Why Siegfried Sassoon?

George Charles Beresford: Siegfried Sassoon (1915)

A visitor to the house once asked me why there was so much war poetry in the bookcases in the living room: more specifically, why there were so many books by Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, and nothing by Wilfred Owen, who is generally regarded as the pick of the bunch? I had to admit she had me there. Why wasn't there any Wilfred Owen? I've since repaired that omission, but it's interesting to me (at least) that it occurred in the first place.

I wouldn't say that I was exceptionally keen on war poetry. Certainly I've read all the usual suspects, and have a number of books on the subject, but it's not really one of my absolute areas of fanatical interest. I do love Edward Thomas, though (as my previous post on the subject should testify). And my fascination with the strange reaches of Robert Graves's imagination remains unabated. Why so much by Siegfried Sassoon, though?

Lady Ottoline Morrell: Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves (1920)

Just about everything to do with the First World War is - quite naturally - very much in the news at present. I've supplied my own tentative bibliography of the subject here. I find some of Sassoon's war poetry as powerful as any ever written: "Base Details," for instance - but also 'Everyone Sang', which is just one of those perfect poems which come out of nowhere sometimes. Not out of nowhere, really, when one comes to think about it: out of four years of suffering and pain and loss of innocence and meaningless machine-age slaughter.

I'm not sure that he's really received his due as an autobiographer, though. Everyone knows Memoirs of an Infantry Office (1930), and most people are aware that it's part of a trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (his imaginary alterego). But how many readers go on to his second, more directly autobiographical trilogy, The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920 (1945)? And yet it's every bit as charmingly and precisely written, and perhaps even more evocative of the vanished world before the bombardment (in Osbert Sitwell's phrase).

Siegfried Sassoon: War Poems (1983)

Six prose memoirs is quite a substantial legacy. And when you add in the posthumous publications: Rupert Hart-Davis's beautifully crafted collections of War Poems (1983), together with three volumes of diaries (1981-85), not to mention Paul Fussell's elegant illustrated edition of the Sherston Memoirs, Sassoon's Long Journey (1983), he begins to look even more substantial.

Paul Fussell, ed.: Sassoon's Long Journey (1983)

Like Graves, he did have the advantage of having survived: not through any want of trying to get killed on the part of either of them, mind you. For all the editing and re-editing, Wilfred Owen's legacy remains fragmentary and thwarted because there is (comparatively) so little of the harsh, late war poetry we all admire, and so much of the flowery, fulsome pre-war poet. The fact that almost all Owen's surviving letters are addressed to his mother doesn't help, either - and nor does the fact that most of the biographical information we have about him comes through the filter of his rather jealous brother, Harold (himself a most accomplished memoirist).

Wilfred Owen: Poems (1920)

But what is it, finally, that explains my rather compulsive collecting of Sassoon's books? They are very beautifully produced and designed, of course: fine Faber layouts on pre-Second-World-War paper, for the most part. To some extent it's because of the sidelights it throws on Graves, who remains my main man in the field, I must confess (despite the comparative weakness of his own war poetry: his heart was never really in it like Sassoon and Owen).

Robert Graves: War Poems (2016)

I suppose, to some extent, it's because his work shows just how much can be accomplished with limited talents if you similarly limit your objectives. Graves was a far more unruly genius than Sassoon, but did he ever write anything as moving and perfect as the Sherston memoirs? I suspect not. Owen proved himself a far more gifted poet in the few months of mature work he was able to complete, but it was Sassoon who liberated him from his Georgian shackles, encouraged his work, and put up with his adolescent hero worship.

What's more, if you actually sit down and read a collection such as Counter-Attack (1918) from cover to cover, I think you might find it hard to sustain your belief in that label of "minor poet" which now hangs around him. It's a pretty powerful book, with poem after poem on its pages destined for immortality. How many other poets of any era can say the same?

Glyn Warren Philpot: Siegfried Sassoon (1917)

•

Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs (1928-45)

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon
(1886-1967)

1. Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1947.


2. Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems 1908-1956. 1961. London: Faber, 1984.


3. Sassoon, Siegfried. The War Poems. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1983.


4. Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. 1928. The Faber Library, 1. London: Faber, 1932.


5. Sassoon, Siegfried. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 1930. The Faber Library, 2. London: Faber, 1932.


6. Sassoon, Siegfried. Sherston’s Progress. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.


7. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress. 1928, 1930, 1936, 1937. London: Faber, 1945.


8. Fussell, Paul, ed. Sassoon's Long Journey: An Illustrated Selection from Siegfried Sassoon's The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. 1928, 1930, 1936, 1937. A Giniger Book Published in association with Faber & Faber. London: Faber / New York: K. S. Giniger Co. Inc., 1983.


9. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Old Century, and Seven More Years. London: Faber, 1938.


10. Sassoon, Siegfried. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber, 1942.


11. Sassoon, Siegfried. Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920. London: Faber, 1945.


12. Sassoon, Siegfried. Meredith. 1948. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1959.


13. Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries 1915-1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Book Club Associates, 1983.


14. Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries 1920-1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1981.


15. Sassoon, Siegfried. Diaries 1923-1925. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1985.


16. Sassoon, Siegfried. Letters to Max Beerbohm: with a few answers. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1986.


17. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886-1918. 1998. New York: Routledge, 1999.


18. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. A Biography 1918-1967. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2003.

Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries (1981-85)

Pictures from the Paper Table Booklaunch (3/12/17)

Paper Table book display

Bronwyn and I would like to thank everyone who came to the Paper Table novella launch yesterday, and were generous enough to buy so many books! We'd also like to thank our two brilliant speakers, Stu Bagby and Tracey Slaughter; our visionary designer Lisa Baudry; Leicester's cousins Dave and Viv Kyle, who were there to represent the Kyle family; our two helpers Niamh and Hatty Fitzgerald, and all the rest of you who were able to spend your Sunday afternoon with us.

We really appreciate it.

The approach to the book table

Jack and his book

Book display

Hand-sewn bookbags

Leicester's first cousin, Dave Kyle, and his daughter Viv

Niamh and Hatty Fitzgerald, our two helpers

The back garden

Gabriel White

Richard Taylor and Tracey Slaughter were the first to arrive

soon joined by many others, including Stu Bagby, Jackie Ottaway and Richard von Sturmer

Bronwyn makes her publisher's speech

Stu launches Leicester's novella, Letters to a Psychiatrist

Tracey launches The Annotated Tree Worship

Bryan Walpert with his bookbag, with Matt Harris behind him

group shot (1)

group shot (2)

group shot (3)

If you have any questions about either the books or the imprint, please visit our Paper Table website.

•


Brand design: Lisa Baudry

Doubting Thomases (3): R. S. Thomas

R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)

When I was in the third form at school - I guess that would be Year 9 in the new nomenclature - we used to have our French lessons in a classroom shared with an English teacher.

There were a series of posters around the wall which had been created by that 'other' class (whom we never met, though I came to envy them intensely). What with one thing and another, I spent an awful lot of time in class staring at these posters. They contained a series of short pithy statements, written out with bright crayon illustrations. I never consciously memorised any of them, but I can still recall some of those inscriptions, as well as the pictures that accompanied them:

They said:
Take hold of the nettle
seize it with both hands
and I did
and it stung me.

I don't know where that comes from, and Google has provided me with no assistance. Perhaps it was the poster-maker's own inspiration. A bit dark, maybe, but certainly memorable. Then there was:

And I thought about books.
And for the first time I realized
that a man was behind each one of the books.
A man had to think them up.
A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper.
And I'd never even thought that thought before.

That one seemed a bit banal to me at the time (not to mention, now, a bit sexist). It wasn't till some time afterwards that I ran across it while reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and suddenly realised that it'd had been a quote from him all along. All at once that made it sound much more pithy to me, little snob that I was.

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

The other wonderful thing I discovered in that first reading of Bradbury's masterpiece was the page where the narrator reads out the last two stanzas of "Dover Beach" to his depressed, suicidal wife and a couple of her friends:

"Dover Beach.” His mouth was numb.

“Now read in a nice clear voice and go slow.”

The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The chairs creaked under the three women, Montag finished it out:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

That poem completely transfixed me at the time. I didn't know it was by Matthew Arnold, or even who Matthew Arnold was. I took good care to find out after that, though.

Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach (1851)

The last of the three sets of poster texts which have stayed with me from that classroom is the only one that was clearly attributed to an author: R. S. Thomas. Just a few phrases stayed with me from that rather fierce poem until I looked it up again just now. To give you an idea of the tricks memory plays, here are the few bits I remembered:

And he said I will make the poem and I will make it now ... so he took paper and pen, the mind's cartridge ... while the spent hearts smoked in its wake ...

And here's the poem itself, from the volume Tares (1961). I don't know if the title was included on the poster. I suspect not:

The Maker

So he said then: I will make the poem,
I will make it now. He took pencil,
The mind's cartridge, and blank paper,
And drilled his thoughts to the slow beat

Of the blood's drum, and there it formed,
On the white surface and went marching
Onward through time while the spent cities
And dry hearts smoked in its wake.

R. S Thomas: Collected Poems 1945-1990 (1993): 122.

I can't tell you how satisfying it is to see that poem again after all these years, and to correct all the mistakes my memory made in recalling it.

I didn't particularly care for the poem at the time, mind you. It didn't rhyme, which was a big deal to me then. The arrogance of it repelled me, as well as what seemed the impossible self-confidence of those opening lines: claiming to know what your poem will be before you've even written it down.

None of that really mattered, though. That was just mind-chatter. What mattered was the fact that I'd finally seen that a poem could repel you and transfix you at the same time: that it could work on you whether you wanted it to or not. I assumed its author, this 'R. S. Thomas' I knew nothing else about, must be a most fearsome person, and it wasn't till years afterwards that I ventured to read any more of his work.

