In the hospital, guilt at the ease and safety he had purchased by his gesture of disobedience began to trouble him, and he finally persuaded his psychiatrist to let him go back to the war. His psychiatrist was Dr. W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922), the well-known Cambridge physiologist and anthropologist, a bachelor 53-year-old Royal Army Medical Corps captain when Sassoon encountered him. In one sense Rivers is the real hero of “George Sherston’s” memoirs, and the only person whose name Sassoon has not changed. His memory was a lifelong presence for Sassoon, who much later, in 1952, wrote in his diary: “I should like to meet Rivers in ‘the next world.’ It is difficult to believe that such a man as he could be extinguished.” Sped on his way by Rivers, he returned to active service, at first in Egypt and Palestine. But he was transferred back to the Western Front after the German attack of March 1918, and in July he was wounded again, this time in the head, and sent home for good.
After the war he found himself caught up in London literary life, especially that branch of it espousing a genteel socialism, and for a time he worked as literary editor of the socialist Daily Herald. But when he was alone he was trembly and tired, afflicted by nightmares of the war. He felt a vague impulse to write something more sustained than lyric poems but wasn’t certain what it should be. A long poem? A play? Or did he have a talent for prose? For fiction? For memoir? Later, he remembered talking with Gosse shortly after the Armistice:
During our talk he strongly urged me to undertake a long poem which would serve as a peg on which—for the general public—my reputation would hang. He suggested that I might draw on my sporting experiences for typical country figures—the squire, the doctor, the parson, and so on. He was, of course, partly influenced by anxiety that I should divert my mind from the war. At the time I thought the idea unworthy of serious consideration.
Too much, perhaps, like a replay of George Crabbe’s The Parish Register and The Borough. But Gosse’s suggestion, if mistaken in its particulars, proved fruitful as Sassoon continued to meditate what he should write. As he tells his diary late one night in March 1921:
I walked back from the Reform [Club] under a black but starful sky, feeling dangerously confident in myself and the masterpiece that I’ll be writing five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years hence. That masterpiece has become a perfectly definite object in my existence, but it is curious, and rather disquieting, that I always dream of it as a novel or a prose drama, rather than as a poem or series of poems…. The theme of my “masterpiece” demands great art and great qualities of another kind.
It’s clear that he’s thinking of writing a book registering subtly and in the process justifying his homosexuality. His masterpiece, he says,
is to be one of the stepping-stones across the raging (or lethargic) river of intolerance which divides creatures of my temperament from a free and unsecretive existence among their fellow-men…. O, that unwritten book! Its difficulties are overwhelming.
Eighteen months later he’s still obsessed with this urgent but cloudy project. “My whole life has become involved,” he says, “in an internal resolve to prepare my mind for a big effort of creation. I want to write a book called The Man Who Loved the World, in which I will embody my whole passionate emotionalism toward every experience which collides with my poetic sensitiveness.” But alas, “At present I have not any idea of the architectural plan of this edifice.”
But finally he got it: he would write a fictionalized autobiography elegizing his young friends killed in the war. “The dead…are more real than the living,” he wrote in his diary in 1922, “because they are complete.” At the same time he would try to understand what the events of 1914–1918 had done to him and his pre-war world, what their relation was, if any, to that pastoral quietude so rudely displaced. Knowing now what he wanted to do, in 1926 he embarked on twenty years of obsessive prose writing. In six volumes of artful memoirs he revisited the war and lovingly recovered the contrasting scene of gentle self-indulgence and pastoral beauty preceding it. At first uncertain of the value of his work, he sent some manuscript pages to Gosse, who replied: “I think you will be anxious for a word from me, and so I write provisionally to say that I am delighted with it so far. There is no question at all that you must go on steadily. It will be an extraordinarily original book….” But as further pages arrived, Gosse was moved to reprehend a part of Sassoon he’s always been uncomfortable with, his impulse to irony and self-distrust: “You are not called upon,” he reminded Siegfried, “to draw a sarcastic picture of a slack and idle young man…. Remember, no satire and no sneering!”
The first volume, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, was published in 1928, a moment which brought forth two other classics of innocence savaged by twentieth-century events, Blunden’s memoir Undertones of War and, in Germany, Remarque’s novel Im Westen Nichts Neues. Two years later, just as Graves was publishing Good-Bye to All That and Hemingway A Farewell to Arms, Sassoon brought out his second volume, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. And in 1936 Sherston’s Progress completed the trilogy he finally titled The Memoirs of George Sherston.
