VIVID MEMOIR

Muste, A. J.

Vivid Memoir Testament of Experience, by Vera Brittain. Macmillan. 480 pp. $5. Reviewed by A. J. Muste THIS IS a tightly packed book of nearly five hundred pages. Vera Brittain is a highly...

...And now that the weapons which men attempt to use in "the nice adjustment of threat and concession" are H-bombs and I.C.B.M.'s, what kind of people shall we be...
...Testament of Experience is quite as much a rehearsal of the main events of a quarter century (including the advent of Hitlerism, World War II, and the launching of the atomic age) as seen by one who was both a participant in those events and a commentator on them in prose and verse...
...Its basis was political, but the message of my fellow-speakers sprang from the love of God...
...It gives, for example, a quite detailed account of twenty-five years of marriage to George Edward Gordon Catlin whom a number of readers of The Progressive have probably encountered as a teacher in American universities or as a lecturer on international affairs and political philosophy...
...Miss Brittain goes on to make some profound comments on the short run point of view—the argument that you will not convert the majority of the nation to pacifism soon enough to avert war—versus the long run point of view which she came to embrace: "the same argument applied to all forms of revolutionary teaching, costly and often dangerous to its interpreters, which visualized life in terms of a society still to come...
...This in 1938...
...Ultimately it is a clash between two religions...
...This Christian pacifist platform was like no other on which I had ever stood...
...In spite of the seriousness and solidity of the material in this book, readers—and it should have many of them—will be carried along by the narrative and often intrigued and fascinated...
...Nor do I think this is because I happen to share this pacifist conviction...
...It is a chronicle made vivid on nearly every page by personal reminiscences of leading figures in many lands...
...She writes: "By the time my turn came I was panic stricken...
...She had already begun to have doubts about the League which "had become a French-dominated instrument for continuing the unjust status quo...
...And how being a writer (23 books) and a public figure, on the one hand, and a wife and mother, on the other, works out and sometimes almost doesn't is set forth candidly in the pages of this book...
...In a crisis people find out what they are...
...Her V answer was in the negative...
...Vera Brittain is a highly competent craftsman...
...Only the lovely cadences of Gounod's Ave Maria, swelling to the vaulted roof of the tall church as G and I signed the register, had symbolized those poig-nant memories...
...Moreover, Miss Brittain had, as...
...In the summer of 1936 Miss Brittain, who had lectured throughout England on the League of Nations and collective security, was invited to speak at Dorchester to an audience of 15,000 people...
...here my customary little speech in support of collective security would strike a discordant note...
...But those memories were, of course, a major element in the early years of marriage during ' which Testament of Youth got itself i written in the midst of frequent journeys and the arrival of children...
...The present book begins: "When G and I were married on June 27th, 1925, the First World War was seven years behind us . . . Hardly a shadow of the griefs and conflicts which had dominated the past decade hung over the cozy, conventional reception...
...It is likely that this aspect of the book will be the most useful and interesting to the general reader...
...To me, however, the most impressive and moving sections of the book are those in which Miss Brittain describes her conversion to pacifism and comments on various aspects of her faith in the way of non-violence and love...
...The book is several things...
...Religious pacifism became the foundation and center of her being, the outcome of deep and often painful experience, of direct contact with modern war, and of prolonged research and reflection...
...she puts it, dedicated herself in the months following the Armistice (1918) "to a future which was less a 'career' than a devotional crusade...
...All of the other featured speakers were Christian pacifists...
...Miss Brit-tain's earlier, famous Testament of Youth, published in 1933 told the story of English youth in World War I and the death of her own young lover...
...As a young bride she asked herself whether "it could really be my duty now, to sacrifice a redemptive faith...
...She calls attention to a brilliant bit of analysis of these contrasting approaches by Kingsley Martin in The New Statesman in 1938: "The pacifist regards the refusal to fight as obedience to a universal obligation, while the advocate of collective security is a politician whose attitude is determined by circumstances . . . Obviously a threat may keep the peace at a particular moment, but equally obviously it brings no hope for the world in the future . . . War has become a monstrously inefficient instrument . . . The division lies between those who think that it is still worthwhile making the attempt to defeat the Fascist peril by . . . that nice adjustment of threat and concession which is called diplomacy, and those who are so sure that any display of force will only breed war that they retire from the immediate struggle, hoping that . . . they may at least direct men's attention to the choice of better methods in the long run...
...to the personal needs of a husband and later a family...

Vol. 21 • December 1957 • No. 12


 
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