Vera Brittain and the First World War

by Mark Bostridge

  Nevertheless, it remained true that, despite the growing list of war books by women, none of them to date had made an impact comparable to the most famous books about the war by men. Studying the works of Blunden, Sassoon and Graves with ‘scientific precision’, Vera reached the conclusion that her story was as interesting as theirs. ‘I am reading “Undertones of War”,’ she wrote to Winifred at Christmas 1928; ‘grave, dignified but perfectly simple and straightforward; why shouldn’t I write one like that?’

  The war book that Vera finally began to plan towards the end of 1929 would be an autobiography – or, as she called it, ‘An Autobiographical Study of the years 1900–1925’ – as well as the biography of her own generation of men and women: the so-called ‘War Generation’. An auto-biography, with its assured first-person narrative voice (all Vera’s novel versions had been in the third person) would rescue her from her none-too-convincing attempts to transpose real-life models into thinly disguised fictional characters. It would play to her strengths as a journalist, allowing her to adopt a more analytical approach where necessary. And it would greatly expand the range of the book, showing how Vera’s post-war commitment to feminism and peace had evolved out of the experiences of her first 30 years. Aware of the continuing strength of the market for war books, although with understandable fears that this was on the verge of disappearing, Vera wanted hers to be ‘as truthful as history’, while recognising that it also needed to be ‘as readable as fiction’.

  It was an ambitious undertaking, requiring enormous energy and commitment. Even at this late stage, Vera considered making the challenge greater still by writing the book in two volumes, under the general title ‘The War Generation’. The first book, covering the years to 1918, was to have been called ‘A Tale that is Told’, and was to have ended with an epilogue set on the Asiago Plateau, and at Louvencourt, with Vera’s visits to Edward’s and Roland’s graves; the second, ‘We Who Were Left’, would have extended to 1930.

  But she went ahead instead with the single volume. It was called ‘Chronicle of Youth’ until August 1931, when a reading of Robert Bridges’s epic poem, Testament of Beauty, inspired Vera to settle on the title, Testament of Youth.

  A book that – in one form or another – Vera had already invested so much time in, and for which she had such hopes, was never going to be easy to write. The difficulties would be magnified by tensions in other areas of Vera’s life: in her domestic life, her marriage, and by the discovery, in early 1932, that Winifred Holtby was suffering from a serious illness of the kidneys, Bright’s disease.

  The confirmation of Vera’s pregnancy at the end of 1929 had meant that she was able to do little actual writing of the book for several months. Initially she was too ill to work, and then, in the spring of 1930, the family underwent the upheaval of moving into a new and larger home, 19 Glebe Place, a tall, thin, Victorian house off the King’s Road, in Chelsea, where the Catlins’ daughter, Shirley Vivian, was born at the end of July.

  Vera could use some of this time, though, in assembling her research, and in structuring the chapters. Looking up details of the past in old diaries and letters from the war, including her correspondence with Roland (Vera’s side of which had been returned to her for safekeeping before his death), convinced her that these contemporary sources, historical records as well as personal materials, would give a special vibrancy to her narrative. She prepared ‘scaffolding’ for each chapter, copying out relevant extracts from her diary and letters – with stray recollections jotted down on tiny strips of paper as they came to mind – as well as a chronology of public events derived from the Annual Register, newspapers in the British Museum, and the collections of the British Red Cross Society and the Imperial War Museum (then still situated in Kensington).

  One obstacle Vera was to face rather late in the day was the difficulty involved in quoting in print from letters written to her by Roland, Victor and Geoffrey. She was determined to quote freely from these, convinced that they would bring back, as nothing else could, the characters of her major protagonists. However, the discovery that the copyright belonged to the dead men’s families threw her into a panic. She eventually preserved the anonymity of Victor and Geoffrey by putting them in the book without mentioning their surnames, and paraphrasing their letters to her to avoid any copyright problems (the copyright of Edward’s letters, of course, belonged to Vera’s parents and no problem would arise there). But she worried that the Leightons would never give her permission to use Roland’s poems or his letters. Part of the trouble, Vera wrote, was that Mrs Leighton, ‘though always very decent to me while R was alive, became very jealous of me after he was dead’. Furthermore, the Leightons were ‘rampant Conservatives’, ‘patriotically militaristic’, and had disapproved of Vera’s political and feminist activities since the war. Clare Leighton, Roland’s sister, insisted that Vera would have to remove her family’s name altogether, ‘& only refer to them anonymously’, and so it was to Vera’s considerable surprise, after writing a flattering letter to Marie Leighton, that she received permission to publish not only Roland’s poetry but also his letters.

