Siegfried Sassoon: the journey from the trenches, 1918-1967 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

The misanthropic afterlife of a war poet

Siegfried Sassoon remains best known for his war poetry - more properly, his anti-war poetry. Although he continued to write until his death at 81, his literary career was not just launched by the horrors of the trenches. It remains defined by the First World War. As Sassoon often commented - not without rancour - most people assumed he had died in 1919.

His conspicuous bravery, bordering on foolhardiness, led to the nickname "Mad Jack". Pat Barker's Regeneration recalled his equally wilful protest over the war, which risked court martial. Instead, he agreed to treatment for nervous disorder under Dr Rivers at Craiglockhart. Here, in 1917, Sassoon first encountered Wilfred Owen, "a rather ordinary young man, perceptibly provincial". However superior Sassoon thought himself, he found his reputation dogged by two comparisons: between himself and Owen (not always unfavourable) and between his wartime and post-war work (invariably so).

The Journey from the Trenches follows Wilson's The Making of a War Poet. Remarkably, the pair constitutes the first orthodox biography. In the first volume, Wilson documented the author's remarkable parentage. His father came from a wealthy Sephardic Jewish clan, long settled in Baghdad. His mother, Theresa, was one of the rural English Thornycrofts. Wilson showed how his striking mixed background gave rise to Sassoon's strong class consciousness and conservatism. These traits, alongside his sexual self-questioning, would inform the war poetry.

Wilson faces much greater challenges in narrating the 50-year "afterlife". Sassoon documented his experiences thoroughly, though unreliably. First were three fictionalised memoirs by "George Sherston". Despite the pseudonym, Sassoon - like Forster - could not allow his writings to touch on what had come to preoccupy him: his homosexuality.

Invariably, when blocked as a poet, Sassoon turned to autobiographical prose. The understandable reticence regarding his private life meant, however, that he was perpetually obliged to revisit only childhood and youth. His long-postponed sexual life was relegated to diaries. Even in these, Sassoon doctored critical passages. Some relationships Wilson has to evaluate solely through often one-sided correspondence.

Sassoon understood that he wrote best when romantically unfulfilled. Consequently, his search for happiness invariably resulted in a collision between his passions for life and writing. Most striking of his male lovers was Stephen Tennant. Wilson underlines Tennant's waywardness, but downplays how Sassoon's crushing determination to dominate made this inevitable. She is better attuned to the grievous abuse of his wife, Hester. If Sassoon's sexual "conversion" appeared sudden, it did not coincide with a deeper re-evaluation of women, who aroused contempt.

Notwithstanding a decade of formidable research, The Journey from the Trenches feels flat compared to its predecessor. Wilson has a problem in keeping the senior Sassoon alive on the page. He clung to the bluff certainty he admired in elders like Gosse and Hardy. As a young fogey, Sassoon had spurned modernism, and he was never comfortable in the new world precipitated by the war. The brusqueness and superiority required in an army officer strike a callous note in peacetime; particularly as the literary fruits of Sassoon's near-misanthropy do not always seem worth the sacrifices required of those around him.