by Alec Waugh
‘He’s in the country,’ Turner would reply. ‘He doesn’t like London. He only comes up to listen to concerts.’
After the publication of the fifth volume of Georgian Poetry 1920–1922, E. M. considered that the series had served its purpose. In that last volume Sassoon was not represented. There was no means of guessing into what new directions he had developed. I presumed that he was passing through a fallow season. Then in 1928 there appeared quietly and unobtrusively Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man. It was published anonymously. I have no idea why; not, I am very sure, to stimulate conjecture. That kind of thing would not appeal to a man so reserved and dignified. Perhaps he wanted to avoid the legend that had gathered round his name. He wanted his book to be reviewed on its own merits. He did not want to read review after review beginning: ‘How little one suspected in 1918 when Counter-Attack fluttered so many dovecotes that ten years later we should be considering such a book as this, yet it must not be forgotten that his previous book published a year earlier was entitled The Old Huntsman. What a change, though, from that high, fierce temper of revolt.’
When the book proved a success he made no attempt to make a mystery about its authorship. The secret was out within a few weeks. It was followed by a series of further memoirs and the Sherston trilogy is today an established classic. But he did not write about anything that had happened after 1922.
For the majority of writers there comes a time when they lose interest in the future, swing round in their tracks and start a second voyage ‘à la recherche du temps perdu’. A capacity to develop, to remain contemporary, to keep pace with the present and scan the horizon eagerly, is not necessarily a test of quality.
I met Sassoon for the first time in the spring of 1919. He lunched with me at the Savage Club and brought E. M. Forster with him. There are points of resemblance between their careers. Writing in the New Age in January 1911, Arnold Bennett said that ‘no novel for very many years has been so discussed by the critics as Mr Forster’s Howard’s End.… Mr Forster is a young man. I believe he is still under thirty if not under twenty-nine. If he continues to write one book a year regularly, to be discreet, to refrain absolutely from certain themes, and to avoid a too marked tendency to humour, he will be the most fashionable novelist in England in ten years’ time. His worldly prospects are very brilliant indeed. If, on the other hand, he writes solely to please himself, forgetting utterly the existence of the elite, he may produce some first class literature. The responsibilities lying upon him at this crisis of his career are terrific. And he so young too!’
Forster’s reply to that prophecy was to make only one further appearance as a novelist, fourteen years later, with A Passage to India. In close upon half a century he has produced in addition to that one novel, a collection of short stories and a few volumes of belles-lettres.
Both he and Sassoon have, I imagine, adequate private incomes. A novelist is rarely able to retire before his talent has declined; I fancy there comes to most writers that period in mid-career when they feel written out, and would give anything to be Civil Servants, to have a steady job with a pension at the end of it. Because they cannot afford to retire, they force themselves to go on writing and eventually get their second wind.
It may be that ‘autumn laurels wreathe for them’ and they write one of their best books in their last decade. But it does not happen very often. Most writers who develop early have done their best work before they are fifty. Who will say that Forster was not wise since fate gave him the opportunity of doing so, to stand upon his achievement, in the belief that he could only smudge his record? Few names are more honoured today in English letters.
As the ‘thirties drew to their close and the threat of war became insistent, I wondered what Sassoon was thinking. Was he oppressed by a feeling of frustration? His protest had been in vain and the world had not learnt its lesson. In 1938 he published a book of poems that did not attract very much attention but had a new quality of wistful resignation. He seemed to have accepted the inevitable. Perhaps he had come to feel as many others had, that no compromise was possible with the Germany that Hitler had created. The world might be in a better position today if we had made peace as we could have done in December 1916, before the Russian Revolution, before America had entered the war, before the collapse of social life in Germany and Austria had paved the way for Hitler, and before all those hundreds of thousands of young men had been slaughtered in the mud of Passchendaele. It may be that a chance was missed then. But by 1939 it was too late, Hitler had to be brought to book. The Second War had to be carried through to ‘unconditional surrender’. The first need not have been.
