Siegfried Sassoon - Memoirs of A Fox Hunting Man

I chose to read this as a prelude to ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’, which is part of my WW1&2 reading list.  This is the first part of a trilogy, of which ‘Memoirs Of An Infantry Officer’ is the second installment and ‘Sherston’s Progress’ the third.  It’s indicative of the kind of reticent emotional life upper class Englishmen were living around the time of the wars that Sassoon choses to write his first volume of memoir with a specific focus on fox hunting.  Having safely assured his audience that no ghastly subjects like feelings, emotions or sexual desires will rear their ugly heads, Sassoon waxes lyrical about the joys of village cricket and fox hunting.  In some ways, it struck me as a bit absurd.  However, in its best parts, it also had a meditative, golden quality of people and places warmly remembered. 

As far as friends or companions go, he only really mentions his groom, Dean, and a friend Stephen.  He seems to be on friendly terms with the people he meets from school at point to point races and hunting but, for the most part, he’s a very solitary figure living a sleepy village existence with his old aunt.  He travels quite large distances by train or bicycle in order to go hunting as a young boy.  He pines to live in a neighbourhood where hunting is more active and when he does manage to leave, seems to enjoy life more.  His aunt is in agreement about this, and is said to have bemoaned the situation of such an active boy in such a decidedly quiet milieu.  

For a book purporting to be a memoir, it’s strange that there’s scarcely a mention of his immediate family in the entire book except to say his parents separated when he was 4.  Wikipedia relates that his father later died when he was around 9, which doesn’t get a mention.  His mother lived until 1947 (when Sassoon was 60ish) but is never mentioned, nor are his two brothers.  This all gives the impression that family life was not happy and, therefore, should not be discussed.  It’s terribly bad form to bring up topics that aren’t jolly, don’t you know old bean?  It's rather strange to have such silence on subjects like family but Sassoon bashes on undaunted by the fact that the only relationships where he seems willing to discuss his feelings are those with servants or horses!  “Aunt Evelyn”, the woman he lives with while not at school, does feature on occasion but always in a kind of Bertie Wooster and Aunt Agatha “aged relative” sort of way.  Sassoon does an admirable job of portraying her as a warm, kind woman.  However, he describes their relationship in such a distant way it really is almost like a “Jeeves and Wooster” character, only not as amusing.

When he’s not at school, another topic that goes almost completely untouched, Sassoon lives with his aunt and subsists on an independent income that allows him to do some hunting and play village cricket.  In many passages he seems to indicate that he’s not that rich, but the reality seems quite the contrary.  He goes to Cambridge for a couple of years, which also goes unremarked upon, and leaves without a degree to take up hunting in earnest.  This kind of indifference to his career struck me as a privilege only a rich person could afford.  His neglect of his career rather endeared him to me, with the exception of the fact that I don't like hunting.  

A subject that does receive major attention is the horses he buys and sells.   I found it telling that there is more information about the first hunting horse he buys than there is about any human being.  His relationship with his groom, who also acts as his mentor in hunting matters, also receives voluminous coverage.  The groom seems to be one of his major companions in early teenage life and tells a lot of stories from the various hunts, cricket matches and point-to-point races he’s involved with.  The image I was left with from his recollections of early life was of a sad, lonely boy estranged from his family with plenty of money but only a servant as a friend.

As he becomes more proficient in hunting, he graduates to riding with his old school friend, Stephen, who lives nearby in an area where they hunt more intensively.  This is one of two relationships that seem especially close in the book, although obviously Sassoon would never mention this himself.  There are clues, like describing people he especially likes in glowing terms as sportsmen and making more frequent reference to them, but, on the whole, he seems more comfortable reserving feelings of affection for horses or servants.  One inkling of a closer relationship comes when the war starts and Sassoon shows one of his fellow soldiers a photo of Stephen he carries with him, which struck me as an odd thing to do if Stephen really were just a hunting friend.  The other ‘special friend’ Sassoon seems to make is Denis, who is master of the hunt for a couple of years near where Stephen lives and employs Sassoon as some kind of assistant.  When he moves to a bigger hunt, he takes Sassoon with him and the two spend lots of time together working, living and hunting but never revealing anything deeper about their relationship.  In both of these cases, I felt there may have been more to the relationship but Sassoon seems determined to only write about coverts, hounds, ‘chicken hearted skirters’ and ‘hard bitten sportsmen’ and never writes an emotional line in the entire book.