The story he tells here is that of a shy, awkward, extremely limited young country gentleman acquainted only with hunting and cricket and golf who learns about the greater adult world the hardest way—by perceiving and absorbing the details of its most shocking war. One irony is that Sherston is removed from the aimlessness of his rural life not by, say, a career in the City, which before the war might have been thought the appropriate antidote to idleness; he’s removed from it by an alternative quite needlessly excessive, the hell of the trenches. The action of The Memoirs of George Sherston is the transformation of a boy into a man, able at last to transfer his affection for horses first to people, and finally to principles. But this transformation is slow and belated. Sherston is over thirty before he begins to master the facts of life, instructed at one point by seeing “an English soldier lying by the road with a horribly smashed head.” Only now is he able to perceive that “life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.” One reason Sherston learns so slowly is that his character is so inconsistent and unfixed. He is never certain what he is. “He varied,” Graves remembers, “between happy warrior and bitter pacifist.” And his company second-in-command, Vivian de Sola Pinto (“Velmore”), notes a similar confusion. “It seemed to me a strange paradox,” he recalls, “that the author of these poems [in Counter-Attack] full of burning indignation against war’s cruelty should also be a first-rate soldier and a most aggressive company commander.” It is out of such queer antitheses and ironies that Sassoon constructs these memoirs.
Of course every account of front-line experience in the First World War is necessarily ironic because such experience was so much worse than anyone expected. If in Good-Bye to All That Graves’s irony is broad and rowdy, in The Memoirs of George Sherston Sassoon’s is quiet and subtle. An example is the way he deals with the theme of horses and warfare, which is to say the way he relates the war part of his memoirs to the earlier pastoral part. In a quiet way, the memoirs become an ironic disclosure of the fate of cavalry—the traditional important military arm in the world before the war—in the new, quite unanticipated war of static confrontation across a pocked, pitted, and impassable No Man’s Land. In Sherston’s youth the cavalry was virtually the equivalent of the Army. But the machine gun and massed artillery changed all that, and almost all the one million horses used by the British army were put to work ignominiously behind the lines only, hauling rations and ammunitions. And a half-million were killed even then. What happened to the pre-war cavalry tradition for both Allies and Central Powers can be inferred from the production figures for machine guns. In 1915, the British manufactured 1,700. In 1916, 9,600. In 1917, 19,000. The war was inexorably becoming a heavy-duty enterprise, and the swank of cavalry was only one of the colorful things it swept away.
Once this trilogy of memoirs was finished, Sassoon began another set. As if di
ssatisfied now with the degree of fiction he’d imposed on his experience, he began reviving the past all over again, writing now what he calls his “real auto-biography,” this time as “Siegfried Sassoon” rather than “George Sherston.” The result was a second trilogy, more true to fact this time, comprising The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942), and Siegfried’s Progress (1945). But remote from fact as here and there it may be, the earlier trilogy seems the more persuasive of the two attempts to capture the past. “I am a firm believer in the Memoirs,” Sassoon once said.
If Sherston was depicted as an athletic, non-literary youth, in the second trilogy Sassoon reveals himself more accurately as a poet extremely ambitious of success among the artistically powerful of London. “Sherston,” he says, “was a simplified version of my ‘outdoor self.’ He was denied the complex advantage of being a soldier poet.” But both characters, representing the two sides of himself he was never sure cohered into a whole, are notable for modesty and understatement, as well as a certain “chuckle-headed inconsistency,” as he puts it. But smile as he may with amusement and pity at his former self, Sassoon’s lifetime devotion to the young man he once was has something undeniably narcissistic about it, and in this he resembles another cunning twentieth-century memoirist, Christopher Isherwood. Both have created careers by plowing and re-plowing their variously furtive pasts, revealing something different with each rendering. Isherwood’s shameful-proud relation to “Christopher” is similar to Siegfried’s relation to “George.” Thus Sassoon writes in his diary, “What it amounts to is this, that I must behave naturally, keeping one side of my mind aloof, a watchful critic. One part of me…is the player on the stage. But I must also be the audience, and not an indulgent one either.” It is this very self-conscious awareness of himself as a performer uttering lines that gives much of The Memoirs of George Sherston its special quality, as in the scene in the hospital where he indicates the different things appropriate for him to utter in front of various audiences.
Aesthetes and hearties: that opposition, still a popular jocular way for university students to divide each other up, seemed in Sassoon’s day a significant set of polar categories, and it was natural for him to conceive of the range of his own character by means of that formula. The polarities of horseman and artist are nicely indicated by two adjacent diary entries he made in 1920:
Oct 20 Bought mare.
Oct 27 Bought Pickering Aldine poets (53 vols)
and a little later he writes, “Inconsistency—double life—as usual….” What he has done in The Memoirs of George Sherston is to objectify one-half of the creature leading this double life, the half identifiable as the sensitive but mindless athlete, and separate it from the other half, that of the much-cossetted aspirant poet, taken up by Lady Ottoline Morrell, Robert Ross, and other useful figures of the salons. Aestheticism, the actual milieu of his family and friends, vanishes from George Sherston’s story. Hence the unsophisticated Aunt Evelyn replaces his actual mother and aunt and uncle, respectively painter, editor, and sculptor. Why does he jettison this Pateresque aspect of himself and his environs? Because, I think, he hopes to show the effect of the war on a more representative and ordinary man, not the man of sensibility and privilege he actually was—rich, literary, musical, arty, careerist. The Memoirs is in part a thirties pacifist document, like Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933); and for it to work it must persuade the reader that the condition of the protagonist is not excessively distant from his own.