  In publishing Roland’s love letters, Vera knew that she ran the risk, according to the standards of the time, of finding herself accused of ‘bad taste’, in telling the world ‘a tale of private lives, private ambitions, private sorrows’ (and this applied not only to the war sections of the book but also to her portrayal of her relationships with Winifred and with George in the final chapters). Yet, as Vera subsequently argued in the publicity material for the book:

  I don’t believe we are entitled to keep to ourselves any jot or tittle of experience the knowledge of which can in any way assist our fellow mortals. A personal difficulty overcome, a grief survived, a philosophy evolved out of sorrow – these things are not ours; they belong to the collective effort of humanity.

  What really matters, for example, about a life like mine? It is that as many people as possible should know … that this is the effect of war … not that I should be able to say with smug satisfaction: this was my private life … and I’ve kept it to myself.

  By early 1931, after nursing the new baby for six months, Vera was writing Testament of Youth almost every day, in addition to contributing a regular column to the periodical, The Nation. Throughout the next two years she would continue to work in earnest on the book. Progress was sometimes halted by household crises, childcare problems, or by a sense of general discouragement – that the book was too long and that interest in books about the war would have long since dissipated by the time she had finished it. Despite the advantage she enjoyed of considerable paid help with the children, Vera often felt overwhelmed by her responsibility for them, especially when they fell ill, feelings exacerbated by the fact that, during George Catlin’s long absences from home while teaching in America, she was effectively a single parent. ‘My “Testament of Youth”,’ she wrote with some exasperation to Winifred, in August 1931, ‘if only … I get the time to do it properly, might be a great book. It is boiling in my mind and I shall become hysterical if I am prevented from getting down to it [for] very much longer … if I am to continue sane I must have … a) a rest from the children & the house and b) freedom & suitable circumstances to continue my book’.

  An early typed draft of the opening page of the first chapter of Testament of Youth.

  Her sense of despair came to a head in early 1932. George had returned to Cornell after Christmas, when first John and then Vera caught chickenpox. At Oakwood Court, Mr Brittain was undergoing treatment for a serious bout of depression. Meanwhile there was cause for renewed concern for Winifred’s health, as her illness was diagnosed as potentially serious, necessitating long periods of treatment in nursing and convalescent homes.

  Vera badly missed Winifred’s company, the stimulus she always gave to her writing, and the constructive criticism she made of her work. Deprived of Winifred’s reassuring presence, Vera turned on a whim to a writer she barely knew. Phyllis
Bentley, a Yorkshire woman of about Vera’s age, was enjoying considerable critical acclaim for her novel Inheritance, which had been published by Victor Gollancz in March 1932. That spring, shortly after completing the Malta chapter of Testament of Youth, Vera set about initiating a friendship with her. She invited Bentley to stay in London – where Phyllis occupied Winifred’s room at Glebe Place – threw a party for her, and generally behaved as if she was hoping that some of Bentley’s celebrity would rub off on her, like literary gold-dust.

  It was a disastrous decision, and their attempts at friendship ended in tears for the time being (in later years Vera and Phyllis would remain friendly acquaintances). There is no doubt that, while Vera admired Phyllis Bentley as a writer, she was deeply envious of her, too. As George Catlin acutely observed, Vera treated Phyllis like an obscure country cousin, and Phyllis retaliated by treating Vera as a negligible writer. From the vantage point of 30 years later, Phyllis Bentley wrote sympathetically in her autobiography, ‘O Dreams, O Destinations’, of the ‘severe private tensions’ on both sides that had led to the destruction of their friendship. She also commented on the ‘prolonged strain’ that Vera was experiencing at that time, as she tried to write her book through ‘every kind of harassment and interruption’, and admitted that ‘[s]uch a situation brings frustration to an almost unbearable pitch’. Phyllis Bentley’s unpublished diary gives a much rawer picture of that frustration: of Vera declaring that her life was overshadowed by grief for Edward and Roland, and that only a great literary work could compensate her for the losses she had suffered in her life.

