Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925

by Vera Brittain

  ‘As Vera Brittain, lecturer and speaker for the League of Nations Union, etc.,’ I wrote on Christmas Eve to Winifred, who was again in Yorkshire with a family rejoicing over the imminent publication of Anderby Wold, ‘I feel quite able to hold my own with Winifred Holtby - and to tell you the honest truth, I don’t care a damn if I can’t; I don’t really care for anything but writing, and making up my mind to stop doing it would never prevent me from going on . . . Not that writing isn’t a bitter business. Yesterday I read bits of Barbellion, whose life seemed to be filled, like mine, with rejected manuscripts. Then I made up my mind that even though our flat was choked with the returned manuscripts . . . I would nevertheless put all I knew into the “Man on the Crucifix” . . . So I set to yesterday evening and wrote the first draft of the difficult first page of the first chapter. I immediately hated it. I wanted to produce on myself the same effect as Hugh Walpole and “Elizabeth” produce on me, and I found I couldn’t do it. Then I cursed myself because I couldn’t write . . . I can’t remember, but I believe that a year ago I had a sort of idea that I’d only got to finish a book to get it published; Mr L.’s . . . encouragement after all did rather suggest that, didn’t it? - and wasted years had shut out any other means of knowledge. At any rate perhaps hating what I do, being at least a new method, may produce a different result.’

  Unfortunately the prospects of a different result, while I was only at the beginning of a new book whose predecessor was still a pariah, were too remote to provide an immediate stimulus, and the next day found me writing to Winifred more gloomily than ever.

  ‘I am depressed this morning . . . because it is Christmas, and cold and damp, and because I ache for beauty and joy, and because there is no sun, and by no stretch of imagination can I pretend it is spring at Siena. I am bogy-ridden by ghosts of individuals and of manuscripts, and also by the dim figure of “The Man on the Crucifix”, which I can’t attack because my feet are too cold for inspiration. I feel like Hilda [Reid], from whom I have had a card briefly stating: “I have been chasing wild geese.” ’

  When Anderby Wold appeared a few weeks later, it deservedly gained an agreeable number of interested reviews. Its agricultural theme was based upon a paragraph from Hobbes’s Leviathan: ‘Felicity is a continual progresse of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the later . . . so that, in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restlesse desire of power after power which ceaseth only after death . . . and there shall be no contentment but proceeding.’ The tolerant, imaginative treatment of so large a topic by so young a writer caused Winifred to be carefully watched from that time onwards by the more discerning editors and critics, and put an end once for all to her occasional ludicrous misgivings about becoming a writer rather than a teacher.

  While the reviews of Anderby Wold were coming in, The Dark Tide was still lugubriously circulating, but, tattered and dirty as the manuscript now was, it had almost reached the end of its tedious travels.

  13

  In the late spring of 1923, my tired and dishevelled novel strayed into the hands of Mr Grant Richards, who was then enjoying one of his most elegant periods of publishing. I had almost completed ‘The Man on the Crucifix’ when the entire complexion of my world was changed by a note from him asking me to call. The book, he said, had certain obvious faults which would make the risk of publication considerable, but he was nevertheless attracted by its atmosphere of youth and freshness.

  ‘What with all this youthful freshness, and needing more experience of life, and so on, I must be suffering from arrested development, ’ I thought ruefully to myself. ‘Well, perhaps being a War Office tweeny for so long was rather bad for the intellect, to say nothing of the stultifying effect of suspense and sorrow. Crowded living and a great rush of events probably do retard development in some ways as much as they hasten it in others; after all, one of the chief factors in mental growth is time to think and leisure to give one’s thoughts some kind of expression. Those of us who got caught up into the War and its emotions before our brains had become mature were rather like Joseph II of Austria - we had to take the second step before we took the first. I daresay if I’d stopped at Oxford, instead of becoming a V.A.D., I should be more intelligent by now; I might even have published a book or two which would have been remembered, whereas my four years with the Army seem quite forgotten by everyone except myself. Oh, well—!’

  And that, after all, was the only comment now to be made on the War; it couldn’t be helped that one had to make it so often.

  In the end Mr Richards made a proposal on behalf of my book which probably represented more or less what it was worth. I was comparatively hard up in 1923, and the contract that I made over The Dark Tide meant several months of very light suppers and only the briefest of visits to Geneva when travel was a dominating passion. Nevertheless, if I were to have the choice over again and still retain my subsequent knowledge of the literary world, I should probably agree to the same arrangement, since no sacrifices, for unforeseen as well as for obvious reasons, were ever endured with more worth-while results.

