Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

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Siegfried Sassoon was already well-known as a war poet when Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was published in 1928. Despite the title, it’s not really a memoir, but a journey from innocence to experience better described as autobiographical fiction or fictionalised autobiography. It is one of the works that helped to create the myth of the long Edwardian summer before the first world war, when in reality that period was one of social change and political uncertainty. Be that as it may, much of what is depicted here was swept away for ever by the war.

This is the story of George Sherston, a young man who has grown up as an only child living with his aunt. He has a modest private income and drops out of Cambridge to concentrate on what he calls his “career as a sportsman”. He devotes his time to fox-hunting and playing cricket in the peaceful, ordered and class-conscious world of rural Kent.

These activities may not hold much appeal for modern readers, but what makes this book such a good read and so memorable is the wonderfully poetic and evocative prose in which Sassoon depicts the countryside. The language is straightforward and precise. Sassoon has the poet’s instinct for exactly the right word. The smell of the air, the change of the seasons, the play of light over the landscape; it is all here, like the literary equivalent of a picture by Eric Ravilious.

This is a world in which Sherston can take his horse to a hunt in another part of the county on a slow steam train that stops at every station. A journey of twenty miles or so is an adventure and trips to London are rare. He delights in being on horseback early in the morning, experiencing the outdoors as those who must work in offices for a living cannot.   

He is completely satisfied with the limited horizons of this small but idyllic world. He accepts the social system and the way things are. He has no thoughts about any future career, or indeed the future in any form. He records his youthful triumphs, such as his innings in the flower show cricket match. This is surely one of the greatest of all literary cricket games and that chapter preserves for ever village social life at that time. There is also his winning ride in the Colonel’s Cup steeplechase.

Yet this is written in such a way as to make clear that Sherston is looking back at his youthful and rather innocent self from some distance in time, with a warm yet slightly critical eye: “All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.” I have the feeling that this aspect of the book was influenced by Proust.

There are sly hints, too, of the war that is to come. There are several references to the great enemy of the hunter when jumping a hedge, barbed wire, and the Boer war is mentioned here and there.

Sherston is a slight outsider in this almost feudal set-up, where most of the hunters are farmers or landowners. His modest private income is not really enough to finance the life he aspires to. He moves in a largely male world, and seems to have no interest in meeting young ladies. He has intense male friendships, for example with Denis Milden, the young master of foxhounds. How the reader interprets this might depend on their knowledge of Sassoon’s life. It has to be said that Sherston is not quite Sassoon. He does not write poetry for example.       

By the later part of the book, Sherston is in the army. He experiences social embarrassment when he finds that most of the officers are men he knows from fox-hunting. He pulls some strings to become an infantry officer himself. It is not really made clear why, with his experience of horses, he does not join the cavalry.

By the end, Sherston has experienced the reality of war on the Western Front. Two of his friends have been killed in action and his aunt’s groom, Jim Dixon, the man who put him on a horse in the first place and encouraged his riding endeavours, has died of pneumonia in the trenches.

Sherston’s darker and grimmer wartime experiences are continued in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

We are now a long way from the earlier part of the book when Sherston told us: “My memory of that summer returns like a bee that comes buzzing into a quiet room where the curtains are drawn on a blazing hot afternoon.”

Cocktail Sticks by Alan Bennett

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Cocktail Sticks is Alan Bennett’s dramatization of his prose memoir about his relationship with his parents. I listened to the BBC Radio 4 version. Bennett plays himself with the younger Bennett played by Alex Jennings.

Bennett is a deceptively straightforward writer. For example, he tells us that if he were a better writer, he would list all the items he found while clearing out his mother’s kitchen cupboard after her death. Then he goes on to list them anyway. Similarly, he suggests that a stable, secure family background is a problem for the would-be writer, because it deprives him of material. Then he goes on to prove himself wrong.

There are a couple of neat references to Philip Larkin here, I Remember, I Remember as well as the more obvious This Be the Verse. It’s worth remembering that Bennett is that crucial few years younger than Larkin and became more of an active participant in “the sixties” than Larkin ever was.

The play moves between Bennett’s narration and dramatized episodes from the past. Sometimes the past and present mingle, as when his father speaks in the present although he has died some years before.

