Letters
Sassoon remembered
Sir: I must take issue with some remarks made by Simon Raven in his review of Siegfried Sassoon's Complete Memoirs of George Sherston in your issue of 3 January. Mr Raven's description of the book is full and accurate, but when he attempts to analyse Sassoon's post-war character he is as far from the truth as it is possible to be. Sassoon may have been 'a man of limited intellect and of limited interests' (which of us is not?), but to say that 'his interest in literature was dilettante, neither wide nor deep, and at times he seems more concerned with elegances or eccentricities of binding, printing or format rather than with text or theme' is grotesquely wide of the mark.
All his life Sassoon had a passion for literature (especially poetry) and for music. One look at his library at Heytesbury was enough to show the width and depth of his reading. He preferred old editions to new, and he issued his early poems in privately printed pamphlets only because he could not find anyone to publish them.
Mr Raven says that 'his only interests seem to have been golf, cricket and foxhunting . . . none of which he really understood very well.' In fact he was well informed about golf, and knew a very great deal about cricket and foxhunting. Having an adequate private income, Sassoon had no need to write for money, and in his prose works he confined himself to those parts of his own life which he found most interesting and imp'ortant. Among these the Great War naturally played an immense part, but to say that 'for Sassoon the war went on for ever' is nonsense.
Of his great friend Edmund Blundfen the remark is true, for in his long life , he constantly read, wrote and dreamed about the war, besides compulsively revisiting the old battlefields. Sassoon,' after he had written his war poems and books, did none of these things, and during his last ten years, when I saw him often, I do not remember his even mentioning the war.
Rupert Hart-Davis Marske-in-Swaledale, Richmond, Yorkshire,
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