Reviews for Testament of Youth

The average rating for Testament of Youth based on 1 review is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-09-10 00:00:00 Eric Bernard It's another irony of that most ironic of conflicts that the greatest account of how 1914-18 was lived comes not from a male writer out of the trenches, or from some politician familiar with the negotiations, but instead from a middle-class girl from Derbyshire who experienced the war first as a waiting fiancée and later as a volunteer nurse. Vera Brittain grew up in Buxton, where her father owned a couple of paper mills; she was close to her musical brother, had a growing romance with one of his schoolfriends, and fought with her family to be allowed to go to university. Her provincial childhood was characteristic of a rather staid but untroubled Edwardian society which offered few opportunities for intelligent women. Then, when she was 20, came the world war. The careful attempt in Testament of Youth to recreate this context - the book begins in the nineteenth century and doesn't end until the 1930s - is what makes it such a powerful read. When the war comes, it is seen not as some isolated ordeal of shelling and trenches, nor as a political collapse - but as the Apocalypse for an entire society that was already struggling with class relationships and gender imbalances, and whose failure to address these issues was in fact central to the way it faced military conflict. It's hard to write about this memoir objectively because reading it is such an emotional experience. Day after day it left me drained and speechless, partly in sympathy with the losses she suffered and partly in admiration at her technique. Her narrative voice is absolutely flawless; she finds a dry, amused tone which is drenched in a kind of sad wisdom and which positions her squarely in a tradition of English irony that I adore. She can be very funny when she needs to be, and she does not over-egg the moments of high drama, well aware of when bare facts will do the job. Throughout the book there is a profound sense of authorial control that I only feel with the greatest writers. Certainly the way she evokes the experience of those left behind during the war, especially women, is nowhere done better. Her use of contemporary diaries and letters allows her to recreate with extraordinary effect the 'prolonged apprehension', the mental strain, of constantly waiting for telegrams or letters from the front to learn whether one's friends and family are still whole or not. ('Even now,' she comments, writing in 1933, 'I cannot work comfortably in a room from which it is possible to hear the front-door bell.') As her brother, her fiancé and her friends all troop off to fight, Brittain realises that she is suffering, 'like so many women in 1914, from an inferiority complex'. This is something that many female writers of the time have tried to analyse - I kept going back to a poem called 'Drafts' by Nora Bomford (in Scars Upon My Heart): So dreadfully safe! O, damn the shibboleth Of sex! God knows we've equal personality. Why should men face the dark while women stay To live and laugh and meet the sun each day. But no one has made me feel the psychological outrage of this as well as Vera Brittain does here, not even Rebecca West. Desperate to do something, she drops out of her hard-won course at Somerville College, Oxford, in order to enrol as a VAD, where she works first in London, then in Malta, and finally in France. The stark realities that nursing represented for a sheltered, middle-class girl are brilliantly evoked - this was a time, she points out, when 'all girls' clothing […] appeared to be designed by their elders on the assumption that decency consisted in leaving exposed to the sun and air no part of the human body that could possibly be covered with flannel'. Now here she was stripping men naked, treating venereal disease, and mopping up blood, pus and vomit for twelve hours a day. Sex was not, I think, a strong force in Vera Brittain's life, at least her early life as described here; she was not very interested in boys growing up, and her attraction to her fiancé Roland was primarily an artistic and intellectual one - they had got engaged almost without having experienced any physical contact at all. Given this complete anatomical ignorance, of a kind now hard to imagine, it is all the more astonishing to read such sensitive passages as the following, which I found extraordinarily moving: Short of actually going to bed with [the patients], there was hardly an intimate service that I did not perform for one or another in the course of four years, and I still have reason to be thankful for the knowledge of masculine functioning which the care of them gave me, and for my early release from the sex-inhibitions that even to-day - thanks to the Victorian tradition which up to 1914 dictated that a young woman should know nothing of men but their faces and their clothes until marriage pitchforked her into an incompletely visualised and highly disconcerting intimacy - beset many of my female contemporaries, both married and single. In the early days of the War the majority of soldier-patients belonged to a first-rate physical type which neither wounds nor sickness, unless mortal, could permanently impair, and from the constant handling of their lean, muscular bodies, I came to understand the essential cleanliness, the innate nobility, of sexual love on its physical side. Although there was much to shock in Army hospital service, much to terrify, much, even, to disgust, this day-by-day contact with male anatomy was never part of the shame. Since it was always Roland whom I was nursing by proxy, my attitude towards him imperceptibly changed; it became less romantic and more realistic, and thus a new depth was added to my love. What I want to draw attention to here, beyond the emotional impact, is the fact that in 1933 there was really no established prose convention under which women could write about men's bodies in this way; Brittain is forging this language for the first time, and that's something she succeeds in doing at many points throughout the book. It is one of the most striking implications of her wonderful (and wonderfully undoctrinaire) feminism that she is determined to say what is unsaid, and more importantly to explain what is insufficiently understood, about women's experiences of the war and of social pressures in general. This is not to say that she neglects how her male friends experienced the war - quite to the contrary, she is committed to understanding and memorialising what she memorably calls 'the tragic, profound freemasonry of those who accepted death together overseas'; but by focusing elsewhere she somehow makes it more profound and tragic than I've ever felt it before. The sense of clear-eyed realism that characterises Brittain's descriptions is reinforced by her rejection of any religious comfort. Her spiritual beliefs constitute a kind of questing agnosticism (informed in part by Olive Schreiner's 1883 novel The Story of an African Farm, which was a keystone book for her and Roland). But she is convinced that death is final; and at times, when she is thinking about interpersonal duties and responsibilities, she is very inspiring on this subject: And then I remembered, with a startling sense of relief, that there was no resurrection to complicate the changing relationships forced upon men and women by the sheer passage of earthly time. There was only a brief interval between darkness and darkness in which to fulfil obligations, both to individuals and society, which could not be postponed to the comfortable futurity of a compensating heaven. It's very affecting to see her reach for these lessons in the latter parts of the book. It would have been easy to start this book in 1914, end it in 1919, and make it a true war memoir. That is not enough for her; it doesn't do the job. She keeps going, through the 'numb disillusion', through the 'indictment of a civilisation', on through the 1920s and into the 1930s, until she reaches a point where she can start to say, This is where I might be able to go next. This is where society might be able to go next. The whole thing is a colossal achievement, hugely upsetting, but hugely inspiring. It blew the back of my head off. It really should be read.