Testament of Youth is long; I have about 200 pages still to go. We’re well into the war now, and her account is a compelling mix of immediacy–especially through the long excerpts from letters and diaries written ‘to the moment’–and reflection. I’m fascinated by the almost portentous sentimentality of much of her youthful writing and her self-conscious reflections on just that quality in it, in her retrospective commentary: “It all sounded, like most of my youthful diary,” she observes wryly at one point, “very earnest and sentimental; only an experienced writer can put aspirations and prayers and resolutions into words without appearing a sententious prig.” Still, the stories of life and death she has to tell deserve a certain sentimentality. Here’s her moving account of receiving a posthumous letter from a dear friend. As the scale of loss in the war is no secret, I think there’s no point in changing names to prevent ‘spoilers.’ I’m reading along, really, in the full expectation that everyone she knows who’s at the front will die. At least this way I can only be happily surprised (not so far, just by the way).

By one of those curious chances which occurred during the War with such poignant frequency, a mail came in that evening with a letter from Geoffrey. It had been written in pencil three days before the attack; reading it with the knowledge that he had been so soon to die, I found its simple nobility even less bearable than the shock of the cablegram [bringing the news].

As I took in its contents with a slow, dull pain, the silent, shadowy verandah outside the door seemed to vanish from my eyes, and I saw the April evening in France which Geoffrey’s words were to paint upon my mind forever–the battened-out line of German trenches winding away into the shell-torn trees, the ant-like contingent of men marching across a derelict plain to billets in the large town outlined against the pale yellow sky, the setting sun beneath purple clouds reflected in the still water at the bottom of many “crump-holes.” How he wished, he said, that Edward could have been with him to see this beauty if it were any other place, but though the future seemed very vague it was none the less certain. He only hoped that he would not fail at the critical moment, as he was indeed a “horrible coward”; for his school’s sake, where so often he had watched the splendours of the sunset from the school field, he would especially like to do well. “But all this will be boring you.”

Characteristically he concluded his letter with the haunting lines that must have nerved many a reluctant young soldier to brave the death from which body and spirit shrank so pitifully:

War knows no power. Safe shall be my going . . .
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And, if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

“Rupert Brooke,” he added, “is great and his faith also great. If destiny is willing I will write later.”

Well, I thought, destiny was not willing, and I shall not see that graceful, generous handwriting on any envelope any more.

The whole memoir is full of poetry, much of it composed by Brittain and her friends. When the belongings of another fallen friend are sorted out, among the muddy, bloody remains of his kit she and his mother find “the black manuscript note-book containing his poems.”

I haven’t been doing very well with Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children since I posted a little while back about how unbearably annoying I found Sam Pollitt. In fact, I have put the book back on the shelf, for now at least, a rare decision of mine regarding a book I recognize to be of genuine interest, even significance–not to mention one that has been appreciated by readers including Elizabeth Hardwick (whose high praise led me to the book in the first place). Maybe another time I will find some way to cope with what felt to me on this attempt like a tormenting barrage of words and negative emotions. When someone drowns a cat in a bathtub early on and this episode quickly loses its distinctive repulsiveness, you know you’re not in a nice place.

In contrast,  I have been instantly caught up in Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, something that has been on my TBR radar for many years but which I only recently acquired. The very first sentence, for instance, is immediately provoking:

When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.

“To explain the reasons for this egotistical view of history’s greatest disaster,” she continues, “it is necessary to go back a little”–and so we do. I’m only a little ways in at this point (the war has not yet broken out) but Brittain tells a briskly evocative story about her early years that is all the while haunted by this promise of impending disaster. She’s particularly interesting, so far, about her education: she was forutunate enough, though at a school primarily considered “as a means of equipping girls to be men’s decorative and contented inferiors,” to have teachers who introduced her to both feminism and literature. Testament of Youth itself is testament, of course, to their lasting influence. A taste of her voice, on which the success of any memoir so entirely depends:

Among the girls Miss Heath Jones’s lessons were not always appreciated, for most of the sheltered young women in that era displayed no particular anxiety to have the capacity for thought developed within them. Even now I recall the struggles of some of my contemporaries to avoid facing some of the less agreeable lessons of 1914. There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think–which is fundamentally a moral problem–must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilized world which still goes to war … and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.

I suppose I like that passage as much as I do partly because I too believe that thought is uncomfortable and that discomfort is, therefore, a necessary and beneficial aspect of education, but we are pressured today to make education as comfortable as possible for our students. But I also like the forthrightness and slight acerbity of the voice. This is, we can tell, an unapologetically opinionated, articulate, political woman who somehow became, and flourished as, such a woman despite the stultifying environment in which, by her account, her intelligence and ambition was seen always as a difficulty rather than an advantage. How she became the woman who wrote this book is inevitably going to be one of the most interesting angles of the book for me, just as in Jane Eyre or Great Expectations the retrospective narration draws our attention to the development of the youthfully misguided protagonist into someone capable of narrating the novels.

There are all kinds of other quotable bits from the first 50 or so pages. She quotes often from her early diaries, which both amuse and appall the later Vera with their naivete.  Naturally, I enjoyed this bit about her reading of George Eliot:

‘The reading of Romola,’ enthusiastically records my diary for April 27th, 1913, ‘has left me in a state of exultation! It is wonderful to be able to purchase so much rapture for 2s. 6d. ! . . . It makes me wonder when in my life will come the moments of supreme emotion in which all lesser feelings are merged, and which leave one’s spirit different for evermore.’

Soon enough, of course, we realize as we note the date. Her resentment of her brother Edward’s “privileged position as a boy” is reminiscent of Maggie Tulliver’s turmoil  in The Mill on the Floss (I wonder if she read that too). “The idea of refusing Edward a university education never so much as crossed my father’s mind,” she recalls, while “the most flattering of [her] schol reports had never … been regarded more seriously than my inconvenient thirst for knowledge and opportunities.” “The constant and to me enraging evidences of this difference of attitude towards Edward and myself,” she reflects, “violently reinforced the feminist tendencies which I had first acquired at school”:

The passage of time–or so, at least, I fondly believe–has changed my furious Bruxton resentments into mellower and more balanced opinions, but probably no ambitious girl who has lived in a family which regards the subservience of women as part of the natural order of creation ever completely recovers from the bitterness of her early emotions. Perhaps it is just as well; women have still a long way to travel before their achievements are likely to be assessed without irrelevant sex considerations entering in to bias the judgment of the critic, and even their recent political successes are not yet so secure that those who profit by them can afford to dispense with the few acknowledged feminists who are still vigilant, and still walk warily along once forbidden paths.

On these last points, the change from 1933 to 2011 is not as great as one might hope.

I’m excited about reading on: this is someone I want to get to know, and to know about. A ‘proper’ post will follow when I’ve read the whole thing.

I’m also excited about finishing Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, which I have been much appreciating despite the difficulties of its prose, which are of the opposite kind to Stead’s difficulties–Hazzard is elliptical, rather than excessive. The Slaves of Golconda discussion of The Transit of Venus, just by the way, will be beginning April 4 (the slight deferral of this date explains why I’ve picked up something else–I’m afraid if I finish Hazzard too far in advance, its details will not be ideally fresh in my mind!).