Sassoon archive on display for first time

Dream Voices: Siegfried Sassoon, Memory and War, opens today at Cambridge University Library, after its £1.25m acquisition of the archive held by Sassoon’s relatives.

The purchase, which means Cambridge University Library now holds the world’s pre-eminent Sassoon collection, was supported by Andrew Motion, Sebastian Faulks and Michael Morpurgo.

Sassoon (1886–1967) is regarded as one of the leading poets of the First World War. His classic prose works Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer have made him the foremost British chronicler of the conflict. He is famous for his protest against the War in 1917 and his refusal to return to the fighting, and for the friendship he formed with fellow war poet Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh.

The archive includes Sassoon’s trench journals, kept in the pockets of his Army uniform on the Western Front; further diaries covering the post-War years; poetry manuscripts, including corrected copies of his war poems; drafts and notes relating to his autobiographical prose trilogy; commonplace books, juvenilia and sporting notebooks; and letters to and from family and friends.

In the words of his biographer Max Egremont, Sassoon’s diaries and autobiographies give ‘an astonishingly frank and revealing view of the man in what is, perhaps, one of the most extensive self-portraits of any twentieth-century British writer.’

Exhibition curator John Wells said: ‘Sassoon was a dedicated diarist and kept a great deal of his correspondence, so when he came to write about his life he could draw on a collection of first-hand sources. This exhibition explores the ways in which documented, remembered, and imagined elements are interwoven in Sassoon’s writings.’

Entry to the exhibition, which closes on December 23, 2010, is free.

Highlights of the display include:

• Diary entries from Sassoon’s First World War trench journals, including an eye-witness view of the First Day on the Somme and an account of the moment he was shot by a sniper at the Battle of Arras

• Letters written by Sassoon on active service in France, including a drawing of early gas-masks in a letter to his mother and a moving account of the battlefield burial of one of his close friends

• Sassoon’s famous 1917 statement protesting at the continuation of the War and refusing to be a party to prolonging the sufferings of the troops, together with the actual telegram from his Commanding Officer summoning him back to HQ

• Manuscript drafts and fair copies with autograph corrections of some of Sassoon’s best-known war poems, including ‘A Working Party’ and ‘Everyone Sang’

• Sassoon’s sketch of the statue he wanted put up in Cambridge as a memorial after his death, drawn while he was expecting to be killed during the Battle of the Somme

• A verse letter which the novelist Robert Graves wrote during the Somme battle, found tucked inside one of Sassoon’s diaries

• Letters and poetry written by Sassoon at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where Sassoon was treated by W. H. R. Rivers and met Wilfred Owen

• Childhood notebooks of poems and stories given as presents to his mother, with pictures showing the ten-year-old Sassoon’s enthusiasm for ‘copious illustration, however incongruous’

• Sporting notebooks and diaries recording the young Sassoon’s exploits fox-hunting, steeple-chasing and on the cricket pitch—the raw materials for his classic Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

• Manuscript notes and drafts of Sassoon’s autobiographical trilogy, including a heavily-revised account of his meeting with Rupert Brooke and his unpublished thoughts on his portrayal of Wilfred Owen

• Printed volumes of Sassoon’s poems, including the first editions of his major collections, unique annotated copies of limited-edition fine-press rarities, and a corrected proof revealing his difficulties with punctuation