PATRICK DEANE Vera Brittain: a Pacifist's Progress

PATRICK DEANE Vera Brittain: A Pacifist's Progress

Popular representations of British experience in the First World War continue to show, and sometimes explicitly acknowledge, a debt to Vera Brittain's "Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925," Testament of Youth (1933). Elizabeth Day wrote recently that when she began her novel Home Fires (2013), "Brittain's memoir was my first port of call. There was almost nothing else available that conveyed the personal devasta- tion of the first world war from a young woman's point of view with such candour." Testament of Youth, she observed, remains "deeply influential" (Day 2013). Brittain's influence has certainly been strong since 1978, when the book was reissued by Virago in a climate increasingly attentive to women's writing. When she died of arteriosclerosis eight years before that, however, her reputation was at a low ebb. According to her daughter, Shirley Williams, Brittain "believed that as a writer she had been forgotten, the fading voice of a dying generation" (The Times 30 March 1970; qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 523),1 and it is certainly true that notices of her death were lukewarm about the achievement of her fifty years as a writer. In the Daily Telegraph David Holloway observed that "Vera Brittain was one of those figures in the literary world whose position stemmed more from the fact that she was known to be a writer than from the importance of anything that she wrote" (Daily Telegraph 30 March 1970; qtd in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 523). It was a peculiar assertion: not entirely correct, but with a kernel of truth that I want to explore in what follows. To be a writer and to be known as a writer was indeed a preoccupation throughout Brittain's life, something distinct from and perhaps more urgent and insistent in her than the desire to write itself. She sought fame pri- marily as a novelist, yet fiction did not come naturally to her – if it came at all. To- wards the end of her life she told Shirley Williams that she "would much rather be a writer of plays and really first-class novels, instead of [...] biographies and 'documen- taries'" (Letter to Shirley Williams, 17 February 1952; qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 460), yet it was in the latter that her talent lay. Her first novel, The Dark Tide (1923), was an account of college life at Oxford so obviously autobiographical that few of Brittain's contemporaries at Somerville had any difficulty linking characters in the book to their real-life models. Whether she was ever able successfully to transmute lived experience into compelling fiction – "first-class novels" – is doubtful. On the other hand, when she embraced autobiography as her métier, the results were remarkable – and the obvious example of this is the book on which her reputation was ultimately built, Testament of Youth. Brittain's intention since 1918 had been to capture her wartime experiences in the form of a novel, but by 1929 she had become reconciled to her failure in the project and in that year decided "to tell my own fairly typical story as truthfully as I could against the larger background" (Brittain 1978, 12). That decision was not made easily, so refractory was Brittain's desire to achieve fame as a novelist. Her diaries provide disconcerting insight into the hold which that ambition had upon her. On 22 March 1932, for example, she notes hearing for the

1 I would like at the outset to acknowledge a general debt to this excellent biography, which I have found an invaluable companion in working on the primary materials.

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 29.2 (September 2018): 11-18.

first time about Phyllis Bentley's recently published novel, Inheritance, pronounced by the publisher Victor Gollancz to be "magnificent." "Wish something of this kind could one day happen to Testament of Youth," she writes. Over the following weeks her diary records both her continuing work on Testament and a deliberate attempt to court and befriend Bentley, at least partly in the hope of gaining access to Gollancz: "Mentioned my own 'Testament of Youth' to P.B. She mayn't be interested – but on the other hand she may; and Gollancz is her publisher."2 More interested in the praise being heaped on Bentley's novel than apparently in the book itself (at this stage it seems she did not read it), Brittain instigated a friendship with the author in an obviously self-interested spirit. Even as the relationship evolved to include an element of genuine warmth, jealousy was at its heart: "[…] at my present stage of 'Testament' found the light of another person's extreme success rather awkward to work by; still, I'd rather be jealous of Phyllis than of anyone" (14 September 1932). As critical recognition of Bentley's achievement mounted in the latter part of 1932 – she received $15,000 for the film rights to Inheritance, and took to sending Vera her American press-cuttings – Brittain was increasingly troubled: "I feel rather as if I were a specta- tor watching from the Dress Circle a play in which I wanted to play lead myself!" (30 September 1932). Despite a growing estrangement between Brittain and Bentley in the last months of 1932 – exacerbated in no small measure by Vera's continuing failure to find a publisher for her now-completed memoir – Bentley did intervene on Brittain's behalf with

