Sassoon Postcards

It may be of interest to learn that recently two picture postcards
have been found which were written by Siegfried Sassoon. It was the
manager of an Oxfam charity (book)shop in London who found them in a
second-hand book he was inspecting. The shop assistant was about to
throw the cards away, and the shop owner was astonished to find one
signed "S. Sassoon" and the other "Siegfried Sassoon". A check of the
handwriting and signature provided conclusive evidence as to the
authorship of the cards.
On one of these, and hinting at his quibbles with Robert Graves,
Sassoon calls Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War "1,000 times better"
than Graves's Goodbye To All That as a war memoir.
The other postcard features a picture of Sassoon the way he might have
looked like while writing what is now known as his "Complete Memoirs
of George Sherston". In a message to one V.W. Garratt, he confesses
that it was impossible for him "to reveal Sherston as a 'poet'.
Sherston, in both volumes, is a simplified vehicle for my simplified
(wartime) experience. I had to keep him inside his frame, so to
speak," Sassoon goes on to explain.
Both cards are expected to fetch between £600 and 800 at an
auction.

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