Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919–1967 Vol 2

Carol Z Rothkopf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138757127
• eBook ISBN: 9781000161861
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish 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.

1932

Fitz House5 January 1932

Since, Edmund, thou to Teffont can’st not come,

(Asthma and Influenza, - loathéd names, -

Being inmates of thy frame

And joyless janitors)

In solitude, with faltering fingers cold,

While Winter howls around the chiminies, I

Thy pensive votary sit

And hymn thy favourite name.

Nevertheless, from Tickell’s Works to quote,¹

(Whose poem on Peace I read ere this I wrote)

“Thee, thee an hundred languages shall claim,

And savage Indians swear by Annie’s name.”

By the way, I have discovered the worst user of Collins’s immortal stanza form, in one Ferdinand Weston (1803). Specimen; from his Ode, To False Sensibility.

“All thy religious pious cant is vain.

What though subscriptions see they name inscribed

For many a splendid gift?

’Tis ostentation all.”

Well, I suppose I must expect you in April, - a pleasant thought, though three months intervene and in dewy fingered Feb. I must steer my way to Oxford’s towers and contribute an interruption to your multitude of them. But

Far be it from me to damp a single spark

Of Lectures upon Lamb for Cambridge Clark -

Illustrious series once adorned by Gosse,

And since by some who might have made him cross!

Let it be so. In Wiltshire where I am,

Steering my daily course

On my refractory horse,

Gazing on sheep, I’ll think of thee — and Lamb,

And while Spring tarrieth slow,

know

That by the perfect process of the hours

Thy grave discourses grow

To upland levels colonied with flowers.

I see the use. Taught thus to find content,

I’ll mildly sally forth (O sirs!)

On finding first editions bent,

And be the bane of not-too-knowing booksellers

And (O my soul awake!)

Return some evening on a south-west breeze,

While one-legged thrushes make

(There’s one who haunts my lawn) loud litanies

Of sorrow for some Thorp² whose fiendish fate

Doomed him to sell me for a five pound note

(In boards, with rare Erratum Note)

Lyrical Ballads, 1798.

SS

_______________

1. Thomas Ticken (1686–1740), poet, friend and associate of Addison in the government of Ireland.

2. Thorp, second-hand bookshop in Guildford.

Merton College24 January 1932

Dear Siegfried,

What a dark interval I have left since your poem lightened the opacity of my illness¹ and scrawling imprisonment at Yalding. And meanwhile I have returned to this noble room (and the horse and the pigeons under the window, sensibly eating on while bells do toll and pens do strive), some nine days; and I have scribbled whole shoals and sects of silly letters, and even been to Cambridge to disgorge my first lecture. Alas, I have only three and a bit done as yet, and much else to provide for several occasions. — The first chance I got, I asked Sir J. J. Thomson² if he recalled E. Gosse’s lectures;³ he did, and the subsequent disturbance, through Churton Collins,⁴ who discovered a wrong date or two. But he couldn’t picture, or did not, the still youthful E. G. in action. How hard it is at will to recover the actualities! I am well aware of that; can’t paint a portrait at all, though I can see it altogether. S. Cockerell was present, and I hope to see him more at leisure this week. He informed me (for I had been too shy or dim-sighted to distinguish those in the large Hall) that A. E. Housman had been present. A. Hayashi has been seriously ill, and alone at that, and I am still anxious about her. I think I mentioned that M. Blunden had obstructed my plans for proceeding with my children’s education without resorting to the law and taking them finally from her. But I hate paying out once again to the lawyers, and indeed they have made me almost penniless between them; now I shall improve the situation somewhat, but don’t feel like weakening it again at once, and moreover I don’t intend spending £300 a year on “educating” those children. I am too tired a man to take on that conventional burden besides those I bear and think it an honour to bear — They must blame her later, and approach me in a good spirit, and I will do them good. — Sorry to hurl all my affairs at you in one salvo again, but you will not misunderstand. Did you read that the Ramparts of Ypres are to be pulled down by way of providing municipal employment! It was reported in the Times and may be mainly correct. Still, I have a very fair model of those Ramparts in 1916–7 in my mind, and — why, this world cannot be perpetual. “And the cock wouldn’t crow/And the bull wouldn’t low”⁵ as Tennyson puts it. — I am transcribing your worst Collinsiana into my annotated edition,⁶ which contains several curiosities but none better. I have it here, will brandish it when you come. Bring the one-ley: ed thrush, he will sing of sentry-groups, Lewis Guns, the rations and the relief. — My little book for Longman⁷ (on Hawstead mostly, but occasionally excursional) is with the printer. Ponder that, thou genuine countryman, and proceed with the History of Matfield; and the parts adjacent, thou Lambarde⁸ of our age. Restore Branbridges, and the cricket-players of Town Matling. But now I must prepare for chapel and subsequent ceremoniousness, alas! for I would rather be walking round a barn with Gilbert and his terrier.

