Siegfried's Journey, 1916-1920

WITH this volume of his autobiography Siegfried Sassoon covers the years 1916-1920 inclusive, the years in which he established his reputation as poet and as protestant against war. Primarily the book consists of literary reminiscences, with interludes concerning Sassoon’s appearances in support of Philip Snowden’s Labor Movement and occasional retirements to the country to resume the role of fox-hunting man. In regard to the last aspect I can merely cite Flinders Petrie to the effect that the chief preoccupation of Paleolithic man was hunting, and that large sections of the English people live in a Paleolithic frame of mind.

All the incidents of this period of Sassoon’s life are colored by his obsession with the horror and futility of war. the personal despair and the crusader’s bitterness. Yet every emotion is, in expression, muted by the shy and withdrawn character of the man himself. In its objectivity and stylistic polish, its shrewd, somewhat impersonal humor, the book is closest in tone to Santayana’s recent autobiography.

Sassoon’s gallery of characters is varied and lively. There are unforgettable passages concerning Wilfred Owen, of whose powers Sassoon was generously and intimately aware. The sketches of Thomas Hardy at Mux Gate are superb. Then there is his first meeting with the Laureate. Bridges at the moment was in his grumpiest mood. “What did you say his name was?” the Laureate said to the gentle and discomfited Masefield. “Siegfried Digweed?” Robert Ross appears frequently in these pages as the spiritual patron of literature and young poets. And as patroness appears the extraordinary Lady Ottoline Morrell, for whom the author maintains more affection than does the reader. John Drinkwater, who would read his poems aloud though he put his unwilling auditors to sleep, Walter de la Mare, the master of enchantment, H. G. Wells, and most of the personages we should like to see intimately are presented to us.

The roster of literary figures whom he knew in America is almost equally extensive, but during a brief visit he had time for little more than fleeting impressions, perceptive though they are. Robert Frost has “the inwardness of a man talking quite naturally to himself.”In contrast, Vachel Lindsay “wrote as an evangelist . . . in an intoxication of color and elocutionary effect.”Sassoon found Carl Sandburg congenial, and with Louis Untermeyer he was more at home than with anyone else in New York. On the occasion of his visit to Boston in 1920 he met Amy Lowell. I remember the occasion — in fact I presided at it when Sassoon read his poems at Harvard with a shy winsomeness to which, according to his own confession, he gave full play in order to cover his fatigue. At the end of the reading Miss Lowell rose from her seat and announcing, “I love that man!” bore him off to her house in Brookline.

Mr. Sassoon is so immersed in his past that I am inclined to suspect that if life did not come to a halt after his youth, it at least slackened considerably. His memories of our present years will surely have little to offer except the fact that he was dwelling entirely in his past — a preoccupation, however, which has produced a modern autobiography unexcelled in interest and distinction.

ROBERT HILLYER