  On 2 June 1932, Vera recorded in her diary the completion of Part II of Testament of Youth, which ended with her walking up Whitehall on the first Armistice Day. There were just three more chapters to go. ‘It seems so strange’, she wrote, ‘that I have thought about little else but the War for eighteen years – and now, perhaps, shall never write of it again.’ She had ‘never shed a tear’ over the parts of the book about the war, and was therefore surprised a few months later, while writing about her visit with Winifred to Edward’s grave in 1921, to find herself so blinded with tears that she had momentarily to put down her pen and stop work.

  For all the ill-feeling that by now existed between the two women, Phyllis Bentley did perform one notable professional service for Vera. In January 1933, when Vera had almost completed her manuscript, Phyllis, together with Winifred, persuaded her to send a copy of the unfinished book to Harold Latham of Macmillan in New York. Latham remembered ‘a tiny woman with shining eyes’ who dropped off a copy of the typescript at London’s Brown’s Hotel, where he was staying. Within a week, Latham had accepted the book for American publication, and this in turn encouraged Victor Gollancz, founder of the major British publishing house, to consider the book for his list.

  Just before midnight on 16 February 1933, Vera wrote the final sentence of Testament of Youth. Five days later, she received the longed-for letter from Gollancz. ‘I have read Testament of Youth with the greatest admiration’, he wrote. ‘It is a book of great beauty, and even greater courage, and I shall be very proud to publish it. In places, I confess, it moved me intolerably …’. Writing immediately to George with the news, Vera admitted that ‘[a]fter the discipline and anguish of a book that’s taken nearly 3 years or more, I can hardly believe that the effort is nearly over’. And to Winifred, who was at her family home in Yorkshire at her father’s deathbed, she sent flowers, ‘with deepest love & eternal gratitude for believing in my book’.

  There were still further obstacles to overcome before the book could go into print. For a start there was the protracted task of checking much of the factual detail. Obtaining permission to quote from poetry by various authors was another time-consuming process. Rudyard Kipling imposed an onerous list of conditions, involving five letters and two presentation copies of the finished book, to allow Vera to quote eight lines from his poem, ‘The Dirge of Dead Sisters’, describing the endurance of nurses in the South African War.

  More unexpected, and much more disturbing, was George’s response to his appearance in the final chapter, ‘Another Stranger’. From Cornell, in April, he returned to Vera the typescript she had sent him with many of its pages scored out, and the words ‘intolerable’, ‘horrible’, ‘pretty terrible’ scrawled in the margins. He asked her to remove any references that might identify him, concerned that these might invite ridicule from his academic and political colleagues. He apologised if his demands appeared ‘brutal’, but added that ‘just because it is a great book and yet also very personal to ourselves I don’t want any part of it to be something over which I should squirm … inevitably the spotlight must come on me … but I beg that this spotlight pass quickly’.

  To Vera this was an ‘almost extinguishing blow’. She complained to Winifred that George wanted her ‘to make him, in comparison with Roland & even with Victor, a complete cipher, & supply the reader with no reason whatever why I should decide to marry him.’ She attempted to explain to George that ‘my method throughout this book has been to illustrate the tragedies of Europe and the story of our generation by the fortuitous symbolism of the events in my own life; and my marriage to you, my resurrection from the spiritual death of the War … are absolutely essential as illustrating Europe’s struggles after a similar new self …’. But it was all to no avail. With the publishers pressing her for the finished manuscript, Vera could not bear to contemplate ‘a prolonged wrangle for weeks across the Atlantic’, and so spent ‘a miserable two days’ removing the most obvious identifying detail, and also abbreviating his name to ‘G.’.

