Gazette: Historical Notes: An uncharacteristic act of vandalism

"IF I had the choice of making friends with Tennyson or with Sassoon," wrote Wilfred Owen, shortly after meeting the fox-hunting man at Craiglockhart War Hospital, "I should go to Sassoon." And a month later Owen was describing him as "Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father confessor + Amenophis IV in profile." A clear case of a younger, less established poet's hero- worship for a handsome, successful senior, you might think. But is this stereotype the full truth?

While it is undeniable that Sassoon felt superior to Owen in a number of ways when they met - physically, socially, psychologically and as a poet - very few people realise just how snobbish Sassoon's attitude towards Owen was. "He was embarrassing," Sassoon told Stephen Spender when he asked him about Owen. "He had a Grammar School accent."

It is also true that Sassoon had a profound influence on Owen's war poetry, in terms of both subject-matter and technique. Some of the more memorable touches in "Anthem for Doomed Youth", for instance, including its arresting title, were the result of Sassoon's direct suggestions. Under the stimulus of his company Owen drafted more than a dozen poems at Craiglockhart, at least four of which were among his best work. But what is less well known is that Sassoon also benefited from the extraordinary coincidence of their meeting at Craiglockhart. Not only did Owen's comments hearten and help him as he showed Owen work destined for Counter-Attack and Other Poems, but Owen's method of approach began gradually to change his own. "To remind people of [war's] realities was still my main purpose," Sassoon wrote in 1918, the summer after his meeting with Owen, "but I now preferred to depict it impersonally and to be as much `above the battle' as I could. Unconsciously, I was getting nearer to Wilfred Owen's method of approach." And Owen's influence is visible in even more specific terms: Sassoon's "unreturning army that was youth", for example, surely echoes Owen's title "The Unreturning".

The most intriguing discovery I made, however, concerned the two poets' personal relationship. Sassoon's own letters to Owen, most of which have survived, give us a fair idea of how he felt about the younger man at the time. But Owen's feelings are more difficult to pin down. While Sassoon says little to suggest a romantic attachment, in Owen's few surviving letters to Sassoon there is already enough to fuel speculation about the precise nature of his attachment.

Certainly he was to regard his first meeting with Sassoon as an epoch in his life, even remembering the exact shade of blue dressing-gown Sassoon was wearing, and he was to replay the scene frequently in his head, as lovers do. Another sign of the strength of his emotions is that on the occasion that he spent a whole day with Sassoon, sharing breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner with him, he failed for once to write the usual letter to his doting mother. But perhaps the most compelling indication that Owen's feelings crossed the borders of contemporary convention is a curious incident which occurred long after his death, when his brother Harold was editing his letters. Though Sassoon had promised to show Harold all Wilfred's letters to him, when Harold arrived as arranged Sassoon changed his mind and subsequently burnt the bulk of them. Harold believed that there was something too intimate in them, which Sassoon wished to conceal. Certainly his uncharacteristic act of vandalism throws a new light on his relationship with Owen.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson is the author of the newly published first biography of Sassoon, `Siegfried Sassoon: the making of a war poet' (Duckworth, pounds 25)