Siegfried Among the Nightingales

by SIEGFRIED SASSOON

1

TOWARDS the end of September, 1018,1 received a letter from Eddie Marsh in which he asked me to come to London as soon as I was well enough. I stayed four nights with Eddie in Gray’s Inn, diverting myself with a series of lunches and dinners at which I met several distinguished people for the first time, among them being Lytton Strachey, Maurice Baring, Edith Sitwell, and Desmond MacCarthy.

On the second evening I went to the Waldorf Hotel, where I was to have lunch with a young officer of my regiment. We had been together in the spring offensive of 1917, and I had good reason to know how imperturbable he could be under the most unpleasant conditions. He had lost an arm, but was the same smooth-haired, whimsical philosopher as ever. Bad though those days had been, he remarked — when wo were halfway through a bottle of “bubbly” — it had been an improvement on a lot of the aimless things one did in peacetime. Some of the best men had gone west, but he was thankful to have known them. Fixing his monocle, he observed that he’d rather be out in France than with most of the civilian birds at the tables around us. Falling in with his humor, I agreed that there was a lot to be said for the ups and downs of active service.

We then adjourned to the Coliseum and saw the ballet Carnival. At that time the Russian Ballet was giving single performances in the variety program. On this occasion we remained till the end, and by then I was conscious of having done about enough for one day. By my present standard of controlled and discreetly assimilative experiencing, I certainly had! But I’d come to London for liveliness, and had been assiduously overentertaining myself all the week. To be dining with Maynard Keynes at his club was, of course, an agreeable occasion, and need not have tired me if I’d talked less and given myself an hour’s rest beforehand. I had got to know him through Philip Morrell and his wife, Lady Ottoline Morrell. As he was a highly important figure in the Treasury, I felt that I was in contact with national affairs, though he made no parade of his eminence and was charmingly friendly.

It was after dinner that the exertions of the day began to tell on me. We went to the Russian Ballet. This time it was Cleopatra, which had such a stimulating effect on my emotions that I afterwards wrote a poem about it. By itself, the Ballet would have been a respite from fatigue. But further social efforts were demanded of me, for Lady Ottoline was there with Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Mark Gertler, and several others. We all went behind to see the leading dancers, and by the time that was over I had a splitting headache and seemed to have been living in a disordered dream where Lady Ottoline, in one of her hugest headgears, towered above Massine and Idzikovsky, who were much smaller in real life than on the stage.

Such was my rather overwrought condition when I went on to Half Moon Street for the very special purpose of saying good-bye to Robbie Ross, who was about to leave England for several months in order to give the Melbourne Art Gallery the benefit of his expert advice. He had told me that he would be spending the evening alone, as his preparations for departure had worried and overtired him. I found him sitting at his table reading a little red-bound Bible. He explained that he wasn’t getting ready to meet his Maker; he had a fondness for the Old Testament because it had such a lot of good stories in it. I lit my pipe and began to feel more like relaxing. It was therefore most unfortunate that Charles ScottMoncrieff should have chosen this moment to come in, bringing with him a tall, thin youth whose name meant nothing to us.

I had met Moncrieff a few times before and had tried to get on with him as he was an intimate friend of Robbie’s. But he had never liked me, and had shown it by reviewing The Old Huntsman with unconcealed acrimony. Knowing that he was in the hospital badly wounded (he was lame for the rest of his life), I artfully responded by writing to congratulate him on the Military Cross he had been awarded. He had sent me a graciously apologetic reply; but in spite of this he now seemed as surly as ever. I knew that before long we should be at loggerheads about something, with poor Robbie trying in vain to mend matters. Moncrieff had a scholarly and rather pedantic mind, and my impetuous and often ill-considered opinions about poetry never failed to aggravate him. I must add that in after years I became fully grateful to him for his masterly translations of Proust; but friendship cannot be sustained by Proust alone. Meanwhile disagreement was avoided. He sat by the fire conversing glumly with Robbie.

