I think it was reading Stefan Zweig's memior that inspired me to read Vera Brittain's. I wanted to read more about the World War I era from the perspective of someone who lived through it. I realized also that – for some time now – I've been more interested in memoirs that fiction.
Testament of Youth is largely a memoir of Brittain's experience as a V.A.D. nurse during World War I, but the book covers a much longer period of time than I expected. Brittain spends some time on her youth and relationships before the war, and the post war section goes on for more than a couple hundred pages and covers her life all the way up to 1925. Roughly, the book covers five eras of Brittain's life (1) Childhood; (2) Oxford; (3) V.A.D. work; (4) Return to Oxford; (5) After Oxford, though the V.A.D. work could certainly be subdivided between time in the U.K., time in Malta, time in France, and time back in the U.K. In any case, the last section – Brittain's life after graduating from Oxford – is freshest in my mind, that being the part I read in the last few days. It almost feels like it should be a separate book. I found the work that Brittain was doing after Oxford very interesting. In this period, she became active with the League of Nations Union and in politics. She was a frequent public speaker and a journalist. She made a few trips to the continent, of which the book had fascinating but rather brief accounts. (I loved reading about her time in Italy and would have read even more!) But the narrative in the book, when it got to this stage, started to feel quite messy. It jumped around in time, making the sequence of events hard to follow. In a way, this end – drawn out as it was – seemed an afterthought to the great narrative of the wartime.
This book must have taken quite a lot of effort to compose. Throughout, Brittain quotes and cites letters and communications she sent and received, which must have been recovered and compiled in a great work of indexing. I was put truly in awe of the wartime postal service. Some time ago I read or heard somewhere that in the early days of postal service, mail deliveries might come as often as four times per day. I realize modern times don't demand such frequent mail service (when I look at the physical mail I receive, I could do without nearly all of it), but it's hard not to feel we've taken a step backward in this regard. (The feeling is like when you see a train map from a century ago and realize how much better served the world was by trains then compared to now.) In any case, as person who travels to Italy once or twice a year and sends several postcards from there when I go, I get a certain pleasure in observing how hilariously long it takes for those cards to reach their destinations. What a marvel, then, to read about Vera Brittain and her brother, stationed in the mountains outside Bassano, sending and receiving mail and packages in the midst of the war. But now I have veered off topic.
I'm so glad I went back and finished Testament of Youth. I'm not sure why I stopped to begin with. I thought, after reading this, I might double down in a way and go right into reading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a book twice as long covering a somewhat later period in Eastern Europe, because Rebecca West comes up in the background of Testament of Youth now and then. But I think I'll wait a moment. In the meantime, I've started a reread of George Gissing's By the Ionian Sea because Gissing too was somehow ringing in the back of my mind while reading Testament of Youth.
