well attested that Lawrence had masochistic tendencies, and we can only hazard a guess as to the psychological trigger for these.  Much seems to have remained private between the two friends; it seems to me highly likely that Sassoon either did not know or did not care what Lawrence did in his own time.

In due course, Lawrence came to share Sassoon's friendship with Thomas Hardy, who was equally fond of both men, just as Florence Hardy was attracted to both.  Lawrence had settled at Clouds Hill, near Wareham in Dorset, in the mid-1920s, half an hour's motorcycle ride from the Hardys.  In 1934, Siegfried Sassoon moved into Heytesbury House in Wiltshire, around 45 miles away, but there is no truth in the often-heard claim that Lawrence was returning home from Heytesbury when he was involved in the accident that ended his life in May 1935.  

After colliding with a cyclist in a country road near his cottage, Lawrence lay in a coma for six days. His head injuries (in those days before crash helmets became common) were so serious that it was clear he could not recover; King George V sent his personal physician just to make sure there was nothing that could be done.  The news was devastating for Sassoon, but it led to a life-changing experience.  The day after Lawrence's death, he felt he had received a sign from his dead friend, a sign that convinced him of the existence of an after-life, and this would indirectly lead to his embracing Christianity, in the form of Roman Catholicism, two decades later.  

Sassoon's poem on the subject was submitted to The Times, but rejected by none other than Edward Marsh.  Perhaps he felt that Siegfried was still suffering from the shock of Lawrence's death and that the experience about which he wrote was "all in the mind".  It rather makes me think of the initial reaction to Sassoon's early war poems and the horror expressed by most of his friends when he put himself in the firing-line with his "Soldier's Declaration".  How little vision they had.

To learn more about the friendship between Lawrence and Sassoon, you could do worse than to read Dennis Silk's monograph on the subject, printed in 2010 by Reading Room Press - if you can get hold of it.  If not, help is at hand, as the lecture Dennis gave, on which the booklet is based, was recorded by the IWM and can be found here: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80030132 

Loving The Lamb

People do love our annual joint meetings with the Wilfred Owen Association, at The Lamb in Bloomsbury.  Actually, 14^thMarch this year was the third time in twelve months that the SSF had visited the pub, since we held our AGM there in the autumn.  No one seemed to mind making an extra visit, given the opportunity to visit a historic and atmospheric building with a great atmosphere and at the same time enjoy good food and drink as well as the company of friends and some great talks from top-rated speakers.

I dare not include myself in that last group, as I was very much a stand-in last Saturday.  The room was comfortably full (not too crowded, as it has sometimes been in the past) for a lecture by Professor Elizabeth Vandiver of Whitman College, Washington, USA, the author of the 2010 classic, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War,  now re-issued in paperback.  Her subject was “The underworld journey in Owen, Sassoon, Graves, and Aldington”.  Professor Vandiver spoke about how these poets approached the topic of the afterlife in their work, and I will not attempt to give a full résumé here, as those of you who are members will see one in Siegfried’s Journal soon enough.

One of the matters Elizabeth focused on was the way in which the individual poets’ educational background affected their treatment of death and the afterlife.  Wilfred Owen, being a grammar school boy, treats the subject more straightforwardly than the others with their public school background – with the possible exception of Sassoon, who appears to be bending over backwards not to reveal his classical education in his satirical war poems.  I agreed wholeheartedly with Elizabeth’s view that this was deliberate.  Sassoon’s concern was to convey his feelings about the war in language that everyone could understand, and his success in doing so was his great achievement.  Today (in my opinion) he remains the most accessible of the major war poets.

Insights into the classical education of the boys who would go on to become junior officers as well as poets have been given in past SSF meetings and conferences by speakers such as Vivien Whelpton, Michael Copp and Gladys Mary Coles.  Thinking back to these, I was surprised that I seemed to have overlooked such an obvious aspect of Sassoon’s war poetry as his avoidance of any intellectual element that might create a barrier between him and his intended audience.  Elizabeth’s comments were a revelation, and, in my own subsequent talk (on the subject of Sassoon’s relationship with Thomas Hardy), I was able to go some way towards demonstrating the correctness of her observations by quoting a passage from his diary from which it is clear that, though he may not have been an academic success, he had not forgotten his knowledge of the Classics.  This appears to demonstrate that it was a conscious decision on his part to leave the classical references out of his poetry, at least during the war years.

It was good to see so many familiar faces at The Lamb, but also several new ones.  Unlike many other literary societies, we have a good gender and age balance among our membership, which has stood us in good stead so far and should continue to do so.  The grandly-named "Empire Room", where we always have to open the windows because of the mass of warm bodies within, has become a home from home, whilst landlord Leigh and his team, dashing around trying to serve thirty different menu choices, are now familiar faces.   Long may the joint spring meeting continue!