The “boy actor” with him — for such he had announced himself to be — was being almost excessively appreciative to me about my war poems, telling me that he had quite lately read them aloud to a lady novelist while lying on the rocks in Cornwall. This only annoyed me, I was feeling too much “on the rocks” myself, and his behavior struck me as too gushing. It became evident, also, that his effusiveness made an unfavorable impression on Robbie, who, for once, lacked his usual liveliness as host.

I had now reached a condition of nervous irritability in which I was capable of contradicting everything I believed in, and some of my remarks to Moncrieff were, no doubt, unpardonably petulant. But the youthful stranger rattled brightly on, making smart remarks, which I considered cheap. There were several copies of Counter-attack on Robbie’s table, one of which I sourly inscribed for him at his request. His name — I can no longer conceal it — was Noel Coward. I must hasten to qualify this account of him by saying that our episodic and too infrequent meetings during his brilliantly successful career have been entirely delightful and stimulating. When I subsequently reminded him of that first encounter, he went so far as to exclaim that he “must have been pretty shattering.” But even then he was the only sprightly element in an otherwise shattering hour which ended in my confessing that my head was splitting.

2

ON November 5 I went again to London to stay a night with Eddie Marsh, who had asked me to dine at the Savoy to meet a somewhat distinguished Colonel. My career as an officer was at an end; for, although not officially “placed on the retired list” until the following March, I received no further order to report myself for duty. In his letter, Eddie had merely told me that this Colonel had done wonderful things in the Hejaz campaign (about which I was quite hazy, though I had often focused my field glasses on the distant mountains of Moab while in Palestine during the previous March and April).

When arriving at the Savoy I expected to find a conventional military character with whom I should have little in common; so the small, fair-haired, youthful-looking person to whom I was presented came as a surprise. His demeanor was reticent and precise. Evidently unwilling to be drawn out about his military exploits, he inscrutably dissolved my shyness and led me on to tell him about my own interests. Eddie, however, directed the conversation towards Arabia, and before long we were talking about C. M. Doughty. It was his poetry rather than his prose that we discussed, and the first time the Colonel laughed was when I described how I had once written to inform the author of The Dawn in Britain that I had read his epic “all through.” He expressed a strong preference for Doughty’s dramatic poem Adam Cast Forth, a strange, contorted work of genius which had impressed me deeply when it appeared, almost unheeded, ten years before.

It turned out that the Colonel had also corresponded with Doughty, and had actually been to see him. It was apparent that he wanted to talk only about men of letters. Henry James was another one who cropped up in our talk, allowing Eddie to delight us with anecdotal reminiscences, including his evergreen imitation of the great man enunciating —with immense effort — one of his convoluted sentences.

Much perplexed by the personality of the Hejaz celebrity, I reached a point when, emboldened by good wine, I looked across the table and exclaimed, “What I can’t understand is how you come to be a Colonel! ” In after years I realized that I could hardly have said anything more likely to please and divert T. E. Lawrence — for he, of course, it was. Subsequently there was some talk about politics and peace settlements. Eddie spoke with a strong bias against President Wilson, whom I still regarded as the heaven-sent leader of the Allied nations. Lawrence reserved his opinion, demurely remarking that Wilson wanted to give Mesopotamia to Portugal.

The impression left on me by Lawrence was of a pleasant, unassuming person who preferred to let other people do most of the talking. As he often did, he was subduing that power of stimulation which could lift others above and beyond their habitual plane of thought and action by communicating his mysterious and superlative vital energy. Had I been told that I was meeting one of the most extraordinary beings I should ever know and idolize, I should have refused to believe it. He was, I briefly informed my diary, “the Hejaz general, a little Oxford archaeologist, who admires Doughty and called him ‘a Viking.’”

A few weeks later, however, Society was agog about him and his romantic military adventures. An intrepidly enterprising hostess buttonholed me at a party with a wildly hopeful eye, exclaiming, “Oh, Mr. Sassoon, I hear you know Colonel Lawrence. Can’t you bring him to lunch? I’m longing to talk to him about Arabia Deserta and all that!” But she might as well have asked me to produce the King of the Cannibal Islands, even if I’d felt like contributing to her menagerie!

It now seems odd and almost incredible that while in Lawrence’s company I should have said nothing about Thomas Hardy. How, I wonder, did I get through the evening without it somehow transpiring that I was on the eve of an inaugural visit to Hardy at Max Gate? How, on the other hand, could I have guessed that Lawrence honored him — as I did — beyond any other living writer (although it was not until 1923 that he became, probably, the most admired and valued friend of Hardy’s last years)?

My own association with Hardy had begun early in 1917, when I wrote to ask him to accept the dedication of The Old Huntsman. In doing this I had been encouraged by my uncle Hamo Thornycroft’s having known him for many years, and by the fact that Edmund Gosse had assured me that the request would give pleasure to “True Thomas, as he called him. Since then I had received half a dozen letters from him, in which he had shown considerable interest in me and liking for my work. When I was about to return to the front, at the beginning of 1918, I had sent him a photograph of Glyn Philpot’s portrait of me, feeling that to be there in effigy was better than nothing, especially as I might be dead before I had an opportunity of visiting him in person.

The photograph had reached him in advance of my explanation. In acknowledging it he had written, “We divined it to be you, but I was not quite certain, till a friend told us positively only a day before your letter came. It has been standing in my writing-room calmly overlooking a hopeless chaos of scribbler’s litter. I shall be so glad to see you walk in some day.”

3

MY spirits were in fine fettle while I traveled towards Dorchester in bright, frosty weather. Naturally, my mind was full of speculations as to how far the Mr. Hardy of Max Gate would harmonize with the writer whose works I had absorbed so fruitfully. But — as in one of his most beautiful lyrics —

For in spite of his letters to me I still looked on him as such an eminent and almost legendary figure that it was puzzling to imagine oneself with him in any ordinary human relationship. He was seventy-eight, too, and I could only approach him agape with veneration. I had a notion that he was a modest sort of man; and Mr. Gosse had told me that, of all the famous writers he had known, Hardy was the least likely to say anything which one remembered afterwards.

The nearest I had got to picturing him “in real life” was through an anecdote of Robbie Ross’s. He had described how, more than twenty years before, he had spent a rather dull evening with the Hardys at a flat they had taken in Kensington. He had been discussing with Mr. Hardy the methods by which authors overcame the laborious process of writing their books. Mr. Hardy having remarked that he had written one of his early novels on his knees, Robbie wittily replied, “We read it on our knees.” Whereupon the late Mrs. Hardy had exclaimed in reproving tones, “Don’t flatter Mr. Hardy in that foolish way! ”

This wasn’t much to go on, and I felt that the first Mrs. Hardy would have taken a similar view of my own mental attitude to her husband. I had left London soon after midday, but my bemused condition caused me to remain in the wrong part of the train, which was left behind at Bournemouth. So I had to go on by a slow one, preceded by an apologetic telegram. Next day I wrote as follows in my notebook: —

November 7th. Arrived 6.45 in darkness. Horse cab rumbled up to porch of small house among trees. Found little old gentleman in front of fire in candle-lit room; small wife with back turned doing something to a bookcase. Both seemed shy, and I felt large and hearty. First impression of T.H. was that his voice is worn and slightly discordant, but that was only while he was nervous. Afterwards it was unstrained, gently vivacious, and when he spoke with feeling — finely resonant. Frail and rather wizard-like in the candleshine and dim room, with his large round head, immense brow, and beaky nose, he was not unlike the “Max ” [Beerbohm] caricature, but more bird-like. He knelt by the log fire for a bit, still rather shy. They both gained confidence, and then there was a charming little scene of “which room is he in, dear?” “The west room, my dear,” though of course he must have known. He lit me up the narrow staircase with a silver candlestick, quite nimble and not at all like a man of almost eighty. Already I felt at ease with him. (I think he had feared that I should be a huge swell and come down to dinner in a white waistcoat. That Philpot portrait is so misleadingly Byronic!)

