Literary Giants Literary Catholics (23 page)

In the midst of Sassoon’s lurid descriptions of the “base details” of war was an intrepid introspection that saw Golgotha amid the hell. Religious imagery, albeit sometimes overlaid with the irony of anger, is discernible in much of his war poetry and detectable in the very titles of many of the poems. “Absolution”, “Golgotha”, “The Redeemer” and “Stand-To: Good Friday Morning” all testify to a soul haunted by Christ even when the spirit was spurned. The spirit was most apparent in “Reconciliation”, a poem written in November 1918, the month the war finally ended. In only eight intensively potent lines, Sassoon asks his compatriots, even as they mourn their own dead, to remember the German soldiers who were killed.

     In that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find

     The mothers of the men who killed your son.

With the war ended, Sassoon, like many of his contemporaries, found himself lost in, and alienated by, the nihilistic no-man’s land, or Eliotic “wasteland”, of postwar England. Apart from the solace sought in the writing of his own verse, Sassoon gained consolation in the poetry of others. He defended the provocative modernity of Edith Sitwell, writing an article defending her work in the
Daily Herald
under the combative title “Too Fantastic for Fat-Heads”. He also found solace in music, defending the provocative modernity of Stravinsky in one of his finest poems, “Concert-Interpretation”, in which the Russian composer’s controversial
Le sacre du printemps
inspires the English poet to muse with ambient ambivalence that the “polyphony through dissonance” of Stravinksy’s work reminds him of a “serpent-conscious Eden, crude but pleasant”. A different spirit pervades “Sheldonian Soliloquy”, possibly Sassoon’s best known postwar poem, in which his feelings of elation during a recital of Bach’s Mass in B Minor are expressed with delightful and cathartic whimsy.

     
Hosanna in excelsis
chants the choir

     In pious contrapuntal jubilee.

     
Hosanna
shrill the birds in sunset fire.

     And Benedictus sings my heart to Me.

Written in 1922, there is in “Sheldonian Soliloquy”, as in many of his war poems, a tantalizing glimpse of an embryonic Christianity that would have a further thirty-five-year gestation period. In the interim, Sassoon became as respected for his prose as for his poetry. His semi-fictitious autobiography,
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston
, published in 1937, was begun with
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
in 1928, continued with
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
in 1930 and concluded with
Sherston’s Progress
in 1936. Truly autobiographical works followed.
The Old Century
was published in 1938,
The Weald of Youth
in 1942 and
Siegfried’s Journey 1916-20
in 1945.

Neither the “journey” of Siegfried nor the “progress” of Sherston ended in 1945, the year in which the last of his autobiographical works of prose was published. On the contrary, the ending of the Second World War marked a new beginning for the poet. In spite of the success of the prose volumes, the most profound autobiography of the poet was to be found in his poems. Arranged chronologically, they offer an impressionistic picture of a heart’s journey toward God and that heart’s progress through the trials and tribulations of life.

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima inspired Sassoon to the same heights of horrified creativity as had inspired Sitwell in the composition of her “three poems of the Atomic Age”. Sassoon’s “Litany of the Lost” employed resonant religious imagery as a counterpoint to the postwar pessimism and alienation engendered by the descent from world war to cold war. As with the previous war, the world had emerged from the nightmare of conflict into the desert of despair, transforming “wasteland” to nuclear waste.

The ending of the second of the century’s global conflagrations marked the beginning of Sassoon’s final approach to the Catholic faith. Influenced to a degree by Catholic friends such as Ronald Knox and Hilaire Belloc, but to a far greater degree by the experience of his own life, Sassoon was received into the Church in September 1957, shortly after his seventy-first birthday. After a lifetime of mystical searching, he had finally found his way Home.

During his first Lent as a Catholic, Sassoon wrote “Lenten Illuminations”, a candid account of his conversion that invites obvious comparisons with T. S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday”. The last decade of his life, like the last decades of the Rosary he came to love, was a quiet meditation on the glorious mysteries of faith. As ever, his meditations were expressed in memorable verse, particularly in the peaceful mysticism of “A Prayer at Pentecost”, “Arbor Vitae” and “A Prayer in Old Age”.

In 1960 Sassoon selected thirty of his poems for a volume entitled
The Path to Peace
, which was essentially an autobiography in verse. From the earliest sonnets of his youth to the religious poetry of his last years, Sassoon’s intensely personal and introspective verse offered a sublime reflection of a life’s journey in pursuit of truth. These, and not his diaries, his letters or his prose, are the precious jewels of enlightenment that point to the soul within the man.

20

_____

The Cultural Reaction to the Desert of Modernity

M
UCH OF WHAT COULD BE CALLED
“Old Europe” was killed off by the First World War. I am aware that, to a degree, this is an oversimplification. If Hilaire Belloc’s assertion that “Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe” is to be taken seriously, and I think that it should be, much of Old Europe was killed off by the Reformation four hundred years earlier. (Incidentally, Belloc was not suggesting in this statement that the Faith was
only
European—indeed, he publicly and stringently denied that he had meant this when someone suggested that this had been his meaning. He meant that Europe, properly understood, was
only
the Faith—in the sense that the concept of Europe was bound up with the concept of Christendom. Take away Christendom as the unifying principle and the whole edifice of Europe begins to crumble.) If this is so, and as I have said, I believe that it is, Europe has been crumbling since the heresies of Luther and Calvin undermined its unifying principle.

