It's Pat Barker's Regeneration we're talking about, a re-read of which I finished a couple of weeks ago with Simon Haisell's book group.

1.
Matthew Wills takes on Oscar Wilde's hair...

Wilde has been haunting the margins of several books lately: Not only Regeneration, but also Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor, and Mad, Bad, Dangerous To Know by Colm Toibin.

We often accuse our own age of superficiality, but possibly humans are just humans, whatever the era. Wills, quoting Wilde scholar Rob Marland, points out that it was Oscar's long hair that really set New York on fire during his 1882 visit -- eclipsing the impact of his poetry, wit, and conversation. And it's the photos taken by Napoleon Sarony at that time, of Wilde aged 27, that have become our defining images of the author/playwright.


One of Sarony's classics

The following year Wilde's hair was very different. Shorter (and definitely weirder). "In an interview -- because yes, his hair continued to be a topic of interest on both sides of the Atlantic -- Wilde said his square-cut bangs were inspired by a Roman sculpture in the Louvre. Only after getting his hair cut in this style, Wilde claimed to have discovered that the 'bust represented Nero, one of the worst behaved young men in the world, and yet a man of strong artistic passion.'"

This might have been overly bold. "When Wilde’s enemies, which eventually included the weight of the British establishment, attacked him for his decadence, immorality, sensuality, effeminacy, homosexuality, et al., they often likened him to the shameless Nero."


No fixed hairstyle

But Wilde throve on publicity, writing to a friend: "Society must be amazed, and my Neronian coiffure has amazed it." And he wasn't averse to retro-fitting an event with a good story: "Marland wonders if Wilde made up the Louvre story to deflect the fact that his bangs on returning to America were actually akin to a then-fashionable style among New York City 'dudes.' Wilde, who called fashion a 'form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months,' never wanted to be associated with anything as mundane as a trendy style."


Taormina, 2025. Everyone rocked up in Sicily at some point... Wilde famously visited Taormina in 1898, towards the end of his short life

*_*_*

2.
We watched Terence Davies's Benediction (2021).

Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden plays the youthful version, and Peter Capaldi the older man), the movie covers some of the same ground as Regeneration.

I wasn't bowled over (a reaction that definitely puts me in the minority as it rates 92 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes...). The archival footage is as gut-wrenching as it always is. And the depiction of Sassoon's early years is interesting. His letter of protest about the conduct of the war; his time at Craiglockhart, where he is treated by W.H.R. Rivers; his friendship with Wilfred Owen -- this was the material that had been covered by Pat Barker. But I did find the rest a tad slow.

After the war, Sassoon (like the protagonist in Earthly Powers) just keeps falling in with people who will disappoint, exploit, and/or deceive him. They're all, by this account, pretty ruthless. Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) is the best known name. Is this just how it was, we wonder, in a world where stable family relationships were not possible for gay men, and relationships always demanded the kind of subterfuge that can breed opportunities for extortion and cruelty?

Rivers always feared that Sassoon was returning to the trenches to seek death. Well, if so, it evaded him. And it seems he regrets that. He definitely appears to suffer from survivor's guilt, and by the end you're wondering whether he questioned more generally the worth of surviving... In 1933, he enters a marriage of convenience (with Hester Gatty), but they lived separate lives after World War II. They had one child, but Siegfried's relationship with his son seems cold. Sassoon is seeking some kind of solace in Catholicism, but apparently not truly finding it.

The movie concludes with Owen's Disabled, which also depicts a survivor who finds his prolonged life very onerous.


Not sure if Sassoon made it to Taormina, but he definitely stayed in Siracusa, pictured here in 2025. He also wrote In Sicily, a component of the beautifully conceived series called The Ariel Poems

Rex Reed comments: "Ending up isolated and alone, his friends all dead, haunted by the past, his work under-appreciated by the masses, his was a sad story that leaves an ache in the heart. Slow but never ponderous, Benediction, the deserving tribute Terence Davis has paid to his extraordinary failures and triumphs, more than makes up for what’s been unfairly overlooked in the past."

As viewers who know the beginning of Sassoon's life but not the end, we're surprised by the trajectory. But the film makes it easy for us to believe "that Sassoon could somehow grow into this hardened, angry man who’s still looking for answers".