Winter Journals Victor Gollancz, and Testament of Youth was accepted for publication by his firm in 1933. The foregoing account is relevant because of what it tells us about Brittain's opportunism, her not insignificant interest in celebrity and public profile, and her

determination in pursuit of those things. She sought a particular identityPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) for herself, initially in the literary world and later in the much broader realm of public affairs, her public standing – as we shall see – being constructed upon the foundation of her literary reputation. For that reason there is truth to Holloway's point that what Brittain for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution wrote proved in the end somehow less important than that she wrote. Interestingly, during one of her lecture tours after Testament was published, a notice in the Toronto Daily Star proclaimed that "the testatrix is greater than the 'Testament'" (qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 300). As John Rodden has convincingly argued of Eric Blair's "George Orwell" (Rodden 1989, passim), "Vera Brittain," public figure, "pacifist, socialist & pro-League of Nations" as she would later describe herself, may be the principal creation of the author of Testament of Youth. The times had a hand in her making as well. When Bentley brought Brittain to Gollancz's attention, his assessment of the market for books about the Great War was significantly changing. While the later 1920s had been an unpropitious time to publish material about the war, by 1933 the situation had changed considerably with escalat- ing tensions in Europe and with the prospect of another conflict – along familiar fault lines – before the end of the decade. So, despite Brittain's enduring association with the Great War, her reputation as a writer was in fact formed in the 1930s – and as much by force of historical circumstance as by the inherent strengths of Testament of Youth. She recognized this herself in later life: writing to her husband George Catlin in May, 1951, she observed "I caught the mood of the thirties exactly, but it only lasted for six years." These were the years from the publication of Testament of Youth in 1933 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.

2 3 April 1932, Fonds RC0103: Vera Brittain, McMaster University Archives. Hereafter, all dated references are to this source unless otherwise indicated.

There is ample evidence of the extent to which Brittain "caught the mood" of the Thirties. On the day of its publication in London, Testament of Youth sold more copies than her five previous books combined. The first impression of 5,000 copies was sold out within a week, and by mid-September, 15,000 copies had been snapped up. By the outbreak of war in 1939, 120,000 copies had been sold (see Berry and Bostridge 2001, 264). In The Long Week-End, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge attribute this directly to "public concern about the international situation in 1933" (Graves and Hodge 1940, 294). Despite this popular success, the book did not enjoy an especially warm response from the literary establishment. That it provided a moving account of human suffering and loss in war was almost always recognized by reviewers; where reservations were expressed, however, they interestingly often had to do with the personality apparently at work in the memoir. Virginia Woolf, who within a few years would begin work on Between the Acts, her own attempt to capture the zeitgeist of the Thirties, was moved by Testament of Youth even while being repelled by its author, whose "stringy, metallic mind […] [and] taste I should dislike in real life."3 That sense of the work and its author (not just its narrator) as simultaneously and equally up for adjudication, is a rather peculiar feature of contemporary critical commentary on Testament, as well as of Brittain's own statements about the book. Her diary for 1933 is replete with comment on the reviews of Testament of Youth as they began to appear, but perhaps the most interesting of these was written on Thursday, 31 August. She takes note that the Daily Express had printed a furious, insulting and vituperative attack by James Agate on both Gollancz and me – chiefly about [the] way he is making a stunt of the book. No doubt since I have now gone on record as pacifist, Socialist & pro-League of Nations, The Express, which is anti all of those things, was glad enough to print the attack. This comment raises two key issues bearing on the impact and reception of Tes- tament of Youth. The first I have already alluded to, and that is Victor Gollancz's astute marketing, his "making a stunt of the book." Gollancz had told Daphne du Maurier that "the essence of publishing is to 'take the tide,'" and there is no doubt that he judged the moment well when, in February of 1933, he wrote to Brittain to accept the book for publication. The second issue has to do with the fact that Vera Brittain had already made herself quite well known for opinions on a range of social and political questions – much more so than as the author of novels or testaments. She had, in fact, been hugely prolific as a freelance journalist and lecturer throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Series G of the Vera Brittain fonds in the archives at McMaster University includes 444 articles, reviews and letters to the editor published between 1919 and 1934 when, in the first flush of celebrity following publication of Testament, she published in Modern Woman an article entitled "Can the Women of the World Stop War?" In the nearly two decades before she was moved to pose that critical question of feminist geopolitics, there is hardly a subject on which she did not, in print or in lecture, express a strong opinion: whether or not to wear a hat, sunbathing, how not to travel, the unacceptability of smoking in trains, how to bring up a husband, what we today might call "mansplaining" and the unattractiveness of men because of that habit, men in the nursery, epidemics and how to avoid them, and some of the challenges of taking a bath in France. Before becoming known as a

