Though Siegfried Sassoon lived a very long life, dying of natural causes at the age of eighty in 1967, he remains frozen, for posterity, somewhere in his late twenties, as an infantry officer in the trenches of the Western Front. Tall, elegant, rather mournful-looking—T. H. White said that he resembled a Borzoi hound—Sassoon epitomized the promise of the generation sacrificed on the battlefields of France, and spoke for it in verses that, along with those of his friends Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, have forever defined the waste and the tragedy of trench warfare in the popular imagination.

A few of Sassoon’s most famous works have earned a permanent place in England’s poetic heritage. Here, for instance, is “The General,” written in 1917 when Sassoon was in a hospital recovering from wounds received at the Battle of the Somme:

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

And this from “Died of Wounds” (1916), based on the midnight ravings of a young soldier:

Then there is “Everyone Sang” (1919), perhaps Sassoon’s most quoted poem, which reconciles the misery of war with the human capacity for joy and hope that can never quite be quashed:

It is almost entirely for his war poetry, and for his “Sherston” trilogy (fictional memoirs? autobiographical fiction?) consisting of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston’s Progress (1936), that Sassoon is remembered today, though he continued to write poetry and prose throughout his life, and not without some success. His limited reputation would seem to arise from the fact that it was only during the war that Sassoon caught—no, grabbed—the spirit of his times; indeed, he personified it. During the rest of his life he resisted every cultural current. In youth, as an amateurish poetaster, he had toyed with a moribund Pre-Raphaelitism and rejected, almost fearfully, the more robust excitements offered by a nascent Modernism; in maturity he directed his affections, and his artistic efforts, backwards at a half-imaginary Golden Age that had lasted, he felt, from about 1825 to 1914. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and querulousness too often overpowered his considerable metrical skill and his genuinely deep feelings and love of beauty. The older he got, the more exclusively he was seen as a relic of the past, and for this he had absolutely no one to blame but himself.

Why another biography of Sassoon? Max Egremont, author of Siegfried Sassoon: A Life, responds with the usual excuse of new material, and this is true enough: he was, he points out in his preface, given access to Sassoon’s unpublished diaries for 1926 onwards, as well as to the previously inaccessible journal of Sassoon’s lover Stephen Tennant.¹ This ought to be a good enough reason, but in the event it is not. There have already been five full-length studies of Sassoon’s life and work, and while the blurb on Egremont’s book calls it the “definitive biography,” that title surely belongs instead to Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s splendid and generously illustrated two-volume Siegfried Sassoon (1998–2003) which managed—without the benefit of the diaries and journals to which Egremont was made privy—to be far more personal, more thorough, more readable, and more sympathetic than Egremont’s attempt.

The inferiority of this biography is largely due to Egremont’s infelicitous style. It is fine that he makes use of these new and exciting sources, but rather than quoting or examining whole passages in them he tends instead to incorporate a word here, a phrase there, into his own narrative; the general effect is so choppy as to induce seasickness. This, for example, is how he opens Chapter One:

Egremont footnotes these scrappy little quotes, but the reader cannot be expected to be constantly flipping to the back of the book to find out the original context for them; hence, they are both distracting and unnecessary. The resulting prose seems to belong neither to Egremont nor Sassoon but to some bland and characterless amalgam of the two. Egremont tends to use these little insertions in lieu of his own opinions or analysis; liberally peppering his text with them, he is content simply to relate or even list the events of Sassoon’s life without taking the trouble to examine or reveal. The only personal feeling Egremont really succeeds in communicating is contempt and even distaste for his subject—almost always, in the absence of a corresponding affection, the kiss of death for a biography.

It has to be admitted that Sassoon was not really the most likeable of men.

It has to be admitted that Sassoon was not really the most likeable of men. Snobbish, self-involved, afflicted with a sort of fastidious distaste for the world, he indulged in a series of laughably disastrous love affairs and a self-indulgent cultivation of nostalgia. But this is far from the whole story. Sassoon was neither as stupid nor as humorless as Egremont makes him seem: At least his friends didn’t think so, and he counted some of the most brilliant and socially demanding people of his generation as friends. The Sherston trilogy, while not “funny,” is full of a characteristic self-deprecating humor, while as a poet he excelled, somewhat surprisingly, in parody.

As told above, Sassoon descended on his father’s side from a famous family of Sephardic Jews who, after having made a fortune in Baghdad and India, had emigrated to England in the mid-nineteenth century. The capital was diluted over the course of the generations; Siegfried’s father, Alfred, was a rich man but not enormously so. The cultural influence of the Sassoons on the poet was almost nil: The family cut off ties with Alfred Sassoon when he married Theresa Thorneycroft, a gentile, and Alfred himself died when Siegfried was only nine, leaving him entirely in the orbit of the ultra-English, Protestant Thorneycrofts.

