Siegfried Sassoon: Poems Siegfried Sassoon

Editor and novelist

Having lived for a period at Oxford, where he spent more time visiting literary friends than studying, Sassoon dabbled briefly in the politics of the Labour movement. In November 1918, he travelled to Blackburn to support the Labour candidate in the general election, Philip Snowden, who had been a pacifist during the war.

Though a self-confessed political novice, Sassoon delivered campaign speeches for Snowden, later writing that he 'felt grateful for [Snowden's] anti-war attitude in parliament, and had been angered by the abuse thrown at him. All my political sympathies were with him.'[20]

While his commitment to politics waned after this, he remained a supporter of the Labour Party, and in 1929 'rejoiced that [they] had gained seats in the British general election.'[21] Similarly, 'news of the massive Labour victory in 1945 pleased him, because many Tories from the class he had loathed during the First World War had gone.'[22]

In 1919 Sassoon took up a post as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald. He lived at 54 Tufton Street, Westminster, from 1919 to 1925; the house is no longer standing, but the location of his former home is marked by a memorial plaque.[23]

During his period at the Herald, Sassoon was responsible for employing several eminent names as reviewers, including E. M. Forster and Charlotte Mew, and commissioned original material from writers like Arnold Bennett and Osbert Sitwell. His artistic interests extended to music.

While at Oxford he was introduced to the young William Walton, to whom he became a friend and patron. Walton later dedicated his Portsmouth Point overture to Sassoon in recognition of his financial assistance and moral support.

Sassoon later embarked on a lecture tour of the US, as well as travelling in Europe and throughout Britain. He acquired a car, a gift from the publisher Frankie Schuster, and became renowned among his friends for his lack of driving skill, but this did not prevent him making full use of the mobility it gave him.

Sassoon had expressed his growing sense of identification with German soldiers in poems such as "Reconciliation" (1918),[24] and after the war, he travelled extensively in Germany, visiting the country a number of times over the next decade.

In 1921 Sassoon went to Rome, where he met the Kaiser's nephew, Prince Philipp of Hesse. The two became lovers for a while, later taking a holiday together in Munich.[25] While they had become estranged by the mid-1920s, due in part to geographical distance and in part, as Jean Moorcroft Wilson notes, to Sassoon's increasing discomfort over Philipp's growing interest in right-wing politics.

Sassoon continued to visit Germany.[26] In 1927 he travelled to Berlin and Dresden with Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, and in 1929 he accompanied Stephen Tennant on a trip to a sanatorium in the Bavarian countryside.[27]

Sassoon was a great admirer of the Welsh poet Henry Vaughan. On a visit to Wales in 1923, he paid a pilgrimage to Vaughan's grave at Llansantffraed, Powys, and there wrote "At the Grave of Henry Vaughan", one of his better-known peacetime poems. The deaths within a short space of time of three of his closest friends – Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy and Frankie Schuster – came as setbacks to his personal happiness.

At the same time, Sassoon was preparing to take a new direction. While in the U.S., he had experimented with a novel. In 1928, he branched into prose, with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, the anonymously published first volume of a fictionalized autobiography, which was almost immediately accepted as a classic, bringing its author new fame as a prose writer.

The memoir, whose mild-mannered central character is content to do little more than be an idle country gentleman, playing cricket, riding and hunting foxes, is often humorous, revealing a side of Sassoon that had rarely been seen in his work during the war years.

The book won the 1928 James Tait Black Award for fiction. Sassoon followed it with Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). In later years, he revisited his youth and early manhood with three volumes of genuine autobiography, which were acclaimed. These were The Old Century, The Weald of Youth and Siegfried's Journey.