  With the book finally out of the way, at the end of July Vera, George and Winifred, in the company of their friend Violet Scott-James, took a brief holiday in northern France. Vera had resisted the temptation to revisit sites associated with her wartime experiences while working on Testament of Youth, lest they play tricks on her memory; but now she felt free to explore some of the places she had so recently described in her book. At Etaples, all that remained of the 24 General was a humped mound of earth, and, as she looked across the fields to where the German ward had once stood, Vera found it oddly disconcerting that it should now be so quiet and still, ‘when I remembered it so full of hurry and anxiety, apprehension and pain’.

  Gollancz’s catalogue announcement of the publication of Testament of Youth in August 1933.

  In the countryside of the Somme, Vera returned to Roland’s grave at Louvencourt, placing two withered roses – pink from the Leightons’ garden and red from hers – against the words, ‘Never Goodbye’, on his tombstone. Afterwards they drove through Hédauville. Here, almost 18 years earlier, Roland had written his final poem about ‘Another Stranger’, and Vera was just able to identify ‘… the long white road/That ribboned down the hill’.

  Testament of Youth. An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 was published on 28 August. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, and, in some cases, ecstatic. In the Daily Mail, Compton Mackenzie called it ‘not merely profoundly moving … but also extremely accurate’; Storm Jameson in the Sunday Times, under the heading ‘Miss Brittain Speaks for Her Generation: War as a Woman Saw It’, wrote that ‘Its value as an experience and as literature, is above commendation’; while the critic in the Times Literary Supplement commented with approval that:

  In the important things of the story – tragic, noble, and in the end not without consolation – there is, in spite (or perhaps because) of its unshrinking frankness, no failure of taste, no irreverence or theatricality in the lifting of the veil from past sorrows.

  That ‘unshrinking frankness’ unnerved the veteran critic, James Agate. He found the book’s emotional candour difficult to stomach, and in one of the few adverse reviews wrote in the Daily Express that Testament of Youth was ‘[m]arred by a great fault – the inability to be content with the tragic and to refrain from fussing about it … The reader is affected as at the sight of a woman crying in the street.’

&nbs
p; In the United States, where Testament of Youth was published in October, R. L. Duffus wrote eloquently in the New York Times that ‘[o]f all the personal narratives covering the World War period there can surely have been none more honest, more revealing … or more heartbreakingly beautiful than this of Vera Brittain’s’.

  Sales in Britain reflected this positive response. The first-day total of 3,000 copies sold exceeded the sales of Vera’s five previous books. Within a week, the first impression of 5,000 copies had been exhausted, and by the middle of September 15,000 copies had been sold. It was to enjoy similar success in America where, on the publication day alone, 11,000 copies were purchased. In 12 impressions in Britain, up to the outbreak of the Second World War, Testament of Youth would sell 120,000 copies.

  The book had struck an immediate chord with the reading public. As hundreds of letters poured into Glebe Place from men and women who saw their own experiences mirrored in the book, or who wrote that Testament of Youth had hardened their own opposition to war, Vera began to realise that the publication of this bestseller would change her own life. At not quite 40 years old, she had finally crossed her personal ‘Rubicon’ between ‘unavailing obscurity and substantial achievement’.

  She had also succeeded in erecting a lasting memorial to four young men, Roland, Edward, Victor and Geoffrey. She had exorcised the ‘brutal, poignant, insistent memories’ of her youth. Furthermore, she had ensured that a female dimension to the war was not forgotten. Perhaps most importantly, she left a warning, which speaks to our own time as much as it did to the book’s first readers in 1933, about the dangers of succumbing to the temptations offered by the glorification of war.

  In her ideas for publicity, Vera had been keen to emphasise that Testament of Youth was far from being just another ‘war book’. ‘First and foremost’, she wrote, it was ‘a story of young love’. It was also, she went on to say, ‘a tale’ that should prove ‘immensely interesting to all the women who are now coming into their own in politics and professions, of a girl’s escape from provincial young ladyhood [and] of her experiences at Oxford both in war-time and afterwards …’.