On the whole, I found this book quite boring and remarkably unforthcoming for a memoir.  In this sense, I suppose it’s a good example of the buttoned-up, repressed style of operation that was in fashion for men of this time and social class.  He wants to present himself as ‘a hard riding swell’ and a gentleman, but is totally disinterested in opening up in any meaningful way.  The book gives a fair representation of the author’s love of hunting, although it seems a very class conscious and stuffy world.  It was at its best recalling idyllic pastoral scenes with a faintly mournful tone, which is probably given more context in the second book of the trilogy, ‘Memoirs of An Infantry Officer’.  My favourite quote was,

“It is with a sigh that I remember simple moments such as those, when I understood so little of the deepening sadness of life, and only the strangeness of spring was knocking at my heart.” (p101)

Maybe he writes such an idyllic, nothing-could-be-jollier type of nostalgia because he wants to draw a stark contrast with the war later on.  Maybe he does it because that’s the way ‘officer and a gentleman’ type WW1 British public schoolboys go about talking about their lives.  Namely, by fastidiously avoiding the main events of their lives and focussing predominately on fox hunting, jolly hockey sticks and depicting himself as the freshest of all country bumpkins.  

Taken on its own, I found it a rather strange little book of nostalgia.  It’s well drawn in places but suffers for simultaneously attempting to be personal while staunchly refusing to broach any feelings more intimate than, ‘I loved hunting and found it immensely good fun’, which, in the final analysis, is not frightfully illuminating stuff! 

Adam Fergusson - When Money Dies

 Originally published in 1975, The Death of Money covers hyperinflation in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.  I chose to read this book as I became increasingly worried about ‘modern monetary theory’ in 2021.  This period of low interest rates and bond, and even equity, buying by central banks to stimulate the economy began after the global recession and despicable bank bailouts of 2008.  Many, including me, speculated that this would create inflation and this book, first published in the 1970s, was re-published around 2008-10.  Inflation actually remained remarkably low, undershooting the US / UK central bank target of 2%, for most of this period.  This book was also the beginning of a reading project about WWI, the intervening period and WW2.

Germany funded WW1 using debt in the form of war bonds, which caused its currency to weaken even before hyperinflation.  After Germany lost the war, and was burdened with huge reparations to be paid in hard currency, money printing began in earnest.  Not having been invaded, Germany still had large amounts of industrial infrastructure intact after the war ended and, with the help of a weakening currency, began to undergo an export boom.  The stock market also boomed.  This confused Germany’s leadership, who thought the economy needed to be stimulated in order to meet reparations payments. The central bankers refused to raise interest rates for this reason and even argued it would make inflation worse by raising the cost of capital.  Instead, all monetary problems were solved by printing money.  However, as the mark weakened and weakened against its foreign counterparts, officials thought that it was the strength of foreign currency that was causing the problem rather than inflation or devaluation of their own.  As Fergusson writes,

“That the government and the Reichsbank were dominated by the notion that a huge ‘passive’ balance of payments made constant devaluation inevitable hardly seems sufficient explanation of their total, blind refusal to connect the mark’s depreciation with the money supply…the budgeting deficits of the Reich and states alike were considered by writers and politicians ‘not the cause, but the consequence of the external depreciation of the mark’.  (p251)

The situation continued to deteriorate as French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr to guarantee payment of reparations in goods like coal.  The German government provided financial support to domestic resistance in this region, again by printing money.  Thus the  Reichsbank ended up in a situation where it was printing money to buy foreign currency to pay reparations, printing money to fund projects and finance entrepreneurs to bolster the economy and printing money to pay for striking workers in the occupied territory.  All this left the country awash with worthless paper money.  However, the continued printing helped political and commercial interests, in the short term, and so it went on:  

“It remains so that once an inflation is well under way (as Schmolders has it) ‘it develops a powerful lobby that has no interest in rational arguments’.  This was as true for Austria and Hungary as for Germany.” (p253)

In a similar vein, Lord D’Abernon, British ambassador to Germany at the time, remarked, “Inflation is like a drug in more ways than one… It is fatal in the end but it gets its votaries over many difficult moments.”

Fergusson rejects any suggestion of scheming or Machiavellianism on the part of the government or the Reichsbank and sees these institutions as overwhelmed by their circumstances and the enormity of their difficulties:

“In practice, inflation proved no means of escaping foreign obligations except so far as it contributed to the economic collapse of 1932 which wrecked the reparations programme for good.  