3 Virginia Woolf. 2 September 1933; Diary, vol. 4. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. London: The Hogarth Press, 1982. 177 (qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 264).

writer, in other words, she was very well known as a journalist and had worked hard to secure a platform for herself and her views in various newspapers – the Manchester Guardian in particular – and reviews like Time and Tide. Feminism was of course an important part of this journalistic work. The early influence of Olive Schreiner is obvious in Brittain's more serious pieces from the 1920s, women and labour being a theme explored in several different contexts. Perhaps not surprisingly, the autobiographical drift of her work in the novel and other genres is discernible in her journalism too. Around the time of her marriage to George Catlin in 1925, for example, we see her bringing feminism to bear on the institution of marriage in essay after essay; and when her son John arrived two years later, her essays and letters reflect that important event and its potential impact on the life of a woman writer. Vera gave birth to John in December of 1927, nearly nine months after an act that would probably not be the first to come to mind in this context: her publication of an essay called "What is a Good Parent? Changing Motherhood" (Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1927). Since we know that during these years Brittain's hope was to produce a novel from her wartime diaries, it is understandable that for at least a decade after 1918, the war and her experience in it does not figure significantly in her journalism. After the wa- tershed year of 1929, however, when she was forced to conclude that this hope would never come to fruition, war and the lessons to be learned from it, as well as from writing about it, become common subjects in her essays and lectures. On 30 Novem- ber 1932, we find her speaking to the Halifax Luncheon Club about "Why Current Events Matter to Us," and within the next eighteen months at various events addressing topics such as: "Importance of Foreign Affairs in Everyday Life," "That this age has no place for romance," "War and Peace Books as Best Sellers," "Our Part in the Disarmament Conference," and "How War Affects Education." These lectures are generically very different from Testament: although informed by the experience that Brittain was simultaneously recalling in her book, they are extrapolations from that experience – commentary offered for the improvement of life in the present. Testament became popular because, as Woolf put it, it was able to make the experience of war run "rapidly, vividly" across one's eyes (Graves and Hodge 1940, 294), and in that respect it answered at least one basic need of an anxious readership – the need to know something of what being at war would mean and what it would feel like. On the other hand, for readers wanting to understand war in geopolitical, philosophical or ethical terms, Testament of Youth fell short, and many reviews made this point, expressing frustration with the intensely personal nature of the narrative. That second imperative Brittain sought to address in her work not as a writer of novels or memoirs, but as a lecturer and commentator. Addressing the League of Nations Union dinner on "Literature and World Peace," 16 June 1932, she begins by affirming J.M. Keynes's assertion that "we may be on the threshold of a new Dark Age." Then, after quoting from Bentley's Inheritance, she goes on to say that there are three functions for literature at the present moment: The first is to tell the truth about the War – for those who experienced it to make sure that their contemporaries shall not forget it and their successors shall know what it really meant. The second is to act as interpreter between conflicting groups […]. And the third and final task of literature in this connection – each writer in his or her own way – is to place before mankind some constructive picture of a better England, a New Jerusa- lem, a fresh civilization […]. (McMaster Archive, Box 65 [Manuscripts of Articles])

