Books in Brief: Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey

Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey: Selections from the Sherston Memoirs, edited by Paul Fussell (Giniger/Oxford, 180 pp., $19.95)

Siegfried Sassoon remains no more than a quick line-item on the syndicated college syllabus that calls itself English literature—the man whose fierce poems about the First World War did away with the rosy glories of Rupert Brooke. His prose has been largely unread in this country for a long time. This abbreviated edition of his three volumes of fictionalized memoirs (with “George Sherston” as his stand-in) may serve as the beginning of a corrective. New readers will see the attractively befuddled Sherston exchange his ceremonious fox-hunting world for the unholy one of the Western Front, and follow his confused odyssey of heroics, protest, wounding, and convalescence. The front, he says, “was a place where a man of strong spirit might know himself utterly powerless against death and destruction, and yet stand up and defy gross darkness and stupefying shell-fire, discovering in himself the invincible resistance of an animal or an insect, and an endurance which he might, in after days, forget or disbelieve.” Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) has supplied the pared-down text with 171 illustrations that harrow the eyes with dying horses, battered crucifixes, bloating corpses, and blasted trees. It is a careful and astonishing assemblage. But the value of reducing Sassoon’s text escapes me. Without all its leisured repetitions, the odd indefiniteness of Sherston, as well as the beautiful accumulations of Sassoon’s own style, cannot really come across. Still, this edition will take some for the first time into places like Mametz Wood, and toward a view of the war that, in one ghastly way or another, sent 17 million souls “west.”

TM

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Thomas Mallon

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Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey: Selections from the Sherston Memoirs, edited by Paul Fussell (Giniger/Oxford, 180 pp., $19.95)

Siegfried Sassoon remains no more than a quick line-item on the syndicated college syllabus that calls itself English literature—the man whose fierce poems about the First World War did away with the rosy glories of Rupert Brooke. His prose has been largely unread in this country for a long time. This abbreviated edition of his three volumes of fictionalized memoirs (with “George Sherston” as his stand-in) may serve as the beginning of a corrective. New readers will see the attractively befuddled Sherston exchange his ceremonious fox-hunting world for the unholy one of the Western Front, and follow his confused odyssey of heroics, protest, wounding, and convalescence. The front, he says, “was a place where a man of strong spirit might know himself utterly powerless against death and destruction, and yet stand up and defy gross darkness and stupefying shell-fire, discovering in himself the invincible resistance of an animal or an insect, and an endurance which he might, in after days, forget or disbelieve.” Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) has supplied the pared-down text with 171 illustrations that harrow the eyes with dying horses, battered crucifixes, bloating corpses, and blasted trees. It is a careful and astonishing assemblage. But the value of reducing Sassoon’s text escapes me. Without all its leisured repetitions, the odd indefiniteness of Sherston, as well as the beautiful accumulations of Sassoon’s own style, cannot really come across. Still, this edition will take some for the first time into places like Mametz Wood, and toward a view of the war that, in one ghastly way or another, sent 17 million souls “west.”