NOTES PREFACE 1. William Empson, Arguejying (London, 1988), p. 125. PROLOGUE: FAMILY TIES 1. Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Siegfried Sassoon: Poet's Pilgrimage (London, 1973), p. 17. 2. See Keith Middlemass, Edward VII (London, 1975), p. 44. 3. See Stanley Jackson, The Sassoons: Portrait of a Dynasty (London, 1968), pp. 84-88. 4. Jackson (1968), p. 75. 5. In 1871 her sister Laura became the second wife of Lawrence Alma- Tadema (1836-1912), the Dutch-born painter who in the 1880s and 90s achieved popular successes with his imaginary scenes from classical Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt. 6. Jackson (1968), p. 76. 7. In The Old Century there is mention of a cook and two maids, with a nurse - later replaced by a German governess - to look after the boys. The male element consisted of the head-gardener, two under-gardeners and Richardson the groom. 8. Philip Hoare, Serious Pleasures: the Life of Stephen Tennant (London, 1990), p. 88. 9. His book collecting may have reminded him of his grandfather Sassoon David Sassoon, who had spent his leisure hours building up a library of rare Hebrew manuscripts. Cf. Jackson (1968), p. 38. 10. Cf. Sassoon's own account of this venture in The Old Century, pp. 279-82. 11. Corrigan (1973), pp. 55-6. 12. Rupert Brooke's last girlfriend, the actress Cathleen Nesbitt (1888-1982) records in her memoirs, A Little Love (London, 1977), that she met Brooke later that same day and that he was full of indignation about Sassoon's remark. That she should recall such a trivial incident over sixty years later (and at the time Sassoon was still a complete unknown) is hard to believe, especially since, according to Sassoon's version, Brooke did not really make an issue out of it. 268 NOTES 269 CHAPTER 1: YOUNG NIMROD 1. Holbrook Jackson (1913), The Eighteen-Nineties (Harmondsworth, 1939), p. 53. It is extremely doubtful whether Swinburne can simply be regarded as one of the Pre-Raphaelites. He did count many of them among his friends (his 1866 Poems and Ballads were dedicated to Burne Jones and he greatly admired Rossetti), but unlike his Pre-Raphaelite friends he was well-read in French literature: he was considerably influenced by the French aesthetes, an influence that dated back to his first reading of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai in the expurgated edition of 1861. Cf. William Gaunt, The Aesthetic Adventure (London, 1945), p. 35. 2. Michael Thorpe, Siegfried Sassoon: a Critical Study (London, 1966), p. 5. 3. Corrigan (1973), p. 15. 4. Robert Graves, In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914-1946, ed. by Paul O'Prey (London, 1982), pp. 73, 74. 5. In Broken Images, p. 28. 6. Cf. 'The Merciful Widow', 'If Wordsworth Had Written "The Everlasting Mercy'" and 'If Mr. Masefield Had Written "Casabianca"', all reprinted in J.C.Squire, Collected Parodies (London, 1921). 7. Harold Williams, Modern English Writers: Being a Study of Imaginary Literature (London, 1918), p. 97. 8. D.H. Lawrence's Love Poems and Others (Duckworth, 1913), published the same year as Sassoon's 'Daffodil Murderer', contains such poems as 'The Collier's Wife' and 'Violets', which show that he had a better ear for local dialect. 9. Four poems from The Old Huntsman were deleted from the Collected Poems: 'Special Constable', 'Liquor-Control', 'Policeman' and "Gibbet' (which had been first published in the privately printed Melodies, 1912). 10. Virginia Woolf in a review of The Old Huntsman in the T.L.S. (31 May 1917). Wilfred Owen in a letter to his father, 26 August 1917 (Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, ed. by Harold Owen and John Bell (London, 1967), Letter no. 543, p. 456). Sassoon himself referred to the poem as "a mere verse exercise", cf. Corrigan (1973), p. 203. 11. First published in The Listeners and Other Poems (1912). 12. Quoted from Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy (New York, 1990), p. 174. 13. Letter to Edward Carpenter, 27 July 1911. Quoted in Tsuzuki, Edward Carpenter (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 147-48. CHAPTER 2: AN OFFICER AND TEMPORARY REBEL 1. See Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare 1914-1918 (London, 1980), p. 21. 2. Ivor Gurney, War Letters, ed. by R.K.R. Thornton (London, 1984), p. 29. Cf. also p. 130, where he refers to four sonnets that were intended as a 1917 answer to Brooke's sonnets. 270 NOTES 3. 'War Diary', 12 June 1917. In: Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience (New York, 1973), p. 89. 4. Robert Graves (1929), Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 146. Graves' autobiography, though always readable, is not always reliable. For one thing 'To Victory' was written in January 1916, and Sassoon was first in the trenches in November 1915 (though admittedly before March 1916 only with working parties). 