Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967 Vol 3

Carol Z Rothkopf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138757134
• eBook ISBN: 9781000161878
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Of the 16 WWI poets memorialized in Westminster Abbey, two were destined to become lifelong friends. Although both served on the Western Front, it was not until 1919 that Siegfried Sassoon received his first letter from Edmund Blunden. This collection of Sassoon and Blunden's correspondence contains more than 1,000 letters, cards and telegrams.

1951

WALLIS¹ TO BLUNDENc/o Australia House, London
9 December 1951

Dear Mr Blunden,

You will not have heard of me and that’s of no importance, but what is all-important is that you should relent and make some move towards sweeping away the misunderstanding between you and Siegfried Sassoon. The most eloquent plea I can make to this end is to remind you of your old friendship with him. If you had seen the anguished look on his face when I witlessly asked if you ever came to Heytesbury, you would have no doubts about how greatly he misses you. “One can’t afford to lose any friends – least of all Edmund” he said.

Most likely it would be wise for me to leave this severely alone, but I never had any claims on wisdom, and having heard how this unfortunate affair came about, it seems to me to be senseless for you both to persist in such a deprivation of friendship. Possibly you believed that, on a former occasion, he had refused to come and see you, but did you know he was too ill to do so? Evidently he made some hurtful and tactless remarks about your being the victim of circumstances. He can be tactless, as I’m sure you know well enough, but he was bewildered by what seemed to be your censure of him without waiting to hear what he would have told you.

He misses you grievously – which is my excuse for this audacity.

If you can find it in your heart to forget what has happened – and I’m placing my faith in your kindness and tolerance – let it seem to be a spontaneous gesture, and don’t mention my intervening in so high-handed a fashion. I’m not expecting you to reply to my supplication, but I’m hoping fervently you will write to Siegfried.

Yours, Dorothy Wallis

_______________

1. Dorothy Wallis (b. 1920) came to England with her mother from Australia at the end of World War II and became a good friend of Sassoon and, subsequently, of the Blundens. Her letter is included because it shows her important role in reuniting the two men. Claire Blunden felt that Wallis’s goal was to find a poet to be her life’s companion, and she had therefore paved her own way by first sending cakes to a select few poets in England to help them during the post-war austerity. See also Egremont, Sassoon, pp. 471–3.

1952

Heytesbury House 3 February 1952

My dear Edmund,

Owing to the providential work done by D.W. I am at last able to write to you. But I feel that you will not want any explanations of my behaviour; and it would only be an infliction on you – and me – were I to ‘go over the ground’ of the past years. And I know that, if we were to meet in my library, all would be as it was, and the bad weather of my misunderstandings beyond the horizon. I can only ask you to believe that, since 1944 – and before that – I have been sorely tried, and oft times reduced to a desperation which was only mitigated by George, who has been my only bond with life and any future which remains for me. In the past year, however, I have had comparative peace, and have felt a sense of recovery. So I am not the drifting and battered hulk which I was.

Let us begin again, dear Edmund, forgive my cussedness, and remember how flawless was the harmony of your friendship for more than twenty-five years. Except for Glen and Geoffrey, all my old friends have vanished – and those two are so busy with their own concerns that I seldom see them. Otherwise I have been nowhere, except to visit George at Oundle¹ once a term, since he went there in Sept. 1950. And my library activity has slowed down to a very sluggish current, not much stimulated by my being so out of fashion with the modernist minds, and definitely discouraged by the autocracy of Eliot under which we exist and are ignored.

In conclusion of this dreariness, if you can contrive to get here for a day or two later on – when this house is less of a refrigerator – nothing would do me more good. I was sorry to hear from D.W. that you looked weary and overworked. What about a glass or two of that old port of mine – still extant, and seldom opened?

