ABSTRACT
Sassoon’s journals have been the object of little to no attention, and have not yet been examined as a work of literature. This chapter defines Sassoon’s war diaries as a genre and literary object. Lejeune’s work on the diary as distinct from autobiography is useful to delineate the generic singularity of Sassoon’s war journal, which circumvents the traditional divide between diary writing, autobiography and memoir. Besides the wish to record and bear witness, Sassoon in his journal enacts a construction of himself as a myth. This invites questions as to the immediacy of representation in Sassoon’s war diaries. Additionally, Sassoon’s war journal can be identified as a writing workshop, a repository of literary experiments for Sassoon’s future work. It is a well-known fact that Sassoon’s war diaries paved the way for the Sherston Memoirs and his future memoirs. The crucial role that the diaries played in the genesis of his war poetry is much less notorious; it is examined here. Finally, this chapter explores the way in which Sassoon’s variety of styles can be organised along a gradient of expressivity, where the blankest phrasing is paradoxically the most expressive of the reality of war.