  The auspicious aspect of their profound and far-reaching consequences was not, however, immediately in evidence. Beautifully produced and printed in a rather blank July, the book was for a few weeks a best seller and received seventy-three notices headed by a serious and favourable review of three-quarters of a column in The Times Literary Supplement, but its first appearance was celebrated by a series of sharp and angry Press attacks upon my treatment of my theme. The usual attempt - then extremely surprising to me - was made by the usual type of newspaper to present the story as a ‘revelation’ of life as lived at an Oxford women’s college - though nothing could have been more ingenuously complete than the guileless moral innocence of all the female characters - and a young man, now a reputable author, who ought to have known better but was probably in need of cash, produced an article in a large-circulation daily which began thus: ‘Once upon a time an Oxford don kissed a woman student, and Miss Vera Brittain immediately sat down and wrote a book about it.’

  But even this unforeseen reception was not so disintegrating as one or two acid letters that I received from individuals in Oxford who believed themselves to be portrayed by the composite characters in the story, many of whom had models quite unrelated to the university in any way. My lugubrious bursar, I was told long afterwards, had caused a good deal of purposeless heart-burning, since she represented the combined portrait of two of my own extremely unacademic relatives. No one, I suppose, who is not himself a novelist ever quite understands the process through which his characters pass in the fiction-writer’s mind. With the exception of the mass-producers, few authors venture upon the dubious expedient of ‘inventing’ their men and women without relation to any known model, but they do not, on the other hand, put themselves into the shoes of the Court photographer. The study of a real individual leaves with the author the impression of a type; he uses this type as the basis for his fictitious creation, and from this foundation grows a character in many important respects quite unlike the actual subject of observation - a character which takes more and more control of its own personality as the story proceeds, and ends as something poles apart from the original. It is only rarely, when drawing minor characters which provide colour and background but are not required to develop psychologically, that the imaginative novelist permits himself the short cut of a direct portrait.

  In 1923 I was quite unacquainted with the more malevolent aspects of publicity, and in spite of the long series of respectful, if critical, reviews that followed the opening attacks, I was unable for weeks to collect my letters after each post without trembling all over, while the sight of a bundle of press-cuttings reduced me to a condition of nervous prostration even when they contained such notices as that by Gerald Gould in the Saturday Review - an astringent but immensely vitalising criticism upon the concluding words of which I was
so often to meditate in the months that followed with a glowing sense of infinite hope:

  ‘The Dark Tide is a remarkable book, though crude. It starts off with a somewhat lurid picture of Oxford life . . . and the author displays, in the interests of the wicked tutor’s subsequent career as a diplomat, an engaging disregard of the distinction between the Civil Servant who is in a Government department, and the politician who aims at being the temporary head of it. But she has the root of the matter in her. She knows how to communicate sympathy. She has spiritual understanding of character. Some day she may write a good book.’

  That summer and autumn, Winifred took an unusually long holiday in Yorkshire owing to her sister’s forthcoming marriage, and day after day I poured out to her much-enduring sympathy a series of anguished letters, describing the terrors of an inexperienced author marooned with a family which she was anxious to protect from her own perturbations while endeavouring to give a harassed mind to the conclusion of her second novel.

  ‘This flat seems peaceful after ours,’ I told her, ‘though something still rises up and chokes me every time the post comes. The wall-papers and the challenging bell at 58 had rather got on my nerves . . . I am most pleased and touched by your mother’s letter and yours this morning. I feel so grateful that anyone can feel like that towards my book; I only hope that others will do so; for, if they do, it cannot possibly do harm. It’s the feeling I wanted people to have - that of weakness being able to rise to great heights of character when strengthened by “the dark tide” of suffering . . . If only some of the Oxford people would see it like that . . . It’s because it was intended to be idealistic that the mud-throwing hurts so . . . At present all I want is to hide my head in the country and stay there without making speeches or meeting anybody.’

  One of Winifred’s unfailingly patient replies might with good reason be reproduced as a pamphlet and presented to every nervous young author who finds himself for the first time in contact with the critical harshness of a world which, being sensitive and susceptible, is sometimes ruthless and vindictive as well.

  ‘I have only now come in,’ she wrote, ‘from having lunch with J. E. B[uckrose]. She has heard of you, and that your book has been “an unusual success for a first novel”, though she has not yet read it . . . She says that she has never yet written a book without making an enemy . . . and even for her mildest has had anonymous letters and frequently people whom she has never heard of write indignantly to protest against being “charactatured”. I told her a few of our troubles and she laughed and said - “Never mind. It’s worth it. Whatever you do, write what you think and not what people want you to think,” and she said that she had ruined herself as an artist by trying to write books that would offend no one, for she has an invalid husband, whom she most dearly loves, to support.’

  Not until long afterwards did I realise that the worries and miseries of that summer had swept me across the rubicon which lies between amateur and professional status. But I had, in September, the satisfaction of knowing that Mr Grant Richards had accepted ‘The Man on the Crucifix’ for publication as Not Without Honour on much more favourable terms than he gave The Dark Tide, while that winter my rejection-slips from editors began to diminish and in another two or three years had practically ceased.