The Reichsbank’s display of naivete in its credit policies of 1922 and 1923 should finally dispel any suspicions of financial Machiavellianism on the part of Havenstein and his associates.  They staunchly denied that higher discount rates would moderate the inflation and, on the contrary, opined that they would merely raise the cost of production and push up prices further.  Loudly as they later asserted that these inexplicably cheap credits were given principally for ‘profitable’ projects, the favoured firms who benefited from this largesse turned the money to their best advantage - either by turning it into material assets or into foreign currency, or simply using it to speculate against the mark and drive it downwards.  The only financial conditions which Havenstein understood were those which prevailed before 1914” (p252)

The government was trying to keep the country stable and keep up payments on an impossible schedule of reparations.  Commercial interests were trying to maintain, or even increase, the value of their own interests using the government and the central bank as a source of cheap credit to buy assets or even speculate against the mark, the exact opposite of what politicians and central bankers wanted.  As such, the country blundered along towards hyper-inflation and eventual stabilisation in 1923.  Even though it seems perfectly obvious in hindsight, it’s noteworthy that neither one of the government, monetary institutions nor the general public had much interest in tackling inflation as it occurred.

The biggest losers from this situation appear to be the middle classes and retirees.  Many had fixed pensions or other types of annuities, or had invested in war bonds or other fixed income assets that paid a set number of marks.  These rapidly lost all value during the early 1920s.  Meanwhile other asset owners, and especially manufacturers, initially benefited from the weakening of the currency and the subsequent export boom as foreigners flocked to buy things cheaply.  Likewise, initially unionised workers could demand pay rises by threatening to strike.   The middle class and the unorganised labour force felt the pinch severely as the cost of living soared and their wages failed to rise enough to keep pace.  As the situation deteriorated, a more general, and perhaps far greater loss took place - that of what could loosely be called ‘societal principles’.  As the rules of preexisting order crumbled around them, citizens did whatever it took to survive:

“There were few in any class of society who were not infected by, or prey to, the pervasive soul-destroying influence of the constant erosion of capital or earnings and uncertainty about the future.  From tax-evasion, food hoarding, currency speculation, or illegal exchange transactions - all crimes against the State, each of which to a greater or lesser degree became for individuals a matter of survival - it was a short step to breaching one of the other of the Ten Commandments.  Whereas the lower classes with the further goad of unemployment might turn to theft and similar crimes (the figures up by almost 50% in 1923 over 1913 and 1925) or to prostitution, the middle and upper classes under a different kind of strain would resort to graft and fraud, both bribing and bribable.” (p236)

The rising tide of money had covered many financial indiscretions and when it was withdrawn, scandals abounded.   Some of the more noteworthy figures involved in scandals were Barmat (p238), Kutisker, Jacob Michael and the Shlarek brothers.  Many of these people were Jewish; hyperinflation was a period when antisemitism became more intense.  After stabilisation, many high ranking government and bank officials were found to have been taking bribes in exchange for credit.  More generally, the receding tide of credit uncovered those who’d been swimming naked:

  

“Stabilisation had ended the period when entrepreneurs could borrow as much as they wished at the expense of everyone else.  A vast number of enterprises, established or expanded during monetary plenty, rapidly became unproductive when capital grew short.” (p228)

Attempts were made to reevaluate mortgage and government debt, the latter at 2.5% of face value and that only after reparations had been paid (chp 14). Even though the general losses are inestimable, some indication of the monetary devastation that had occurred emerged.

“The seal of permanence had been put on the people’s losses; as Bresciani-Turroni described it, ‘the vastest expropriation of some classes of society that has ever been effected in time of peace’. (p207)

The monetary fiction was over, and German society lay in a sickly state that it would not recover from for decades:

“With inflation alone, noted Gunter Schmolders, can a government extinguish debt without repayment, or wage war and engage in other non-profitable activities on a large scale:  it is still not recognised as a tax by the taxpayer.” (p249)

Another important consequence of the inflation was political radicalisation.  Some parts of German society still felt that the loss of WW1 had been a capitulation by politicians and that the army would’ve won the war if it had been given a fair chance.  These same factions opposed reparations as a gross injustice.  The appointment of President von Hindenburg (1925-34), a former general and war hero, could be seen as an example of this mindset.  Another could be the banning of “All Quiet On The Western Front” as unpatriotic.  After the inflation, when many people had lost everything, the rules of what had been known as ‘normal’ society had evaporated and antisemitism was on the rise. The country was highly unstable.  