I had arrived on a Wednesday, and stayed until midday on Friday. “Both days were bright and frosty. T.H. became more lovable all the time. A great and simple man.” That was all I found time to say in my diary (though I might well have added a few words in praise of Florence Hardy, who was always the best of friends to me). In one of his letters he had told me that he didn’t know how he should have endured the suspense of this evil time if it were not for the sustaining power of poetry. .And it was mainly of poets and poetry that we talked.

It was the beginning of a genuine friendship, and of my experience of his vitality and mental resilience. The door of his mind always remained open to the ideas and speculations of the young. Those of my generation were his new hope for that war-weary world in whose sane reconstruction he did his best to believe. Thus I soon found myself forgetting the disparity of years and achievement that divided us. He was enlivened by my exuberant youngness, and enjoyed being with me because we could always drop into a comfortable chat about quite ordinary matters. It may be said that I gained his confidence by not trying to seem clever and through my interest m everyday humanity. He liked good talk, of course, but preferred people not to be vividly intellectual at the tea table. What I was offered at Max Gate was homeliness. On that basis we discussed Shakespeare and Shelley, Keats and Browning, with uncritical gratitude for their glories. When I asked him why “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?” is such a memorable poem, he replied, “Because Browning wrote from his heart.”

Meanwhile I was learning a lesson which has leavened my imperfections ever since. He was giving me a demonstration of the simplicity of true greatness. By this I do not mean that he was simple, when viewed apart from his writings, though his modesty sometimes misled superficial observers into thinking so. This modesty was instinctive and quite unaffected. For example, he once remarked to me, with one of his wistful little sighs, that he didn’t suppose he’d have bothered to write The Dynasts if he could have foreseen the Great War. The comment may have been only half serious; yet no one but he could have made it. It was impossible to imagine him talking for effect, and he was adroit at declining to be drawn out by visitors angling for oracular utterances.

J. M. Barrie had a story of him at the Savile Club, where the secret of style was being discussed by a group of writers. When all the others had set forth their views, Hardy was unable to produce any explanation except some quite trivial remark. He was interested in cleverness but not attracted by it. The homely strength and ripe integrity of his nature were somehow apparent in his avoidance of the brilliant and unusual. When he did say something profound, he contrived to make it seem quite ordinary. He was, in fact, a wise and unworldly man who had discarded intellectual and personal vanity. He has described himself as “a private man,” which merely meant that he liked to live quietly, shunning active com petition with his contemporaries. He regarded authorship as an unobtrusive occupation rather than a struggle to attract attention. He had written his novels to earn a livelihood. He wrote poetry to please himself, and even in 1918 was not fully aware of the admiration for his verse prevalent among other poets, both old and young.

Anyhow, what I carried away from Max Gate, both then and thereafter, was an impressive awareness that Hardy — who was, as I remarked to myself, “the nearest thing to Shakespeare I should ever go for a walk with” — had no vestige of vanity and wore his illustrious laurels with no more concern about them than if they had been his hat. The pessimism which has often been imputed to him was, in his own words, merely “the sad science of renunciation.” In spite of what Meredith called his “twilight view of life,” he was not a melancholy man. He had a normal sense of humor and could be charmingly gay. The bitterness in his writings was meditative and impersonal. He was disappointed rather than disillusioned in his attitude to life. Instinctively compassionate, he had suffered deeply through the apparently fortuitous victimization and injustice in many human happenings.