5. See Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915-1918, ed. by Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London, 1974), pp. 90-1. 6. Organizational tables of the British Army are given in Haythornthwaite, A Photohistory of World War One (London, 1993). For Sassoon's experiences, cf. his contribution to J.C. Dunn's, The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 (London, 1989), p. 306. 7. Raymond Asquith: Life and Letters, John Joliffe, ed. (London, 1987), p. 206. 8. Charles Carrington, Soldier from the Wars Returning (London, 1965), pp. 159-60. 9. Henri Barbusse: Le Feu (1916). An English translation by W. Fitzwater Wray appeared in 1917 under the title Under Fire. Page reference is to the Everyman edition (London, 1965), p. 44. 10. Cf. Sassoon's footnote to 'In the Pink' in The War Poems, ed. by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis (London, 1983), p. 22, where he adds that the poem was refused by the Westminster "as they thought it might prejudice recruiting!!". 11. This first draft is included in the Diaries 1915-1918, pp. 49-50. That he omitted the final stanza when he revised 'A Working Party' for publication in The Old Huntsman was probably due to the fact that he considered it too sentimental, going on as it does about "widows grieving down the streets in black / And faded mothers dreaming of bright sons". 12. Jon Silkin, Out of Battle: the Poetry of the Great War (Oxford, 1978), p. 132. 13. Corrigan (1973), p. 21. 14. War Poems, p. 47. The somewhat apologetic tone of these lines is probably due to the fact that they were written after Sassoon's conversion to Roman Catholicism. 15. Herbert Read, Collected Poems (London, 1966), pp. 37-40. First published in Naked Warriors (1919), the volume singled out by T.S. Eliot in the July 1919 issue of the Egoist as containing "the best war poetry that I can remember having seen". 16. Permission had been granted, but it was soon discovered that Graves' nerves had suffered so badly that on 7 June he was sent to Osborne Palace on the Isle of Wight (once Queen Victoria's summer retreat where Sassoon's grandmother Mary Thomycroft had gone to paint portraits of the Royal Family and now another convalescent home for officers). 17. Ottoline at Garsington, p. 181. NOTES 111 18. The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield 1903-1917 (Oxford, 1984), p. 310. 19. In Diaries 1915-1918, pp. 173-74. 20. Sassoon gives his own account of this action in the final chapter of Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. For a discussion of this account, cf. pp. 134-35. 21. Cf. Paul Levy, G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford, 1981), p. 289. Lytton Strachey based his defence on these grounds when he appeared for a tribunal in March 1916; cf. Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: a Biography (New York: Holt, 1980), p. 626. 22. Cf. Bennett's second judicious letter, reprinted in Sassoon's Diaries 1915- 1918, pp. 180-81. Bennett agreed with Robert Ross that Sassoon must have been " a little deranged", cf. his letter to Ross in Bennett, Letters Vol. Ill (London, 1970), pp. 36-7. 23. Robert Hanmer's letter in Dl, 178; for Graves' response, cf. In Broken Images (London, 1982), p. 77. 24. The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1918, p. 372. 25. Five days earlier, on 4 June 1916, Wilfred Owen had joined the 5th (reserve) Battalion of the Manchester Regiment at Milford Camp, Surrey, as a newly commissioned 2nd Lieutenant. 26. Cf. Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian Literary Scene (London, 1946), p. 244. 27. Denis Winter, Death's Men, pp. 59-60. 28. Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters (London, 1967), p. 484. 29. Ibid., p. 485. 30. The first time Owen's mother heard about his meeting with Sassoon was in a letter dated 22 August (the same date as the Leslie Gunston letter), but in this letter Owen only mentions the second meeting, without referring to the first one. In his Wilfred Owen: the Last Year (London, 1992), p. 39, Dominic Hibberd places this first meeting "on about 16 August", though he does not explain why he mentions this particular date. Sassoon's own suggestion that it was "One morning at the beginning of August" (SJ, 58), would seem to be incorrect, in spite of its vagueness. 31. Hibberd (1992), p. 10. 32. For the first letter, cf. Collected Letters, p. 486; Sassoon's remarks about Gunston's poetry were omitted from the Collected Letters, but quoted in Hibberd (1992), p. 42. 33. Collected Letters, pp. 487, 547. 34. Ibid., p. 496. 35. Cf. Sassoon's pencilled in changes to 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', in The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. by C. Day Lewis (London, 1984), pp. 185-88. 36. Sassoon also described this scene in a letter to E.M.