Yours affectionately, Edmund

P.S.-P.S. My old friend W. H. Fyfe, headmaster of Christ’s Hospital, and now principal of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ont., has written to me about a review he edits, called the Queen’s Quarterly (well known in Canada). He is eager to raise its literary standard, and asks us, and you by name, to contribute poems. I sent him one, and wish you would.⁹ The Quarterly pays I think fifteen dollars for a short poem, quite handsome. (For my last in the Observer;¹⁰ a better piece, I was sent two guineas; I protested, and 1 more is to be paid.) Well, if you have an item and have no particular objective elsewhere, W. H. E would, as he says, “love” to get it.

_______________

1. Influenza.

2. Sir James John Thomson (1856–1940), physicist, discoverer of the electron; Master of Trinity College from 1918 to 1940.

3. Gosse was the second Clark Lecturer from 1884 to 1889. His lectures published in From Shakespeare to Pope: An Enquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England (1885).

4. John Churton Collins (1848–1908), scholar and critic described by Tennyson as ‘abuse in the locks of literature’, decried Gosse’s ‘gross and palpable blunders’ in the Clark Lectures. for more on this cause célébre, see Thwaite, Edmund Gosse, pp. 276–97.

5. Maeldune.

6. The Poetical Works of William Collins (1858).

7. The Face ofEngland (1932).

8. William Lambarde (1536–1601), jurist and antiquary, notably of Anglo-Saxon literature.

9. ‘A Tale Not in Chaucer’, Quarterly (February 1932).

10. ‘Fancy and Memory’, 27 December 1931.

Merton College14 February 1932

My dear Siegfried,

I hope all is well? No news is sometimes not so good to the apprehension of us weary wanderers. I have a message to convey but you will hear it more fully from the source. H. J. Massingham and his brother are editing for publication in the summer a volume of reconsiderations of great Victorians. H. J. M. is approaching you for a paper on Mr Hardy, having paired me off with M. Arnold.¹ I don’t know whether you will break your rule but if it could be for anybody it might be for T. Hardy whose poetry especially I find has more enemies than understanding readers. The Payment for these essays is not extraordinary, but not bad. H. J. M. will I take it define when he petitions you for your collaboration.

I am passing through (perhaps “through”) a period of deep inward disturbance brought on by a young lady’s disclosing to me a love which has defeated my two years’ attempts to prevent it from development; and I am myself much of her mind;² but my general situation and especially my peaceful love for Annie and all her works complicate. — At least this enables me more precisely to follow out the trouble and the courage of SS — It has been the devil of a job to prepare my lectures &c., and I have now some here as well as over the way. C. Lamb seems in fair running order, but I am yet to write the last three sections. — What comes of your Poetical revival? Must I languish without a zephyr from your enchantment? Well, I hope you have sung out, and many will be happy if so. Who else is there to do it?

Do not damn me: I have been offered, and have taken, a pl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Letters 1932–1947