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. 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.

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. 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. 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).

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2011-10-14 21:13:04 Boxid IA161301 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City London Date-raw January 1, 1960 Edition Repr. [d. Ausg.] 1960. External-identifier It is amazing what books can do in your life, where they can take and how they can change the cause of your life. 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:

I had a difficult time relating with That book’s sequel was also well received. The New Statesmancritic called Memoirs of an Infantry Officer“a document of intense and sensitive humanity.” In a review for the Times Literary Supplement,after Sassoon’s death, one critic wrote: “His one real masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer… is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is candid, critical, and humourous. … If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work from him almost by accident.” After the war, Sassoon became involved in Labour Party politics, lectured on pacifism, and continued to write. His most successful works of this period were his trilogy of autobiographical novels, The Memoirs of George Sherston.In these, he gave a thinly-fictionalized account, with little changed except names, of his wartime experiences, contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings. Some have maintained that Sassoon’s best work is his prose, particularly the first two Sherston novels. Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Manwas described by a critic for the Springfield Republicanas “a novel of wholly fresh and delightful content,” and Robert Littrell of Bookmancalled it “a singular and a strangely beautiful book.”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. 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. 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."

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. 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. In 1957 Sassoon became a convert to Catholicism, though for some time before his conversion, his spiritual concerns had been the predominant subject of his writing. These later religious poems are usually considered markedly inferior to those written between 1917 and 1920. Yet Sequences(published shortly before his conversion) has been praised by some critics. Derek Stanford, in Books and Bookmen,claimed that “the poems in Sequencesconstitute some of the most impressive religious poetry of this century.” Sassoon/Sherston is just beginning to get a glimmering of what he wants to do with the rest of his life. It will all be compressed very shortly when he finds himself among the bombs, blood, and horror of war. When you believe you will die at any moment, long term life goals become irrelevant, even painful to contemplate.

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. 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. 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: 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'. 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.

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.

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 ). 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. George is a boy who ought not to be interfered with too much,’ she would say. And I agreed with her opinion unreservedly.” 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. An early love of Sassoon's poetry (trench warfare poetry is as good for gothic teenage tastes as Sylvia Plath) led me to finally read this book, the first in the Sherston trilogy, a fictionalised trio of biographies written by Sassoon between the two world wars.