Siegfried was a dreamy boy, unsuccessful in the masculine pursuits his culture demanded. Athletically undistinguished, he was not academically gifted either; when he left Marlborough in 1904, his report said that he showed little “intelligence or aptitude for any branch of work,” and few prospects for “any special career.” He took refuge in his favorite romantic, emotional poetry—Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and the like—and, when he discovered its joys, fox-hunting. As a homosexual and a Jew, Sassoon was definitely an outsider in English country life, but fox-hunting had, as Egremont points out, “after the entry fee had been paid . . . , a curious democracy of elegance and courage where feats of horsemanship and nerve were admired unstintingly as physical, sometimes beautiful, manifestations of human achievement.” Sassoon would eventually repay the sport for everything it gave him: it has never been more feelingly eulogized than in his lovely Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

He was not much more successful at Cambridge than he had been at Marlborough, studying only desultorily and lapsing into “day-dreaming and Pre-Raphaelitism . . . , lutes and nightingales.” At the age of twenty he had a volume of poetry, heavily influenced by his favorite writers, privately printed, then left university without a degree. Without the necessity of earning a living, he aspired to be a professional writer. But the eminent critic Edmund Gosse, to whom he sent his work for advice (and who was later to become one of his greatest friends and supporters) initially thought him not talented enough for a full-time career as a writer.

As with so many young poets of that time, Sassoon’s meeting with Edward Marsh, then Winston Churchill’s private secretary and the future editor of Georgian Poets, was key: in fact Marsh, Gosse, and Robbie Ross, Oscar Wilde’s one-time companion, became a powerful trio of older mentors without whom Sassoon might never have been anything but a gifted amateur. Marsh expressed his impatience with Sassoon’s fin-de-siècle affectations and his “invertebrate sort of poems fading away in a sigh.” Marsh’s influence, as well as the poetry of Thomas Hardy which Sassoon read rapturously at this period—and, later, his wartime friendship with the younger poet Robert Graves—helped to focus Sassoon upon the elements that would make all the difference to his style and that remain the single most effective and memorable aspects of his best work: the use of the familiar and the everyday, the shift from “poetic” language and images to the rough and frequently anti-romantic language and images of real life.

Until 1914, Sassoon was directionless; the war came as the answer to all his uncertainty about the future. He enlisted on the very first day of the war, as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry: he refused, initially, to become an officer. Breaking his arm in training, he missed the Battle of the Marne, and eventually took a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, departing for France in November, 1915. Early poems like “Absolution” (1915) display a Rupert Brooke-like idealism and martial ardor (it is interesting to reflect that but for the randomness of disease and stray bullets, Sassoon might today be remembered as the idealist and Brooke as the grim realist). It was not until he reached the front line in late 1915 that the tone of his poems aquired the very distinctive tone we now recognize: the first of these was “The Redeemer,” written in November 1915, revised and rewritten March 1916, inspired by his experiences at Festubert.

Though fully alive to the horrors around him, Sassoon was convinced that he was in the right place. The war had given him what he had long lacked: a vocation. He had a strong sense of noblesse oblige, recognizing the enormous debt the officer owed his men. Prewar doubts, too, about his manliness and his poetic gifts became irrelevant. “All that mattered now,” Egremont says, “was courage and the ability to lead and sustain comradeship. He found he had these, and a new Sassoon appeared. . . .” It was all far better, he reflected in his diary, than the “old inane life of 1913–14.”

In 1916 Sassoon’s poetry, along with that of other war poets, began to change, to become more outspoken and angry, to speak more in terms of waste than of sacrifice. The posthumous publication of Charles Sorley’s verse in January 1916 made a tremendous impression, sowing not only doubts as to how the war was being conducted but doubts as to whether the Allies even deserved to win. Sassoon’s verse caught the crest of the rising wave. “In the Pink” (February 1916), “the first of my outspoken war poems,” was refused by the Westminster Gazette on the grounds that it might harm the recruiting effort. Others, such as “Christ and the Soldier,” “They,” “The Tombstone Maker,” “To the Warmongers,” and “For England,” take up the themes for which Sassoon became famous: the ineptitude of the generals’ planning the war, the idiocy of the home front coverage, survivors’ guilt, the innocence of the troops, and the betrayal of their trust. Another of Sassoon’s subjects, less attractive, was an extreme misogyny: he seemed on some level actually to believe that women were responsible for the war, or at any rate for its perpetuation.

This really does seem a little unfair.

Much of the power of Sassoon’s poetry derives from a trick he had picked up from Thomas Hardy, that of ending his poems with what he called a “knock-out blow.” It became something of a trademark, to the point where some critics began to think his real gifts were more epigrammatic than poetic. This is a judgment that deserves some real consideration; it is certainly true, in any case, that his epigrammatic poems have mostly proved more memorable than his lyrical ones, and none of his postwar poetry was to have the staying power of the wartime work which emphasized the epigrammatic.

