Playing Fields, Flanders Fields
When Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth was published in 1933 it struck a deep chord among those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been 'smashed up' by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been men of special grace, the irreplaceable flower of the nation's youth; and they blamed the post-war decline of Britain on their absence. The survivors—guilty, perhaps, simply of having survived—were left to bear the burden of a disappointing and mediocre peace.
Brittain became a leading spokeswoman for this national myth….
When one reads Brittain's [Chronicle of Youth] it is hard to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness and superior airs, she cuts a very appealing figure. She charts her course like a heroine from her favourite novelist, George Eliot: first the escape from a stifling provincialism, then a place at Oxford, followed by a vocation among 'the poor and striving and thoughtful'. Her feminism was both instinctive and brave; unwilling to be traded on the Buxton marriage market, she swore never to marry except on terms of companionship and equal opportunity. When Leighton gave her a copy of Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, it seemed that he must be her destined lover, for Lyndall, the novel's ill-fated feminist heroine, answered so exactly to Brittain's own cult of independence and spiritual fulfillment.
Leighton, then, provided a single focus for all of Brittain's scattered and indefinite ambitions. Her natural inclination was to view people either with idealism or with contempt, so ideal Leighton had to be: but he can scarcely seem so to today's reader. At first, his faults are merely those of a puffed-up schoolboy prize-winner. The war, however, shows him in a steadily worse light. During his snatches of leave he torments both his fiancée and his mother by his aloofness: he browbeats shop assistants by flaunting his service at the Front: his emotional repertoire consists of being glacial, or being condescending. He sits down to read Rupert Brooke near the graves of a major and a private, and muses thus: 'I cannot help thinking of the two together and of the greater value of the one. What a pity it is that the same little piece of lead takes away as easily a brilliant life and one that is merely vegetation. The democracy of war!'
Brittain might be hurt or angered by Leighton, but she could not see through him. She had to exalt him in order to validate her own sense of being special. At Somerville, she seems to have consciously modelled her career on Leighton's at Uppingham….
Brittain was doubtless no more insufferable than many other bright undergraduates, and the world can usually be relied on to knock the corners off them. But when Leighton was killed a year after her arrival at Oxford, she put up the shutters against any further outside influences. She convinced herself that his sacrifice both consecrated his character and justified the flaws in her own. Not that she was unaware of those flaws—far from it. She merely determined to give them free rein, and to face down anyone whom they offended. She would live as 'an egotist with a grievance', grimly getting on with the job of coming out top in every real or imaginary class….
Anyone so driven, and so clever, was bound to get some measure of what she craved, yet her post-war career seems marked by a retardation in her intellectual as well as her emotional development. Her youthful ideals had been rendered largely irrelevant by the war. At Oxford, she learnt how to shine in examinations, but not to become a critical thinker or master the idioms of modern thought. We can forgive her for cherishing Leighton's fustian poetry: what is less pardonable is her apparent lack of any standard by which to measure the limits of his talent—and even less, the limits of her own. (p. 22)
Paul Delany, "Playing Fields, Flanders Fields" (appears here by permission of the London Review of Books and the author), in London Review of Books, January 21 to February 3, 1982, pp. 22-3.∗
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