BOOK REVIEW: ‘Vera Brittain and the First World War: The Story of “Testament of Youth”’

OPINION:

VERA BRITTAIN AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR: THE STORY OF ’TESTAMENT OF YOUTH’

By Mark Bostridge

Bloomsbury, $27, 252 pages, illustrated

TESTAMENT OF YOUTH

By Vera Brittain

Penguin Books, $18, 661 pages

It is no accident that Vera Brittain began writing “Testament of Youth,” her peerless memoir of a woman’s losses in World War I, at the very end of the 1920s. For the final years of that decade had seen the floodgates of recollections by writers who had served in the conflict: Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and Erich Maria Remarque’s “Im Westen Nichts Neues” “(All Quiet on the Western Front”) and closer to home, Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That,” R.C. Sherrif’s “Journey’s End,”,plus works by Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden and many more — 29 such works in 1929 alone. Brittain herself had actually served for much of the war, as a nurse in hospitals, some near the frontline, after dropping out of Oxford University, which she had struggled so determinedly to reach, after just one year. And this forms an important part of her book, as does the prewar life smashed by events and the fragile reconstruction of a postwar existence.

But what has drawn readers to “Testament of Youth” since it first burst upon the scene more than 80 years ago is its wrenching account of the effect on Brittain of losing Roland, her fiance, their best friend, another close friend, and finally her much-loved brother Edward, her only sibling. Beautifully written, skillfully crafted, it is the distillation of those terrible years of devastation and personal loss, the story of how the crucible of this experience changed her. “Not many women have suffered as she has suffered in this war,” Roland’s father wrote to hers after Edward’s death. Without self-pity yet never minimizing these losses and their impact on her and others, realistic yet artful, this is truly a magnificent testament.

In the years since Brittain’s death in 1970, there has been an avalanche of background material to “Testament of Youth” in the form of letters, diaries and journals which she meticulously kept. Inevitably, these reveal facts and feelings, which, partly for valid personal reasons, partly in deference to the mores of the time, were omitted from the great book. The year 1994 saw the appearance of a fine biography by Paul Berry, who had known Brittain quite well, and the younger Mark Bostridge, who apparently did most of the heavy lifting. Mr. Bostridge has now given us an excellent short book, which puts “Testament of Youth” in the context of all this additional material while also serving up some priceless up close and personal moments in his own sleuthing efforts to uncover secrets long buried, by Brittain and others.

Both his book and the latest of the many reissues of “Testament of Youth” come in the wake of a recent movie version. Mr. Bostridge was involved in this project and provides a wealth of interesting detail of everything from its gestation to its filming. He is a great fan of the considerably longer 1979 television dramatization which aired on “Masterpiece Theatre” the following year, so much so that his feeling it could not be bettered today was key to his approval (he is one of Brittain’s executors) of the big screen adaptation.

I was somewhat dismayed to read an interview with the actress playing Brittain in the movie (excellently, according to Mr. Bostridge, who would know) in which she said that she had deliberately not read “Testament of Youth” but rather concentrated on the letters and diaries. These provided a greater feeling of immediacy for her to draw on in her portrayal. To me this rather misses the point: the film’s title is that of the book, as was the TV version’s, and certainly nobody could accuse the latter of lacking immediacy. But it also reflected the artfully constructed book on which Mr. Bostridge tells us Brittain labored so long and painfully hard. I have read all the background stuff and while I found it fascinating, it did not even approach the emotional impact which “Testament of Youth” had.

Even in Mr. Bostridge’s book, I found myself more moved by this extract from Brittain’s finely wrought “Testament,” written after her brother’s death about the remaining months of the war, than by anything else in it:

“Now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the war; nothing remained except to endure it.”

Immediacy is all very well, but what it so often reflects is a numbing dullness. Those years of reflection gave a necessary distance which allowed Brittain to make something great and special out of experiences had by many. So enjoy the DVD of the television version and the movie, dip into the letters and journals if you are sufficiently interested, but always, always come back to “Testament of Youth” itself. For to paraphrase Shakespeare, “the book’s the thing.”

• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.