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

Product Information

I had a difficult time relating with I expected to find the fox hunting part of the book dull and perhaps even offensive - it's a practice not to modern tastes for reasons of elitism and cruelty - but was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Sassoon seemed to enjoy it as an opportunity to enjoy the countryside and jump a lot of fences at high speed; an early extreme sport, if you will. The death of foxes, game and deer in the tally-ho pastimes of his class are glossed over in favor of amusing sketches of upper-class twittage. Sassoon has a great ear for speech and a dry line in self-deprecation.

It's a picture of the Edwardian world caught in aspic just before it fades - the troubles of the young George Sherston, standing in for Sassoon, are no more dire than finding good horseflesh, a well-made pair of riding boots, and enough money to hunt each season - something he can only manage by going into debt when he moves to a more toffy part of the country with his local Master of Hunt as a kind of assistant, and must hide the fact that although well educated, his yearly income is smaller than your average well-bred chappie. 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. 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. In 1917, famously, Sassoon was supposed to have thrown a Military Cross he won for "conspicuous gallantry" into the River Mersey. But even this wasn't such a simple thing. He later explained: "Weighted with significance though this action was, it would have felt more conclusive had the ribbon been heavier. As it was, the poor little thing fell weakly on to the water and floated away as though aware of its own futility … Watching a big boat which was steaming along the horizon, I realised that protesting against the prolongation of the war was about as much use as shouting at the people on board that ship." Talking of weight, it turns out he only actually lobbed the ribbon. The medal was found in an attic in 2007. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was a British author and poet. His notoriety began as a war poet, writing first hand from the trenches of the western front where he fought as a soldier in the army. His bleak realism was ignored at the time unlike other patriotic poets but achieved better recognition after the war. His later poetry began to echo his spiritual searches which eventually led him to convert to Catholicism in 1957. He also achieved success in prose writing. He published a semi-autobiographical trilogy: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and Sherston's Progress (1936). He also published an autobiography, The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938) which was his own personal favourite. (Oxford Companion to English Literature).

Become a Member

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: This is the first of Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy relating to the First World War; part of my reading for the anniversary this year. Although a novel, this is strongly autobiographical and there is no doubt that the protagonist, George Sherston, is Sassoon. 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. Homosexuality also gets a look in: three male friendships feature prominently in the book and can either be treated as bromances or as veiled homosexual encounters - both are satisfactory for the reader.

He spends most of his time in careless and meaningless pursuits, still finding ways to fund his occasional spending sprees in London despite his trustee’s limiting the amount of money he receives as punishment for failing at Cambridge. He becomes a well-respected hunter and rider, buying bigger and better horses and winning “point to point” races against other aristocrats. 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. The first volume in Siegfried Sassoon’s beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston , with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell 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. Where the war verses are bayonet-hard and sharp, this prose is soft and gentle as the "river mist" George lovingly describes, down in a valley, where "a goods train whistled as it puffed steadily away from the station with a distinctly heard clanking of buffers. How little I knew of the enormous world beyond the valley and those low green hills."

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. 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. It has taken me a few days before i could review this book. There is nothing earth shattering about the narrative - a young man who wishes he is much richer than his actually is, so he can live a life of leisure. I felt the same at his age & it was harder having a few friends who were independently wealthy & watching from the side lines. A highly decorated English soldier and an acclaimed poet and novelist, Siegfried Sassoon won fame for his trilogy of fictionalized autobiographies that wonderfully capture the vanishing idylls of Edwardian England and the brutal realities of war. Many aspects of Sassoon's actual life are missing here - he would have you think Sherston is a bumbler - whereas he was known for being madly brave, a committed post-war socialist, and a closeted gay man.

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. 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." The Memoirs of George Sherston (contains Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and Sherston's Progress), Doubleday, Doran, 1937 (published in England as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, Faber, 1937 ). All of this Edwardian badinage only makes it the more painful when he sees his cosy world come crashing down with the outbreak of the First World War, a narrative intrusion that is carefully held off until near the end of the book. It's consequently quite horrific to head off to the trenches with such a jovial narrator after endless chapters of cheerful rural pranks – like seeing Bertie Wooster given a rifle and thrown in a dug-out.

Success!

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. 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):

Funny because Sassoon wants it to be, not because he is lapsing, DH Lawrence-style, into absurd nature-fetishism. Green's Cold Comfort Farm analogy is unfair. Sassoon's evocation of the English countryside is so lovely partly because it is gentle (give or take a few too many references to Elysium) – even when he is writing with emotion: 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:The ban marked the formal end to an era that was, I suppose, in practice already long gone – the time of local hunts that brought small country communities together, ruddy-faced farmers doffing their caps as the squire rode past in hunting pink, everyone knowing everyone else and everyone knowing their place. Nowadays these same picturesque little villages are more likely to hold bankers on weekend retreats, adulterous retirees, and women pulling in six figures selling gold lamé tea-towels on Etsy. The first volume in Siegfried Sassoon’s beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell