Book post: Testament of Youth
Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain’s 1933 memoir of her youth, her time as a VAD, and her struggle to adapt to living on after the war when practically everyone she loved had died. I reviewed the miniseries of Testament of Youth some time ago, when I was lost in the wilderness and totally unable to put my hands on a copy of the book.
Cut for length, not spoilers.
Brittain attempted to write her story several times between about 1916 and 1933, as a fictionalised narrative then by publication of her diary with the names changed, but found both to be unworkable. The diary, along with letters and poetry forms the backbone of the novel, and Brittain quotes directly from these sources in many places.
The story opens with Vera at school, then leading the life of a middle-class lady of leisure in the antechamber between childhood and married life. She is determined to go to Oxford, and enjoys the typically understated support of her younger brother Edward to do so. They are both supposed to go up in the same year, but after war is declared, Edward decided to join up instead. While this is happening, Vera is getting involved in a primarily correspondence-based romance with Roland Leighton, the undisputed leader of Edward’s clique at school, dubbed by Roland’s mother as The Three Musketeers - the third of the trio is Victor Richardson. Edward is stuck in camp in England for some time, where he meets Geoffrey Thurlow, who becomes the fifth of the group around which Testament of Youth is based.
Leighton struggles to get a commission because he doesn’t have perfect eyesight, but he’s eventually successful, and is the first of the friends to go to France. After a year at Oxford, Vera goes down to become a VAD, first at hospitals in Britain, then in Malta, then on the Western Front, and finally back in the UK after she breaks her contract in France to return to England for her mother’s sake. What happened to Roland, Victor, Geoffrey and Edward is well known, but on the off chance that someone reads this who doesn’t already know, I won’t say too much more about the segment of the book dealing with the war. After she is demobilised, Brittain returns to Oxford, where she finds that she is quantitatively and qualitatively older than the other scholars. She receives no empathy for the trauma of her war experience among women who were children at school when it was going on, and who now want to get on with their gay university adventure. This last segment tries to tie together the preceding story into a conventional plot, with Vera working through and emerging from her grief, and finding closure and the sense of a happy ending. I suspect this is owed in equal parts to autobiography and fiction.
Testament of Youth reads in many places like Brittain’s attempt to come to terms with how the war devastated her life. Brittain mentions repeatedly that the war killed an entire generation and cut down the finest British manhood. Vera’s social class, lost proportionally more of its young men – the death toll amongst company officers was twice what it was among the ranks – which probably accounts both of these views, even if it also reveals a certain degree of snobbishness. This book was something of a catharsis for Brittain; when she speaks of the loss of a generation in general terms, she is really speaking of the trauma of losing so many people she personally loved. In writing the book’s conclusion into a conventional happy ending, she is permitting her fictionalised self the happiness and peace she struggled to find in her own life.
Brittain’s emphasis on the loss and waste of war serves another purpose. By 1933, when Testament of Youth was written, Brittain was starting to develop the pacifist leanings which had emerged fully by the outbreak of war in 1939. Testament of Youth reflects this, stripping the young Vera and her cronies of their idealistic views of war, which come out in their letters (I’m reading Letters from a Lost Generation at the moment, incidentally). With Erich Maria Remarque and Wilfred Owen, Brittain really founded the meta-narrative that has dominated writing about WWI ever since. In this way, Testament of Youth feels less neutral than, for example, Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That. However, we might forgive Brittain for wanting her book to be a testament against war.
This book is absolutely compulsory reading on WWI. It is very readable, very engaging, and a very moving story about the effect of the war on a group of five people who were scarcely more than children in 1914.
This is my second book for the War Through the Generations 2012 WWI challenge.
