In honour of Siegfried Sassoon's birthday this month, 8 September, I have compiled a collection of books about his life and works. An English war poet, writer, and soldier decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. While he is best known for his poetry, my love for Siegfried Sassoon is in his novels. The idyllic images of country life that he conjures up in Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man and The Old Century and seven more years, I always find myself returning to them again and again.
Memoirs of a
Fox Hunting Man
"I can hear the creak of the saddle and the clop and clink of hoofs as we cross the bridge over the brook by Dundell Farm; there is a light burning in the farmhouse window, and the evening star glitters above a broken drift of half-luminous cloud. It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of the spring was knocking at my heart."
"George Sherston develops from a shy and awkward child, through shiftless adolescence, to an officer just beginning to understand the horrors of trench warfare. The world he grows up in, of village cricket and loyal grooms, had vanished forever by the time Sassoon wrote this book, but he captures it with a lyricism and gentleness that defy nostalgia.
A bestseller on publication in 1928, this superb evocation of the Edwardian age has remained in print ever since. It was the first volume of a classic trilogy, completed by Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress, that charted both the destruction of the world for which Sassoon fought, and his own emergence as one of Britain's finest war poets."
The Old Century
and seven more years
The distinguished poet depicts his childhood in a country house in Kent and his experiences at Cambridge University.
"One of those rare, unobtrusively original books, that are destined to endure. The warm simplicity of the earlier chapters is reminiscent of Tolstoy's memories of his childhood. Than which I know no higher praise." - Roger Pippett, Daily Herald.
"In this reflective and captivating book the author of the Sherston memoirs tells the true story - a substantially different story from that of his famous fox-hunting man - of his first twenty-one years. So vivid and authentic are the scenes, people and experiences recalled by Mr. Sassoon that the reader has at times to pull himself up sharply in order to realise that the world described by the author is irrecoverably lost. All the people are more interesting than the characters in most novels." - Douglas West, Daily Mail.
"If that does not mean good writing then my notion of what is meant by good prose is out of date. The bloom on the book is as if a hand had never been on it." H.M. Tomlinson, Observer.
Collected Poems
First published in 1947, this collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. He had become horrified by the realities of war, and the tone of his writing changed completely: where his early poems exhibit a Romantic, dilettantish sweetness, his war poetry moves to an increasingly discordant music, intended to convey the ugly truths of the trenches to an audience hitherto lulled by patriotic propaganda. Sassoon's poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war.
Siegfried Sassoon
A Biography
"The life of Siegfried Sassoon has been recorded and interpreted in literature and film for over half a century. He is one of the great figures of the First World War, and Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer are still widely read, as are his poems, which did much to shape our present ideas about the Great War. But Sassoon was more than the embodiment of a romantic ideal; he was in many senses the perfect product of a vanished age. And many questions about his character, unique experience and motivations have remained unanswered until now.
Siegfried Sassoon’s life has been recorded and interpreted in literature and film for over half a century. But this poet, First World War hero, friend to Robert Graves and mentor to Wilfred Owen, was more than the embodiment of a romantic ideal.
Passionately involved with the aristocratic aesthete Stephen Tennant, married abruptly to the beautiful Hester Gatty, estranged, isolated, and a late Catholic convert, his private story has never before been told in such depth. Egremont discovers a man born in a vanished age, unhappy with his homosexuality and the modernist revolution that appeared to threaten the survival of his work, and engaged in an enduring personal battle between idealism and the world in which he moved."
The Weald of Youth
"An utterly gorgeous portrait of the artist as an awkward young man, struggling to find his muse amidst his conflicting passions for Sport and Poetry. In this memoir of his time before the war gave structure and clarity to his life, Siegfried encounters some of the great literary and sporting characters of his day and recounts his adventures in late Edwardian London."
Letters to Max Beerbohm
& a few answers
"Conversing with Max, everything turns to entertainment and delectable humour and evocation of the past. […] Not a thousandth part can be recorded. But I feel that these talks with Max permanently enrich my mind, and no doubt much of it will recur spontaneously in future memories; he is like travelling abroad – one feels the benefit afterwards."
Diaries
Siegfried's early diaries were published posthumously in a series of three books, 1915-1918, 1920-1922 and 1923-1925, edited by Rupert Hart-David.
"Diaries and journals can be among the most intimate and revealing of texts, offering accounts of their authors' lives with minimal literary artifice or mediation. Considered as physical objects, too, they accrue the fascination of having travelled with the writer through the events described in their pages. The notebooks kept by the soldier-poet Siegfried Sassoon during his service in the British Army in the First World War are among the most remarkable documents of their kind, and provide an extraordinary insight into his participation in one of the defining conflicts of European history."
I hope you have found something of interest amongst this collection of books, but if not, there may be something more to your tastes in the Compendium's Library.
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