What I read bore no resemblance to the poem I remembered from the classroom, though. To be honest, in its violence and single-mindedness, it sounded more like Ted Hughes than the mild-mannered Welsh clergyman R. S. Thomas turned out to be. Until I read his autobiography, that is.

R. S. Thomas: Autobiographies (1997)

Perhaps I should say "Autobiographies": there are four such works collected in the volume above, all of them written in the Welsh he so painstakingly learned as an adult, but was - much to his chagrin - never able to compose poems in:

For me, being a poet is a full-time job, and although the muse may languish as one grows older, there is a kind of duty upon you to persevere in perfecting your craft, and to secure an answer, though poetry, to some of the great questions of life. Some are still surprised that I write my poems in English, as if it were a matter of choice. I have said many times that I was thirty before I started learning Welsh in earnest. English (my mother tongue, remember) was long since rooted in me, and it is from the depth of his being that poet draws his poetry. If I believed that I could satisfy myself by composing poetry in Welsh, I would so so. But I learned many years ago, with sorrow, that it was not possible. ... But be that as it may, Llŷn is not an escape, but a peninsula where I can be inward with all the tension of our age.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 151]

I hadn't really thought about that experience of staring at those texts and wishing that I was in that class, where you might be encouraged to create your own poster for your own quotation for quite a few years. A couple of months ago I was talking to Graham Lindsay, though, and he told me about an experience he had as a schoolboy when a relieving teacher gave their class Dylan Thomas's "Poem in October" (plus, I think, "Fern Hill" - which was also extensively excerpted from in the wall texts in my own classroom).

Reading Thomas for the first time was an extraordinary experience for him, and yet he was far too tongue-tied to tell the teacher about it when back at school. No doubt that teacher presumed that his little poetry experiment had been a complete failure. You never know, though. I'm sure that the teacher who got his or her class to create all those posters had no idea that anyone besides them actually read them, let alone was moved, intrigued, provoked by them to such a degree.

It must have been shortly after that that I started to write my own first painfully derivative, clumsily rhymed poems, full of archaic diction and mythological references, just like the nineteenth-century poets who were my models.

There are a lot of striking passages in R. S. Thomas's autobiography:

Today, when I was out in Pen-y-cil and Parwyd, as I was looking down the precipice, there came the old urge to leap down. Almost everyone has experienced it. There is a psychological explanation most probably, but not everyone has a steady enough head to be able to look down, let alone climb down.
[Blwyddyn yn Llŷn / A Year in Llyn (1990): 123]

That one certainly struck a chord. Someone once asked me why I wrote poetry, and I replied: 'To come up with reasons for wanting to stay alive." That must have sounded like a piece of pretentious posing to her, but I'm afraid it was nothing but the strictest truth. It runs in the family, I'm sorry to say.

Then there's this bit:

In 1938 came the awakening .. to a boy with ideals to uphold, the situation was clear enough: Christ was a pacifist, but not so the Church established in his name ... Meanwhile ... under the influence of the beautiful and exciting country to the west he continued to write poetry - tender, innocent lyrics in the manner of the Georgian poets, because that was the background to his reading among the poets. Edward Thomas was one of his favourites and because the latter had written about the countryside, the budding poet tried to imitate him. The more 'modern ' English poets had not yet broken though to his inner world to shatter the unreal dreams that dwelled there. And, alas, the Welsh poets did not exist for him. Who was to blame? The desire to write was within him, but because of the nature of his education and his background, he could only think in terms of the English language.
[Neb /No-one (1985): 44-45].

Those early religious struggles were more quickly resolved in my case, but those problems with 'modernity' took a long time to filter through into my writing, too. For his 1938, put my 1975. I can now see that that poem of his was one of the vehicles of transformation, but I wasn't really aware of it until just now.

Here's a list of the books of his I own:

R. S. Thomas: Collected Later Poems: 1988-2000 (2003)

Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000)

Poetry:

Thomas, R. S. Selected Poems, 1946-1968. 1973. Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1974.

Thomas, R. S. Between Here and Now: Poems. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Poems 1945-1990. 1993. London: Phoenix Giant, 1996.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. 2003. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.

Thomas, R. S. Uncollected Poems. Ed. Tony Brown & Jason Walford Davies. Highgreen: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2013.

Prose:

Thomas, R. S. Autobiographies: Former Paths / The Creative Writer's Suicide / No-one / A Year in Llŷn. 1972, 1977, 1985, 1990. Trans. Jason Walford Davies. 1997. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.

R. S. Thomas: Uncollected Poems (2013)

Few possessions: a chair,
a table, a bed
to say my prayers by,
and, gathered from the shore,
the bone-like, crossed sticks
proving that nature
acknowledges the Crucifixion.
All night I am at
a window not too small
to be frame to the stars
that are no further off
than the city lights
I have rejected. ...

"At the End"

R. S Thomas