Autumn is it absolutely not in the south of Germany! The warmest of sunshine, leaves barely tinged and little change in sight. But nevertheless it is a good time to start planning for days indoor. For this “The Guardian” has some good suggestions. Not necessarily those mentioned above in their pulled quote, though by Streisand I could be tempted. Of the others, some expected and therefore of no surprise: Zadie Smith, Mary Beard, Emily Wilson. And one who I will be particularly thrilled to read again after all her travails in the last few years: Jesmyn Ward – for this I have been waiting.
No, they have not been thoroughly read, but I can say the headers and quick scans of each suggest – more than suggest – high praise, and sung in unison. Which would delight the Muses no end. Emily Wilson, herself, seemed particularly taken with The Bulwark (not known to me – looks really interesting, but mostly sub. based) piece. As she tweeted:
Wonderful Iliad review in The Bulwark. “Wilson’s deep love for and understanding of the Iliad…shine throughout this superb translation. The completion of her verse Homer amounts to nothing less than the renewal of an English poetic tradition”. https://t.co/xvN3rpIyhc
Beyond the book, gossipy even (and adventurous: wouldn’t you like an assignment that takes you to Ithaca? And not that one in the Empire State), is Judith Thurman’s piece for The New Yorker“How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern”. An entertaining read, though the “modern” of the title, if one is to understand correctly Wilson’s comments in the above thread where she makes a point of voicing her displeasure at a simple reception with the claim of “modernizing Homer”, is probably misplaced. Also, Charlotte Higgins’ piece in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago writes of the the technical choices Wilson contended with in her translation of the Iliad that culminated in today’s publication.
And at Lit Hub, Emily Wilson in conversation with her friend, Madeline Miller, reveals further insights into her methodology as a translator, the psychological depth of Homer’s poetry and into her character interpretations – also a great read:
And, finally, a diary entry unto myself: BBC Radio 4Start the Week on Monday, 2 October – “The Iliad and the right to rule”. Adam Rutherford and his guests EMILY WILSON, Mary Beard and Ben Riley-Smith “explore the battle for power and the right to rule”.
I look forward so much to reading, reflecting upon, living with, this Iliad just as I did a couple of years ago withthe Odyssey ‘according to Emily Wilson’ so to speak – a year long project that gave me great personal pleasure. But, first, I must get the book! And that seems easier said than done at the moment – in Germany at least!* But it does mean I can mull over a good (and doable) reading (and writing) schedule without undue haste. Until then.
*Reluctantly in the end I accepted Amazon delivery out of the US in a couple of weeks.
Of lists & threads – of the information they impart & the tale they weave
From my recent post and having been inspired by the newly (by me) discovered Gertrude Trevelyan and, therefore, as ever, by musings on Woolf, as one who had (probably) inspired her (and in more ways than the room and 500 quid), I had thought to write some more on the Pargiters. But, as I am only right now going about, and rather ponderously at that, re-reading and writing up Woolf’s diary that covers that period immediately following her speech to the National Society for Women’s Service on 21 January 1931 from which The Years (as lived by the Pargiter family) would evolve (and not in the way Woolf had at that time envisaged), I realize now this to be a more complex exercise than I thought; it seems there is a lot to be said on literary method and creative choices, and deserving, therefore, of greater attention. Simply said: this, whilst not exactly relegated to the bucket list, a task to be held in abeyance until I have pulled the very many threads together to do it justice.
…as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time […] so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal …
On which, then, this thread must find an end … but just before finishing up on Trevelyan’s book (and the Trevelyans), it has occurred to me that I didn’t previously emphasize one particular characteristic enough. From the very first page, the novel’s narrative is interspersed by the listing of factual events – some short, some long; from close to home and from far shores; some of historical significance such that they are still familiar but very many now lost in the passing years; and which David Trotter in his essay variously refers to as a “database”, “news crawl”, or as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time. But they are so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal, often reflecting out of or into Katherine’s classroom, or Robert’s lab or bed-sit.
An unusual stylistic choice, and one that could easily date a book; and one that may have contributed to Trevelyan’s novel disappearing into obscurity for so long – others perhaps making the (superficially based) decision that later and contemporary readers would be put off by (or ignorant of) the real world goings on during those between the wars years.
Finally, I end with the admission that I can not think of a book quite like Two Thousand Million Man-Power. (Writing about the same time but on a grander scale, Dos Passos – sorry a gap in my education! – is mentioned as one employing a similar methodology.) Coming to my mind is only a song – albeit, a list song – that tracks the post-war years in the second half of the century, and that has special significance to me (another story!). Radically different, yet with something in common, these two listings of the people and events of different generations – strewn realities to be made palpable, and therefore relatable, only with the sensory overload stimulated by the natural phenomena of noise and fire respectively. Take it away … Mr. Billy Joel!
David Trotter’s review in the LRB of the re-discovered and re-published novel, Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan was interesting enough such that I downloaded a copy post-haste. And I read it likewise. Not so the writing up, but then both the novel and the review encouraged some deeper reflections on my part.
Enough that Trotter begins: “Gertrude Trevelyan lived the Virginia Woolf dream: £500 a year and a room of one’s own in which to write experimental novels. […]” And enough that that room has been foremost on my mind (again!) during the last days.
Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan Boiler House Press, 297 pp., November 2022, 978 1 913861 85 8
Whilst now finding herself published as Gertrude T., the times in which the writer lived were such that this and her other works were originally put out in a frenzied world by the androgynous (sounding) ‘G.E.’. Whether this had been her own decision, suggested to or forced upon her, who could say, but it may well have been also a personal swipe at the dynastic overgrowth and the familial predilection to initials. Where exactly she, formerly known as G.E., fits into this constellation is anyone’s guess. To name but a few: there was that distant cousin (so says Trotter): G.M. Trevelyan. But also his elder brothers: C.P, who got the title and the middle brother R.C. – ‘BobTrev’ to his friends, including the Woolfs (this not mentioned by Trotter), and as ‘Bob’ frequently mentioned in Virginia Woolf’s diary and in her letters. It is, though, the first said, George Macaulay T., that gets the treatment in A Room of One’s Own – the preeminent historian of his time was after all just there for the blokes!
History scarcely mentions her. And I turned to Professor Trevelyan again to see what history meant to him […] Occasionally an individual woman is mentioned, an Elizabeth, or a Mary; a queen or a great lady. But by no possible means could middle-class women with nothing but brains and character at their command have taken part in any one of the great movements which, brought together, constitute the historian’s view of the past. […]She never writes her own life and scarcely keeps a diary; there are only a handful of her letters in existence. She left no plays or poems by which we can judge her. What one wants, I thought—and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it?—is a mass of information; at what age did she marry; how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like, had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of it.
Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own (Kindle Locations 547-555). Kindle Edition.
This comes after Woolf has unsuccessfully excavated G.M. Trevelyan’s History of England (1926) in search of women through the ages, mused that the contemporary student (of say Newnham) could do such research better than her, and then would be inspired to famously imagine that Shakespeare had a sister called Judith. (The part of the essay that everyone remembers!)
David Trotter claims in his review of Gertrude Trevelyan’s novel that the unusual – obscure, even – title of the book, divulging scant hint of the narrative to follow, derives from a chapter written by Ian Colvin in the final volume of a certain – also, obscure – Universal History of the World in 1927. There is little reason to doubt this. Only in the reading does the title make sense.
Having said that, I admit to some uncertainty as to the sense in which the novel was conceived and intended to be received. Does Trevelyan want to instruct, convert, persuade? Is she calling upon the reader’s good sense of being a citizen of the world – a common sense to navigate a society undergoing radical change? Or is it more personal than that – a work of introspection? An attempt to reconcile the sensory from within with the reality from without? This latter I find plausible – also imaginative and daring. Any wonder that I am undecided when the author may well have been herself, and is studiously tracing her changing perspective in this her chosen narrative.
It may be (as Trotter suggests) that Gertrude Trevelyan was thinking about something that could be broadly described as a novel of ideas – a philosophical tract on the social (dis)order arising out of the inherent (but surely not irreconcilable?) tensions between labor and commerce and, within that context, man and machine. And, then, found in the writing, her own positions were anything but fixed; shifting with the same tempo as the society about her; Trevelyan calling upon her own sensory attributes and experience to navigate through her own journey of rational discovery – in a literary sense – and illustrated well by her characters’ growing sensitivity to the pulsation of progress about them, the growing ‘noise’ of modernity.
[…]He goes home and has supper and lights a pipe while he waits for the wireless stations to close down at ten. He sits and smokes, feet on fender, and waits for the noise to stop. Twenty thousand new houses erected in one year, two hundred and seven persons killed in London streets in three months, wireless station, one of the world’s greatest, completed at Rugby, motor firm turns out forty-eight thousand seven hundred and twelve cars in 1925 against three hundred and thirty-seven in 1919, it is found necessary to install soundproof floors in a mammoth block of flats in Park Lane, the B.B.C. institutes a transmission of dance music until midnight — “dance music the backbone of British broadcasting” — every day with the exception of Sundays. Robert clenches his teeth and tries to concentrate: he thinks if he had Katherine there to keep him to it he might be able to get more done.
