On the outside looking in
In all the Diaspora narratives there are few success stories to match those of two young men who arrived, from the Continent and the Orient respectively, in 19th century England. From the Frankfurt ghetto, 21-year-old Nathan Mayer Rothschild came to Manchester in 1798, speaking not a word of English. Sixty years later, Sassoon David Sassoon, the third of eight sons, was dispatched to London from Bombay, where his family had prospered after its expulsion from the Caliph’s court at Baghdad. In line with the expanding fortunes of both dynasties, the Sassoons (although they were merchants, not bankers) were soon known as the Rothschilds of the East; indeed, S.D. -- as the head of the English branch was called -- was the first in the family to wear Western dress. A photograph in Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s two-volume life of the poet Siegfried Sassoon shows the patriarch in turban and Turkish slippers with three of his sons, of whom S.D. alone is stuffed into a starched Victorian shirtfront. If there’s a touch of Gilbert and Sullivan here, it lies in this visual marker midway in the family’s social ascent; S.D.’s grandson Siegfried would further the transformation with his “Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man,” completing the journey from robes to britches.
Siegfried’s father, Alfred, the first Sassoon to be born in England, was also the first to marry outside his religion. Expelled from the family and disinherited, he abandoned his wife and their three young sons in rural Hampshire when Siegfried, the youngest, was 5. The future poet, only half-Jewish and a poor relation, would become the most famous of the whole tribe. An indifferent student, he dropped out of Cambridge to devote himself to his real passions: hunting, cricket and golf. Among other lifelong conflicts, he suffered a disconnect between the philistine “hearty” and the artist. With the rural Englishness of his upbringing and the isolation from his Sassoon relatives, the Jewish issue was slow to surface. When he enlisted in August 1914, just before war was declared, Siegfried was shocked to find his name included in the university’s Hebrew War List.
Sassoon is the only poet of that lost generation to have survived into old age. (His friend Robert Graves became much better known for his prose: “The White Goddess” and the series of historical novels starting with “I, Claudius.”) It’s not longevity or greater talent that sets Sassoon apart from the others: Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg. Siegfried the heroic survivor became the antihero, the only one to expose the lie on every slain soldier’s gravestone: Dulce et Decorum est.... His war poetry detailed the nightmare of trench warfare: the filth and fear, the agony of untreated wounds and always the rats. (“And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, / Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime. / And then the rain began, -- the jolly old rain!”) Savage verse satires, like the much-anthologized “Everyone Sang,” took aim at every species of warmongering patriot: smug clergy, hypocritical bureaucrats, noble mothers, cynical commanders and their politician bosses prolonging the massacre to further their ambitions. By 1917, outrage had moved Sassoon from poetry to public protest. Refusing to return to the Front, he sent a copy of the letter he wrote to his commanding officer to journalists and anti-war politicians, assuring its wide publication and a reading in Parliament. In case anyone missed the point, he threw his Military Cross into the River Mersey. Finally he was persuaded by friends to avoid court martial (and allow the government to save face) by taking medical leave with a diagnosis of shell-shock.
Wilson’s two volumes are an archive, not a literary biography. Even as recounted in her numbing detail and drab prose, Sassoon’s vault from the romantic field-and-stream lyrics of the Georgian poets to subversive messenger from Hell is essential reading. After the drama of the Front followed by a defiant pacifism, the rest of his life is a sorry tale. Coming out as a homosexual, he revealed only his bad taste in lovers. He finally inherited substantial Sassoon money, spending much of it traipsing through Europe in the entourage of the bejeweled tantrum-throwing aesthete Stephen Tennant. The ugliest chapters focus on the poet’s marriage, a disastrous attempt to join his new, liberated life with the old yearning to be the perfect country squire, complete with grand property and progeny to fill it. Wedding a talented and beautiful heiress, Siegfried was outraged to learn that after producing a son she expected companionship along with the additional children he demanded, and he drove her from the home she had largely financed.
After 1918, Sassoon’s poems regressed to pre-war bucolics, while their author inveighed against modernism and all its works. He found a popular prose vehicle for nostalgia in the form of lightly fictionalized autobiography -- “Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man,” followed by the less sentimental “Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.” The rest of his long life continued a steady retreat into the past. He died in 1967 at 80, a forgotten near-recluse in his crumbling country place.
Philip SASSOON and his sister Sybil, Siegfried’s cousins, appear as the ultimate Establishment insiders to the poet as outsider. True to the tradition of dynastic mergers, their father had married a French Rothschild. As Philip was left three-quarters of their parents’ estate, his wealth was staggering; still, Sybil’s smaller inheritance landed her a grand title. She married a peer with the Trollopian name of Lord Rocksavage, later Marquess of Cholmondeley. In the elegantly produced “Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil,” Peter Stansky, chronicler of upper bohemian Bloomsbury, offers an expert tour through these glossier lives: the great houses, spiffy clothes, celebrity-crammed parties, butlers, Bugattis and Riviera villas, all celebrated in portraits and interiors by their friend John Singer Sargent, illustrations from Country Life and campy snapshots. The reviewer’s favorite: a photograph of Sybil and Philip seated cross-legged atop a pair of matching plinths on the grounds of Port Lympne, the country house overlooking the English Channel that Philip built in Kent.
Eton- and Oxford-educated, rich and well connected, Philip Sassoon reasonably planned a career in politics. To his great disappointment, after decades of loyal service as First Underling, he was never rewarded with higher office. He spent the war years as private secretary to Gen. Douglas Haig, one of the most reviled commanders in modern history, known as the “Butcher of the Somme.” (It’s clear why Philip was in no hurry to meet cousin Siegfried.) As under-secretary of State for Air, his brief was to create social cachet for a branch of the service hitherto confined to policing a newly created Iraq from the skies. To this end, he gave recruitment talks to the boys at leading public schools and played host at an annual summer camp at Port Lympne, where airmen and their families could mingle with dukes. On leaving, the servicemen’s children were each handed 5 pounds by the butler.