I last saw Sassoon in October 1940 under ironically appropriate circumstances.
A few weeks earlier I had been posted as staff-captain to the Petroleum Warfare Department, a branch of the Ministry of Mines, that under the dynamic inspiration of Geoffrey Lloyd made a considerable contribution to the war effort. The full story of the department has been told by its D.G., Major-General Sir Donald Banks in a book called Flame over Britain. At that time we were chiefly concerned with the defensive uses to which oil might be put, flame-throwers, tank traps, flame on water. In mid-October we went down into the country to give a demonstration.
It was what is called a typical, which is to say it was an exceptional, late autumn day; a day that started with mist and a chill in the air, a mist through which the sunlight began to break about eleven. By noon it was summer hot. It was the perfect day to drive down into the country with a team of cameramen to film the demonstration and it was a perfect picnic site that had been chosen for the demonstration, at the head of a valley, with the grass very green with dew and the trees red and brown and yellow and the spire of a church showing between the branches of an orchard.
We got down early, set out our cameras and waited. The blitz had been heavy on the previous night. It was a relief to lie out in the grass, with the sun warm upon our faces, in a countryside untouched by war. The valley was quiet and deserted: nothing dramatic in the country’s history had happened here. It was strange to reflect that within an hour its slopes would be lined with red-hatted officers; a whistle would blow, the handles of the cameras would turn, explosion would follow on explosion, the soft greensward would be scorched and ripped and scattered into a desert of smouldering fires and scarred iron.
The demonstration started at two o’clock. Within a quarter of an hour the beauty of the valley was destroyed and it was just as the high grade staff officers were moving to their cars, as the final informal conferences were breaking up, that a horseman, a civilian, came trotting by. This was, no doubt, a favourite ride of his. He had had no idea that this demonstration was to be held. It could scarcely be a pleasant surprise for him. I looked up, to note with a start of surprise that it was Sassoon.
My first instinct was to run across and greet him: but a second, wiser instinct checked me. There was an inscrutable expression on that drawn, handsome face as it looked down on the charred and littered grass.
What thoughts, I wondered, were moving behind that mask: how many different thoughts must be creating a mixed mood—memories of the last war and his revolt against it, his contempt for ‘scarlet majors at the base’, his poems that had seemed then and later the battle call to a crusade; the sacrifice of his generation that had failed to prevent this second war, whose intensified horror was exemplified by these new engines of destruction, with himself a quarter of a century later, in his fifties and too old for service?
It was kinder to leave him to that mood, those memories.
Two soldier poets, now generally recognized as two of the most important, were not included in the December 1917 reviews of the year’s poetry—Wilfred Owen and Richard Aldington. Owen’s story has been told once and for all in Osbert Sitwell’s Eminent Presences. To Richard Aldington’s story, I can add a footnote.
The story is peculiar, and its peculiarity lies in this. That we know almost nothing of his background. He was
born in 1891. He was educated at Dover College, and afterwards in France. But he has told us nothing about his home, his family, his upbringing. He was so anxious to attribute T. E. Lawrence’s ideas of grandeur to his illegitimacy, that one wonders whether the vein of bitterness that marked and in my opinion marred so much of his prose writing may not be due to some kind of an unhappy home. That is conjecture. I have no means of knowing. He has told us nothing. Nor has anybody else. At this late day it is unlikely that anybody will—or can.
Almost the first thing we know of him is that by January 1914 he was one of a group of poets who paid tribute to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. His companions were W. B. Yeats, T. Sturge Moore, F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound. He was then moving in high company. But during the war, he was never in the news. He was absorbed in the anonymity of army life. He served in the ranks. He was posted to an officer cadet training unit. He fought as an infantry subaltern in France. He wrote poetry in his dug-out. He was an ‘Imagist’ not a ‘Georgian’ and was represented in the Imagist Anthology of 1917, but not in the Catholic Anthology of 1915. He was never publicized as a ‘soldier poet’.