Asked in an interview what he thought Sassoon was looking for in Catholicism, Davies replies: "He wanted redemption, and nothing can give you that. Certainly, religion can’t. You have to find that within yourself, or you don’t find it at all. But I think that’s what he was looking for... [He was seeking] to be forgiven, but not for anything specific. Something wider. He did survive the First World War. Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen didn’t. He saw, to a certain extent, his work eclipsed by them, because death does confer on you some kind of special honor. I think that hurt him. But when you’re looking for something that will balm your soul, would you ever find it? I don’t think anybody does. You either have that or you don’t. I’ve been looking for it for 76 years now and I’ve never found it."

The movie also shines a (not necessarily flattering) light on some of Sassoon's contemporaries. Edith Sitwell, asked how the "entertainment" known as Facade was received, responds: "They tittered..." And the primary impression it leaves of Lady Ottoline Morrell is her fondness for pursuing handsome young men... (More on her below.)

The screenplay is available here.


Sitwell definitely racked up a Taormina visit...

*_*_*

3.
I keep being reminded of Bertrand Russell...

He's another of the figures who crops up (indirectly this time) in Regeneration: "Robert Graves is furious with Bertrand Russell and Ottoline Morrell for encouraging Siegfried Sassoon. 'They could see the state he was in,' he tells Rivers, 'and they still went ahead.' Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was one of the most prominent English philosophers of the early twentieth century. He became an outspoken opponent of the war and was twice convicted for his activism under the Defence of the Realm Act. In 1918, he spent six months in Brixton Prison for lecturing against the United States' entry into the war."

Maria Popova also flagged up two of his essays: In Praise of Idleness and Useless Knowledge. (The collection they come from can be found here.)

The first begins: "Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.'... But... my opinions have undergone a revolution. I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what always has been preached... The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich... [Yet] without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things."

The second strikes a blow against the utilitarian approach to knowledge: "Learning, in the renaissance, was part of the joie de vivre, just as much as drinking or love-making... Throughout the last hundred and fifty years, men have questioned more and more vigorously the value of 'useless' knowledge, and have come increasingly to believe that the only knowledge worth having is that which is applicable to some part of the economic life of the community... Knowledge, everywhere, is coming to be regarded not as a good in itself, or as a means of creating a broad and humane outlook on life in general, but as merely an ingredient in technical skill." He would probably be horrified by the political debates about education these days...

And this bit is eerily prescient: "A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable... The world at present is full of angry self-centred groups, each incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilization rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote... What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole... It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs."

In a world where concern is growing that AI is messing with all our jobs, these pieces seem relevant all over again. (I LOVED this post by Pam Mandel the other day, entitled AI Could Never. And, of course, the Pope has been addressing this topic, too.)

In an ideal world, AI would take on all the dross jobs, leaving us humans with more time for the good stuff that Russell describes. What we fear is already happening is the reverse.


Russell, needless to say, dropped in on Taormina...

And, incidentally, he was also the brother-in-law of Elizabeth von Arnim (author of The Enchanted April, Love, and Elizabeth and her German Garden). Kate Jones writes: "During WWI, and recently parting ways with Wells, [Elizabeth] fell in love with the brother of Bertrand Russell, John Francis Russell, second Earl Russell, marrying him in 1916 and becoming a Countess twice over. She sadly lost her youngest daughter to pneumonia during that year... More chaos followed, with her tempestuous marriage to Russell ending after three years, resulting in a dark novel Vera, in 1921, with the Earl contemplating suing his ex-wife for defamation."

*_*_*

4.
And where there's Russell, there's Morrell...

Everyone seems to make fun of Lady Ottoline Morrell. But Alan Schwerin argues that she left a hefty impact on Russell's conception of philosophy. When Russell renewed his acquaintance with Morrell in 1911, he was kicking off a liaison that would last six years and a friendship that would last another 21. And they certainly did industrial-scale communication, says Schwerin, sending each other more than 3,400 messages, comprising letters, telegrams, and postcards...


Morrell: Also in Taormina...

Richard Vytniorgu also contends "that Ottoline should be considered an important thinker whose approach to creativity and personality offers a fresh understanding of modernity and modernism".

She connected Russell and D.H. Lawrence in productive ways, although their acquaintance, according to Russell, was "brief and hectic", and according to Morrell, one of "instinctive enmity". And the National Portrait Gallery's collection shows the range of her photographic ability.

She's worth following up...


Russell, by Morrell, 1924