Darkly into Oblivion; Talk by Robin Whitehead, Friday 17 October

Unfortunately I, along with the Chair of the Literary Society and our daughter, missed this meeting. I've had glowing reports of Robin's talk, and hope he or one of our members could provide a short summary to post here for the benefit of those who, like us, could not be at the meeting. To give an idea of the ground covered, here is a bibliography of the books mentioned.

History/Factual

The Living Shadow - The Great War and the 20th Century    David Reynolds
The Great War and Modern Memory    Paul Fussell
Faith under Fire: Army Chaplains and the Great War    Edward Madigan
Wounded    Emily Mayhew

Some Contemporary Novels

Birdsong    Sebastian Faulks
The Regeneration Trilogy    Pat Barker
Toby's Room    Pat Barker
Strange Meeting    Susan Hill
My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You    Louisa Young
The Absolutist    John Boyne
The Return of Captain Emmett    Elizabeth Speller
At Break of Day    Elizabeth Speller
The Lie    Helen Dunmore
Daughters of Mars    Thomas Kennealy
The Reavley Series WW I Quintet    Anne Perry

Novels written during and shortly after the War

Under Fire    Henri Barbusse
All Quiet on the Western Front    Erich Maria Remarque
Storm of Steel    Ernst Junger
One of Ours    Willa Cather
A Son at the Front    Edith Wharton
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse    Vicente Blasco Ibanez
Retreat: A Story of 1918    Charles Richard Benstead
Death of a Hero    Richard Aldington
A Farewell to Arms    Ernest Hemingway
Non-Combatants and Others    Rose Macauley
Return of the Soldier    Rebecca West
The Secret Battle    AP Herbert
The Middle Parts of Fortune    Frederic Manning
Parade's End    Ford Madox Ford
No Hero This    Warwick Deeping
The Spanish FarmTrilogy    R H Mottram
The 39 Steps/ Greenmantle/ Mr Standfast/ The Three Hostages  John Buchan
Bulldog Drummond Stories   "Sapper" (H C McNeile)
Private Spud Tamson    R W Campbell
The Biggles Stories    Captain W E Johns
Sherlock Holmes Stories (His Last Bow)    Arthur Conan Doyle

Memoirs

Testament of Youth    Vera Brittain
Goodbye to All That    Robert Graves
A Passionate Prodigality    Guy Chapman
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston    Siegfried Sassoon
Undertones of War    Edmund Blunden
Wet Flanders Plain    Henry Williamson

Short Stories

The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

Testament of Youth; Introduction by Maddy Coelho

Vera Brittain's book was discussed at the Book Club's meeting on Monday 20 October. This book was the choice of Maddy Coelho, who kindly provided a copy of her introductory remarks:


"Testament of Youth was published in 1933, the first instalment in the memoir of Vera Brittain who was born in 1893.  It depicts the life of an ordinary, or perhaps not so ordinary, middle class young woman, living through an extraordinary time in history. The two main themes in the book are the impact of the First World War and feminism.  The interaction between these is made clear from the striking understatement of the very first sentence of the first chapter:

“When the Great War broke out, it came to me not as a superlative tragedy, but as an interruption of the most exasperating kind to my personal plans.”

So what were these ‘personal plans’?  In the two or three years leading up to the war, Vera’s ambitions have revolved mainly around achieving what she considers to be a ‘proper’ education, at Oxford, equal in quality and status to her brother Edward’s.  More conventionally, she also begins a romance with one of Edward’s Uppingham contemporaries, Roland Leighton.

But of course the advent of the war does interrupt these personal plans.  After a year at Oxford, Vera abandons her studies to work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse in London, Malta and France.  From this she gains a first-hand understanding of the impact of the war on both the soldiers, allies and enemies, and also on the civilians left behind.  The visceral horrors of front-line fighting are in stark contrast to the Brittain family’s middle-class problems with servants and rationing and Vera is positioned awkwardly at the juxtaposition between the two.

The general horrors of the war are, however, overshadowed by Vera’s more personal tragedies.  Roland, now her fiancé, dies at Christmas 1915.  From that moment on, there seems to be a sense of the inevitable – for both her and us, the readers – of just waiting for a similar fate to befall Edward.  Sure enough, in June 1915, he too is killed in action, just a few months before the end of the war.  And her two closest male friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, also die.

After the war, Vera returns to Somerville to complete her degree, but a sense of disillusionment and anti-climax casts a shadow over this achievement, which, just five years previously, had appeared to represent the pinnacle of her ambition.  We sense her quite remarkable and admirable eagerness to spend the rest of her life engaging with the real world, far from the dreaming spires.  And so the remainder of the book covers the beginning of her career in journalism, writing for Time and Tide and lecturing for the League of Nations and developing a strong ideology founded on socialism and pacifism.

In the introduction, Brittain describes how she originally intended to write of her experiences as a novel but was unable to achieve the necessary objective distance from the subject.  She then tried to publish her original diary from the war years with fictionalized names, but this also proved unworkable.  It is interesting to speculate on why the final format did work better than the first two.  The author’s stated intention was to make her story “As truthful as history, but as readable as fiction”.  Did she achieve that aim?  After reading the first reviews of Testament of Youth, which sold out its first print-run of 3,000 copies on publication day, Brittain wrote “Oh what a head-cracking week… Never did I imagine that the Testament would inspire such praise at such length, or provoke – in smaller doses – so much abuse.”  Eighty-one years on, at the centenary of the outbreak of the war which lies at the heart of this remarkable book, what acclaim – and criticism – would we lay on it today?"

Programme Updates as of 5 October 2014

Because his second novel, The Lives of Others, published in September, has been short-listed for the Man Booker prize, 2014, Neel Mukherjee - who was scheduled to talk to the WLS on 17th October - has had to ask for a postponement of the date. The Man Booker prize-winner will be announced on 14 October. Neel’s talk (which will include his reading from the novel) is therefore postponed until a later date, possibly on 14th or 21st November 2014, possibly in 2015. The novel, set in post-independence India, looks intensely at a particular upper middle-class Indian family, its servants and dependents, and at the involvement of one of the sons of the family in armed rebellion against the state. It is a large-scale, ambitious, passionate and rewarding novel. 

Denis Moriarty's talk on John Betjeman has been postponed from 5th to 12 December 2014.

The Rector of St Thomas' Winchelsea, has kindly agreed to talk to us about World War I Literature on Friday 17 October.