Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man

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He took a German trench single handed, but instead of reporting back he sat and read poetry for over an hour. A limited edition, signed by Sassoon, was published later in 1928 and matching limited and signed volumes were issued alongside the publication of the two other volumes.

Condition of the book is VERY GOOD+ ; just the merest hint of shelf wear, covers extraordinarily clean and unblemished. Nowadays these same picturesque little villages are more likely to hold bankers on weekend retreats, adulterous retirees, and women pulling in six figures selling gold lamé tea-towels on Etsy. Bookseller's ticket of Albert Dowling, Bristol, on front pastedown of Infantry Officer; publisher's mailing card loosely inserted in Sherston's Progress. Anyone who cares to do so is at liberty to make fun of the trepidations which a young man carries about with him and conceals.

Other key memoirs about WW I are Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger (5 stars) , Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (4 stars) (also a friend of Sassoon), Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, badly translated but worth it--in French the title is simply Feu, and it's better to read it in French until a better translation comes along. His charming style, his resolute meliorism, his careful excision of anything remotely unpleasant or (for good reasons) to do with sex: these all improved his popularity. Instead, Owen died, Graves started ploughing his own singular muse-obsessed furrow and Sassoon retreated into the past. In a neat bit of synchronicity, Siegfried Sassoon's work has been compared to Cold Comfort Farm, last month's Reading group choice. VG copy [scattered light creasing, top edge foxing] in spine toned Dust Wrapper with a few short edge tears/nicking.

The first two thirds of this book is devoted to fox-hunting, horse racing, cricket matches, reading, gazing longingly at young men he admired, and enjoying what would turn out to be the last few years of a naivety that England would never be able to reclaim. TE Lawrence once remarked that “if I were trying to export the ideal Englishman to an international exhibition, I think I’d like to choose Siegfried Sassoon for chief exhibit”. This changes with the death of his friend Dick Tiltwood, who is based on Sassoon’s friend David Cuthbert Thomas. All of the tragedies he witnesses are treated in this way, matter of fact; they are something to be regretted, but not something that one has any real power to change. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.Nice clean yellow boards with black lettering, the boards not bowing, very clean rough-cut pages as issued with minimal flecking on the front block, very clean endpapers, in an unusually nice dustjacket, no tears or marks, fractionally paled lettering to the spine, with the inner glassine wrapper present. The deaths, horrible as they were, seemed very predictable, even as the sober descriptions allowed the horror to become something. It was here that he met Robert Graves, described in his diary as ‘a young poet in Third Battalion and very much disliked. This is the first of Siegfried Sassoon’s trilogy relating to the First World War; part of my reading for the anniversary this year. Could it be said that part of the reason Sassoon dug into his past, like Proust, was to make a space for the foundations of the future?

According to Keynes, 'This special printing was an afterthought, made when the success of the ordinary edition was assured and the identity of the author known'.This is an interesting novel, not the simple evocation of a lost past that I was expecting; there is much more nuance and Sassoon was clearly expressing a good deal of ambivalence (sitting on the fence if I am being cynical).

Of course, when war breaks out, George Sherston does his duty, as do most young men of English descent. It portrays a way of life at the turn of the 20th century which was a golden era for Britian's middle and upper classes. Sassoon obviously wanted to create an alter ego who was quite a bit more naive and bumpkinish than he ever was; I suspect to highlight the changes ,in him and in his country wrought, by war. He abandoned transport duties and went out on patrols whenever possible, desperate to kill as many Germans as he could, earning him the nickname ‘Mad Jack.The talk about foxhunting and all of the specificities of that sport were daunting in the beginning but they got me reading about foxhunting and the book easily gets the reader in without dwelling too much in the jargon. After time on leave, on the 18th of May, 1916 he received word that David Thomas had died of a bullet to the throat.