During the thirties Sassoon, active in pacifist causes, was distressed to witness Europe moving steadily toward war again. In 1933, at the age of forty-seven, he married and had one son, George. He continued to write poetry, but most critics found this later work feeble compared with his performance as a “war poet.” “My renown as a W.P.,” he observed, “has now become a positive burden to me.” In 1957 he became a Roman Catholic, and in 1967 he died at the age of eighty. But as he seemed to recognize himself, the interesting part of his life was the earlier part, which he revisited repeatedly, recalling twice over in superb prose the Edwardian and Georgian world of his youth and the war that shattered it forever.
PAUL FUSSELL
Princeton
July 1983
PART ONE
EARLY DAYS
1
My childhood was a queer and not altogether happy one. Circumstances conspired to make me shy and solitary. My father and mother died before I was capable of remembering them. I was an only child, entrusted to the care of an unmarried aunt who lived quietly in the country. My aunt was no longer young when I began to live in her comfortable, old-fashioned house with its large, untidy garden. She had settled down to her local interests, seldom had anyone to stay with her, and rarely left home. She was fond of her two Persian cats, busied herself sensibly with her garden, and was charitably interested in the old and rheumatic inhabitants of the village. Beyond this, the radius of her activities extended no further than the eight or ten miles which she could cover in a four-wheeled dog-cart driven by Tom Dixon, the groom. The rest of the world was what she described as ‘beyond calling distance’.
Dixon was a smart young man who would have preferred a livelier situation. It was he who persuaded my aunt to buy me my first pony. I was then nine years old.
My aunt had an unexplained prejudice against sending me to school. So I remained at home until I was twelve – inefficiently tutored by a retired elementary schoolmaster, a gentle, semi-clerical old person who arrived every morning, taught me a limited supply of Latin, and bowled lobs to me on the lawn. His name (which I have not thought of for I don’t know how many years) was Mr Star.
Apart from my aunt’s efforts to bring me up nicely, my early education was exclusively controlled by Mr Star and Dixon, who supplemented Mr Star’s lobs with his more intimidating overarm bowling, and never lost sight of his intention to make a sportsman of me. For the vaguely apologetic old tutor in his black tail-coat I felt a tolerant affection. But it was Dixon who taught me to ride, and my admiration for him was unqualified. And since he was what I afterwards learnt to call ‘a perfect gentleman’s servant’, he never allowed me to forget my position as ‘a little gentleman’; he always knew exactly when to become discreetly respectful. In fact, he ‘knew his place’.
I have said that my childhood was not altogether a happy one. This must have been caused by the absence of companions of my own age. My Aunt Evelyn – who was full of common sense and liked people (children included) to be practical in their habits and behaviour – used to complain to Mr Star that I was too fond of mooning aimlessly about by myself. On my eighth birthday she gave me a butterfly-net and a fretwork saw, but these suggestions were unfruitful. Now and again she took me to a children’s party given by one of the local gentry: at such functions I was awkward and uncomfortable, and something usually happened which increased my sense of inferiority to the other children, who were better at everything than I was and made no attempt to assist me out of my shyness. I had no friends of my own age. I was strictly forbidden to ‘associate’ with the village boys. And even the sons of the neighbouring farmers were considered ‘unsuitable’ – though I was too shy and nervous to speak to them.
I do not blame my aunt for this. She was merely conforming to her social code which divided the world into people whom one could ‘call on’ and people who were ‘socially impossible’. She was mistaken, perhaps, in applying this code to a small, solitary boy like myself. But the world was less democratic in those days, and it must not be thought that I received any active unkindness from Aunt Evelyn, who was tender-hearted and easy-going.
As a consequence of my loneliness I created in my childish daydreams an ideal companion who became much more of a reality than such unfriendly boys as I encountered at Christmas parties. (I remember a party given by my aunt, in the course of which one of my ‘little friends’ contrived to lock me in a cupboard during a game of hide-and-seek. And, to tell the truth,
I was so glad to escape from the horrors of my own hospitality that I kept as quiet as a mouse for the best part of an hour, crouching on the floor of that camphor-smelling cupboard.) The ‘ideal companion’ probably originated in my desire for an elder brother. When I began these reminiscences I did not anticipate that I should be describing such an apparently trivial episode – and I doubt whether such a thing can be called an episode at all – but among a multitude of blurred memories, my ‘dream friend’ has cropped up with an odd effect of importance which makes me feel that he must be worth a passing mention. The fact is that, as soon as I began to picture in my mind the house and garden where I spent so much of my early life, I caught sight of my small, long-vanished self with this other non-existent boy standing beside him. And, though it sounds silly enough, I felt queerly touched by the recollection of that forgotten companionship. For some reason which I cannot explain, the presence of that ‘other boy’ made my childhood unexpectedly clear, and brought me close to a number of things which, I should have thought, would have faded for ever. For instance, I have only just remembered the tarnished mirror which used to hang in the sunless passage which led to my schoolroom, and how, when I secretly stared at my small, white face in this mirror, I could hear the sparrows chirping in the ivy which grew thickly outside the windows. Somehow the sight of my own reflection increased my loneliness, till the voice of my aunt speaking to one of the servants on the stairs made me start guiltily away….
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Page 2