Relatively Idyllic

In prose and mood, no reminiscences published in 1939 are likely to surpass the idyllic felicity of Siegfried Sassoon's The Old Century and Seven More Years (Viking, $2.75), a nostalgic account of his first 21 years. Those who read his latest poems, Vigils (1936), will be prepared for this serene counterpart in prose. To most other readers Siegfried Sassoon is still associated with 1) his realistic war trilogy (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, etc.) and his bitter war poems (CounterAttack, etc.); 2) his spectacularly murderous heroism in the trenches (in order, he once told Robert Graves, "to keep up the good reputation of the poets"); and 3) his equally spectacular pacifism, when in 1917 he threw his Military Cross into the sea, publicly denounced the "political errors and insincerities" of the British Government.

Only once in The Old Century does war overshadow Sassoon's mellow recollections of his Kent childhood, his nurses, tutors, governesses, Thornycroft relatives, boys' schools. Reminded while revisiting his old village of his brother Hamo, killed at Gallipoli, he muses bitterly over the present "halfhearted renouncement of war," the "heavily armed pursuit of peace." But he quickly decides that "I must give up feeling bad-tempered about it, or I should be ruining my afternoon." For the rest, the War's corpses are peacefully buried. So is his onetime vow to write to "scandalize the jolly old [Sir Edmund] Gosses and [Lytton] Stracheys."

Yet despite Sassoon's mature glow, his idyll sets down a striking number of young Sassoon's unhappinesses. His parents' separation infected even the nursery with melancholy. His rich Aunt Rachel (the only Sassoon he remembers well), who lived in a gloomy mansion and was married to a paralytic (owner of the Sunday Times), went insane at her husband's funeral. Romantic Siegfried was alienated from his mechanically-minded brothers and schoolmates by his taste for poetry. At Marlborough he was bored. (His final report read: "No particular intelligence.") Cambridge, which he left in his second year, was even less congenial.

"I prefer," says Sassoon, at 52, "to remember my own gladness and good luck, and to forget, whenever I can, those moods and minor events which made me low-spirited and unresponsive." His happy memories are really a tribute to the optimistic spirit of upper-class Englishmen's pre-War world. That spirit Siegfried Sassoon conveys exactly. Defending it, The Old Century is his testament that the worst that can happen in peace is idyllic compared to the best that can happen in war.

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