fortune.
Sassoon was already finding his vocation ‘irresistible’. Between 29 May and 14 August 1909, the initials S.S. appeared seven times beneath an assortment of verse in The Academy. On 26 June it published his sonnet ‘The Travellers’. Sassoon was having a golden day, as on that day he also received a parcel from the Athenaeum Press containing copies of his latest venture, ‘thirty-five in stiff white cartridge-paper covers and three on hand made paper bound in black buckram’. This private edition comprised 34 poems, of which 18 were sonnets. The title, Sonnets and Verses, was as predictable as the contents – loose descriptions of nature, early mornings, shepherds and goblins. The whole collection resembles fingers going up and down the keyboard, producing sound but no recognisable melody.
Helen Wirgman came for her usual long summer holiday. She was given a copy of the poems and Sassoon waited for her opinion before distributing copies of this latest opus. Meeting her in the garden and anxious for a response, he was deflated when none came. He sensed disapproval and disappointment on Wirgie’s part. It was a reaction endorsed by his own opinion of the volume. Returning to the Studio, Sassoon was overcome with frustration and mounting annoyance with himself. The collection he now realised was immature and he was relieved that no one but Wirgie had seen the poems. Lighting a fire in the Studio grate, he burnt the entire edition, with the exception of the three buckram copies. ‘When I confessed to Wirgie what I had done, she gave me one of her slow, sad looks.’
All was not lost in the conflagration. Sassoon had second thoughts about his precipitate action. He determined to salvage what he thought were the best of the sonnets and decided on another private edition. In a letter of May 1922 to his friend Sydney Cockerell, Sassoon says: ‘I muddled along, making corrections; I had no one to whom I could show any poems in MS, and these little books were a sort of private hobby.’
Hobby is a strange description of an intensely felt vocation, highlighting the danger inherent in Sassoon’s dividing his time between country pursuits and the pursuit of the Muse. As Uncle Hamo pointed out to Gosse: ‘At present he is too much with the inferior country intellectuals and I should like him to meet literary men.’
Underlying Sassoon’s disappointment over Sonnets and Verses was the suspicion that he had lost the naturalness of some of his earlier work. He was poetising, moralising and intoxicated with word-sounds. Influenced by Swinburne, he continued to explore the possibilities of the sonnet. Technique was a major problem, as was the question which opens one of his poems from the destroyed collection: ‘What shall the Minstrel sing?’ ‘The question what exactly should I sing was one which I had not so far asked myself with any awareness of the circumstance that, like many minstrels of my age, I had nothing much to sing about.’ There was, however, much to think about.
Sassoon at 25 years of age was not the happy-go-lucky person of earlier years. The absence of focus in his latest volume of poetry reflected the lack of focus in his life. There was an increasing awareness that life for him was ‘an empty thing’. He was experiencing ‘great perplexity and unhappiness’. It was while in this state of mind that he struck up a friendship with a brilliant academic named Nevill Forbes, Reader in Russian at Oxford. Sassoon first heard of Forbes nearly a decade earlier, when Fräulein Stoy arrived at Weirleigh. Her previous post had been tutor to Forbes and his sister. The Fräulein made it clear that Nevill was a pupil of prodigious talent, a polymath and a polyglot. So effusive and constant was the praise that Sassoon took against Forbes and dismissed him as a ‘swot’. Forbes preceded Sassoon at New Beacon School and Marlborough College, after which he went up to Balliol, then to Leipzig, before returning to Oxford and an academic post. In addition to his facility with languages – of which he spoke 14 – he was also a brilliant pianist with a strong liking for the music of Debussy, Ravel and Chausson. Probably at the suggestion of Fräulein Stoy, Nevill Forbes was invited to Weirleigh. Despite his original dislike of him, when they met and spent time together, Sassoon reversed his opinion.
In June 1910 Forbes invited Sassoon to spend some days in Oxford. There is no record of their conversations but there is the strong probability that Sassoon shared with Forbes, albeit in a general way, his dissatisfaction with his latest volume of poetry, the lack of focus, the unhappiness which pervaded his life and his inability to settle. It is unlikely that Sassoon would have told Forbes that he attributed the cause to sexual frustration but it is clear that he told him enough for Forbes to guess the nature of Sassoon’s difficulties because he suggested that he read the works of Edward Carpenter, whom Forbes knew and admired. During the autumn of 1910, Sassoon read Carpenter’s pioneering work on sexuality, The Intermediate Sex, and his volume of poems published in 1883, Towards Democracy, part of which appeared under the title ‘Who Shall Command the Heart?’ Carpenter propounded the theory that masculine and feminine sexuality occupied different ends of a line. Moving towards the centre these absolutes lessen until at the midway point masculinity and femininity coalesce – each person is somewhere on that line, as opposed to the then held view that there was only unalloyed feminine and masculine sexuality. But there was more to Carpenter than theories on human sexuality. According to E. M. Forster, he was a socialist in the mould of Shelley and Blake, ‘who saw from afar the New Jerusalem from the ignoble slough of his century’. Ordained into the priesthood, he afterwards found that he could not subscribe to the articles of faith and went to live among the working class in the north of England. The Socialist aspect in Carpenter’s books did not engage Sassoon at that point but he was affected by his thoughts on homosexuality.
In May 1911 Sassoon went again to Oxford and stayed with Forbes. They made a sentimental journey to Marlborough and, no doubt, exchanged confidences, with Sassoon expressing gratitude for the introduction to Carpenter’s work. Whether Forbes urged him to contact Carpenter is not clear but on 11 July a letter went to him from Weirleigh:
Dear Edward Carpenter,
… It was not until October last year, when I was just 24, that, by an accident, I read your Intermediate Sex, and have since read Towards Democracy and Who shall command the heart? I am afraid I have not studied socialism sufficiently to be in sympathy with what I know of it; but your words have shown me all that I was blind to before, and have opened up the new life for me, after a time of great perplexity and unhappiness. Until I read The Intermediate Sex, I knew absolutely nothing of that subject, (and was entirely unspotted, as I am now), but life was an empty thing, and what idea I had about homosexuality was absolutely prejudiced, and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be, and the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathy for women a mystery to me. It was only by chance that I found my brother (a year younger) was exactly the same. I cannot say what it has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on, though of course the misunderstanding and injustice is a bitter agony sometimes. But having found out all about it, I am old enough to realise the better and nobler way, and to avoid the mire which might have snared me had I known 5 years ago. I write to you as the leader and the prophet.
The note of effusive thanks and admiration is followed by some details of Sassoon’s life in the country, his love of music, commitment to poetry. He then, probably out of deference to Carpenter’s Socialism, distances himself from the ‘plutocratic’ Sassoons and follows this with a quite extraordinary reference to his father who, he tells Carpenter, ‘was intensely musical and I think had a strong vein of the homosexual nature in him’. Did Sassoon believe that showing intensity in the arts was a sign of homosexuality? What we know of Alfred Sassoon leaves little doubt that he bore no sexual antipathy to women. The letter ends with Sassoon in unctuous mood: ‘May your reward be in the generations to come, as I pray mine may be. I am not religious but I try to believe that our immortality is to be, (in those immortals whom our better lives may lead to, and whose immortal ways are marred and kept back by the grossness of unworthy souls). I take as my watchword those words of yours – strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.’
Carpenter