He married H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) the Imagist poetess. An American. It was a short-lived and must have been an unusual marriage. In 1952 I met their daughter who told me that she had no recollection of either of her parents. Aldington, on the very rare occasions when he mentioned H. D., spoke with warm appreciation of her poetry; he never spoke about her as a woman. I never met her.
Aldington matured young. Nichols, Sassoon and Graves had not reached a position in January 1914 when they would have been invited by Yeats and Sturge Moore and Pound to present a tribute to Scawen Blunt. Moreover Aldington had spent his maturing years in France. Englishmen of the late Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian periods, because of the public school system, sexually developed late. Graves has in his maturity written a number of deeply intimate love poems. But there is no evidence of that intimacy in Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers; nor is there in the poetry of Nichols or Sassoon. Aldington, on the other hand, through his years in France was sexually mature when the war broke out. He is essentially a love poet. He saw war in terms of his exile from love. No other English poet did. ‘Reverie’, ‘Meditation’, ‘Epilogue’ may not be greater poems than Graves’s, Sassoon’s, Nichols’s and Wilfred Owen’s. But they are different, in that profound respect.
I met Aldington for the first time at one of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop parties in the early spring of 1919. There was a difference of seven years between us, but we met on equal terms, as subalterns ‘home from the wars’ who had won their spurs as writers and now had to come to terms with a post-war world. There was an instantaneous affinity. A few weeks later I read his poem ‘Reverie’ in the English Review. I thought, I still think, that it is a very lovely poem. My appreciation of his poetry was an added bond between us. I wrote an article about him in Holbrook Jackson’s magazine Today which he carried round in his pocket for so long that it became dog-eared, with the creases split.
How many times did we meet in the next twenty years? Not so very often in actual fact. But when I read of his death in 1961, I felt that I had lost one of my closest friends. It is not the quantity but the quality of the meetings that count. I always met him under intimate conditions, often with Harold Monro. I remember in particular a dinner just the three of us at the Poetry Bookshop, and a summer evening when Monro and I were on a cricket tour that was based on Newbury. Aldington had a small cottage then at Bucklebury; he came over to watch the game and took us back with him for dinner. He was living alone and cooked the meal himself. He came little to London then. He could not afford to, he explained. He needed peace of mind to follow his own thoughts through; he was reviewing French books for the Times Literary Supplement, on which he could support himself as long as he avoided London. He lived simply, but not austerely. He enjoyed the pleasures of the table, of wine particularly. It was a solitary existence, but he was a dedicated man. His work came first. He was resolved to make the most of his talent. There was an air of reality about him; of putting first things first. There was also an air of warmth. In personal relations he was the same person that he was in his poetry.
He lived in Bucklebury for several years (later it gave him the material for The Colonel’s Daughter). Once when I was playing cricket at Aldermaston, with J. C. Squire’s XI, he came over to watch the game. He was wearing a beret and a beard. He was with an attractive female who was his companion for quite a while. His beard gave him a foreign air; before he had looked like an army officer in mufti. I did not think that the beard suited him. I mentioned this to Monro. Monro shrugged. ‘It is a symbol of emancipation. I grew one myself when I first went to live in Italy.’
In 1926 I began to travel and I lost touch with Aldington, as I did with many other friends. He was still, I gathered, living quietly, mainly in Europe now. Then in the autumn of 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front started a boom in war books. It had been taken as axiomatic in the trade that war books did not sell; though one or two good books had had large sales, Gilbert Frankau’s Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant and Wilfred Ewart’s Way of Revelation while the American play What Price Glory? had a long run in the U.S.A. It would be truer to say, not that war books were not being read, but that they were not being written. Writers like readers wanted to forget the war. Then suddenly a mood of nostalgia forced upon both writers and readers a need to relive their past; there was a flood of war books, most of them of high quality, Goodbye to All That, All our Yesterdays; Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and the play Journey’s End.
