time passages
Diana Athill is an English writer and editor, born in 1917, who has recently written a memoir about aging called Somewhere Towards the End. A fine title, that. She has just written an essay about Vera Brittain’s famous memoir of her service as a nurse in the Great War, Testament of Youth. Here’s an excerpt:
I must confess that, reading this book soon after its publication in 1933, . . . what came across to me . . . was her self-importance and heavy earnestness, and I (a very new-fledged pacifist) disliked the way she wrote as though she alone had suffered in the war, romanticising it even as she abhorred it. . . . Of course war was unspeakably vile — but what a tiresomely melodramatic woman this one was!
So it was a surprise to pick her book up now and discover how very good it is.
I’m trying to wrap my mind around this, but it’s not easy: to read a book in 1933 and then come back to it in 2009 . . . to have a sufficiently good memory to recall the first experience, seventy-six years ago, and to compare one’s current experience to it . . . that’s pretty remarkable. To read it the first time when Ramsay MacDonald was Prime Minister, the Weimar Republic was collapsing, and virtually the whole world was in a deep economic depression — and then to come back to it now. It boggles the mind, is what it does.
I have always thought that, among famous people anyway, the one who lived through the most extraordinary period of change in human history was George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was born in Dublin 1856 and died in 1950. That is, he was born when the railroad was still a new technology and died when the Space Race was just beginning. When Shaw came into this world, there was still hope of averting civil war in America, where Franklin Pierce was President; he lived into the Truman administration, and saw on film the Holocaust and Hiroshima. I have never quite been able to get over this.
Thomas Hardy is also a good candidate for those kinds of musings.
— Freddie · May 16, 04:23 AM · #
My grandfather was roughly the same age as Shaw,(1855 to 1948) though much less celebrated. But neither Shaw nor my grandfather saw the “Holocaust”. They both read the news reports and saw the photos, but the phenomena we now treat as the “Holocaust” were less consolidated.
— Bill Harshaw · May 16, 03:15 PM · #
I’m a recent Diana Athill fan who has the good fortune of working at the University of Tulsa, which has all the Andre Deutsch material, including her voluminous correspondence with authors since 1951. I’m hoping to edit a collection of her letters—wonderful stuff.
— Joli Jensen · May 17, 08:55 PM · #