“The population is ripe,” Joseph Addison wrote home to Alexander Cadogan (both British diplomats) “to accept any system of firmness or for any man who appears to know what he wants and issues commands in a loud, bold voice.”  Addison had another significant point to make:

“Economic distress is leading the people to be much more amenable to authority as representing the only hope of salvation from the present state of affairs.  Unemployment is taking the gilt off the gingerbread of democracy, while the working classes realise that striking is useless since nothing would be more welcome to employers.” (p188-9)

Fergusson writes that:

“In German minds democracy and Republicanism had become so associated with the financial, social and political disorder as to render any alternatives preferable when disorder threatened again…” (p248)

And, assessing the condition of the German people, concludes elsewhere: 

“They had little enthusiasm left for democracy, and were themselves moving towards authoritarianism through sheer weariness of spirit and an almost complete indifference to anything except their own lack of material comforts.” (p189)

Such was the downtrodden state of the vast majority of Germans, a narrative that squarely blamed foreign imposed reparations and the preceding government while promising some degree of material security and the restoration of national pride was a very appealing one.  And those not polarized towards Hitler and the right went towards the Russia-backed revolutionary left, which was scarcely less destabilising in terms of the effect it would have had on foreign politics if it came to power. 

“It is thus not astonishing that there are in this country great numbers of ordinary mankind - excellent fathers and husbands of families - who can think of foreign politics only in terms of war.” (p245) Lord D’Abernon 

All this made me wonder if ‘modern monetary theory’ will eventually lead to disastrous consequences like hyperinflation and societal collapse.  It certainly seems like a loss of faith in money can have extreme outcomes.  In the modern world, there doesn’t seem to be a direct equivalent to reparations.  On the other hand, the refusal to raise interest rates, even in the face of increasingly buoyant markets and economies, and the huge amount of cheap credit available today both seem similar.  Perhaps central bankers are overconfident about their ability to finely control inflation and the economy.  I wonder if they’re unwittingly enacting Lenin’s famous quote - "the best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency."  When inflation rises, it may become very hard to control.  Currently, central bankers say they will target an average of 2%.  So if it has been lower for a long period, it can afford to be higher for a few quarters or years.  However, it seems dangerous to me to have negative real interest rates for so long.  Such heavy manipulation of the bond market by central bankers and the seeming necessity for easy credit conditions to keep the party going are both highly worrisome as well. 

This was a good and thoroughly researched book with lots of interesting vignettes.  The book relies heavily on contemporary British political and diplomatic papers relating to Germany.  It shows its age a bit in the academic language and tone. I found it a bit lacking in terms of a clearly sketched overview of the period it deals with along the lines of the ‘Epilogue’ chapter that does exactly that for the period directly after the inflation.  It also wasn’t very detailed in its explanations of the technical aspects of monetary policy and central bank discounting.  In fairness, it is a general account and not a technical one.  The book is well indexed and footnoted and makes frequent reference to Bresciani-Turroni’s ‘The Economics of Inflation’, so perhaps that is the place to turn!  

NOTES

P195 - point about inverse of Gresham's law

Andrea Pirlo & Alessandro Alciato - I Think Therefore I Play

 This was a fun 150 pages of war stories and anecdotes.  Written informally and littered with average jokes, Pirlo clearly wants to give the impression he’s a laid back guy who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

He loves playing for Italy, taking the piss out of Rino Gattuso for being stupid and playing PlayStation against Alessandro Nesta.  He complains about Simone Inzaghi’s infantile diet, plain spaghetti and baby biscuits, and his pre-match ritual of going for several shits and stinking out the dressing room.  He’s still haunted by the 2005 Champions League final when AC Milan squandered a 3-0 lead and lost on penalties to Liverpool.  He modelled his iconic free kick technique on the Brazilian Juninho Pernambucano and hoped to be the all time top scorer of freekicks in Serie A history.  An internet search reveals he came up four short of Sinisa Mihajlovic’s record of 28.  He’s a big fan of Antonio Conte, his coach at Juve, and is full of praise for the owners of the two clubs he played the most games for - Silvio Berlosconi (AC Milan) and Andrea Agnelli (Juventus).  

Aside from some great stories and a lot of not-so-great jokes, Pirlo has a lot of opinions and presents himself as something of a thinker. 

