The Past Revisited: The Autobiographies

Abstract

“Far off in earliest remembered childhood I can overhear myself repeating the words ‘Watercress Well’. I am kneeling by an old stone well-head: my mother is standing beside me and we are looking in the water”. This is the first of the two evocative memories that Sassoon recounts in the Prelude which opens The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938).¹ In the second he again hears his own voice: “This time it asks a question. ‘What will the seeds be like when they come up?’ I am standing beside my mother, who is making a watercolour sketch of a man sowing”. These two earliest memories symbolize the purpose of the book, in which the author means “to tell whither the water journeyed from its source, and how the seed came up”. This seems to suggest that Sassoon seriously intended to reinvestigate his youth in an attempt to come to a better understanding of his own personality, without making the mistakes he confessed to towards the end of the Sherston-trilogy, when he wrote that over-simplification had made self-analysis impossible. But if ever this was his intention, he does not carry it through. As in the Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Sassoon shies away from an objective investigation of the late-Victorian and Edwardian Age and his own youth.