Cruelly ripped from the brittle, brown leaves of a 1929 issue of The Bookman was this review of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Sigfried Sassoon (1886-1967):
“Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, it sounds comfortable, out of doors, Victorian; it seems to belong on a shelf in a library hung with pictures of beloved horses; it does not suggest the Sassoon of 1917 and 1918.”
“During the war something was lost to Englishmen which they can recapture in nostalgic memories but never recover in fact. This strange novel of Sassoon’s reminds one of the faintly faded colors and old-fashioned security of English sporting prints.”
“It is a charming, sober-hued book, full of the peaceful solidities of days spent with ploughed fields, sweating horses and simple, friendly men for whom the fox and the hound are all that life holds most worth while…After many tranquil chapters never very far from the stirrups, the war swallows up our fox-hunting man. But he remains calm to the end, which is hardly an end, but more like a semicolon. Somehow the healthy weariness, the the outdoor magic of those years of fox-hunting persist even under bombardment”.
“Altogether a singular and strangely beautiful book.”
Click here to read a 1920 article about the W.W. I soldier poets.
1929 was the year many of the finest W.W. I books were published…