“I know how to think…Generally speaking, I reckon I’m a fairly switched on guy and I’m not ashamed to express it, defend it and, where necessary, shout it from the rooftops.” (p143) 

On the basis of this book, I’d say the jury was still out!  Among his better judgements is a prescient argument for introducing video technology, the omission of which he rightly claims is very unfair on referees.  This book was published in 2013 and it was duly introduced in the biggest European leagues between 2017-19.  

However, some sections make his thinking look confused.  He complains about being man-marked and says it goes against the spirit of football, which seems somewhat self-interested, to say the least.  He also makes the unsubstantiated claim that Deportivo La Coruna’s players might have been on drugs during the 2004 Champions League quarter final when they beat AC Milan 4-0 to overturn a 1-4 defeat in the first leg.  Generally, he seems admirably anti-racist and goes out of his way to defend Mario Balotelli.  However, he also gives a rather wooly exposition on how racist incidents should be handled when talking about Kevin-Prince Boateng’s decision to leave the pitch in the face of racist abuse.

“If one of my team-mates was a victim of intolerance and refused to carry on playing.  I’d go along with his wishes and those of the rest of the team.  It would be up to him to tell us how he felt and to take the final decision.  I’d leave the field only if the whole team was in agreement, though.  I think you’d have to actually experience something like that to know how you’d react.  It’s too delicate a subject to plan your response in advance.” (p132)

This seems to me to raise more questions than it gives answers!  So he would leave the pitch, but only if everyone agreed, which makes me wonder why players who haven’t been racially abused should have a say?  It also strikes me that the more “delicate” a subject is, the more need there is to plan your response in advance, not vice versa!  

Equally, Pirlo presents himself as above suspicion when it comes to fair play, doping and match fixing but also gives a half-hearted defence of Juve’s role in the “Calciopoli” scandal (p104).  I don’t know about the scandal in detail, but it seems a bit rich for him to slag off cycling for doping when Italian football is fairly notorious for corruption.  He also opines it would be a good thing if clubs could offer win bonuses to other clubs in the league to help motivate them, which doesn’t strike me as particularly thoroughly thought out.  Perhaps the best evidence that Pirlo isn’t quite as “switched on” as he likes to think are his comments about his tattoos.

“I’ve got well-hidden tattoos: my son Niccolo’s name in Chinese letters on my neck.”

This brazenly ignores the fact that Chinese doesn’t have “letters” but uses logograms called “hanzi”.  This makes “writing” a name like “Niccolo” impossible in any Western sense.  Usually names are “translated” by using a few characters to approximate the sound of the name, even though the meaning will be completely different.  So what Pirlo actually has tattooed on his neck are some random characters that might sound a bit like “Niccolo” but mean something completely different.  It’s not the sort of stuff that makes you think he’s any more intelligent than your average footballer!  Why on earth he wants a tattoo in a language he doesn’t even seem to understand, let alone speak is beyond me! 

In fairness to Pirlo, some of these woolier parts of the book may come from either the ghost writer or translator.  For example, the sentence “he was worn out and refused to speak to anyone apart from Daniele [Rossi] and I.” (p40) This uses the subject “I” when it should use the object “me”.  This wouldn’t even be worth mentioning if it wasn’t for the fact that the book then goes on to mock Gattuso for getting his grammar wrong on pp 48-49!  Obviously, I can’t tell if the error was Pirlo’s, the ghost writer’s or the translator’s, but if you’re going to mock other people for making grammatical mistakes, it’s probably best not to make your own a few pages before.  The “Thanks” written at the end of the book by the ghost writer may give a clue as to why it isn’t the best written book though.  Alciato, an Italian journalist, thanks everyone he can think of and then thanks his family finishing with the final sentences, “They’re always the first names on my teamsheet.  All of them.”  (pp 151-2)  To me, this begs the question of why they aren’t the first names on the thank you list but maybe I’m being too pedantic!  Whatever the case, I thought it was clunky and, generally speaking, I found the prose lost clarity and cohesion when tackling complicated ideas or subjects.  It has a nice informal tone when dealing with funny stories though, which is a redeeming feature.

I would recommend this book to football lovers as it is very short, takes no time at all to read and contains some wonderful stories and insights.  It has a light, jocular tone and even though some of the jokes are more likely to produce a groan than a laugh, it’s better than someone who takes themselves too seriously.  It’s not very well written, can be sycophantic and is more confusing than enlightening on topics like racism in the game and the “calciopoli” scandal, in spite of Pirlo’s claims to being an insightful thinker!