Siegfried Sassoon. By John Stuart Roberts. Richard Cohen Books. 354pp. £20 in UK.
AFTER the 1918 Armistice, Siegfried Sassoon continued to write poetry for almost half a century, but no one now reads it. Indeed one suspects that if, like his friend Wilfred Owen, he'd been killed during the drawn-out debacle of the Great War, his reputation today would be much more secure, blessed by the mythologising power of an early and senseless death.
He nearly achieved that. Returning from enemy lines during the closing months of the war, he was shot in the head by a soldier from his own regiment who mistook him for a German. The wound was superficial, but he was invalided back to England, and so ended a military involvement that had begun in idealism and ended in disgust.
The idealism was common to his moneyed and leisured class. The son of a wealthy Jewish father and an Anglican mother, he was raised by the latter in pastoral Kent when his father ran off to live with an American novelist. Siegfried (the name came from his mother's love of Wagner) was three when that happened, but so protective and nurturing was his home life that he grew up with little on his mind except fox-hunting, cricket and poetry.
Encouraged by his mother, he had begun to write very early, but it was not until his late 20s that his talent was noticed by such apostles of the now-musty Georgian style as Edward Marsh and Harold Monro. However, as with Owen, it was the war that gave him his true subject.
He had enlisted as it loomed, and he served on the Western Front, gaining a Military Cross and earning himself the nickname "Mad Jack" for his reckless bravery. Disillusionment, however, soon set in with the spectacle of men being used for meaningless slaughter, with the arbitrary decisions of those in high command, with the prolongation of a grotesquely conducted war by a British government that refused to set out conditions for peace, and with a mindlessly jingoistic civilian attitude back home.
The poems became bitter, angry (" `He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack/As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack./But he did for them both by his plan of attack") and sometimes savagely satirical ("Does it matter? - losing your sight?/ There's such splendid work for the blind;/And people will always be kind,/As you sit on the terrace remembering/And turning your face to the light"). He also issued a furiously forthright prose statement about the war, which led the government to try to have him declared insane when he was invalided home in 1917.
John Stuart Roberts is interesting on the war years, even if his dogged prose leaves something to be desired. But you'd need to be a passionate admirer of Sassoon to be engrossed by the remaining three-fifths of the book, which detail his homosexual relationships after the war, his late and unsatisfactory marriage to a much younger woman and, in the 1950s, his very late conversion to Catholicism. If the writer's post-war work were a little more compelling, the life might seem compelling, too, but apart from some fine volumes of thinly-disguised autobiography (chiefly the memoirs of a foxhunting man and of an infantry officer), the poetry and prose are thin stuff.
Essentially, it was the Great War that made Sassoon a real poet - as it made Owen a real poet, too - and when it ended, so also did his inspiration and gift. But even in the battlefront poems, Owen emerges as the much greater talent. You read Sassoon's most lasting war poems and you gain a palpable sense of the man's rage; you read Owen, and the skill and passion are so flawlessly merged that it's you who feel the rage at the obscenity and futility of it all.
John Boland is a poet and critic. His poetry collection Brow Head has just been published by Abbey Press.