There is a sort of standard narrative about the clever scholarship boy or girl who comes to be ashamed of their humble parentage. Bennett presents all this in a rather gentler way than some other writers have done. He tells us how he is ashamed now of his shame about his parents then.

The play is warm, witty and hilarious. Bennett clearly had a warm and loving relationship with his parents. It becomes poignant in the later part as his mother succumbs first to depression and then to dementia. Bennett has such a good ear for words that he can even make dark comedy out of his mother’s loss of language at the end. In fact, Bennett has the kind of feel for the absurdities of English that you normally expect to find in people who have learnt English as a second language. There is a neat play on the word “cocktail” and the way it is used to describe the mixture of drugs in Bennett’s chemotherapy treatment.

Bennett has written extensively about his early years and the question of what his parents knew or thought about their son’s sexuality haunts these works. There are hints here that they knew perfectly well what he was like, his father’s worry about how their “sensitive” son would cope with National Service and his mother’s knowing references to the writer Beverley Nichols. This is what Bennett captures so well, the rhythms of speech where things are hinted at and alluded to but never said directly. He has recorded not only the speech patterns but the social customs of that late 1940s/early 1950s era.

I think that rather like John Betjeman, Bennett has become the prisoner of a false reputation. Neither of them is quite the cuddly figure that they appear to be from the personae they adopted to present TV documentaries. There probably won’t be too many more works to come from Alan Bennett so we should make the most of him while we can.  

Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis

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Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis was published in 1980. Recent events have prompted me to have a look at it again. It’s not one of his best-known novels and probably not even one of his best. It is fascinating, though, for reasons that I hope I shall make clear.

It’s a sort of science fiction novel that depicts a Britain under Russian military rule at some unspecified point in the twenty-first century, after an event referred to only as the “pacification”. The central character, Alexander, is a young Russian officer who becomes involved in a plot to undermine the government and restore rule to the British. He is an unsympathetic figure, selfish, vain and chiefly interested in his numerous affairs with women, including a rather strange mother and daughter. Character and the rather convoluted plot are not really the point here, though. What is so compelling is the believable world of a conquered Britain.

The oil is beginning to run out and cars are reserved for senior Russian officers. Horses are once more the main mode of transport for everyone else. Computers have been and gone. Everything seems dirty or degraded and there is a general air of shabbiness. Most of the trees have gone from the gardens of English country houses. Inside, the old furniture and paintings have long since disappeared.

Nothing, from clothes to alcoholic drinks is made to the standard that we would consider normal. Most people are reduced to eating a sort of peasant diet of broth and vegetables.

Everyone speaks Russian most of the time and English dialogue is printed in italics. It’s fashionable among the Russians to drop English phrases into their conversation but with no real knowledge to draw on they get them wrong, and it comes out sounding like a sort of mangled Bertie Wooster.  

We are told that there was a deliberate policy of “de-nationing”. British history and culture have been almost completely eradicated. The civilian population has no knowledge of what happened in the second world war. A festival of British culture is planned and it becomes apparent that no-one remembers Christian church services, or understands Shakespeare.

Something else that has been and gone in this world is Marxism. The Russian rulers have reverted to a sort of Tsarist autocracy. There is no moral centre in this world where both Christianity and Marxism are things of the past.

The game of the title is a variation on Russian Roulette, played with live ammunition.

It’s not really clear what Amis was up to here. On the one hand there’s a certain similarity to A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, where the “Russian” slang of the teenage characters stood in for the American slang of the rock and roll era. Is it all meant to be a sort of allegory of the late 1970s when it was written, a warning about the loss of traditional British culture from a writer who was becoming increasingly conservative in his political outlook at this point? Or is it a sort of transferred depiction of the actual quality of life inside the Soviet Union at that time?

It’s not the easiest read, but a thought-provoking one. It’s a major structural fault, I think, that so much of the information about what exactly happened in the past is held back until too near the end. There is a pointed mention of the fact that the Americans did not intervene.

Too many Russian names are introduced too quickly at the beginning. Oddly enough, this is precisely the problem that English readers often have with Chekov or Tolstoy, so it rather makes me wonder whether it might have been intended as a parody.

It is compelling, though. For all its faults, I’ve read it three times.