The obvious and superficial comment on this flood of war books would be that all over the world a number of writers decided to cash in on the success of All Quiet. But that is not the way good books are written. A good book is written when a good writer feels a need for self-expression, and a moment’s thought will show that a book takes a year to write and several months to publish. Even if a number of publishers in Europe and the U.S.A. had said to those of their authors who had seen war service, ‘Now’s the time, now’s your chance. Get cracking’, there would not have been the time to catch the market. Clearly what happened is this: all over Europe a number of writers felt simultaneously and independently a need to relive their war experiences, anticipating by eighteen months or so the public’s need to relive those same experiences. That is what timing is. No author can tell in 1927 what the public will want to read in 1929, but the novelist who is in tune with his time is ahead of his time, and anticipates intuitively the public’s need without knowing that he is doing so. As long as he can do that, he is a best-seller. The moment he loses that subconscious power of divination, he drops out of the race. Richard Aldington, who of all writers was the very last to write with his eye on the main chance, and also the last of all writers, leading as he did a secluded and solitary life, to have expected to find himself in tune with his hour, had the deserved good fortune to hit the market with a first-class book. He became overnight one of the most popular novelists of the decade. A string of novels all of which did well, followed on one another: The Colonel’s Daughter, All Men are Enemies, Seven against Reeves. He could live now in relatively affluent circumstances. He was free to travel as he chose. And all the time he was producing a body of, in my opinion, superb poetry.
At that time, travelling as I was, I missed A Dream in the Luxemburg, the beginning of this recrudescence. But in 1934, Beachcomber’s column in the Daily Express contained a contemptuous reference to his latest poem ‘The Eaten Heart’. Beachcomber, though himself a man of scholarship and taste, is in his column resolutely, obstinately ‘lowbrow’. He quoted from ‘The Eaten Heart’. ‘This is what they call poetry nowadays,’ he scoffed. I read and re-read the extract. It seemed to be what I called poetry. I immediately bought ‘The Eaten Heart’; and when I had read it, I bought A Dream in the Luxemburg. Then I wrote to Aldington. During the next four years I kept seeing him, off and on in London and at my home in Silchester.
In retrospect I realize that I never during those four years saw him against the background of his personal life. He was either my guest, or the guest of someone else, of Douglas Goldring, at least once. The only time that I was ever his guest was on that distant occasion when Monro and I dined with him in Bucklebury. It is possible that never having seen more than one of his various homes, I have missed the clue to him. But it is my belief that he was one of those men who cannot be bothered to organize a social life, who socially live from hand to mouth, making the most of what happens to be around. This view is strengthened by the picture that he gives of himself, without knowing that he is doing so, in his book on Norman Douglas and Orioli. He was seeing a lot of the two of them and of Reggie Turner in Florence in the late ‘thirties. He had gone to Florence, because he liked the place, because he had a book to write and, since he needed conviviality, he accepted what lay to hand. This is said neither in disparagement nor approval. Some novelists feel that it is necessary for their work to organize their private lives in such a way that they can obtain the widest view of the world around them.
Aldington was not that kind of novelist, and it was because he left things to chance, that he found confusion in his private life. It is surprising that it is the poets who have been basically the purest, such as Shelley, who have landed themselves into ‘the most impossible situations’.
There has been enough ‘chatter about Harriet’, but Aldington is an example of that particular confusion. When I re-met him in 1934, he was living with a widow rather older than himself. She was red-haired, and extremely handsome; it was obvious that she had been a very great beauty in her youth. She was still most attractive. They were not married, though she was introduced as Mrs Aldington. She had inspired A Dream in the Luxemburg. Hers and Aldington’s had clearly been a high romance. One said to oneself, ‘The disparity of age. How long will it last?’