PATRICK DEANE Vera Brittain: a Pacifist's Progress

11 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 in- deed 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 trans- mute 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 be- come 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. Anglistik, Jahrgang 29 (2018), Ausgabe 2 © 2018 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 12 PATRICK DEANE 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. Anglistik, Jahrgang 29 (2018), Ausgabe 2 © 2018 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) VERA BRITTAIN: A PACIFIST'S PROGRESS 13 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, metal- lic 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.

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