There’s an interesting anecdote about this book in Amis’ Memoirs. It was his current book at the time he met Mrs Thatcher. On being told what it was about, she replied “No, no, no!”, indicating that whatever her other qualities, an understanding of fiction was not among them.



The Life of Ian Fleming by John Pearson

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This was the first biography of Ian Fleming, published in 1966 two years after his death. Pearson had worked with Fleming at the Sunday Times. The great advantage of this is that Pearson was able to interview in person most of the people who had known Fleming at the various stages of his life. Much of what they said is quoted in direct speech, bringing Fleming vividly to life.

The slight disadvantage is that Fleming’s widow Anne was still alive when Pearson was writing the book and certain details of Fleming’s private life had to be left out.

It is a fast-paced, gripping read and Pearson never gets bogged down in the detail, evoking the various worlds that Fleming moved through without boring the reader. It is not like the modern style of biography, more dependent on archive material, that never quite comes to life.

In proper journalistic fashion he answers the questions that the reader might have about some of the more mysterious episodes in Fleming’s life. For example, just how was it that a former journalist working as a city stockbroker was appointed to a senior position in naval intelligence at the beginning of the second world war? You will find the explanation here. Where did Fleming’s interest in underwater swimming that found its way into the Bond books come from? That, too, is explained.

Pearson takes the view that the Bond Books were a sort of fantasy projection of Fleming’s own character and pre-occupations. It is Fleming’s friend Robert Harling who recalls him saying “I’m going to write the spy novel to end all spy novels.”

The long, slow process of turning the Bond books into best sellers is described, with Anthony Eden’s stay at Goldeneye being a key event that brought Fleming’s name to a wider public. It’s fascinating to learn, by the way, just how primitive the accommodation at Goldeneye actually was.

In the end, the film deal that made Bond a household name came too late as by then Fleming’s health was in decline and he couldn’t really enjoy the success he had worked for.

Pearson looks at Fleming’s attitude to money as the second son of a wealthy family whose widowed mother controlled the purse strings. It is suggested here that M was what the Fleming children called their mother. I would have liked a bit more about Fleming’s relationship with his mother, perhaps the source of his rather odd attitude to women.   

This is not really a critical biography, but what Pearson does have to say about the Bond books is shrewd and interesting. He considers Casino Royale to be the best, but that Fleming put so much of himself into it that he couldn’t repeat it. He suggests that Fleming rather lost interest in the later books and he has less to say about those.

Almost hidden away in here is some fascinating stuff about the origins of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I didn’t know that Fleming had been a keen skier in his youth and was actually buried in an avalanche in Switzerland. He brought home a Swiss fiancé but his mother vetoed the marriage. Henry Miller is quoted as saying that Fleming wrote quickly like Rider Haggard and with the same direct access to his subconscious. There was a later girlfriend, not named, who was killed in the blitz. Are we looking at the real-life equivalents of Vesper Lynd and Tracy here? Years later the Flemings went on a nostalgic skiing holiday, just before Fleming wrote the book. Perhaps there was as much of Fleming in this book as in Casino Royale.

Despite later biographies, the reputation of this one has remained high. All in all, a fascinating and highly entertaining read for anyone who likes the Bond books.

 

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W H Auden

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Only a week or two ago, this short poem by W H Auden could be filed away as a piece of twentieth century history. Suddenly, it is topical all over again.   

I re-discovered it when I watched the 2003 BBC series, Cambridge Spies, in which it is featured. “Is he talking about Hitler?, asks the character who reads it aloud. It was published in Auden’s 1940 collection, Another Time. Certainly, at the end of the 1930s, or in Auden’s words, “that low, dishonest decade”, most readers in Britain would probably have taken it as referring to Hitler, Franco or Mussolini.

The irony in a drama about Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, is that as dedicated anti-fascists, they failed to see that in offering their clandestine services to Stalin, they were collaborating with a dictator of equal ferocity.

Epitaph on a Tyrant by W H Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

To Any Member Of My Generation by George Barker

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Given the grim events of the last few days, I thought I should try to find an appropriate poem, but it’s been a harder task than I imagined. For some reason, this one popped into my mind. Perhaps it is the feeling of “we should have seen this coming” that it conveys so powerfully.

