Huntsman

MEMOIRS OF A FOX-HUNTING MAN-Siegfried Sassoon -- Coward McCann ($2.50).

The Story. Had it not been for Dixon, there would never have been a "foxhunting man,"--an attorney perhaps, or a chartered accountant, a Cambridge graduate and passable cricketer, but never a gentleman rider. Dixon, whose life centred upon kennels and stables, had faithfully served "the mistress" these several years, though she had never ridden to hounds, and was now reduced to riding in the four-wheeled dogcart. But "the mistress" had a 9-year-old nephew; and in young George Sherston, Dixon founded his hopes and secret ambitions. With studied casualness, that nevertheless carried authority, Dixon remarked to Aunt Evelyn that it was no doubt time Master George had a pony, whereupon the little gentleman's sporting career was started. "Stick your knees in, sir ... I can see you'll make a rider all right," and George Sherston was so delighted (Dixon had never before called him "sir") that he straightened his back and resolved to do the good groom credit.

His first appearance on the hunting "field" was in dismal brown corduroy, and his self-conscious small-boy misery over his equipment, his hands, his seat, vied with the excitement of the meet. Seasons later, smartly rigged "in pink," perfectly shod by Craxwell (for "a boot can look just as silly as a human being"), he was the more able to relish the sport. ". . . grey southwesterly morning, with its horsemen hustling on in scattered groups, the December air alive with the excitement of the chase, and '.he dull green landscape seeming to respond to the rousing cheer of the huntsman's voice when the hounds hit off the line again after a brief check. Away they stream, throwing up little splashes of water as they race across a half-flooded meadow. Cockbird, George's favorite mount, flies a fence with a watery ditch on the take-off side. 'How topping,' I think, 'to be alive and well up in the hunt'; and I spurt along the sound turf of a green park and past the front of a square pink Queen Anne house with blank windows and smokeless chimneys, and a formal garden with lawns and clipped yew hedges sloping to a sunk fence."

His only regret was that he had not sprung from a "well-known sporting fam-ily": "I wanted to be strongly connected with the hunting organism which at that time I thought of as the only one worth belonging to. And it was (though a limited one) a clearly defined world, which is an idea that most of us cling to, unless we happen to be transcendental thinkers."

The Significance. The pleasant British hunting world with all its appendages has not often been accurately reported--its members not being the sort who think transcendentally, or even observantly. Author Sassoon is however not only an able fox-huntsman, but a poet into the bargain, with the result that he has caught the peculiar rhythm of riding to hounds. A quadruped's points, the tying of a stock, the imminence of frost, the perfect groom --these things he records with charm and with leisurely humor. Then, in sharp contrast, a few chapters on the War--told with such tragic bitterness of restraint that the effect is more appalling than the usual statistics of lice and mud. His hunting world is shattered, his hunting friends are killed--even Dixon, the perfect groom.

The Author. Coupled with Rupert Brooke as one of England's war-time poets, Siegfried Sassoon produces in the Memoirs his first prose, a distinguished piece of writing. The first English edition appeared anonymously, such was its autobiographical nature; but with quick succeeding editions the author grew appar-ently bolder, affixed his signature.