Enlightening Equestrians

A late year morning swamped in winter-smelling air. Horsemen are riding, galloping something serious in a blaze of red through the chilly English countryside. Mud spatters their riding boots, and the sudden toot-toot of a hunting horn sounds. The roar of a hundred hounds, a hundred howlers, take up the call. This is the world of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

 

But this vision, once so common in the pre-millennium English landscape, is now mostly alien to us. Hunting with dogs, now banned in mainland Britain (excluding Northern Ireland where a proposal in December 2021 failed to pass among MLAs at Stormont), will likely elicit impassioned disgust in the reader’s heart. Reading Sassoon a near-century on, we reluctantly trot into a world that is not only reprehensible but illegal — a world that provokes repulsion in its proud posturing of an old-world gentrified pastime.

 

Nevertheless, we must understand that fox-hunting was a norm in Sassoon’s day. Most contemporaries had encouraged it: many viewed fox-hunting as a respectable practice among the men of Sassoon’s class (Sassoon grew up in his Aunt’s house, with servants and stables to boot). Many even applauded the sport’s brutality, that included cub-hunting, a practice near unimaginable to today’s audiences. Sassoon as the star practitioner finds the latter disagreeable — and that’s because throughout the Memoirs there’s a slight self-awareness to his words.

 

Sassoon’s linguistic net intends to capture the social prejudices of his time. Writing in the late 1920s, he was more than capable of standing at an ironic distance to criticise his former self. He winces for instance when writing about a harboured sense of superciliousness, a “well-developed bump of snobbishness”, that once made him look down upon the house servants at his aunt’s home. From the start, we’re well-aware that Sassoon is writing about the type of person he once was, and gazing back distantly to his former Edwardian customs almost twenty of years on provides plenty of leg-room for rigorous reflection.

 

This is what makes the book reprinted by Faber & Faber in 2017 so readable today. Sassoon clearly had a passion for equestrianism, horse-racing, and oh yes, fox-hunting — but it is the English social world spun from Sassoon’s hand that make the Memoirs truly gallop through our minds.

 

Memoirs are always a combination of two vital ingredients: the author’s memory and their diary of past experiences. (The clue is in the name, i.e., “memo” then “ir” as a truncated form of “diary”.) Blend these two together and you’ll dish out a highly subjective account of past events — in narrative method, more a novel than anything else.

 

Sassoon follows the memoir recipe with loyalty, dipping into the deep pool of his memory to draw out the characters of his youth. Easy-going Aunt Evelyn and her uppity “social code” with only two kinds of people in the world: ones you can call on, and ones that are socially impossible — a suffocating notion that sits uneasily with the boy Sassoon’s brain. The lovable horse master Dixon whose simultaneous committal to Sassoon’s growth and budding maturity is nothing but admirable. Then there’s Sassoon’s guarantor Mr. Pennett who subdivides the youth’s inheritance and warns him with “wiseacre phraseology” to stay on at Cambridge university, only for Sassoon to ignore him, amusedly. Throughout, Sassoon conjures up characters from the dead. He successfully projects them full-fleshed and full-blooded into our mind’s eye. Though highly expressionist, each and every character feels as convincingly alive and real as they once were over a century ago.

 

On this expressionistic streak, Sassoon tends to slip into the stream of the sentimental and when a sentimentalist, he writes in a melo-lyrical way. Remembering a village cricket match, for example, his prose waxes thick into broad shades of purple:

 

But they [the star cricket players] had also produced a less localized effect on me. Rotherden was on the “unhunted” side of our district; it was in a part of the country which I somehow associated with cherry-blossom and black-and-white timbered cottages. Also it had the charm of remoteness[.]

 

Quite. Such passages have the charm of heightened memory. The words bumble and balloon in the sort of Edwardian English that recalls, say, the more indulgent passages from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Sections like these see Sassoon approach the past with a poet’s mind, neo-romantic in its heavy reminiscence. However charming the words turn out to be, they may also send you straight to sleep. . . .

 

Yet on the whole it works. Sassoon’s intentions are clear: to revive and relish in these bygone days. Early on in the first pages of the book he admits that his memories are “like reflections in a glass”. So Narcissus-like, he stares into this intoxicating frame of mind, “inclined to loiter among them as long as possible”. In the literal sense of the word, he is re-collecting — that is to say, he is bringing up all the memories from his brain’s storage trunk to display in his own little curiosity cabinet, mostly for his own pleasure.

 

But fine-made cabinets always attract an audience’s attention. The written style of the book is subtly tuned, reflecting the way Sassoon’s merry Englishmen and women once spoke. His first-person narrative is all landowner’s language, with all its pomp negations (e.g. “not altogether happy” or “these suggestions were unfruitful”) and adverbial insouciance (“the vaguely apologetic tutor” [my emphasis]).

 

But Sassoon’s talkative tone, loaded with the socio-cultural attitudes of his day, is carefully chosen — it’s what he calls the “sunshine of my own clarified retrospection”. He wants the reader to understand that he is self-aware of what he chooses to share, even when the style turns to snooty subject matter, relayed in chin-raising twitches. Once travelling from London via train, Sassoon spots the outer city ‘slums’, London’s own “dingy and dilapidated tenements”. He confesses that,

 

Poverty was a thing I hated to look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells, and I resented the notion of all those squalid slums spreading out into the infected green country. While I perused a magazine called Golf Illustrated I stole an occasional glance at the two very first-class looking passengers who occupied the other corners of the compartment.

 

To think this is The Establishment writ large is only to skim the surface. Rather, Sassoon is engaging in a very careful act of literary self-display. Compare and contrast, he is saying. There’s a very good reason why he lists his past ridicules with such (seemingly) distasteful honesty. “As I remember and write, I grin,” he admits later, “but not unkindly, at my distant and callow self and the absurdities which constitute his chronicle” (my emphasis). Notice how Sassoon distances his past self from his present à la 1928. The double negative (“not unkindly”) may complicate the picture of Sassoon’s more mature personality but the general air of reflectiveness is clear. This is memoir as social document.

 

Then comes the Great War.

 

In the final quarter of the Memoirs, Sassoon’s prose becomes brutal as he returns to his time in France, a “soul-clogging country” denaturalised in new forms of warfare. He is heavily critical of the war ­— and in today’s culture of remembrance past the Great War’s centenary, rightly so. He may have won the Military Cross for his service, but this fails to hold Sassoon back when he labels the war “a crime against humanity”. Like his friend and fellow soldier Wilfred Owen, Sassoon came to view British war valour as a complete myth. His words are some of the most damning as contemporary accounts go.

 

The toll of the Great War is present throughout the Memoirs, particularly in the absence of one its most central characters: Sassoon’s brother. What went on to become Faber’s first mass bestseller excludes one of the most important details of its author. The brother who died while fighting in France is never mentioned.

 

Declared a “fine book” upon first publication, Sassoon’s dual story of both England and his own personal coming of age is as valuable today but for different reasons than once intended. Dive in for what it’s able to say on the nature of memoir-writing and the legacy of the Great War; give secondary attention to its quaint depictions of horse-riding in the innocent country.

Sassoon's Memoirs, a lyrical account of the poet's younger years