Narcissism And Autobiography

There is little doubt that Sassoon, judging by his own admission and the observations of his friends, was throughout his life narcissistic and self-absorbed, and that this motivated and shaped his autobiographical project. In his version of autognosis, which was never as rigorous and disciplined as Rivers might have encouraged, Sassoon's response to literary tradition was as important as any systematic, psychoanalytic self-scrutiny. When he had completed his trilogy of semi-fictionalized memoirs, he turned almost immediately to autobiography, a genre clearly suited to his preoccupations. Having participated in the great wave of war books in the late 1920s with the Sherston memoirs, Sassoon's choice of genre in 1936 demonstrates that, despite his contrarian aesthetic claims, his work kept up, if not always precisely in step, with prevailing literary tastes.

In the late 1930s autobiography was a popular form for serious contemporary and modernist writers. In Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), a late inclusion in the war book phenomenon, Wyndham Lewis draws together key moments in his vorticist and military past in this construction of self. Younger writers with no army experience to draw from focused on their early and formative interactions with another key English institution, the public school. Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise (1938), for example, attends to the scarring and ideologically oppressive imprint of his school days upon his self-understanding.