posted on 09 Sep 2024

The Old Century & seven more years by Siegfried Sassoon

It has been six years since I last read any Siegfried Sassoon – I reread The Memoirs of George Sherston in 2018 and reviewed it here. But this past week or so I have been rereading his later memoir, The Old Century & seven more years, and was reminded of what a truly lovely book it is.

What makes it such a pleasure is that it is Sassoon’s most Proustian book: it is clearly and evidently autobiographical, but its real subjects are memory and the passage of time and it contains some of Sassoon’s most beautiful prose. 

It was written in all likelihood during 1937 and published in 1938. It isn’t immediately obvious, and the timeframe is only somewhat loosely adhered to, but from the historical vantage point of 1937 Sassoon is looking back forty years to his own childhood, beginning with his own memories and experiences from 1897 when he would have been ten or eleven. In fact, he looks back initially to a quite specific date: the 22nd June 1897, the day on which Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated, and especially the evening of that day, when bonfires burned brightly in villages and hamlets and on coastal walking paths and hilltops across the country.

Sassoon explores the place and the people that made him: his extraordinary family – artists, sculptors, engineers, inventors and shipbuilders on his mother’s side, and wealthy Iraqi Jewish merchants on his father’s side; and his idyllic childhood with his brothers at Weirleigh, their rambling, gothic childhood home in the Weald of Kent. He covers his early childhood years, his ‘home schooling’ (a fairly ramshackle affair at best), his prep school years and his university years at Cambridge. It is a classically English account of a very specific and privileged kind of wealthy, rural, land-owning upper class life in the closing years of the Victorian century and the early years of the twentieth century. But it is also at times a craftily modernist work that reflects on its own writing and the act of remembering.

Let me try and convey something of its sophistication. There is a lovely section where with great affection he recalls a dear family friend, Helen Wirgman, always known as ‘Wirgie’. ‘From a long way off,’ he writes, ‘I can hear the click of Wirgie’s pink parasol as she puts it up. That little click, preceded by a faint creak of stretching silk, seems to fix these retrospections at a point from which I can behold the Kentish Weald as though it were the future that awaited me.’

This simultaneous looking back while also looking forward produces moments of exquisite nostalgia but also of great emotional depth as he gently contrasts the innocence of childhood and the long golden Edwardian afternoons of memory with the grief and suffering that the Great War will bring. At times, so immersed are we in the closing years of the nineteenth century, it seems Sassoon is writing with a revenant’s foreknowledge of impending disaster. But apart from one instance, where he writes of the death of his brother, Hamo, what is to come is rarely explicitly stated: ‘No one,’ he continues, ‘could tell what was going to happen any more than I could see beyond our safe-looking hills. While Wirgie played the piano after dinner people were jingling out to the Opera in hansom cabs. A brilliant season was in full swing around them, and they knew as little of their future insecurity as my tortoise Joey, who died the next winter of being dug up to see how he was getting on while hibernating.’ 

I read recently that Sassoon regarded his Sherston memoirs as over-simplified and lacking in objective self-analysis and that he wrote The Old Century to correct this. I’m afraid this sounds rather more like academic wishful thinking than fact, for The Old Century reveals nothing more of Sassoon than he intended. He was after all an intensely private man whose most famous and enduring personal statement was made not in his autobiographical memoirs or his novels but in his courageous ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’, in which he protested formally to the military authorities about the conduct of the war – and for his troubles was declared unfit for service and sent to the Craiglockhart military psychiatric hospital.

The Old Century leaves the enigma of Sassoon essentially intact but furnishes a beautifully written and more intimate account than we find in the Sherston memoirs. It is also worth saying that the voice we hear in this book is that of Sassoon, not George Sherston. This may seem obvious – Sherston is, after all, a character and his ‘memoirs’ are novels – but it came as a revelation to me and helped me see that Sassoon is a far more artful writer than I initially recognised. 

While this may arguably be a less important work than any of the Sherston books, admirers of Sassoon will find a lot to enjoy in it and much to return to for pure pleasure. Highly recommended.

 

Alun Severn

September 2024