Yours ever, SS

________

1. Public school in Northamptonshire.

The Times Literary Supplement 4 February 1952

My dear Siegfried,

I saw as I came in a rather alarming pile of letters on my table; but my inward Groan ended when I found among them one from you. I am deeply delighted that Dorothy Wallis’s visit has led to this and thank both her and you for a very good Monday morning; and the photographs of you and George are part of this. (The Cocktail Party¹ which Claire and I saw at Windsor was the oddest thing, it reminded me of all the obvious tricks of the playwright who might aim at success in theatres on piers; but the grand Psychiatrist in it was a simple transformation of Sherlock Holmes, and a Mystery Man such as my school fellows yearned to act. The audience all the same were all applause. I was finally extinguished when we were told that a young female character had been crucified out East, not as Jesus was, which one might think sufficient, but over an Ant Hill.)

It is a shame if I can’t get you for my World Cricket XI (I expect they’ll want me to officiate), but I well understand, alas, that even you must yield to the argument of lumbago. Claire tells me that I am only an invalid in winter, or I might now finally keep off the field of play. Last year I managed two “Heytesbury” inningses, but was all the time annoyed at not being quite powerful enough to let loose.

Although we have been, as you say, put aside by the literary autocracy, I gather from a lecturing visit just done that general readers do not altogether ignore us. But they go mostly to the free libraries and there the selection is made by the new school of librarians, who must be in the fashion; and anthologies also both help and hinder their discoveries.

You see what you are in for when I am in your library again, but though I was voluble (polite word) when D. W. came here I can also listen! Or beat me with a cricket stump. Incidentally I shall ask for your memories of K. L. Hutchings once more. It is shocking that in Tonbridge his name generally meets blank faces.

My father took many memories away when he died the other day.² He had planned a day or two at The Mote³ with me. But he didn’t “expect much.” Now I shall look forward to coming to Heytesbury, just when it is convenient to you and when the days are longer. George looks splendid. Some boys in Tonbridge, the le Flemings, claim to know him.

Yours ever, Edmund

________

1. T. S. Eliot play, which made its debut in 1950.

2. Charles Edmund Blunden had died in November 1951, aged eighty, and was buried at Yalding.

3. Kent cricket ground at Maidstone.

Heytesbury House 5 February 1952

My dear Edmund,

My bedroom is beslanted (the literary touch) by post-white frost sunshine, and your letter is also a light bringer, restoring the circulation. How much there is to tell him, I think, and how much to revive – of the old associative memories, so long locked away in the dark cupboard of self-deprivation. Meanwhile I must send you the fruits of solitude which Geoffrey Keynes has so handsomely printed, having overcome my unwillingness by sheer persistence.¹ Not a very cheerful collection. A bit of slow batting, unenlivened by scoring strokes “all round the wicket.” I seem to be playing into the hands of those who deplore my decline into Bernard Bartonism.² But there it is – an elderly solitary doing his traditional stuff and taking no chances with experimental felicities – the patient craftsman, putting the coat of varnish on his bits of cabinet making. Anyhow I have avoided writing anything ill-tempered, which is something to the good, for I have experienced many unamiable hours since you last saw me. Such merit as is in these pieces will be recognised by you – but not by the admirers of W. Carlos Williams³ and E. Pound.

So your good old Dad has departed – philosophically, with a 1905 Wisden in his pocket. He impressed me by his reticence. I can imagine him now, returning to first-slip after a thoughtful over against the East Peckham hitter, deciding to drop that tempting one just a shade shorter, like Ronny Mitchell used to do, for his c and b’s. One accepts these losses; but the gap is there. (I find it difficult to believe that my mother isn’t on her sofa at Weirleigh, though it is four and a half years since she went, at the age of ninety-three.) By the way, I read in yesterday’s Times that the widow of my old headmaster, J. S. Norman,⁴ died, in her one hundredth year.

I am really quite active, though rather stiff in the knees just lately. The last time I played in a match I went in with 5 wickets down for 5 on a wet pitch, and remained not out 15 when the innings finished at 51. But short runs don’t suit me. And I dropped a couple of catches last time I fielded for Heytesbury. Sam Dredge and H. Perrett...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Letters 1951-1967
• A Postscript from the Editor
• Register of Letters
• Index