Sassoon, needless to say, caught the attention of the pacifist intellectuals who gathered around Ottoline Morrell at Garsington. (Ottoline even conceived an ill-judged passion for the handsome poet, though his obvious lack of interest galled her: She called him “very vain” and “violently self-centered.”) Here was an outspoken critic of the war who also happened to be a genuine hero—Sassoon had won the Military Cross in 1916—and strikingly attractive to boot. Bertrand Russell and John Middleton Murry, the leaders of this group of pacifists, persuaded Sassoon to publish a statement against the political errors of the war and the wholesale sacrifice of innocent troops. This statement created the hoped-for commotion, with a question asked in the House of Commons and a hubbub in the press. But the protest was eventually suppressed, with a Medical Board convened and Sassoon sent to a psychiatric hospital in Scotland; after treatment there with Dr. Rivers, who became a friend and emotional mentor, he returned to his regiment. (This fascinating story was at the center of Pat Barker’s brilliant Regeneration trilogy).

Looked at retrospectively, this incident is clearly one of the events that changed the way the left-wing intelligentsia looked at war throughout the twentieth century: It would have an enormous influence on home-front reactions to Vietnam, Korea, and the secret and not-so-secret crimes of Stalin and Mao. This is ironic, because Sassoon was, in essence, a conservative (despite his Labour politics) and a romantic. After his death, the Catholic writer Christopher Hollis claimed that the protest of 1917 showed that Sassoon was no radical, but a conservative pacifist. This is true, I think. Egremont agrees. “Siegfried Sassoon was not a political writer. His protests against the war had their origins more in emotion than in a wish for radical change. During the postwar decades he seemed often a poet of noble intentions but, to other contemporaries, increasingly unadventurous.”

The war was the moral apex of Sassoon’s life.

The war was the moral apex of Sassoon’s life: he distinguished himself through his personal bravery, his poetry, and his intelligent questioning of the war and its aims. The remaining fifty years of his life were something of an anti-climax, to the point where he sometimes thought that he should have died in battle like his friend Wilfred Owen. His hatred of the modern movement (led by the despised “Towering Tom” Eliot) pushed him into the cultural rearguard, a difficult position to hold without real genius, which Sassoon did not possess. The Sherston trilogy was the best prose work he ever produced, and remains a minor classic. Egremont is correct, however, to remind us that in recreating himself through his autobiographical protagonist George Sherston, Sassoon omitted everything that made him odd—some might say everything that made him interesting: his homosexuality, his Jewishness, his poetry, his neurotic mother. Still, the work is very much worth reading. Later prose was not so successful. Apparently incapable of writing about anything but himself, the ultra-narcissistic Sassoon turned to straight autobiography in another trilogy: The Old Century (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried’s Journey (1945). Anyone hoping for material more intimate and revealing than the Sherston books was disappointed: once again, Sassoon seemed incapable of exposing the unconventional aspects of his life and character.

Sassoon’s personal journey makes for depressing reading. Nearly all of his homosexual loves were unworthy characters: the trashy Prince Philipp of Hesse, who later sold out to the Nazis; the glossy Ivor Novello; the screamingly flamboyant Stephen Tennant, “a figure worthy of Aubrey Beardsley”—outrageous even by the standards of the Bright Young Things among whom he moved. People laughed outright to see this incongrous couple, “the craggy war hero and the precious, shrieking aesthete.” Late in life Sassoon tried to go straight and married the ethereal Pre-Raphaelite beauty Hester Gatty. The marriage was a predictable disaster, with each partner soon coming to hate the other but apparently unable to let go. Both seemed, to their friends, more than slightly mad. Their son George, Sassoon’s longed-for heir, was practically torn in two.

The emotionally tortured Sassoon was received into the Catholic Church in 1957, and thereafter, for the last decade of his life, he seemed finally to find a measure of peace. He had always been, he claimed, essentially a religious poet.

If we look back over his entire career, his judgment seems a reasonable one. Fixation on mere beauty—beauty for beauty’s sake—can be damaging to any art, and Sassoon was certainly guilty of that sin. His poetry, and his prose, suffered accordingly. Yet often it was not so much beauty that he wrote of as its too-frequent absence, and when he managed to equate the longing for beauty with a spiritual search his work achieved real success. As an anonymous critic in the Observer commented, “Mr. Sassoon creates beauty simply by the hunger for it he arouses.” This is undeniable. What makes the brutal images of the war poems so memorable is the different world they automatically imply: a prewar pastoral that had already, by then, vanished forever.