September sent it to the Athenaeum Press. Within two weeks the first proofs arrived, with a second set in early November.
Having returned to Cambridge he was more than ever out of sympathy with his studies and was minded to go down without completing his degree. Theresa, he was confident, would support this; he might even have suggested it to her during the summer. She saw no point in her son pursuing matters in which he was not interested. Uncle Hamo took the opposite view and wrote urging him to persist. As a possible diversionary tactic, he suggested that his nephew enter for the Chancellor’s Medal. The subject was Edward I and, although Sassoon thought it a strong theme for an epic poem, he became disillusioned with his efforts. Eventually he struck on a possible treatment and sent in the finished work. Convinced he would not win the prize, he went home to Weirleigh for Christmas. The 18th December was a red-letter day. Fifty copies of the presentation volume arrived. He noted in the proudest terms, ‘no one knew about it, not even my mother’. Theresa was splendidly surprised with her Christmas gift.
In the New Year Sassoon had a slight chill which, turning into a mild case of flu, delayed his return to university till March, another of those convenient illnesses which enabled him to postpone the evil day. Uncle Hamo may have suspected as much and, unlike his sister, felt regret that his nephew would not complete his degree. Writing to his friend Edmund Gosse, he said that Siegfried jibbed at the idea of work and was determined to follow a line of his own; that he had his mother’s support in this and must go his own way. He also appealed to Gosse to have a word with Theresa. Nothing came of his efforts. His idea of the Chancellor’s Medal, or the Chancellor’s Muddle as Theresa called it, also met with failure – his nephew did not win. Sassoon’s undergraduate days at Cambridge came to an end. Well aware that his uncle was disappointed, he wrote to him on 19 May 1907:
Dear Uncle Hamo,
Cheque received: I must screw myself up to inform you that I intend to give up Cambridge. I see no use in staying there three years and not getting a degree, and am sure I should never pass the exams. I expect you will be very sick with me about it, but I don’t think I should ever do anything there. I admit it appears rather idiotic, but I have quite made up my mind about it.
Your not at all truculent nephew
S.S.
Not truculent! And accompanied by a slice of imperiousness in the final sentence. Uncle Hamo accepted defeat, knowing that his nephew would be 21 that September and free to follow his own course. A few weeks before the birthday, Sassoon went in a semi-apologetic spirit to Uncle Hamo’s studio. The trepidation he felt as he approached was dissolved by the ever charitable and gentle uncle, who showed himself quite reconciled to the decision. He was working on a statue of Tennyson and he encouraged his nephew to try on the Laureate’s cloak and hat. It was something of a coronation, with Uncle Hamo’s commendation of his nephew’s work and faith in his future. ‘Let us hope that some day you will have no need to borrow the mantle of greatness, old man. Let your thoughts ring true; and always keep your eye on the object while you write.’ The advice was sound, though unfortunately Tennyson’s outsize hat had slipped down to cover Sassoon’s eyes.
Sassoon at 21 began to settle into the life of poet, sportsman and country gentleman with an income of £400 a year. He took possession of the upstairs floor of the Studio where his father had once played the violin, painted and browsed through his library. Sassoon’s own library was begun during his frequent absences from Marlborough College. It was to be ‘a real library – in which one went up a ladder and pulled out a dusty volume, to discover with delight that it was a first edition of somebody like Bunyan’. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than a good edition with a fine binding. A single volume or an author’s complete works would be ordered from a favoured bookseller, usually in part exchange for one of his father’s books, which the Bookseller’s Chronicle informed him was being sought by some other bibliophile. The opening transaction involved a first edition of Gissing’s New Grub Street:
Heard from Brownish Bros. They are willing to give £1. 5s in cash for Gissing or £1. 15s in books. Have decided to accept the latter alternative, so wrote immediately for the The Works of Samuel Johnson, 12 vols., calf, 1801, 15s; Sir Dudley Digges’s State Letters, folio, old calf, 1665, 6s; Paul and Virginia, 12 mo., calf, 1779, 2s.; Potter’s Euripides, 2 vols., calf, 1814, 5s. 6d.; and the Life of Queen Elizabeth, 4to., panelled calf, 1738, 3s 6d. This leaves 3s. to my account.
These were the first of the thousands of volumes Sassoon collected during his lifetime and which he neatly arranged to show their bindings to best effect. Neatness and order were, he declared, ‘a craving’. In his memoirs Sassoon creates the impression that he was, like his father, a browser. ‘Most of my serious reading was undoubtedly done with my watch on the table, and my thoughts may have wandered away to the golf links over at Sevenoaks.’ That is the confession of his youthful years; the mature Sassoon ‘knew his books so well that he could spring up and pull one down and open it at the very page to make his point’.
Taking possession of the Studio in that September of 1907 had emotional resonances:
If only the Studio could write reminiscences of its grown-up childhood how interesting they would be! My mother seldom spoke of those times, but the Studio had seen the happiness that came before those sad events which had so impressed themselves on my mind; and I would have liked to hear more about my father as he was at his best. The Studio must often have heard him playing his Stradivarius with that gipsy wildness which was the special quality of his fiddling. It had heard the light-hearted voices talking of the future without foreboding. The past had filled the Studio with vibrations that were one with my own history. For a moment I felt as if my father were in the room. So real had my meditations made him that I could almost smell his cigar smoke. But it was only the imagination of a moment.
For the next six years Weirleigh was the centre of Sassoon’s life, from whence he ventured into the surrounding countryside of Kent and Sussex. There were trips to London, sometimes with Theresa to concerts or exhibitions and on to the old family home at Melbury Road. There were also visits to stock up with hunting gear. The six years have a dual theme: emerging poet and enthusiastic sportsman. His days were lived on two levels – the public life, as in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, and the internal, tranquil self of his second volume of autobiography, The Weald of Youth. These were also the years in which he formed a new friendship and strengthened an existing one. Both arose from Sassoon’s love of hunting and point-to-pointing.
Stephen Gordon Harbord (known as Gordon) was born in 1890, the son of the Revd Harry Harbord, rector of East Hoathly, near Lewes in Sussex. Sassoon introduces him in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. In April 1911, Sherston goes as a spectator to a point-to-point meeting at Dumborough in Sussex. The racing card informs him that one of the riders is a Mr S. Colwood: ‘It can’t be Stephen Colwood, can it? I thought, visualising a quiet, slender boy with very large hands and feet, who had come to my House at Ballboro’ about two years after I went there. Now I came to think of it, his father had been a parson somewhere in Sussex, but this did not seem to make it any likelier that he should be riding in a race.’ In fact S. Colwood is G. Harbord, and the passage is a good example of how Sassoon mingles circumstances, changes names and dates. Dumborough is the alias for Eridge; Colwood was the name of the Harbords’ family home and it was Gordon’s brother Kenneth Blair Harbord who was Sassoon’s contemporary at Marlborough, but the experiences shared and the people portrayed are authentic, if at times heightened for effect.
The Harbords were a large family. In all