George Barker, (1913–1991) was a prolific poet, much admired in his time, but perhaps over-prolific, which may be part of the reason he has become less well-known today.

He was in the generation that came to maturity in the 1930s, and who were in their twenties during the second world war.

To avoid any confusion, I should point out that the “Richmond” here is Richmond on Thames, a place I know well and perhaps another reason this poem speaks to me.

To Any Member Of My Generation by George Barker

What is it you remember? – the summer mornings
Down by the river at Richmond with a girl,
And as you kissed, clumsy in bathing costumes,
History guffawed in a rosebush. What a warning –
If only we had known, if only we had known!
And when you looked in mirrors was this meaning
Plain as the pain in the centre of a pearl?
Horrible tomorrow in Teutonic postures
Making absurd the past we cannot disown?

Whenever we kissed we cocked the future’s rifles
And from our wild-oat words, like dragon’s teeth,
Death underfoot now arises; when we were gay
Dancing together in what we hoped was life,
Who was it in our arms but the whores of death
Whom we have found in our beds today, today?

The Old Familiar Faces by Charles Lamb

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I had the sad experience recently of finding out that one of the friends of my youth had died. Another link with the past was broken. It was to this poem that I turned. 

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) was an essayist and poet. He was a schoolfriend of Coleridge, and knew Wordsworth and Hazlitt. His best-known work today is the children’s book Tales from Shakespeare, co-written with his sister Mary.

He wrote many poems, but it is only this one that has survived to achieve immortality. It’s easy to see why. It says something that we can all recognise, particularly as we get older, in plain and clear language. It captures the pain of nostalgia perfectly. And with the title, Lamb added a phrase to the language.

The Old Familiar Faces by Charles Lamb

I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a love once, fairest among women;
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her —
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like, I paced round the haunts of my childhood.
Earth seemed a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father’s dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces —

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

The Fifties by Hugo Williams

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Hugo Williams is probably my favourite current poet. This one is from 2014 and it’s a good example of his style, easy to read with those overlapping lines, almost conversational, but with more going on than might be apparent at first. Like so much of his writing, it’s a  slightly melancholy comment on changing times and social mores.

I don’t actually remember porters, but I do remember people wondering why they had disappeared. The whole question was rendered redundant by the invention of the wheeled suitcase, of course.

Another reason I like his work so much, is that he has written about how he came to poetry via song lyrics. That is a journey I myself have made over the years. The title of the collection in which this appeared is I Knew The Bride, a reference to the Nick Lowe song. It also contains a poem called Twenty Yards Behind, dedicated to Wilko Johnson. Those two go back a long way. Hugo Williams is also a journalist and wrote the programme notes for Doctor Feelgood in 1975.  

The Fifties by Hugo Williams

Remember porters? Weatherbeaten old boys
with watery blue eyes, who found you a corner seat
‘facing the engine’ and stowed your luggage
in a net above your head? You gave them a coin,
worth almost nothing, even then,
and they touched their caps and thanked you
as they struggled out through the sliding doors
of the compartment into the corridor.
You used to worry vaguely
that they wouldn’t have time to get down.

The Birds by Daphne du Maurier

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The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, in which large flocks of wild birds suddenly attack humanity in a systematic and highly organised way, was published in 1951. It has been somewhat overshadowed by the film that Alfred Hitchcock made from it in 1962. The story is actually rather darker than the film and read today seems startingly original, the precursor of the sort of ecological disaster science fiction produced by John Wyndham, J G Ballard and others in the later 1950s and early 1960s. It’s also been given a fresh relevance by the Covid emergency.

Du Maurier was reported not to like the film and after reading the story I can quite see why. The events are relocated to a sunny California and it all seems like a local problem. In the story, winter seems to come to the bleak Cornish landscape in the blink of an eye and it’s not clear at first if it is the weather that is making the birds behave in such an odd way.

There is a gradual, growing unease that this is not just a local problem. It turns out to be a national emergency, then perhaps a worldwide one. This progression is conveyed by the change in the radio broadcasts until the final silence. It has perhaps the darkest ending of any fiction apart from Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, in which humanity is wiped out by nuclear fallout.

The story is very much of its time, the post-war era of rationing, austerity and government control. Memories of the Plymouth blitz are still fresh and the main source of news is the wireless. Could it be that the Russians are somehow responsible for the aggressive behaviour of the birds?

