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." 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. 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."

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: 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. Here is a book that has made me feel a bit nostalgic about my childhood and youth. It has reminded me of the days when I was in primary school and we had something called 'dictation'. On the one hand Siegfried Sassoon’s _The Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man_ (the first volume in a trilogy)can be seen as a paen to the idyllic way of life of a country gentleman before the war to end all wars destroyed any pretence to concepts of chivalry and gallant action. On the other hand it can be seen as an indictment (knowing or otherwise) of the generally indolent and purposeless lives of the idle rich before an entire generation was nearly decimated. Either way it is a well-written and interesting picture of Edwardian life seen from the point of view of someone definitely in the upstairs portion of the upstairs/downstairs equation.If you cannot open a .mobi file on your mobile device, please use .epub with an appropriate eReader. Nowadays in the UK fox hunting is only permitted in a modified form, but in the 80s and 90s it was a very divisive political issue. This book reveals that it was also so even a century ago. At one point Sassoon relates how a village parson shakes his fist at the hunters and calls them "brutes" (Sherston dismisses him as a "silly old buffer"). Elsewhere another huntsman refers to "those damned socialists who want to stop us hunting." Typically, the author comments that "Socialists, for me, began and ended in Hyde Park, which was quite a harmless place for them to function in." [Hyde Park is a London park, one corner of which became established as a location for political and religious speakers]. Probably there are quite a few people who will be put off reading this book by its title, but the author does not actually describe the death of any fox, and his motivation for hunting seems to be the companionship of like minded people and the opportunity for a good gallop around the countryside. I live in a rural area and, though I don't hunt myself, I know that fox hunting is still seen as a social event by the farming and landowning sector. Knowing something about horses probably also adds to the enjoyment of reading this book. He is so passionate about what he does that he drops out of cambridge university where he was to study the law and become a barrister. 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. George Sherston, AKA Siegfried Sassoon, is a young man of modest means. His family left him a small legacy that allows him to drift through life without working for a living. His Aunt Evelyn susses him up properly:

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.

by Siegfried Sassoon

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 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. The air was Elysian with early summer and the early shadows of steep white clouds were chasing over the orchards and meadows; sunlight sparkled on green hedgerows that had been drenched by early morning showers. As I was carried past it all I was lazily aware through my dreaming and unobservant eyes that this was the sort of world I wanted. For it was my own countryside, and I loved it with an intimate feeling, though all its associations were crude and incoherent. I cannot think of it now without a sense of heartache, as if it contained something which I have never quite been able to discover." 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.

This is an interesting novel, not the simple evocation of a lost past that I was expecting; there is much more nuance and Sassoon was clearly expressing a good deal of ambivalence (sitting on the fence if I am being cynical). The asides make it more interesting as do the evocations of Proust.What gives this novel power is you know this to be autobiographical; this book is talking about a period that is going to be shattered and completely replaced with something new. So, we are immersed in rural Kent, with servants and horses and steam trains and a bucolic life of gentle pursuits. Of an England that is hankering for a return to the glory of Victoria, but also a period of stability economically. But European royalty are not experiencing a time of stability & of course, it ultimately explodes into what we know as World War 1. The Old Century and Seven More Years (autobiography), Faber, 1938, Viking, 1939, reprinted with introduction by Michael Thorpe, Faber, 1968. 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.

Sassoon’s critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredithfound a similarly positive reception. In this volume, he recounted numerous anecdotes about Meredith, portraying him vividly as a person as well as an author: “The reader lays the book down with the feeling that a great author has become one of his close neighbors,” wrote G.F. Whicher in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review.The critical portions of the book were also praised, though some found the writing careless. But the New Yorkercritic noted Sassoon’s “fresh and lively literary criticism,” and the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplementdeclared that “Mr. Sassoon gives us a poet’s estimate, considered with intensity of insight, skilfully shaped as biography, and written with certainty of style.” The first volume in Siegfried Sassoon’s beloved trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston , with a new introduction by celebrated historian Paul Fussell 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. 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] 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.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. I’m going to continue on with book two in the trilogy, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. The writing is mostly rather light for Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. I have a feeling the tone will change for the second book. Hopefully, the Whizz-Bangs will fly high and wide.