The Right Nation, by John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge PENGUIN £8.99 (466pp) It is perhaps the most intriguing question in Western politics: why has America, the country that voted Kennedy, Carter and Clinton into power, lurched so decisively to the right? The Republican Party has won seven of the past 10 presidential elections and controls both houses of Congress. Had up at Salisbury magistrate's court on a motoring offence - he was a famously erratic driver - he complained "How many of them suspected that I have written poems in the last 2 months which will be glorious long after Salisbury Town hall has been pulled down and carted away?" Towards the end - a rather foreseeable destiny for this brand of visionary English mysticism - came Mgr Ronald Knox, Dame Felicitas Corrigan and the consolations of the Catholic Church. "Back to the jingle of hansom cabs in the recollected calm of 1907," as Egremont characterises one of the later volumes. On the rebound from Stephen, he married a much younger woman, Hester Gatty, with high hopes of uxorious serenity, but the marriage foundered on locked bedroom doors and a writerly need for quiet. There was a single son, George, a divorce, and a great deal of ill-natured bickering.Sensitive to his subject's ever-changing moods, in which pique, hauteur and amiable generosity routinely combined, Egremont is adept at uncovering the odd mixture of idealism and complacency that coloured Sassoon's late-period outlook on life. Back in England, recovering from wounds, Sassoon declined to obey further orders, issued a pacifist statement, and was eventually removed by the authorities to a mental institution in Scotland. On the other, it provided the raw material for a series of poems on war's futility, whose importance was incalculably strengthened by the public profile of the poet.As a serving soldier with an MC on his lapel Sassoon was, to quote Waugh again, "the perfect person" to argue the case for other serving soldiers who suspected the war was being unduly prolonged by people who were doing well out of it.
The meteoric success brought by his collections The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-attack (1918) was stoked by controversy. His literary earnings in these early years were below £5.The war did two things for Sassoon. On the one hand his service in the trenches, where his acts of bravery frequently shaded into outright recklessness, authenticated a sense of manhood that had previously only been nurtured by the hunting field. Sassoon, a less moneyed offshoot of the Jewish manufacturing clan (although family resources still allowed him an income of £500 a year), had uniformly dim pre-1914 prospects.
A diffident Marlborough public schoolboy and an unsuccessful Cambridge undergraduate, he drifted through into early twenties publishing his poems - at this point sedate and pastoral - at his own expense and fretting about his homosexuality. Waugh, who had known him well in the 1920s, was ready to signal a greeting when something in the rider's features - "the inscrutable expression on that drawn, handsome face as it looked down on the charred and littered grass" - stayed his hand. Sassoon, clearly, was lost in some unapproachable private universe Waugh let him pass. Plenty of other people were on hand during Sassoon's long middle-to-old age - he died in 1967, a few days short of his 81st birthday - to confirm his apparent detachment from the life that burned on around him. Anthony Powell, visiting the old man's estate in the early 1960s, noted that "for Captain Sassoon, though no longer involved in it, the first war was still in progress".
