Clearly, the composition of Siegfried's Journey was a fraught experience that left Sassoon exhausted. In 1946 he agreed to write about the life of another man – George Meredith – as a relief from the travails of literary autognosis. Though he began the work with characteristic diffidence, he completed Meredith in manuscript almost on schedule, in August 1947. In his approach to Meredith, it is interesting to note the same heightened awareness of the multiplicity and elusiveness of self that marks his autobiographical writing. He felt ‘confronted’, he writes, ‘by the protesting presence of Meredith’ warning him of the impossibility of knowing an author in any personal way through his works and a few scraps of letters, through the veil of ‘posthumous opacity’. ‘You can see through me’, the spectre of Meredith tells him, ‘but you will never see into me,’ as it disappears in another variation of Sassoon's liminal moment: ‘Bowing with a sort of elaborate courtesy, he vanishes’ like aspects of Sassoon's own interiority that pass beyond the limits of his vision at key moments of self-scrutiny in his autobiography. ‘[Meredith's] career, however, remains’ in the material solidity of the books that ‘crowd’ the shelves of Sassoon's library, something like the surviving solid door at the top of the stairs at 1 Raymond Buildings in 1941 that discloses an emptiness.