Biography: Of the war poems which WB Yeats did include in his notorious Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Siegfried Sassoon's On Passing the New Menin Gate looks upon the commemorative monument to the Great War dead with savage indignation
And here with pride
'Their name liveth forever', the
Gateway claims.
Was ever an immolation so belied
As these intolerably nameless
names?
Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.
Sassoon's life (1886-1967) was "forever" haunted by those war experiences which, according to Max Egremont's authorised biography, "were restricted to inauspicious times, to the prelude and start of the Somme in 1916, to the Hindenburg trenches in April 1917 at the time of the battle of Arras, just before the failure of the Nivelle offensive; then to the early summer of 1918 when the Allies were still reeling from the massive German attacks of March. Back in Britain, he heard of an apparently bloody, bad end to the Somme".
Twice wounded, decorated with the Military Cross, Sassoon's survival - unlike other war poets with whom his name is bound, such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg - is told in all its anxious, yearning self-obsession in this somewhat bloated book of almost 600 pages. As with most master narratives, the elusive human truth of Sassoon's life lies elsewhere. Sassoon's Jewishness, his homosexuality and his conflicted desire to be part of the aristocratic "in crowd" brings to mind Oscar Wilde's rapid life and perilous times - a connection underscored by Sassoon's friendship with Robert Ross. But this story (again a little like Wilde's) is tacitly inscribed in Sassoon's bestselling poetry and in his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress, collectively known as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. While the first volume of the Memoirs was being lauded for its "ease and quiet and lovely Englishness" and Sassoon was being compared to Shakespeare, he saw Fox-Hunting Man as, in Egremont's words, "a sham, denying the most important parts of him"; "almost none of the things I would like to write", is how Sassoon described the book.
What was "left out" was an extraordinarily privileged life of luxury, generosity, emotional turbulence, masochism, Puritanism, repression, denial and never-ending self-dramatisation. In the latter, Sassoon was ably assisted by a string of lovers, hero-worshippers, cheerleaders, patrons, party-goers and, ultimately, those who really cared about him.
Egremont's biography is a portrait gallery of a caste of English eccentrics, traversing their own country estates and hidden villas and "big houses", at a point of terminable imperial decline, after the first World War and before the second World War. Thomas Hardy at Max Gate is "a shrine" but his passing in 1928 reveals Sassoon as a weathervane, spinning this way and that, continually lavishing gifts of money and presents upon his many contacts, including the preposterous Sitwells, and upon those who had been (and might become again) friends, such as Robert Graves. With so much temperature-taking of feeling, mood-swings, impatience, irritability, languor and the swift judging of others (behind backs, in the diaries of the time), it's sometimes hard to keep up with who is in and who is out. These folk were certainly well tuned to the expanding world of celebrity and publicity.
Yet Sassoon's life story moves from the sexual obsessions which, according to his biographer, "plagued him", to marriage, the birth of his adored son, George, and a parable life lived in relative isolation as an English country gentleman of an intently spiritual frame of mind. The to-ings and fro-ings of his previous gay life with, among others, Stephen Tennant are the stuff of a Wildean drama. Tennant, who insisted upon travelling with his valet, nanny and beloved parrot, lived until 1986, in his last years as "a recluse at Wilsford, his bed strewn with seashells, sheaves of his own drawings, and the manuscript of [ his unfinished novel] Lascar; fat, with turbulent orange hair, still proud of what he thought of as his shapely legs".
Egremont is unrelenting in reminding the reader of Sassoon's sexual desires, from boy soldiers to actors to princes, but less sure of his ground when it comes to Sassoon's fascinating ethnic and religious background.
"Kentish" is how Edmund Blunden described Sassoon's writing; "healthy and pastoral" glosses Egremont. But if the biographer's opening description of Sassoon as "an uncertain Englishman" sounds almost tragic, the concluding words of this important study could be read in today's world as a tad chauvinistic: "Sassoon evokes a lost, decent England achieved only in the imagination, perhaps only in the imagination of those a little outside this country of the heart. The myth is strong, even mesmeric, better and more honourable than most myths by which nations live, and [ Sassoon's] writings have helped it to endure."
Siegfried Sassoon: A BiographyBy Max Egremont, Picador, 597pp. £20
Gerald Dawe's most recent poetry collections include The Morning Trainand Lake Geneva. He is compiling an anthology of 20th-century Irish "war" poetry. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin