Footnotes

ʻYOU EXAGGERATE THE HORROR OF OUR INTELLECTUALITY. IT IS ONLY HAVING ONCE LIVED IN BLOOMSBURY' – VIRGINIA WOOLF TO SIEGFRIED SASSOON. Sassoon, the huntsman and soldier, was suspicious of modernism and did not feel at ease in the intellectual circles typified by the Bloomsbury set. When Virginia Woolf wrote asking him to dine with her and Leonard in May 1923 he replied: ʻI am not at all intellectual – in fact I have a very cumbersome mind' (quoted by Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches, 2003, p.122, from the original at the Berg). Our letter is her reply (published in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1977, iii, p.85).

Their dinner was eventually to take place the following January; prompting Sassoon to record in his diary: ʻI have wanted to meet V. W. since last April, when I read Jacob's Room at Garsington. But I felt that the Woolfs belong to a rarefied intellectual atmosphere in which I should be ill at ease. I went to Paradise Road, Richmond, this evening, intending to be discreet and observantly detached. But the evening was a gossipy affair, very pleasant and unconstrained. V. W. drew me out adroitly, and I became garrulous. (Did I bore them once or twice?) Leonard Woolf seemed reticent and rather weary; anyhow my presence reduced him to comparative muteness... Thank heaven, I avoided giving my "war-experiences" turn. (Though I did touch on Craiglockhart Hospital, in connection with Wilfred Owen.) They agreed with me about the modem vulgarisation of fine literature by the commercialism of publishers; and urged me to publish a book with the Hogarth Press. I dallied with the idea of a small volume of "scraps of prose", vaguely visualising selections from my journal, which I feel now to be quite impracticable. We dined in their kitchen, which was pleasant and cosy. Ottoline told me that "Virginia is very inhuman", but I found her charming' (Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1923–1925, p.78–9). Soon afterwards, she wrote that ʻOld S.S. is a nice dear kind sensitive warm-hearted good fellow'; although not long after that, seeing him at Garsington, things reverted to type and she craved from him ʻmore brain, O God, more brain!' (Diaries of Virginia Woolf, ii, p.287; Moorcroft, p.123).

The book of his that she reviewed was The Old Huntsmen and Other Poems, published in 1917. It was the collection that brought Sassoon fame as a war poet; indeed, when the shy Wilfred Owen introduced himself to Sassoon at Craig Lockhart Hospital that August, he was carrying several copies of the book for older man to sign (Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography, 2005, p.165). Virginia Woolf's review was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 31 May 1917: ʻWhat Mr Sassoon has felt to be the most sordid and horrible experiences in the world he makes us feel to be so in measure which no other poet of the war has achieved... It is difficult to judge him dispassionately as a poet, because it is impossible to overlook the fact that he writes as a soldier. It is a fact, indeed, that he forces upon you, as if it were a matter of indifference to him whether you called him a poet or not. We know no other writer who has shown us as efficiently as Mr Sassoon the terrible pictures which lie behind the colourless phrases of the newspapers... The vision of that "hell where youth and laughter go" has been branded upon him too deeply to allow him to tolerate consolation or explanation. He can only state a little of what he has seen, a very little one guesses, and turn away with a stoical shrug as if a superficial cynicism were the best mask to wear in the face of such incredible experiences... There is a stage of suffering, so these poems seem to show us, where any expression save the barest is intolerable... Mr Sassoon's poems are too much in the key of the gramophone, to be read as poetry; but his contempt for palliative or subterfuge gives us the raw stuff of poetry'. Ottoline Morrell, the conduit for Sassoon's thanks, was part of the anti-war circle around Bertrand Russell with whom Sassoon was associating at the time he made his protest against the war (for which, rather than face court martial, he was sent to Craig Lockhart).