If the second and third of these functions were not directly addressed in the writing of Testament of Youth, Brittain's other activities – capitalizing on the fame which the book brought her – were compensation on an extraordinary scale. Immediately after Testament was published in 1934, she embarked on an exhausting schedule of lectures, public appearances and journalistic work outlining her motives in writing. While on a tour of the United States she gave the same lecture, "Why I wrote Testa- ment of Youth," at least seventeen times between October and December 1934 alone. This was the beginning of a remarkable period in which, through her journalism and public lectures, she developed a formidably coherent and passionately held intellectu- al and spiritual commitment to peace – one that would occupy her to the end of her life and bring her arguably more attention and renown than any of her novels and memoirs. In her peace work one might say that "Vera Brittain" found herself, her name becoming synonymous not with "always vulgar" autobiography,4 maudlin self- interest, and literary ambition, but with a cause that transcended and in a profound sense came to command her personal circumstances and history. The publication of Testament in 1933 not only gave Brittain the fame she had as- pired to in her student days, it also gave her a prominent position in the national dialogue about England's place in the world and about war as an instrument of foreign relations. That dialogue tested her beliefs and in certain important aspects changed them, making it possible for her to move from a victim's understanding of war and of her own role as testatrix, to a more activist position in which the writer has her eye perennially on "some constructive picture of a better England" (McMaster Archive Box 65 [Manuscripts of articles], cf. p. 14 of this article), one in which the killing of innocents is less to be mourned than to be proscribed altogether. She had been a member of the League of Nations Union since 1921 and continued to work for the Union into the Thirties; but by 1934 the effectiveness of "collective security" as en- visaged by the Covenant of the League was seriously in question. The success of Testament of Youth brought her to the attention of other groups working for peace – the National Peace Council, the Union of Democratic Control, and the Women's In- ternational League for Peace and Freedom, to name a few. In particular, it attracted Canon Dick Sheppard, whose Peace Movement launched "A Peace Appeal to Men" in October, 1934 (see Berry and Bostridge 2001, 354). Sheppard's imprecations, plus the influence of Bertrand Russell's Which Way to Peace? (1936), eventually caused Brit- tain to join the Peace Pledge Union, renouncing collective security in favour of what she called "the complete pacifist outlook" (Letter to George Catlin, 21 June 1936). Brittain moved towards that outlook, ironically, at more or less the same pace Europe was moving towards war. Her tour to promote Testament of Youth in America at the end of 1934 had seen her still advocating limited armament for self-defence (cf. Berry and Bostridge 2001, 300) and stressing the threat posed by Germany and Japan to the rest of the world. She was also at that stage still much delighted by her celebrity: "Twenty years ago," she wrote to Winifred Holtby in October of that year, "it would have seemed like a wild fantasy. I pictured myself then as writing, but never as the centre of cheering, wildly excited crowds" (qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 300). In contrast, the climax of her visit to the US three years later was not public adulation but a purposeful lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, whose aid Vera was seeking in her efforts to enlist women for the cause of peace. By 1944, though, she was no longer welcome at the White House and the crowds were gone. That was the year in

4 Berry and Bostridge report that shortly after the publication of Testament, in Vera's hearing, Rose Macaulay pronounced autobiography "always vulgar" (2001, 270).

