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

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All this, for the establishment, made Sassoon’s later outspoken opposition to the war all the more difficult to handle because he couldn’t be branded a coward. Hence the resort to mental illness. It will be interesting to see how Sassoon handles this journey in the second novel. 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” Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems about World War I, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. He was also well known as a novelist and political commentator. In 1957 he was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. Memoirs also covers the first 6-9 months of the war. So much went wrong in those early months, chiefly through an inexperienced military, and the bungling and the old ways being inadequate are very honestly portrayed here.

The Old Century and Seven More Years (autobiography), Faber, 1938, Viking, 1939, reprinted with introduction by Michael Thorpe, Faber, 1968. Prior to its publication, Siegfried Sassoon's reputation rested entirely on his poetry, mostly written during and about World War I. Only ten years after the war ended, after some experience of journalism, did he feel ready to branch out into prose. So uncertain was he of the wisdom of this move that he elected to publish Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man anonymously. It is a depiction of his early years presented in the form of an autobiographical novel, with false names being given to the central characters, including Sassoon himself, who appears as "George Sherston". Sassoon was motivated to write the work by a war incident, when a fox was loose in the trenches and one of his friends shot and killed it. However, the book draws heavily on his pre-war life, with riding and hunting being among the favourite pastimes of the author. [2] Kent, the county in which George grows up, is famous for its fox hunting, and so once he is riding a horse, George is soon taken by Dixon to a hunt happening nearby, where he meets his future friend Denis Milden. George is impressed by the activity of the hunt, the audacious way in which the hunters ride their animals and the liveliness of the dogs. He decides that when he grows older, he too will be a fox hunter. As for the author, I first heard of him from Pat Baker's book, the eye in the door. This is what motivated me to buy it. Anyway, it's that lost world of rural Britain that is evoked in this affecting memoir – fictionalised memoir, I should say, because Sassoon also wrote some ‘straight’ non-fiction versions of his childhood, which most critics seem to think were less interesting than this putative novel. It is full of very beautiful Hardyesque descriptions of the English countryside:Published anonymously) Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (novel), Faber, 1930, (published under name Seigfried Sassoon) Coward-McCann, 1930, reprinted with illustrations by Barnett Freedman, Faber, 1966, Collier, 1969. I had a difficult time relating with Anyone who cares to do so is at liberty to make fun of the trepidations which a young man carries about with him and conceals. But there is a risk in such ridicule. As I remember and write, I grin, but not unkindly, at my distant and callow self and the absurdities which constitute his chronicle. To my mind the only thing that matters is the resolve to do something...even though [these thoughts] are only about buying a racing-cap.

Can you recall the novel that took you away from the nursery bookshelves and into the realms of Grown-Up Books – a gateway book, if you like? I happened upon mine after months of resisting efforts both at home and at school to get me to read something more challenging. Until then, as a pony-mad child without a pony, I’d sought refuge in my tattered copies of thrilling stories like Show-Jumping Secret and We Hunted Hounds by the Pullein-Thompson sisters. Then one day, entirely of my own volition, when I was perhaps 12 or 13, I reached for the blue, cloth-bound copy of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the “Rothschilds of the East” because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the World War I, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work The Daffodil Murdereris a parody). Sassoon writes beautifully, and has an eye for those little quirks that make the most minor characters memorable and amusing. He writes with special fondness for the countryside, and his descriptions of crisp winter mornings and the thrill of being young and galloping through the fields on a horse were just perfect. Sherston's life is gloriously free from worry or responsibility, but there's a dark cloud on the horizon; we can see it getting ever closer as the years advance towards 1914, but Sherston is blissfully unaware. When it comes, he is utterly unprepared. Memoirs Of a Fox-Hunting Man is the first of three fictionalized memoirs written by Sassoon detailing his life prior to, during, and following the First World War. George Sherston is an orphan who is adopted and raised by his spinster aunt. His childhood, while somewhat lonely and blighted by his own shyness, is spent in luxurious surroundings in the South of England, and he is somewhat spoiled by his aunt Evelyn, to whom he means everything in the world. Tom Dixon, his aunt’s groom, forges a close friendship with the boy. He convinces Evelyn to allow George to ride a horse, hoping to transform him into a respectable gentleman. And as I see it now, in the light of my knowledge of after-events, there was a premonition in his momentarily forsaken air. Elderly people used to look like that during the War, when they had said goodbye to someone and the train had left them on the platform."

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Characters whom we have come to love die meaninglessly, and Sherston only can record the facts of it - he doesn't reflect on his grief at all, as though the awfulness of it utterly dulled his pen. I liked this memoir. It’s likely not for everyone and I would find it difficult to filter out to whom I could recommend it, but if anyone gives it a go, I’d be interested in any thoughts. Mine maybe slightly biased by the benefit of reading previous works about and by the author. This is a long-term project for me. I do intend to read the follow-up semi-autobiographical memoirs at some stage. Not that that was any great concern to me as I rode Mr Star along the lanes to my first meet. How big everything seemed to a youth as callow as myself and I kept myself out of harm's way towards the rear, admiring the precocious sporting talents of Denis Milden, a boy no more than a year older than my fourteen years. "To be sure, Master Milden is a handsome rider," said Dixon, as we returned home. "But you are no booby yourself." My heart swelled with pride and I resolved to become the best huntsman of my generation. Most readers encounter Sassoon as the brave soldier-poet with the Military Cross, the mentor of Wilfred Owen, who has shaped our thinking on the First World War perhaps more than anyone else. It was Sassoon who first exposed the horrors of the trenches in his poetry. His depiction of the calamitous Western Front and the gulf between blundering, incompetent generals and innocent young soldiers betrayed is the overriding impression we have of that conflict, despite efforts of revisionist historians in the decades since his death. But that afternoon, as I devoured the first of Sassoon’s three volumes of lightly fictionalized autobiography, I met him as a boy in the person of his alter-ego George Sherston, clip-clopping to a distant meet alongside Dixon the groom, his fingers numb and a melting hoarfrost on the hedgerows.