I was often astonished by an octogenarian agility and quickness which matched his alertness of mind, and can remember how, at eighty-four, when discussing some variant reading in Shakespeare, he went up to his study to fetch his facsimile edition of the First Folio. As he re-entered the room with it under his arm, I realized that he must have run both ways — had at any rate performed his errand at a lively trot! His movements were brisk, purposeful, and compact. He always chose a straight-backed chair to sit in, and carried himself with an almost military erectness. Seen in a strong light, he looked all his age — a bird-like ancient whose monumental head might well have belonged to some worthy Mayor of Dorchester.

Hobnobbing with him of an evening, I could almost forget that he was anything more than a dear and delightful old country gentleman. But I have watched him when he was in shadow and repose and have held my breath in contemplation of what seemed the wisdom of the ages in human form. For that timetrenched face in the flicker of firelight was genius made visible, superhuman in its mystery and magnificence. This was the face of the life-seer who had transmuted the Wessex country into a cosmogony of his imagination, who had humanized it and revealed its unrecorded meanings and showings with patient power and mastery of half-tones and subdued colors, who had learned the secret of underemphasized radiance and the rich significance of shadows, overhearing the semitones of sounds in nature, and observing the qualities and characteristics of his native country until he had made them all one with the English heritage of recreated life.

Here was the real Hardy, immeasurable by intellectual standards, who will haunt the civilized consciousness of our race when the age he lived in has become remote as the Roman occupation of Britain. He was sitting with one arm around his old friend “Wessex” — that unruly and vociferous sheepdog whom he has enshrined in a poem. But when he gazed down at “Wessie” he ceased to be Merlin. The face of the wizard became suffused with gentle compassion for all living creatures, whom he longed to defend against the chanceful injustice and calamity of earthly existence.

4

FROM Max Gate I journeyed to Garsington, the Morrells’ home, where I had been invited to stay as long as I liked. Reading the papers in the train, I must have found plentiful historic reportings to distract me from observing “the Hardy country” through which I was traveling. But for some reason I am unable to bring to mind how it felt to be living through that final week of the war, which was made memorable for me in other ways. This process continued next day, for Lady Ottoline had arranged that I should go to lunch with the Masefields.

There had been no previous communication between Masefield and me. I was, of course, eager to know him; and there was the added excitement of hearing that he would be taking me to call on the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. Everything seemed to be happening at once, I thought, while making my way towards Abingdon in cold, sunny weather on a borrowed bicycle. The distance, however, proved greater than I’d calculated, and it took me so long to get up Boar’s Hill that I arrived, perturbed and perspiring, some time after they had finished lunch. Masefield brought me a steaming plate of roast mutton and potatoes, and my equanimity was soon restored by his serene and unassuming manners.

While swallowing my meal, I told him how I had been to stay with Hardy. His courteous and deliberative replies must have been an amusing contrast to my impetuous utterances, which in those days had a habit of falling over one another almost before I had decided what I intended to say. Anyhow, while he listened and concurred, with downward glances and gentle deference, I felt conscious of giving him pleasure by my presence and was much exhilarated by the cordiality of the occasion.

In other words, we got on famously, and I felt quite sorry when our talk was interrupted by his reminding me that it was time to make a move in the direction of the Laureate. During the short walk to Chilswell he told me that since the house burned down Bridges had been living in the gardener’s cottage. Having heard that he was likely to be abrupt and even arrogant towards newcomers, I was rather nervous. But I had loved his poetry ever since I was twenty, and nothing could have been more decorously deferential than my state of mind when we entered the cottage.

My first, view of his magnificent bard-like head and fine patrician features was a pleasantly impressive recognition of the portrait frontispiece to his Collected Poems. Masefield having pronounced my name with dulcet distinctness, I meekly awaited the response. There was, however, no welcome in the way he looked at me, nor did he stir from his chair. After an awkward pause he told us to sit down. Then, having inquired of Masefield whether there was any credibility in the report that the German Emperor had abdicated, he glowered in my direction and gruffly made one of the most, surprising remarks I have experienced. “What did you say his name was — Siegfried Digweed?”

