Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
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Slowly Sherston comes to hate the war and all of the meaningless death and destruction it brings. As he digs further and asks more questions he comes to believe that those in charge, the people for whom he and his friends are putting their lives on the line, are pursuing not a noble war of defense in the face of tyranny, but a war of aggrandizement and acquisition. Is this worth dying for? Is it worth killing for? Sherston knows the answer to these questions that his own heart gives, though he feels keenly the futility and alienation of his position should it ever become known. Still, he begins to tentatively travel in some of the anti-war circles of his day and formulates an idea that he must do something, anything, even if it is simply to state his opposition to the horrors continuing unless the Allies’ objectives become clear and open knowledge. He is not really a member of the anti-war intelligentsia though, and even his desire to act in some way outside of the military sphere is one fraught with internal conflict. He is still simply a soldier thinking of the needs of other soldiers and while it may be true that in the eyes of the anti-war protestors …there was no credit attached to the fact of having been at the front… for me it had been a supremely important experience. I am obliged to admit that if these anti-war enthusiasts hadn't happened to be likeable I might have secretly despised them.
I wouldn't recommend this to you if you're a particularly squeamish individual, but if you're okay with the quote above, you should be fine. Sassoon pulls no punches, but this gives the novel an extra dose of reality.In much the same vein, it is difficult to gain full knowledge of George Sherston without you have read the book by the name of Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. [2] Sherston is still in the Army and decorated so his superiors proceed cautiously. Sherston's intransigence begins to greatly anger the Colonel however. Eventually Sherston's friend David convinces him not to publish the manifesto Siegfried Sassoon is one of the mainstays of World War I literature. He wrote poems (see "Glory of Women"—one of my favorites) and he wrote a trilogy of fictional memoirs. Now, why would anyone want to write a fictional memoir? A thinly veiled fictional memoir, at that. About one man's journey through one of the most visceral and haunting wars of the 20th century. Born into a wealthy Jewish family, sometimes called the “Rothschilds of the East” because the family fortune was made in India, Sassoon lived the leisurely life of a cultivated country gentleman before the World War I, pursuing his two major interests, poetry and fox hunting. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by John Masefield (of whose work The Daffodil Murdereris a parody).
You would think the dull sitting around would make this a turgid languid book that is hard to get through. However, Sassoon is a master of he written word & the book keeps the reader interested throughout & you pop out the other end much surprised when you realise the long dead moments & short action sequences. More troublingly, perhaps, the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and his character--the protagonist of the title, George Sherston--presents a central critical issue.Craig Raine, ‘Siegfried Sassoon’ (1973), in: Haydn& the Valve Trumpet (London, 1990), pp. 165, 167. That book’s sequel was also well received. The New Statesmancritic called Memoirs of an Infantry Officer“a document of intense and sensitive humanity.” In a review for the Times Literary Supplement,after Sassoon’s death, one critic wrote: “His one real masterpiece, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer… is consistently fresh. His self scrutiny is candid, critical, and humourous. … If Sassoon had written as well as this consistently, he would have been a figure of real stature. As it is, English literature has one great work from him almost by accident.” Nowadays, many potential readers of Sassoon’s evocation of a pre-1914 rural idyll are put off by its title: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. A hunter of foxes? The book must be full of ignorant bullies and gruesome death! No Thank You. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer is widely recognized as one of the greatest war novels ever written. It is the second in the George Sherston trilogy written by Siegfried Sassoon, a man known as one of the War poets. Largely autobiographical, it covers Sherston’s experience on the front lines as an officer, witnessing the deaths of his comrades, experiencing his own injuries and culminating with a written protest against the war while convalescing. In addition to the beautiful writing, there is a great deal of survivor’s remorse that oozes out of this book.
Here we have George Sherston in a nutshell: born into privilege and snobbery, yet impressed and intimidated by more vigorous boys and cut off from people of like mind. Brian Finney, The Inner I. British Literary Autobiography of the Twentieth Century (London, 1985), p. 172. As this is a thinly veiled autobiography, it's easy to spot the people he's referring to. Cromlech is obviously Robert Graves, a man who Sassoon has really mixed feelings about. Having read Graves' Goodbye to All That, it's a stark contrast of opinion- Graves thought Sassoon was wonderful, while Sassoon says some rather harsh things about Cromlech/Graves. But there's too much of reality in this fiction for it to be purely make-believe. Too much reality... they say that about war. Reality blowing up in your face. The most "realistic" war movies often garner the highest praise. But the reality of war is in the unreality of it. In this war's case, the absolute insanity of it.In light of this, it might help us if we were to should acquaint ourselves some pertinent aspects of Sassoon’s earlier book, together with a discussion on the relationship between the writer’s own life experiences and those of his protagonist, George. Sassoon’s critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredithfound a similarly positive reception. In this volume, he recounted numerous anecdotes about Meredith, portraying him vividly as a person as well as an author: “The reader lays the book down with the feeling that a great author has become one of his close neighbors,” wrote G.F. Whicher in the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review.The critical portions of the book were also praised, though some found the writing careless. But the New Yorkercritic noted Sassoon’s “fresh and lively literary criticism,” and the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplementdeclared that “Mr. Sassoon gives us a poet’s estimate, considered with intensity of insight, skilfully shaped as biography, and written with certainty of style.”
Times Literary Supplement, July 11, 1918; June 3, 1926; November 1, 1947; September 18, 1948; January 4, 1957; December 7, 1973. Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets or bombs, so they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from ths soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed the place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the war. Who made the War?” You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’. [ 1]I)t was Dixon who taught me to ride, and my admiration for him was unqualified. And since he was what I afterwards learnt to call ‘a perfect gentleman’s servant’, he never allowed me to forget my position as ‘a little gentleman’: he always knew when to become discreetly respectful. In fact, he ‘knew his place’. [ 7] Such sights must be taken for granted…” reflects Sherston, but the disturbance they cause deeper in his psyche can ultimately not be ignored. A gunner had just been along here with a German helmet in his hand. Said Fricourt is full of dead; he saw one officer lying across a smashed machine-gun with his head bashed in---’a fine looking chap,’ he said, with some emotion, which rather surprised me.”
- Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
- EAN: 764486781913
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