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.”
The Good Reader 