Masefield met this embarrassing situation by repeating my name with submissive politeness. Personally I was so taken aback that I wasn’t even capable of realizing that we had been so unlucky as to find the Laureate in one of his grumpiest moods. There was, however, an element of absurdity in the episode, which saved me from feeling completely crushed, especially when I caught Masefield’s eye.

(The name Digweed, by the way, is to be found in the letters of Jane Austen. The Digweeds were neighbors of her family at Steven ton and Chawton. There was a certain Mrs. Digweed of whom she often makes gentle fun.)

I had innocently expected to hear the Poet Laureate discourse about literature. But he had other matters in mind and was resolved to ventilate them. His main theme was “those Socialists,” in whom he found nothing to applaud and much to admonish. He was particularly severe on German Socialists. “Look at them!” he exclaimed, showing us a row of photographs in some newspaper which had predicted possible ingredients for a democratic government in Germany. “Did you ever see such a parcel of pudding-faced dullards?” he added, with the slight retardation of his consonants which wasn’t exactly a stammer.

We were obliged to agree that, as human types, they showed little promise of refinement or intelligence. Meanwhile I wondered why I should be hectored like this; for it seemed that his remarks were aimed at me as a reprehensible supporter of Socialist opinions and that he had awaited my arrival with the intention of taking me down a few pegs! And although he mellowed towards me afterwards, I departed with a disappointingly unfavorable first impression, for which I could hardly be blamed.

Seen in the light of subsequent experience of him, it was all quite characteristic. He was proud, selfconscious, and often aggressively intolerant. There was something of the self-contradictory schoolboy about him. (When presenting himself at the Palace to receive the Laureateship, he remarked to the lord in waiting that he “didn’t want any of their Stars and Garters,” an assertion which was afterwards rewarded — most deservedly — with the Order of Merit.) It was, I think, his unrestrained naturalness which caused these somewhat petulant exhibitions of rudeness. He hated pomposity and consistently refused to stand on his dignity. And this same naturalness was the mainspring of his geniality, which could be glorious. One who knew him well has described him as “delightfully grumpy.” “He mentions thing after thing which is commonly believed and says that of course it’s not so. He’s always right. His intellect has been so completely self-indulged that it now can’t understand rubbish.”

He wasn’t “always right.” I have heard him dismiss the works of Landor — with whom he had affinities—as “rather bosh.” But, once one understood him, there was no need to declare that his nobility of mind atoned for his inurbanities of behavior. In his writings he showed splendid control of self and spirit, undeviating devotion to his art, and the gracious purity of one who “uttered nothing base.” In the man there was an unreserved and abundant humanity, and no one but a fool could fail to love him for it. The “Digweed” episode was the only time I saw Robert Bridges in a bad humor.

During the next ten years I was not with him often, but I can claim that he liked me, and my admiration for him ripened to affection. He will always be among the living dead whom I have known and honored. Remembering him as he appeared on that November afternoon, I mildly rebuke my young self for not understanding that this was a man of high courage and sensibility, remarkably vigorous at seventyfour, who had endured several years of brooding inactive melancholy, and had also had his comfortable house burned down. It should have occurred to me that he had suffered in spirit. As it was, I resented his war talk and thought him a bigoted reactionary. Not long afterwards he made a magnanimous public gesture of reconciliation towards German men of learning and letters. And while staying with him some years later, I discovered in his library an antiGerman book and was touched by finding that he had erased the word Hun throughout, substituting German.

Meanwhile I left Masefield playing a twilight game of hide-and-seek in his garden with his two children and one of the Bridges girls. Bicycling easily back to Garsington I drew comparisons between Max Gate and Chilswell, which ended in a decision that no two illustrious septuagenarians could be more different. But I’d had such a long day that in contrasting them I got no deeper than the fact that T.H. was a nonsmoker, while Bridges puffed a full-flavored pipe.