This is the theme of Chesterton’s epic poem, “Lepanto”, written in 1912, two years before the start of the First World War. Europe in the sixteenth century is being overwhelmed by Protestant heresy and undermined by late-Renaissance decadence. This poison from within is being exacerbated by the Muslim threat from without. A weakened Europe is in danger of being overthrown by a resurgent Islam. (The more things change, the more they remain the same!)

     They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,

     They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,

     And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,

     And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,

     The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;

     The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;

     From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,

     And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

     . . .

     The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes

     And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,

     And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,

     And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,

     And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,

     But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.

     . . .

     King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck

     (
Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck
.)

     The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,

     And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.

     He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,

     He touches and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,

     And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey

     Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,

     And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,

     But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.

The poem concludes thus:

               
Vivat Hispania!

               
Domino Gloria!

               Don John of Austria

               Has set his people free!

     Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath

     (
Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath
.)

     And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,

     Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,

     And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade. . . .

     (
But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade
.)

Chesterton’s concluding lines are curious. As a climax they are curiously anticlimactic. Why is this? Historically speaking, Miguel Cervantes fought at Lepanto and was severely wounded in his chest and arm during the battle. This is the fact of the matter. Chesterton, however, is using the fact only as a launchpad to the truth it represents. “Not facts first, truth first” was one of Chesterton’s maxims. What, then, is the truth that Chesterton is trying to convey? He is telling us that the Christian victory at Lepanto in 1571 saved European civilization and European culture from destruction. An Islamic victory would have meant the destruction of Christendom—the Europe of the Faith—and all that it represents. In short, if Don John of Austria had not set his people free, Cervantes would never have written
Don Quixote
. And here
Don Quixote
is a symbol of all the Christian culture that followed: Shakespeare, Calderon de la Barca, Manzoni, Newman, Hopkins, Eliot, Tolkien—yes, even Chesterton himself!

Although Chesterton’s poem is about a battle fought in the sixteenth century, it is awash with cultural references to his own time. The battle for Christendom—for orthodoxy—was still being fought; the war against the heretics was still being waged. It was indeed no surprise that Chesterton had written books entitled
Orthodoxy
and
Heretics
a few years before writing “Lepanto”. Also, the allusions to Decadence in the poem were very close to home. Chesterton had grown to maturity in the fungoid atmosphere of the
fin de siècle
. Much of his work in the first decade of the twentieth century was, in fact, a reaction against the Decadence of the previous decade. In fact, the ennui, pessimism and cynicism of the 1890s had been replaced in the years from 1900 to 1914 by an overriding sense of excitement, optimism and romance. Decadence had been exorcised by a resurrected sense of the adventure of life.

On the one hand, you had the counter-Decadent defiance of the dynamic orthodoxy propounded by Chesterton and Belloc—the excitement of a Crusade, the optimism of the
vita nuova
and the sheer romance of Rome. On the other hand, you had the counter-Decadent superciliousness of the dynamite idealism expounded by Shaw and Wells—the excitement of Socialism, the optimism of the New Age and the sheer romance of Revolution. Pilgrims or “Progress”—that was the question; Pilgrims or “Progress”—that was the choice. This almost universal sense of optimism would be blown apart by the utter carnage of the First World War, leaving only a wasteland of shattered dreams and broken images.

The world entered the war with jingoistic optimism, besotted with the ideal of heroism. These early months of the war have been called the “Rupert Brooke period” after the poet of that name who marched to his death in 1915 having left as an epitaph to himself the haunting lines of his poem “The Soldier”:

     If I should die, think only this of me:

          That there’s some corner of a foreign field

     That is for ever England.

Soon, however, after the war had become bogged down in the entrenched nightmare of no-man’s-land, and after the combatants had been butchered, or had witnessed their comrades being butchered, in battle after endless battle, the jingoistic optimism began to make way for the jungles of despair. In Germany, the horrifically graphic depiction of hideously deformed and limbless war veterans by the artist Otto Dix encapsulated the despair and desolation of that nation’s defeated army. The angst and anger of postwar Germany, captured so luridly on canvas by Dix, was the breeding ground of the hatred that festers and fosters revolution. The result was the rise of a certain Adolf Hitler.

So much for the Weimar Wasteland.

In England the artistic reaction against what Tolkien called the “animal horror” of the war was most graphically expressed not on canvas (though C. R. W. Nevinson and John Singer Sargent produced some gruesomely realistic paintings) but in poetry. In particular, the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen conveyed the growing sense of disillusionment and resentment. This was the poetry of protest, and Sassoon and Owen were pulling no punches.

In Sassoon’s bitter verse invective “Fight to a Finish”, the poet dreams luridly of a Revolution of Revenge in which the returning troops would turn their guns and bayonets on the politicians and the press. Such a revolution would never materialize in England, although of course it became all too real in Russia, where the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 heralded seventy years of Marxist wasteland. Fueled with the fading dreams of the French Revolution and inflamed with the passions aroused by the bloodbath of the war, the Russians took the elusive and illusory vision of
libertè, ègalitè et fraternitè
and turned it into the three steps on the path toward their own enslavement, the three steps—or perhaps that should be steppes—toward the Gulag Archipelago from which Solzhenitsyn would emerge like a phoenix from the ashes. In Germany the Revolution of Revenge would take the form of the seeking of a scapegoat on which to enact the revenge: in Russia, the wasteland of the Gulag Archipelago; in Germany, the wasteland of Auschwitz and Dachau. Never in the long and bloody field of human history had there been an Inquisition as diabolical as the KGB or the Gestapo. Oh, how the gurus of modernity, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, had ushered in a brave new world of mass murder and genocide!