In his role as political host there and at his two other houses, Philip was more successful. He entertained party leaders, foreign heads of state, entire international conferences and secret meetings. His hospitality was so taken for granted that prime ministers Lloyd George and Bonar Law thought nothing of inviting their own guests. Stansky reports that Philip, far from resenting these liberties, “thrived on being used”; thus his puzzlement as to why Sassoon never achieved higher rank is hard to understand. As official host, Philip accepted a part that historically was backstage, not front office -- a part traditionally played by women, political hostesses furthering their husbands’ careers. That he was dismissed as a lightweight should come as no surprise. Parties were his real vocation. The decorating and redecorating of his houses should be seen as the creation of stage sets for an endless extravaganza of weekend house parties, vast official receptions and bohemian jollifications mixing the rich and the artistic. Stansky invites us to ponder other reasons for Sassoon’s thwarted ambition: Rumors of homosexuality? Philip’s discretion was such that not even his biographer has unearthed evidence of any intimate relationships. If suspicions of this kind were an obstacle to advancement, moreover, probably neither political party could have formed a cabinet. Anti-Semitism, never far below the surface in English life, is more plausible. One of Philip’s weekend guests at Port Lympne, Virginia Woolf, described her host as “an underbred Whitechapel Jew.” A related explanation seems likelier. Until very recently, all outsiders aspiring to leadership positions (Jews, people of color, women) have had to be more: more intelligent, talented, qualified -- in a word, exceptional. By every measure except wealth, Philip Sassoon must be counted as exceptionally average. Sybil got the brains in the family. Leaving the role of host to her brother, she helped found the WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service), oversaw a model restoration of Houghton, the great 18th century house inherited by her husband, and proved a vital force in the support of music and struggling musicians.
It’s no discredit to Stansky to say he writes as a fan. His sympathy for the Sassoon siblings and his zesty pleasure in the high life of the period draws us into a world as remote from our own as the court of Versailles. Sharing their world view is more problematic. Although he discusses the effects of anti-Semitism on their lives, he never connects their vulnerability to the constellation of attitudes they shared with their class: the narrowness and snobbery; the xenophobia and racism; and, through the 1930s, the indifference to the suffering of fellow Britons that helps explain the next generation’s attraction to communism.
Victor, Third Baron Rothschild, born in 1910, seemed to be the man who had everything. Handsome, rich, brilliant, he was a promising scientist, with wit and charm that many found magnetic. What went wrong? Kenneth Rose, a political commentator and biographer as well as a friend of VR -- as Victor royally signed himself -- tries to answer the question, but his “Elusive Rothschild: The Life of Victor, Third Baron,” though smartly written, lets his subject get away once again.
A precocious dazzler, Victor moved easily among the worlds of academe, government and cafe society, revealing at the same time a genius for acting as his own worst enemy. His career as a zoologist was short-lived, his energies diverted to the pursuits of the rich amateur: collecting Impressionist pictures and 18th century first editions. But he also apparently felt that no Rothschild would be taken seriously as a scientist -- a concern disproved by the career of his sister Miriam, an expert on fleas. His doubts became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Newly married, the young Rothschilds became famous in Cambridge for weekend house parties with glittering guests from London and Paris and “cascades of fireworks on the river.” The pattern of provocation, of seeing what he could get away with, then crying foul, was thus established. During World War II, he served in MI5 as head of counter-sabotage and later as director of research for the Royal Dutch Shell Group. Political ambition led him to change his party from Labour to Tory, but the switch got him no further than an appointment as head of the Conservative Party’s Central Policy Review Staff, a.k.a. the Think Tank. This disappointment was eclipsed when his suspected role as one of the “Cambridge spies” threatened to end his life in disgrace.
Defending Rothschild against accusations (neither proved nor disproved) of treason -- of acting as a double agent and accomplice of his friends Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt -- is the charge of Rose’s book. To this end, he whacks his way through thickets of circumstantial evidence. Most damning was Victor’s attempt to clear his name. When a disaffected former MI5 agent, one Peter Wright, who had lost his pension and emigrated to Tasmania, made known his intent to write a book exposing MI5 treachery, Victor offered the impoverished spy a free ticket back to London. Once the guest was installed in his house near Cambridge, Victor produced a collaborator, a journalist looking for a big story on the Cambridge spies. The product of Rothschild’s bribery and brokering was to be a book that would reveal the inner workings of MI5 and, not coincidentally, spin off an affidavit clearing Victor of the suspicions dogging him. When Wright ratted on his benefactor in an Australian courtroom, Victor became the object of an official investigation, whose conclusion threatened to see him indicted for treason under the Official Secrets Act. The best Rose can do is ascribe this seamy episode, along with lies and omissions in VR’s recorded interrogation, to poor judgment, illness and advanced age.
Whether or not he was guilty of betraying his country, Victor Rothschild had a pathological need to betray and humiliate intimates and acquaintances alike: He bullied his two wives and manipulated the daughters of his second marriage while ignoring and disinheriting their step-sisters. As an adult, one of his daughters would “wonder why he needed to crush as well as to instruct the young.” He double-crossed his older son Jacob, voting instead for his second cousin Evelyn to succeed him as chairman of the Rothschild bank. In 1996, Victor’s younger son, Amschel, 41, hanged himself in a Paris hotel room.
Siegfried Sassoon once remarked that he attributed his artistic side to his English blood; his “demons,” he said, were all Jewish. Among the demons were the contradictions and constraints in the lives of these privileged outsiders, their illustrious names excluded, as VR joked of himself, from “the List of the Great and the Good.” *
