Word: sassoons
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...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...
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...
...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...
...last Jockey Donoghue kept his weight down to 110 lb. Lately a contract rider for Sir Victor Sassoon, owner of Shanghai's ill-fated Hotel Cathay (see p. 14), he hoped to win this year's Derby with Sir Victor's Renardo, but finished in the ruck along with the favorite, the Marquis Evremond de St. Alary's French-bred Le Ksar.* But he showed his old touch on other occasions this season by winning the Oaks at Epsom Downs and the One Thousand Guineas at Newmarket with Sir Victor's Exhibitionist, the Irish Derby...
SHERSTON'S PROGRESS-Siegfried Sassoon-Doubleday, Doran...