The Professor and Other Writings Read Online Free Page B

Tynan’s diaries from Amazon but found I was in no mood for high camp and dominatrixes. I wanted something stolid and sad. With a sense of oh-what-the-hell, I finally picked up a book I’d bought on the trench trip and then instantly lost interest in: a new paperback edition of Vera Brittain’s Great War diary, the very diary she later transmuted into her celebrated 1933 war memoir, Testament of Youth . *
    Brittain was hardly an unknown quantity. I’d read Testament of Youth in my twenties and had never forgotten the intensity with which she related the primal bereavements of her early years. (I had once observed my grandmother surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes while reading it in the 1970s; her own Great War losses—of fiancéand only brother—duplicated Brittain’s exactly.) Yet I couldn’t say I had ever exactly warmed to Brittain, as either author or woman. For all the pain and horror she had suffered—and for all the integrity of her subsequent personal and political commitments—she struck me as abrasive and conceited. I tended to agree with Woolf, who, after devouring Testament of Youth , applied the usual backhanded praise in a comical diary entry from the 1930s:
    I am reading with extreme greed a book by Vera Brittain. Not that I much like her. A stringy metallic mind, with I suppose, the sort of taste I should dislike in real life. But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war, and how she lost lover and brother, and dabbled her hands in entrails, and was forever seeing the dead, and eating scraps, and sitting five on one WC, runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes.
    And as I started in, it all began coming back to me: the Head Girl self-righteousness; the smug rivalry with other women; the gruesome fascination with period bores like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Olive Schreiner. (In her wartime letters to the doomed Roland Leighton, her nineteen-year-old fiancé, Brittain is forever comparing their poetical puppy love to that of the unfortunately named “Lyndall and Waldo” in Story of an African Farm .) Nor did I find much at first to obviate my ill humor. I’ve got big irritable underlinings, I see, at just that point early in 1915 when Brittain, still at Somerville, contemplates enlisting as a VAD nurse:
    Janet Adie came to tea to help me learn to typewrite. She is feeling very busy because she now has the secretaryship of one of those soup-kitchen affairs on her shoulders. It does not sound very strenuous an occupation; these people who never had anything to do before don’t know the meaning of work…I was told I ought to join this &that & the other. Everyone seems to be so keen for me to give up one kind of work for another, & that less useful, but more understandable by them. The general idea seems to be that college is a kind of pleasant occupation which leads to nothing—least of all anything that might be useful when the results of war will cause even graver economic problems than the war itself. If only I can get some work at the Hospital in the summer. I wonder what they will say when they see me doing the nursing which seems to exhaust them all so utterly, & my college work as well! I always come out top in the end, & I always shall.
    Yet as I continued to read, something else began coming through too—something less rebarbative. I started noticing, amid all the boasts and bitchiness and careening ressentiment , a more vulnerable side to Brittain’s personality. I hadn’t remembered—at all—what a phobic and self-critical woman she was, or indeed how deeply she had had to struggle, throughout the First World War, with what she felt to be her own pusillanimity. Now among the myriad painful feelings the attacks of September 11 had evoked in me—grief, despair, outrage—perhaps the most shame-making had been a penetrating awareness of my own cowardice. I worried incessantly about crashes, bombs, sarin gas,