Sherston's Progress Read online

  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

  RIVERS

  1

  To be arriving at a shell-shock hospital in a state of un-militant defiance of military authority was an experience peculiar enough to stimulate my speculations about the immediate future. In the train from Liverpool to Edinburgh I speculated continuously. The self-dramatizing element in my mind anticipated something sensational. After all, a mad-house would be only a few degrees less grim than a prison, and I was still inclined to regard myself in the role of a ‘ripe man of martyrdom’. But the unhistrionic part of my mind remembered that the neurologist member of my medical board had mentioned someone called Rivers. ‘Rivers will look after you when you get there.’ I inferred, from the way he said it, that to be looked after by Rivers was a stroke of luck for me. Rivers was evidently some sort of great man; anyhow his name had obvious free associations with pleasant landscapes and unruffled estuaries.

  Slateford War Hospital was about twenty minutes in a taxi from Edinburgh. In peace-time it had been a ‘hydro’, and it was a gloomy cavernous place even on a fine July afternoon. But before I’d been inside it five minutes I was actually talking to Rivers, who was dressed as an R.A.M.C. captain. There was never any doubt about my liking him. He made me feel safe at once, and seemed to know all about me. What he didn’t know he soon found out.

  Readers of my previous volumes will be aware that I am no exception to the rule that most people enjoy talking about themselves to a sympathetic listener. Next morning I went to Rivers’ room as one of his patients. In an hour’s talk I told him as much as I could about my perplexities. Forgetting that he was a doctor and that I was an ‘interesting case’, I answered his quiet impartial questions as clearly as I could, with a comfortable feeling that he understood me better than I understood myself.

  For the first few days, we had one of these friendly confabulations every evening. I had begun by explaining that my ‘attitude’, as expressed in my ‘statement’, was unchanged. ‘Just because they refused to court martial me, it doesn’t make any difference to my still being on strike, does it?’ I remarked. (This fact was symbolized by my tunic, which was still minus the M.C. ribbon that I had thrown into the River Mersey!)

  Rivers replied that my safest plan would be to mark time for a few weeks; meanwhile the hospital authorities would allow me all the freedom I wanted and would rely on me not to do anything imprudent. One evening I asked whether he thought I was suffering from shell-shock.

  ‘Certainly not,’ he replied.

  ‘What have I got, then?’

  ‘Well, you appear to be suffering from an anti-war complex.’ We both of us laughed at that. Rivers never seemed elderly; though there were more than twenty years between us, he talked as if I were his mental equal, which was very far from being the case.

  Meanwhile my main problem was how to fill up my time. Everything possible was done to make the hospital pleasant for its inmates, but the fact remained that most of the ‘other patients’ weren’t feeling as happy as they used to do. The place was a live museum of war neuroses – in other words, the hospital contained about 150 officers who had been either shattered or considerably shaken by their war experience. I shared a room with a cheerful young Scotch captain who showed no symptom of eccentricity, though I gradually ascertained that he had something on his mind – was it some hallucination about his having been shot at by a spy? – I have forgotten, and only remember that he was a thoroughly nice man. On the whole, I felt happier outside the hydro than in it, so I went for long walks on the Pentland Hills, which really did seem unaware that there was a war on, while retaining their commemorative associations with Robert Louis Stevenson. But at the end of my first week at Slateford my career as a public charac
ter was temporarily resuscitated by my ‘statement’ being read out in the House of Commons. Referring to Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 30th July, 1917, I find that the episode occurred at 7 p.m. There, I think, it may safely be allowed to remain at rest, unless I decide to reprint the proceedings as an appendix to this volume, which is improbable. I will only divulge that the debate ended by Mr. Bryce saying ‘We know that the Croats, the Serbs, the Slovaks, the Slovenes, and the Czechs are all opposed to it.’ (What they were opposed to was the Austrian dynasty, not my statement.) Oddly enough, the name of the commandant of Slateford Hospital was also Bryce, which only shows what a small place the world is.

  As far as I was concerned the only visible result was a batch of letters from people who either agreed or disagreed with my views. But I needed a holiday from that sort of thing. The intensity of my individual effort to influence the Allied Governments had abated.

  At intervals I reminded myself that my enormous gesture was still, so to speak, ‘on show’, but I unconsciously allowed myself to relax the mental effort required to sustain it. My ‘attitude’ was, indeed, unchanged; it had merely ceased to be aggressive. I didn’t even feel annoyed when a celebrated novelist (for whose opinion I had asked) wrote: ‘Your position cannot be argumentatively defended. What is the matter with you is spiritual pride. The overwhelming majority of your fellow-citizens are against you.’ Anyhow a fellow-citizen (who was an equally famous novelist) wrote that it was a ‘very striking act’, and I was grateful for the phrase. (How tantalizing of me to omit their names! But somehow I feel that if I were to put them on the page my neatly contrived little narrative would come sprawling out of its frame.) Grateful I was, and not annoyed; nevertheless it was obvious that I couldn’t perform that sort of striking act more than once and in the meantime I acted on the advice of Rivers and wired to Aunt Evelyn for my golf clubs, which arrived next day, maybe accelerated by three very fully addressed labels, all inscribed ‘urgent’. Simultaneously arrived a postcard from one of the overwhelming majority of my fellow-citizens who kept his name dark, but expressed his opinion that ‘Men like you who are willing to shake the bloody hand of the Kaiser are not worthy to call themselves Britons’. This struck me as unjust; I’d never offered to shake the old Kaiser’s hand, though I should probably have been considerably impressed if he’d offered to shake mine, for an emperor is an emperor all the world over even if he has done his best to wipe you off the face of the earth with high-explosive shells. As regards Aunt Evelyn, (who had a pretty poor opinion of the Kaiser) the Morning Post had now put her in full possession of the facts about my peace-propagating manifesto. No doubt she was delighted to know that I was well out of harm’s way. The Under-Secretary of State had informed the House of Commons that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown and not responsible for my actions, which was good enough for Aunt Evelyn, and, as Rivers remarked, very much what I might have expected. Very soon I was slicing my tee-shots into the long grass on the nearest golf course. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ I exclaimed (referring to my swing and not to my recent political activity).