Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man: The Memoirs of George Sherston: 1 (George Sherston Trilogy)

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I recently saw the film, 'Benediction', about Siegfried Sassoon. I had only just read Pat Barker's 'The Ghost Road' (part of the 'Regeneration' trilogy), again featuring Sassoon and a number of his peers. In short, he was a complicated, three-dimensional man. Even so, the England-loving lyricism of Memoirs Of A Fox-hunting Man is initially unsettling. Sassoon writes of his longing for a lost innocence and a world before the great fall of the war – and this world is one that might well appeal to Gove. The narrator's Auntie is a big-C Conservative and loved as such. Of course, that makes sense from a man who would become an officer in the class-rigid world of the trenches. It even fits that he should have George, his mainly autobiographical narrator, say that "poverty was a thing I hated to look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells". He would do his learning later. TE Lawrence once remarked that “if I were trying to export the ideal Englishman to an international exhibition, I think I’d like to choose Siegfried Sassoon for chief exhibit”. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, published in 1928 and attractively reissued by Faber, is that ideal Englishman’s regretful (sometimes slightly cloyingly nostalgic) lament for an ideal, vanished England. The book ends with Sassoon heading off to the war that would inspire his famous poems. That quote comes from an article by Peter Green in New Republic, which reading group contributor MythicalMagpie highlighted. The whole article is well worth reading, with the great historian on typically smart and provocative form. He also says that Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is "carefully sanitised" and that all Sassoon "wanted was the past". Green explains the success of the novel in deeply unflattering terms:

If truth be known, more than fame or money or prestige, I most crave to not ”be interfered with too much.” I’ve thought about trying to put my personal desire into words for many years, but until I read those words by Sassoon, I’d never really found the proper ones before. Under pseudonym Saul Kain) The Daffodil Murderer, Being the Chantrey Prize Poem, John Richmond, 1913.

Success!

It's a fascinating record of lost language and standards of behaviour and politeness, expectation and strictly defined class boundaries. Particularly because of what Sassoon leaves out - his alter-ego is an only child raised by an aunt, while he in reality had a brother whose death at Gallipoli devastated him. Sherston is not Jewish either - something which mattered a great deal in England, and made Sherston's sense of being an impostor, not quite up to the task of being what he was expected to become, ring a little false. By excising his Jewishness (he was not religious, his father having been rejected by his very correct anglo-indian family for marrying a christian for love) Sassoon removes the most obvious barrier to Sherston's social mobility and makes him seem reticent in a manner which rings false to his personality. For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy's trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all the killed and wounded were brought in”

Our narrator's natural Conservatism and patriotism evaporate on exposure to the realities of trench warfare. And the measured judgements of this cheerful innocent are much more powerful than any number of angry denunciations from other quarters. Possibly more surprising is the fact that Sassoon should write with such loveliness. It takes some getting used to, after those poems. Sassoon, who dwelt so long on grey mud, bleached sand bags and ashen-faced soldiers, on the stench of death, on screams and on the sound of wind "dulled by guns", can also describe sensory perceptions with all the sensual relish of Proust (of whom he was clearly a fan): He is also left-wing. His sympathies are with the "simple soldier", and against the "Majors at the Base" who "speed glum heroes up the line to death". He publishes poems in magazines like the Nation (which nowadays trades as the New Statesman). Poems scarlet with rage:Most British people of a certain age will know of Siegfried Sassoon as one of the WWI soldier poets. When I was at high school in the 1970s his anti-war poems, and those of Wilfred Owen, featured prominently in our English lessons, a fashion that seems to have passed. This book is however the first part of his best known prose work, a "fictionalised autobiography" in three parts, with Sassoon thinly disguised as one George Sherston. This volume takes Sherston into the war years, through training and into France. Sherston (and Sassoon’s) entry into the war was delayed by a riding accident. The novel ends at the beginning of Sherston’s time in the trenches, when the horror of it all was becoming clear. At one point Sassoon refers to the war as a “crime against humanity”, quite a modern turn of phrase. The term had only been coined about 20 years earlier and was confined to diplomatic paperwork. This may even be its first use in literature.