The mask lifted

Duckworth, #25

PRAISE the Lord and pass the ammunition and the rhyming dictionary. The canon of works on the Great War poets has finally been augmented by a biography of the most influential of them all.

Wilson's first volume traces a privileged childhood, a nondescript adolescence, and then a young manhood which was exceptional, even in exceptional times. Simply, Sassoon had a great Great War.

This is not to trivialise his physical and emotional suffering but rather to emphasise that in a time of outrageous bravery and pulsating poesy Sassoon was capable of outstanding achievements in both word and deed.

In truth, there was little in his background to suggest that Sassoon would leap to such prominence. A scion of the fabulously rich Sassoon dynasty, Siegfried seemed content to paddle in the low waters of academia.

His education was expensive but was an investment which yielded only a truncated career at Cambridge. His lifestyle was louche, his work lethargic.

Sassoon's legacy from a father who died young left him free to pursue foxes on handsome hunters and long hops on village cricket fields.

His poetry, like his life, was soft and aimless. He had nothing to express but had rather too much to say.

Wilson's diligent researches faithfully follow Sassoon from school to school, from dormitory to dormitory. The biography explodes with the onset of war. As Wilson, provocative and perceptive on Sassoon's writing, remarks: a poet had found his subject.

The ineffectual and immature dilettante was to become a daring and controversial satirist. The man who at 28 had to return home to live with his mother because he could not cope financially or emotionally would prowl the deadly corridors of no man's land, revelling in the nom de guerre of Mad Jack. The sophisticated huntsman became a reckless adventurer in the killing fields.

The man had found his time and the poet would find the words. Wilson, given access to diaries, letters, and the unpublished fourth part of Sassoon's biography, breaks free of the cloying detail of the early years to confront thrillingly the internal and external conflicts that shaped Sassoon.

Skilfully and unobtrusively, she pieces together Sassoon's journey from unquestioning patriot to outspoken dissident. The idealism of Absolution dissolves into the realism of The Redeemer before crystallising into a fine form of cold anger in In the Pink.

Rupert Brooke found death and glory in the war. Wilfred Owen rushed at the conflict with a belligerence full of unconscious irony. Sassoon mocked the war, mixing fiery imagery with cool satire.

For Sassoon there were two conflicts which sparked the muse. The first was the external reality of a horrific war. The second was the internal realisation of his homosexuality. Sassoon faced the first with an unhealthy eagerness. His bravery was marked by wounds and a Military Cross which he later threw into the Mersey in disgust.

His sexual orientation was more difficult to accept. His homosexuality found no physical expression during the war. But there is ample evidence that he fell in love with many of the men he sent over the top to their deaths. His revolt was his noblest, bravest act. Packed off to Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh as mentally unstable, Sassoon conversed with the great Dr Rivers, encouraged the young Wilfred Owen, and then defiantly returned to the Front. He believed the prosecution of the war was wrong but could not see how this could exempt him from his duty to his comrades.

Sassoon wrote much of his story in his fictionalised biography of Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress. He hid himself in these works under the guise of George Sherston.

Wilson has done much to lift this mask and paint the features of a great poet who deserves much more than a faceless obscurity.