which her excoriating attack on the practice of saturation bombing, Massacre by Bombing,5 appeared in the US, endorsed by twenty-eight leading figures in the American church and literary establishment. Brittain's now determined pacifism made her an extremely controversial figure and she was rebuked by Mrs. Roosevelt, who was reported to have dismissed her fully articulated pacifist position as "all sentimental nonsense" (qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 441). Brittain's activities during these years show the convergence in her thinking of several strains that were discernible but also discrete in her work of the 1920s. In the heat of looming European apocalypse, her still powerful sense of personal loss, her determination that children should not again endure the suffering of war, her realization that collective security as a policy was no guarantee against conflict, and her Keynesian conviction that the humiliation imposed on Germany at Versailles would ensure rather than prevent another war: these bonded under the catalytic influence of her feminism. As she wrote in "Women and Pacifism" (1941), "the struggle against war, which is the final and most vicious expression of force, is fundamentally inseparable from feminism, socialism, slave emancipation and the liberation of subject races" ("Women and Pacifism," Peace News, 15 August 1941; qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 367). Brittain's diaries and papers from the 1930s testify to the earnestness and determination with which she thought herself through to a position of "complete pacifism," losing in the process much of the popular acclaim and adulation that Testament of Youth had brought her; the friendship of people like Margaret Storm Jameson and Sarah Gertrude Millin, with whom she had been very close; possibly the love of her son, to whom she addressed the letters on peace published in 1942 as Humiliation With Honour; and her alliance with Bertrand Russell, who, by 1940, was taking the position that war against Hitler was necessary. Russell called that position "relative political pacifism," while the only word for Brittain's pacifism – by that time beginning to be infused with a religious belief absent from her earlier thought – would be "absolute." In Humiliation With Honour, Brittain's most cogent and comprehensive statement of this absolute view, pacifism is defined as "nothing other than a belief in the ulti- mate transcendence of love over power" (Brittain 2005, 5). The Christian-pacifist influence of Canon Dick Sheppard and the Peace Pledge Union shows most strongly in the final letter, "The Shape of the Future." Here, as so often elsewhere in Brittain's work, Olive Schreiner is used to set the tone; but this time the quote speaks not to issues of women and labour but rather to the difficulties of seeing human life sub specie aeternitatis: "There is a veil of terrible mist over the face of the Hereafter" (79). Brittain's writing in this last letter departs from her usual style – that of an edu- cated middle class English woman in whose work occasional religious references would be unremarkable – by adopting an explicitly Christian matrix within which to situate her political argument. The argument is striking in that it looks far beyond the events of 1942 and England's conflict with Germany, taking in – as in "Women and Pacifism" she said it must – "feminism, socialism, slave emancipation and the liberation of subject races. […] The work of reconstruction will demand every gift which can be contributed to the common weal by all the races of men: the black, the brown, the yellow, the white, 'whose prayers go up to one God under different names'" (87).

5 The UK title was Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means. Published for the Bombing Restriction Committee by New Vision Publishing Company in London, 1941.

Brittain's relationship with Christian pacifism was slow to develop. As Berry and Bostridge have pointed out, even as she began to understand that Christian pacifism was a "state of mind, offering a 'revolutionary principle' ultimately rooted in […] the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a constructive policy which could provide an alternative to war, […] she was not yet ready to surrender all hope in political expedients" (Berry and Bostridge 2001, 356-7). We can see this vividly expressed in Humiliation With Honour, nine chapters of which are taken up with sharply reasoned political and ethical argument, the choir of theological justification raising its voice only in the last chapter and Epilogue. "I am not a pacifist for reasons of Christianity," she had written in 1937 ("Why I Stand for Peace," McMaster Archives; see Berry and Bostridge 2001, 359). Indeed, the opposite was probably true – she embraced Christianity as a consequence of her pacifism and her work as a writer. Christian doctrine was certainly useful to Brittain because it facilitated something she had always sought – the ele- vation of lived personal experience into a significance greater than the self – and in that sense she was able as a Christian pacifist to do in a different way what she con- fessed to Shirley Williams she had been unable to do as a writer: to transmute the contingent matter of documentary and testament into art. Elsewhere in this collection of essays, Thomas Dilworth has written about David Jones in the Great War. In Jones's preface to In Parenthesis – like Testament of Youth also a work of the late 20s and early 30s (cf. Deane 1997) – we find this memorable expression of the artist's impulse to redeem wartime experience: "We find ourselves privates in foot regiments. We search how we may see formal goodness in a life sin- gularly inimical, hateful, to us" (Jones 1937, xiii). For Brittain as for Jones, Christian doctrine provided a narrative within which the otherwise stupefying question of human barbarism could be understood; it was her antidote to despair, her consolation in a world in which, as Jones put it elsewhere, "they don't give a bugger […] to be without the holy city" (Jones 1981, 190). That phrasing sends us back to Brittain's obser- vation quoted above that the final point of literature is "to place before mankind some constructive picture of a better England, a New Jerusalem, a fresh civilization." When she spoke those words at the League of Nations Union dinner in 1932, Brit- tain was pointing less to the promise of plenitude in the afterlife than to the possibility of a 'better' place in the here and now, realized in some way through the agency and activity of writers. From that insight her fiercely prosecuted mission as a journalist, campaigner and commentator was an entirely natural development, one accelerated and invigorated by the fame and attention that followed publication of Testament of Youth. However, by 1942, when Humiliation With Honour was largely written, the public consensus that another conflict on the scale of 1914-1918 was unthinkable – a consensus on the tide of which she had so effectively ridden – was broken. Reading her wartime diary for those years one senses she is on the edge of exhaustion; she seems a lonely figure, writing and lecturing indomitably to an audience constantly shrinking as her home is literally brought down around her. On 9 December 1942, she writes, "How tired I am of this country fighting the Germans (who are so efficient and thorough) – I am sure that the future peace of Europe depends on our ability to be friends with them – & upon little else" (1989, 197). By Brittain's own account, her romance with celebrity and the broader public was over by 1939. Paradoxically, however, with the outbreak of war in that year her public identity – as well as her personal sense of vocation – seemed to find a new coherence. Although increasingly positioned against the grain of public opinion, "Vera Brittain" was becoming an emblem of an honest and uncompromising alternative to violence.