  To-day, if a young man or woman fresh from college brought me a first-novel manuscript, and asked for instructions with regard to publication, in the light of my own experience I should probably give without a qualm of remorse some such unorthodox advice as this: ‘By all means go to a first-class agent and get good terms from a publisher if you can. But if you can’t, absolve your agent and put up with the best you can get from any firm with a reputation to maintain. Don’t think too optimistically in terms of profits, for any publisher who launches you, an unknown beginner, upon a world that doesn’t want you, is taking a very great financial risk. But get published somehow. The only thing that matters to you at this stage is to get published and talked about, to be able to refer the editors who find your adolescent bombardments intolerably tedious to a printed work of your own. Later, when you have a following and something of a name, you can begin to think about being a good business man or woman and making watertight contracts. Before that, just concentrate on getting published, and if there is anything in you, sooner or later the rest will follow. If there is nothing in you, you will have learnt without further waste of time that a writer’s calling is not for you.’

  Because The Dark Tide made more difference to my personal and professional life than the most ardently self-deceived optimist could have expected from a first novel with ten times its merits, I should like here to place on record my gratitude to Mr Grant Richards for publishing it on his own experimental terms instead of condemning it to oblivion by a dignified refusal. His decision launched me on a career of writing which, though quite unspectacular, is tolerably remunerative, and above all has brought me a great deal of happiness - the most permanent and reliable happiness that I know, for it is not at the mercy of accident to the extent that personal relationships always are and always must be. Finally, by bringing out the book just when he did, Mr Richards set the stage for an event, of considerable importance to myself, which was probably the last result that either he or I expected from its publication.

  12

  ‘Another Stranger’

  HÉDAUVILLE. November 1915.

  The sunshine on the long white road

  That ribboned down the hill,

  The velvet clematis that clung

  Around your window-sill,

  Are waiting for you still.

  Again the shadowed pool shall break

  In dimples round your feet,

  And when the thrush sings in your wood,

  Unknowing you may meet

  Another stranger, Sweet.

  And if he is not quite so old

  As the boy you used to know,

  And less proud, too, and worthier,

  You may not let him go—

  (And daisies are truer than passion-flowers)

  It will be better so.

  R. A. L.

  1

  In the middle of June 1923, a few weeks before The Dark Tide appeared, I went to Oxford with Winifred for the Somerville Gaude, the periodic after-term celebration for old students.

  We had only just returned to London, when a minute envelope addressed to me in microscopic handwriting was forwarded by Somerville to the Bloomsbury flat. It contained a man’s visiting-card, on the back of which was written, in effect, the following brief letter:

  ‘DEAR MISS BRITTAIN, - I am almost sure I saw you when I was in the Camera on Wednesday. You probably won’t remember me but I used to see you at Somerville debates. Won’t you have tea with me one afternoon or come on the river?’

  I turned the card over; the address on its face was certainly ‘New College, Oxford’, but the name of the letter-writer was one of which I had no recollection.

  ‘Whoever’s this impertinent young man?’ I inquired of Winifred, passing over the card, and when she assured me that she had never heard of him, I tore up the intrusive piece of pasteboard, and, to my everlasting regret, threw the scraps of handwriting away.

  The silence which I thus imposed upon the ‘impertinent young man’ would probably never have been broken had not my book been opportunely published a month or so later. In August, completely exhausted after the attacks on it by dons and reviewers, I gave way to the desire to hide my head in the country which I had expressed to Winifred, and was staying in one of the Kingswood houses attached to the ever-growing St Monica’s, now empty for the holidays, when a small package arrived for me from Grant Richards’s office with the usual sheaf of press-cuttings. As I did not recognise the handwriting in which it had originally been addressed to me care of the office, I opened it with trembling, reluctant fingers, for every strange calligraphy now suggested to me a new and furious onslaught on my novel. From the wrappings a slender book emerged, out of whi
ch fell a note written from New College, Oxford, in the same precise, beautiful characters that I had seen on the back of the visiting-card.

  The note announced, a little defiantly, that the writer had read, ‘with the utmost pleasure’, my novel The Dark Tide, and asked me in return to accept ‘the enclosed’ - which, it said, there was no necessity to acknowledge. ‘The enclosed’ proved to be a short monograph on one of the seventeenth-century philosophers; its fly-leaf informed me that the author had been a New College Exhibitioner, and was now a lecturer in a northern university.

  For some unaccountable reason, I felt curiously disturbed by the persistence of this determined young scholar. Why, I wondered, as I sat with his book on my knee beneath a luxurious arch of pink rambler roses in the peaceful garden, had the letter and the little academic monograph made such an impression upon me? Letters, and manuscripts, and unsolicited gifts were, I already knew, quite usual consequences of a book’s publication; they were normal manifestations of that strange glamour which inexplicably surrounded the personalities of writers, murderers, musicians, boxers, tennis-champions and film-stars, yet most unjustly failed to lend a similar enchantment to teachers, magistrates, engineers, solicitors, shopkeepers and county councillors. This youthful don’s letter was only an incident more trivial than many others; for the past two years, for all their comparative emotional security, had not been altogether without their incidents.