It’s difficult at first to get the authorities to take the reports of the bird attacks seriously. Once they do, there is a fear that they will not act appropriately. After military aircraft have been shown to be ineffective against the massed birds, it becomes clear that the farm labourer and his family are on their own and must depend on themselves for survival. Order and civilisation are fragile and have broken down entirely under the onslaught of the birds.

It’s never really explained what might have caused nature to rise up against humankind in this way, whereas the film does hint at an explanation. One can’t help feeling that this story is somehow a response to the atomic bombs and the revelations about the concentration camps, the sense of living in a world that had changed utterly, but du Maurier leaves it open for readers to make up their own minds.    

I myself think there is a link to Du Maurier’s Kiss Me Again Stranger and the idea in that story that Britain might not actually be entitled to claim the moral high ground over what took place during the recent war.   

Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James

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With Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish back on television in his third incarnation, it seems an appropriate time to look again at Talking About Detective Fiction by P D James. This is not a comprehensive survey or an academic study. It’s more of a personal reflection on her favourite genre both as reader and writer and the one in which she wrote for almost fifty years. It came out in 2009, when she was almost ninety, and I think it was her last published work.

As well as insights into her own writing, there are some very interesting views on the work of others here, and part of the pleasure of a book like this is seeing where you agree or disagree with the author. I was delighted to see that she gave some attention to Trent’s Last Case by E C Bentley, a personal favourite of mine that I think is rather underrated today. On the other hand, she doesn’t have much to say about the novels of Nicholas Blake, which I think is a  pity. Is this a case of damning with faint praise, or was it simply that she had not read them?

She has rather more to tell us about the four “Queens of Crime” of the inter-war “Golden Age” – Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie. She has clearly been reading and re-reading these writers since her teenage years. Given that she was born in 1930, she is a little bit closer to the world they lived in and brought to the page. Her observation that the “cosy” description is a later romanticisation of that era, and that English society really did feel more stable and secure then, is fascinating.

Part of the limitation of her approach is that she concentrates on what she calls the “classical detective story”, the murder mystery with a closed circle of suspects. This means that some of the most interesting books of the “Golden Age”, the psychological studies of would-be killers whose identity is revealed at the start of the story, fall outside her remit. I am thinking of Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles and The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake.

She relates the appeal of detective fiction to the Christian sense of guilt, so it would have been interesting to have her thoughts on writers who abandon this completely, such as Patricia Highsmith.

Given that she seemed such an establishment figure, it’s worth remembering that P D James was an innovator in the genre. She brought all her Home Office experience to bear, and her forensic cold-bloodedness of the descriptions of crime victims was something quite new, pre-dating Patricia Cornwell, I think. She was one of the writers who modernised the detective story with greater realism, both in setting and the details of police work. Like Colin Dexter with Morse, she created a detective who was a credible modern policeman while retaining some of the appeal of the private investigators of earlier stories. This all came together brilliantly in her 1977 novel Death of an Expert Witness, where the murder suspects were themselves a group of pathologists.

Interestingly, she says that if she were starting today she would create a female detective as her lead character. At the time she began writing, there weren’t any women police detectives so a female character would have to be an amateur. She says of Dalgleish: “I gave him the qualities I personally admire in either sex – intelligence, courage but not foolhardiness, sensitivity but not sentimentality, and reticence.” James did in fact write two detective stories with a young female lead but then returned to Dalgleish for the rest of her writing career, giving him a female sidekick rather than the usual male one. Perhaps this is why she so admires the writing of Sara Paretsky, the creator of private eye V I Warshawski, who “operates as a courageous, sexually liberated female investigator”.

One of James’ great talents was description and creating a sense of place. There is a wonderful example of that here, so good that it could have come from one of her novels and worth quoting in full, I think.

“East Anglia has a particular attraction for detective novelists. The remoteness of the east coast, the dangerous encroaching North Sea, the bird-loud marshes, the emptiness, the great skies, the magnificent churches and the sense of being in a place alien, mysterious and slightly sinister, where it is possible to stand under friable cliffs eaten away by the tides of centuries and imagine that we hear the bells of ancient churches buried under the sea.”