After the war was over
Peter Quennell
Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries 1923-1925 Edited and introduced by Rupert Hart-Davis (Faber and Faber £12.95) Iremember listening, some 20 or 30 years ago, to a fierce dispute that broke out between two friends, both of whom had seen active service during the Second World War. One said that for him it had been a period of unrelieved wretchedness; While the other, rather apologetically, admitted that, despite certain rare mo- ments of fear and horror, he had consider- ably enjoyed himself; he had visited so many strange countries, met such extraor- dinary people, and at a number of foreign Posts, particularly Cairo, revelled and phi- landered to his heart's content.
Trench-warfare was an experience that no civilised man, even the most adventur- °us and bellicose, could pretend he had enjoyed. Yet the First World War pro- duced a group of young poets who gave their dreadful memories a vivid literary Shape. Among the best, of course, was Wilfred Owen, killed in 1918 just before the conflict ended. Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon survived, both, however, bearing mental scars; and Graves has described the difficult years he passed as he sought to adjust his heart and mind to Peace-time life. 'The war was not over for US yet', he writes; shells came bursting on his bed; whole scenes from the past slid back into the present day. He had re- turned, he imagined, to a dug-out at Cambrai: 'I would look up the shaft and see somebody's muddy legs coming down the steps, and there would be a crash and the tobacco smoke . . . would shake with the concussion and twist about in patterns like the marbling on books.' These and Other daily nightmares continued to haunt him 'until -well on in 1928'. Siegfried Sassoon's . experiences had Perhaps been yet more inwardly disturb- ing; for they had driven him to utter a Public protest against the unnecessary pro- longation of the war; and he had only escaped a court-martial because the au- thorities, on sensible advice, decided they Should regard him as a shell-shocked casualty, and commit him to the care of psychiatrists at a military hospital. In March 1919, he was officially retired from the army, and then, aged 33, did his best to begin a completely new existence. Two earlier volumes of his diaries, written from 1915 to 1918, and from 1920 to 1922, also edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, have shown the earlier development of the poet's emotions and ideas. The present volume opens on 11 January, 1923, half a decade before his close friend and fellow-sufferer, Robert Graves, according to Graves's autobiography, had at last shaken off his hideous war-time dreams.
Here Sassoon seldom refers to the war; but its after-effects remain obvious. We have the impression that, no matter how hard he tries, and for all the fame that his war poems have earned him, he cannot definitely settle down. He is always a little uneasy. Senior men of letters, Hardy, Bridges, Masefield, Wells receive him with wide-open arms; but although his self- esteem is often agreeably touched, he is still aware of an underlying vacuum that their approbation never quite fills. He wants something more — a sense of belong- ing to the world, and of possessing an intellectual and emotional identity for which as yet he seeks in vain.
This book, his attempt at a day-to-day self portrait, reveals his constant doubts and struggles. The diarist, we soon notice, is an unmistakably odd, even occasionally perverse character — one who likes to exhibit his own oddity, and seems to pride himself on the fact that he is somehow very different from ordinary easier-going men. He dreads loneliness, yet usually despises the company into which he happens to be cast. Not that he avoids such company. He has taken a room at the house of an ill-tempered brother-poet he finds perpe- tually annoying, and, bored with London, accompanies a plutocratic old friend to a hotel in the south of France, where he observes strident hostesses, and the 'nobs, snobs and profiteers', through a coldly • disapproving eye. Amid his trials he is nevertheless cheered by a firm conviction of his personal superiority. On the journey to Beaulieu, 'what a dreary assortment of voyagers! I am sure I was the most distinguished-looking, though a few had monocles and fur coats.'
It is difficult to read the new volume of Siegfried Sassoon's diaries without some feelings of exasperation. He is so often unnecessarily hurt or offended, and the grounds on which he builds up a quarrel are, at times, ridiculously slight. Why is he enraged by the presence of Osbert Sitwell?
• May it not have been, he asks himself, because once, when he had hoped to show Osbert Sitwell his latest poems, Osbert appeared more anxious to recite his own works? Whatever the reason, the sight of his colleague's 'Hanoverian-looking' bow- ler hat and the sound of his ceremonious salutation — which had, Siegfried thought, a slightly ironic ring — were quite enough to spoil his day.
Yet that the diarist had a far more likeable and admirable side, both as a personality and as a writer, all who remem- ber him will certainly agree. His war poems deserve a place in any history of English verse — they are poetic propaganda of the noblest kind; and it was his great misfor- tune that peace could not provide an equally vigorous incentive; with the result that most of his later verse added little to his reputation. Meanwhile, however, his three autobiographical narratives, written under the name of 'George Sherston', his sensible, straightforward alter ego, reached a very large public; and there are traces of Sherston in pages of his diary. From the distractions of literary London, he looks back, regretfully and impatiently, to the simple pleasures of the hunting field:
This morning (he writes early in 1924) I went for a walk — through St James's Park and round the Serpentine. A pleasant grey morn- ing which . . . made me realise the intensity of the glare of my electric lamp on my nocturnal pages of this winter. Watching the grooms exercising in Rotten Row, I felt a strong craving to be a brainless fox-hunter again.
These cravings he still now and then satisfies, as he relates in April 1923; and his description of a race on a gallant young mare who fell at the last ditch and nearly broke her back — we think of Vronsky's race described by Tolstoy — is one of the freshest and liveliest pieces of writing that his diaries can provide.
Siegfried Sassoon was not a happy man; but it was the element of conflict in his disposition — first brought to light, no doubt, by his war-time sufferings — that aroused his imaginative and creative gifts. Rupert Hart-Davis's editing of the new diaries shows his usual skill and patience. They portray a talented, high-minded, in some ways strangely ingenuous man, who, having survived the war years, found it yet more difficult to come to terms with the unrestful years of peace that followed.
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