SONG OF A DEATHLESS LIFE

In 1923, the writer and editor C.K. Scott Moncrieff produced a barbed ode called A Servile Statesman, which read, in part:

Sir Philip Sassoon is a member for Hythe He is opulent, generous, swarthy and lithe The houses he inhabits are costly but chaste But Sir Philip Sassoon is unerring in taste

The recipient of these lampooning lines — politician, arts patron, aviator, munificent host — might have been disappointed at the sentiment. After all, Scott Moncrieff was notable as the translator of Marcel Proust’s mammoth opus , and Proust was Sassoon’s favourite author; he knew a fellow voluptuary of the senses when he devoured one. But he probably wouldn’t have been surprised. Though he worked his way into the British establishment, serving on the Tory benches, holding government posts, and throwing his various well-appointed homes open to the likes of Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George during the interwar years, his family’s Eastern Jewish origins and prodigious wealth, and his own confirmed bachelor status, meant he was Othered as much as fêted. Scott Moncrieff’s ‘swarthy’ was, but its subject seems to have sensed a certain hollowness beneath the lavish trappings: “To have slept with Cavalieri [Michelangelo’s male muse], to have invented the wireless instead of Marconi, to have painted Las Meninas, to have written — that is a deathless life,” Sassoon wrote. “But to be like me, a thing of naught, a worthless loon, an elm-seed whirling in a summer gale.”