Aesthete and man of war

Elizabeth Jennings
MICHAEL THORPE, in Siegfried Sassoon (Oxford University Press, 40s.) devotes his study to his subject's writings; the life is merely an accompaniment, and quite secondary. In a way this is a pity.
Except with the greatest writers, the life tends to overshadow the works. Mr. Sassoon is, of course, well-known for another reason. He was one of the heroes of the 191418 war who, after experience at the front, deliberately chose to be a pacifist. Mr. Thorpe thus has a complex subject with which to deal.
Mr. Sassoon was a glamorous figure before and during that war. He was "taken up" by many people of literary talent and his own verse quickly received acclaim. As a young war poet he met Wilfred Owen, and himself wrote biting satire on the British Government and generals.
His verse of this time was some of his best and I think he never quite reached again the power of his war poetry. It is no wonder that he was hustled into hospital on the grounds that he was suffering from neurasthenia. He was certainly greatly shaken by what he saw and felt in France, but his pen was a dangerous weapon and many of the brass-hats and politicians wished to take it from him.
But all this is only one part of Sassoon's life. His boyhood and young manhood (as revealed in his autobiographies) are also fascinating as a picture of the times. Alongside his conventional autobiography, he wrote several books, such as "Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man", which also reveal the duality in the author's nature — the conflict between the aesthete and the man of action.
Poetry finally triumphed, however, and it is as a poet that Sassoon must finally be judged. Above all else, he is a satirist, a poet of irony. His work in a different though equally serious vein never completely convinces the reader.
Since he became a Catholic, Mr. Sassoon has written a number of poems but, as Mr. Thorpe says, "[his] religious poetry is modest and selfeffacing, Its deliberately muted colours and movement express the diffident gropings of the true contemplative : they suggest analogy with a rule of abstinence".
Mr. Thorpe has made a very careful and thorough study of all the prose and verse and its various fluctuations. I do not see how it could have been bettered for scholarship and devotion to its theme.