From Soldier-Poet to Veteran Memoirist: Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and the Limits of Life-Writing in Prose

Sean A.  McPhail

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2021.e79211

Authors

Sean A. McPhail University of Toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-4320

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2021.e79211

Abstract

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language.

Author Biography

Sean A. McPhail, University of Toronto

Recently defended his dissertation, Fraternity on the Front Lines: Siegfried Sassoon, Fictive Kinship, and the First World War, with the Department of English at the University of Toronto. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English and German and a Master of Arts in English from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. His research focusses primarily upon the relationship between kinship and commemoration in the works of the Great War writer Siegfried Sassoon. Other scholarly interests include British and Irish Modernisms, twentieth- and twenty-first century German literature, and the short story

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