SASSOON

Siegfried L., 1886-1967, Poet) Unsigned but complete Autograph Letter to "My Dear Edward"

      - starting "Coming upstairs after reading a couple of chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit, I feel dissatisfied with being just a poet. O to sit down at one’s table & get going with Part XLVII of that enormous novel - for that enormous Public - instead of staring at a sonnet about something irridescent & insubstantial! Thus might a secondary schoolmaster (assistant) envy the driver of the Scotch express - did Dickens describe St Pancras at midnight on Xmas Eve? - with a page and a half of moralisations about the express engine of life rushing through the darkness and snowflakes - (human souls every one of them) . ‘If he didn’t he ought to have done’ (Arnold Bennett). I see Dickens fit plainly as the driver . (in a posthumous Punch cartoon by Tenniel . ‘Driving his characters to the Terminus’ ." then he gives a pastiche of how Dickens would have described driving the train "now there is a stupendous hissing of steam and a tremendous trawling of trolly-loads of turkeys along the rumbling platform. Now Jasper Cram [?] leans with one intense last look to whisper in Lilian’s acquiescent ear those few and fondest syllables which it would be sacrilege to commit to print, even for thee - O gentlest of readers’ . Oh to be Dickens - or apparently, to be even Priestley! ." 2 sides 8vo., Heytesbury House, Wiltshire headed paper, 27th April 1935 Having started his writing career as a poet, in 1928 Sassoon turned to prose & published Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, anonymously, though his name appeared in the second impression. His fictionalized autobiography of his early years in Kent, was an immediate success. He continued the story in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). From the estate of  Juliette HUXLEY , wife of Julian.