On the other hand, Egremont is extremely good on the war years, which are, after all, why we care about Sassoon, and he demonstrates, firmly but sympathetically, that Sassoon's famous letter renouncing the war was muddled and naive, the product of manipulation by Bertrand Russell and other Bloomsbury pacifists.
Sassoon eventually went back to the front, and in later years, without renouncing the anti-war sentiments in his poetry, tried to distance himself from this period of protest.
Egremont has also benefited enormously from access to
Tennant family papers and from unpublished Sassoon archives, to which he was given access by the poet's son, George, and the result is the fullest account yet of a romance so unlikely it reads like something out of Firbank.
Most of Sassoon's affairs were discreet arrangements with chaps more or less like himself. Tennant, 10 years younger, was an exotic, flamboyant creature, who wore makeup, collected seashells and dried flowers, and never went anywhere without a case of unguents and cold creams and his fur-lined dressing gown.
Yet Sassoon and Tennant fell for each other passionately, and traipsed together all over Europe, before the affair eventually dissolved in tears and recriminations.
There were sexual problems. (Tennant was unable to achieve orgasm, despite Sassoon's manful efforts.) But even more, Tennant's flightiness and fragility finally wore Sassoon down.
On the rebound, and looking for stability, in 1933 Sassoon married Hester Gatty, an heiress 19 years his junior.
The marriage was happy for a while and in 1936 produced George, whom Sassoon adored, but eventually it, too, collapsed, out of sexual incompatibility and Sassoon's increasing wish to be left alone with his work -- work that, sadly, fewer and fewer people were paying attention to.
The couple split up in 1945, and Sassoon lived the rest of his life alone in their grand house at Heytesbury, which, without his wife's inheritance to pay the bills, grew steadily run down.
He was for years painfully estranged from George, and
stoically endured a string of increa-singly painful ailments, all the while waiting in vain for a knighthood or the laureateship. (John Betjeman, who did get the laureateship, confided to a friend that Sassoon had been denied merely because he was "queer.")
He kept writing, and he was sustained in his old age both by his newly acquired Catholic faith and by a few devoted friends who revered him as a kind of relic of a pastoral England now almost vanished.
Some people, like the critic and translator C.K. Scott Moncrieff, thought Sassoon a ridiculous and outmoded figure, but in Egremont's telling he emerges as an immensely touching and sympathetic one -- a man not entirely at home in his own skin, let alone in the world he was born to, but who plumbed the great trauma of his generation, the horrors of World War I, and unlike so many, told the truth about it and about himself.
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