So I’m having a bit of trouble framing some closing thoughts on the writing of the Great War–and more trouble, without the pressure of a dated deadline, to actually write and post them. There must be a good way to wind this project down… but I haven’t figured it out yet. I do know, however, that I need to write more about Vera Brittain, and find a good way to bring her story, at least, to a close. Today is a good opportunity to, at least, begin. Before moving forward into her long postwar life, we can see what she is thinking, right now, a century back. She is in mourning still, depressed and indifferent to the diminished life that could now open up in a different form as her nursing service ends. The Vera Brittain who wrote this poem of today, a century back, isn’t living in the moment–she’s living still in the war, and thinking about the day three years further back, when Roland Leighton was killed.
After Three Years
What think you now, if you can see me still,
Of her you loved those endless years ago?
Have I grown commonplace–that greatest ill
To your swift mind–and lost the power to thrill
You used to know?Have I so changed, since sorrow set her seal
On my lost youth, and left me solitary
Amid the dreams of vanished joys, once real,
Or fallen often from that sweet ideal
You formed of me?What though no spring shall ever now renew
The April in my eyes, the wayward will
That could not live through all I have lived through?
I think you love me just the same, if you
Can see me still.[1]
It’s not hard to sense, reading this poem, that Brittain will have a difficult time moving ahead. She is haunted not only by Roland’s lost love–the “April in your eyes” lines came from one of his poems to her–but by the wrenching loss of her brother in the war’s last months, and of their two other close friends, who had also become hers. She is still very young, but she doesn’t feel it: her life of “provincial young-ladyhood” and that brief period at Oxford is years distant now, but it feels more distant still–it belongs to her memories of the dead.
But she will move on, as most survivors do–though for a while, she struggled mightily, despite the forced gaiety of the post-war months. The first chapter of the last section of Testament of Youth is entitled “Survivors Not Wanted.”
To-day, as we look back, 1919 seems a horrid year, dominated by a thoroughly nasty Peace. But when it came in, it appeared to an exhausted world as divine normality, the spring of life after the winter of death, the stepping-stone to a new era, the gateway to an infinite future — a future not without its dreads and discomforts, but one in whose promise we had to believe, since it was all that some of us had left to believe in. At that time, too, various authorities were busy being grateful to us who had once been young and were apparently, amazing as it seemed, still so regarded…
Nevertheless, the year did not seem to have begun very auspiciously for those who still clung to the ingenuous notion that by their sacrifices they had created a world of sweetness and light for their descendants to inhabit. During the weeks immediately after the Armistice, my automatic existence at Millbank virtually obliterated for me the fact that, all over the country, eloquent platform heroes were busily engaged in Making Germany Pay and Hanging The Kaiser… I was making up my mind to go back to Oxford — not because I particularly wanted to go back, for I was not conscious of wanting to do anything, but because college seemed the one thing left out of the utter wreckage of the past, and I had a prejudice against leaving unfinished something that I had begun…[2]
So Brittain will return to Oxford, but when she does it will be as if she were sleepwalking, too timid and worn out to object to being treated as a second-class student, a female who didn’t really belong. Her accounts of 1919 make it pretty clear that she was depressed, possibly suffering from what we would now identify as PTSD. There were bouts of paralyzing anxiety and debilitating insomnia, and when she found herself–a woman of twenty-five, who had assisted at amputations and worked through air-raids–being treated as a naughty schoolgirl, she put up with it. She lacked the resources to protest.
This was a low point. Once again she was starting almost as a “new girl,” her previous experiences and formidable abilities peremptorily discounted. There was no way to process her war experiences: she had no loved ones of her own generation to discuss it with, and no one showed any interest in learning of a woman’s experience of the war. (The poems she published mostly treat the war from the accepted position of bereaved sister or fiancée.)
But things will soon begin to look up. Oxford brought not only a reawakening of the mind and a renewed determination to succeed as a writer, but also what would become the most important friendship of her post-war life. Winifred Holtby was a fellow aspiring writer, and after a testy initial meeting the two women found in each other staunch allies, and then boundless sources of intimacy and support. Together they figured out how to be feminists at Oxford and in London, where they shared a flat in the early twenties as they worked on novels, articles, and reviews. And together they traveled to Italy, and up a winding mountain road to a forlorn British cemetery on the windswept Asiago Plateau, where Vera plant a fern on her brother’s grave.
I want to return to Vera Brittain in a future post and sketch a bit of the rest of the story. Her life was a very interesting one, and the story of her writing of her story will be an excellent way to study that crucial period of war writing–between ten and fifteen years after the war–when so many of the writers upon whom this project has depended published their “war books” and forever changed the war literature in English.
So all that in time–in some vague, non-calendar-dependent amount of time. For now, though, a quick look ahead. Throughout the Twenties, even as she achieved some success as a novelist and essayist, Vera Brittain’s war book, her own story–or, rather, the story of herself and Roland and Edward and their friends, which only she survived to tell–remained a frustratingly elusive work in progress, both a burden and an ambition. It was written and rewritten as a novel (her early novels, which I haven’t read and which are, by most accounts, not particularly great), a roman à clef in which the very lightness of the fictionalization seemed to prevent her from describing the reality of the war as she had seen it.
During this period she met–after a brief epistolary courtship–and swiftly married George Catlin, an academic and early fan of her novels. They were soon spending most of their time apart, as she wrote in London and he pursued his career in America. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade there were two children and a burgeoning career as a novelist and feminist essayist. A while new life. Yet the ghosts of the old one had not yet been laid to rest.
Let’s end today, then, with a memorable passage from her Testament of Youth, the writing of which I will discuss a bit next time. Here Brittain addresses what we might term the Problem of the Twenties, when survivors of the war moved on, yet continued to feel that the experiential gulf was no shallower for all its slow recession into memory.
Between the first life that ended with Edward’s death in 1918, and the second that began with Winifred’s companionship in 1920, no links remain except Roland’s family and my parents; they alone can remember the world that revolved for me round Edward, round Roland, round Victor and Geoffrey. Of those others upon whom my deepest affections now rest — Winifred, my husband, my children — not one knew even by name a single contemporary who counted for me in the life before 1918. For a time I felt forlorn, even bitter, because they could not share my memories, but now I have grown accustomed to revisiting that past world alone.
Only the permanence of my fondest ambitions, and the strange and growing likeness of my son to Edward, reminds me that I am still the individual who went to Uppingham Speech Day in July 1914, for although I was a student at Oxford in both my lives, it was not the same Oxford and I was not the same student. The fact that, within ten years, I lost one world, and after a time rose again, as it were, from spiritual death to find another, seems to me one of the strongest arguments against suicide that life can provide. There may not be — I believe that there is not — resurrection after death, but nothing could prove more conclusively than my own brief but eventful history the fact that resurrection is possible within our limited span of earthly time.[3]