What had drawn negative comment in her earlier work – the sense that somehow the project of being Vera Brittain the writer dwarfed in importance even the human trage- dies that she took as her subject – becomes far less problematic as she begins to use her grief not as subject matter but as fuel to power the process of analysis and understanding, theorizing a comprehensive ethical and political position in relation to war. Humiliation With Honour is in that respect a fascinating work because although Brittain sought to inject a "personal" presence into it – it was originally a collection of essays which she concluded "was lifeless and read like a tract" (see Berry and Bostridge 2001, 422) and so re-cast as a series of letters to her son John Catlin – the work remains firmly focused on ideas and the development of a fully-articulated pacifist position. The epistolary structure feels like the afterthought it was, and ironically could for some readers undermine the profoundly humane drift of the argument. What kind of person, after all, writes ten long letters with endnotes to the teenage son from whom she has been forced by war to live apart, laying out in full detail the reasons she is right and he (probably) wrong, and without once asking after his health and happiness? Fortunately, the attempt at artifice is a conspicuous failure and we are left with "Vera Brittain" not as a hovering literary presence, "a stringy, metallic mind" or the "testatrix […] [always felt to be] greater than the Testament" (qtd. in Berry and Bostridge 2001, 30), but a cogent, principled and undivided voice committed in a specifically Christian way to what W.H. Auden, writing on the eve of the Thirties, called "New styles of architecture, a change of heart" ("XXIII," Auden 1977, 36).

Works Cited Auden, Wystan Hugh. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927-1939. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. Berry, Paul, and Mark Bostridge. Vera Brittain: A Life. 1995. London: Virago, 2001. Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. 1933. London: Virago, 1978. ––. Wartime Chronicle: Diary 1939-1945. Eds. Alan Bishop and Y. Aleksandra Ben- nett. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989. ––. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War. London: Continuum, 2005. Day, Elizabeth. "Testament of Youth: Vera Brittain's Classic, 80 Years on." The Guardian 24 March 2013. Web. 3 January 2018. Deane, Patrick. "David Jones: Poet of the Thirties." Chesterton Review 23, 1 & 2 (1997): 147-155. Graves, Robert, and Alan Hodge. The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1940. Jones, David. In Parenthesis. London: Faber and Faber, 1937. ––. The Roman Quarry and Other Sequences. London: Agenda Editions, 1981. Rodden, John. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of 'St. George' Orwell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.