Trevelyan, Gertrude. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (p. 64). Boiler House Press. Kindle Edition.
On hearing last week that a digitized version of Virginia Woolf’s personal copy of her first novel The Voyage Out is now freely available, I read around the many reports including at the BBC (a Radio 4 news report had been my first source), and linked to a timely article by Mark Byron from the University of Sydney (where the original resides) in The Conversation. This article I have now republished here.
Here now is the link to the University of Sydney library – with a well formatted web version of Woolf’s book; also available for download as pdf. The accompanying description alerts one to Woolf’s revisions in Chapter 16 (pp.249-267 [web-tool/pdf 262-284] with typed paste-ins on pages 254 and 256) and Chapter 25 (pp.398-432 [411-445] with a number of deletions) in preparation for the book’s US publication in 1920.
Original copy published by Duckworth & Co., London, 1915.My own 1991 Penguin paperback
A glance to her diary is informative in this regard. Virginia Woolf writes on 28th November 1919, that two parties are interested in both The Voyage Out and Night and Day and their publication appears likely, and a footnote confirms that to be the case – with George H. Doran of New York becoming Woolf’s first American publisher [see The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 1]. Then, the on 4th February 1920 she writes:
The morning from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know – such a harlequinade as it it is – such an assortment of patches – here simple & severe – here frivolous & shallow – here like God’s truth – here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn – & then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole i like the womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences – & my word, what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find, vulgarisms – crudities rather – that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D. – I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two (1920-1924)
Woolf’s tone in the private space of her diary suggests, irrespective of the blush, some pride in her younger self. Remember, as “Melymbrosia”, her book first started taking form as early as 1907, and remember, too, as Virginia surely would have, her severe mental illness during many of those preceding years. That Virginia must be respected.
At the Internet Archive is a copy of the Doran first edition, and it appears to me those corrections suggested by Woolf’s annotations in this newly ‘found’ treasure were adopted only in part – the paragraphs she suggests in Chapter 16 were indeed included (quite how, and what if anything was omitted only a more thorough look on my part will reveal) but those in Chapter 25 that she (?) suggested be deleted seem to remain in full in the US publication. This latter is particularly interesting; I could imagine Woolf mulling over whether Rachel’s feverish state may be interpreted as something close to her own mental agonies over the years. Leaving aside the veracity of my hypothesis and Woolf’s intentions, I have always found Rachel’s torment through those days and nights extraordinarily vivid. It must have been lived. Virginia lived through it. Rachel did not.
Virginia’s book has made quite a ‘voyage’ of its own. Presumably beginning in a room of her own (though the writing and editing of her first novel predates her actually having a room of her own – that did not come her way until 1919) in London and/or Sussex, onwards to her literary estate and its executors, somehow turning up in a bookshop in Lewes from whence it was sold in 1976 – were they mad, or was this simply a failure to predict the market potential? – to an Antipodean university, whereupon it was promptly (?) lost into the cavernous depths of the science section – were THEY mad? An ABC report explains the chain of events up until the book’s reemergence in 2021. To which we can only say: god bless literate, curious and alert Metadata Service Officers!
“Exit Hector, Again and Again: How Different Translators Reveal the ‘Iliad’ Anew” by Emily Wilson, The New York Times, June 28, 2023.
In English alone there are about 100 translations of Homer’s Iliad; to which we may add Emily Wilson’s new translation (to be published in September presumably). Her excellent comparative essay in The New York Times shows the range of interpretive possibilities of Homer’s epic poem through the ages – from the original to George Chapman in 1611 through to the contemporary culminating with that of her own (a sneak preview if you will!), in various metrical forms and not, rhyming and not – and exemplified in the memorable scene when Hector bids farewell to Andromache and his baby son (book 6. 482-497).
Wilson shares her translation of this passage. Again, as she did with Ulysses, she uses the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and Milton, and her vocabulary choices and turn of phrase in this small sample already recall to me very much that work. And reminds me how very much I have been looking forward to her Iliad.
Essays are a favorite ‘filler’ if you will – ideal reading material when time is limited, on train or plane, when sleep escapes. And, there can’t be much better than those from Joan Didion who so magnificently chronicled the America of the sixties through to the new millennium. And (courtesy Amazon Prime), that is to whom I have flown of late. And, as coincidence would have it, in the form of her legendary collection, “The White Album”, from which this NYT piece last week springs, and in which the writer and academic, Timothy Denevi, is inspired by the release by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum of the Jean Stein Personal Papers that includes an audio recording of an interview Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, gave to Jean Stein in 1971.
The first and title essay of the collection has almost legendary status; in the first instance for its opening sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” (An oft quoted statement that has come to profoundly mean anything – or nothing at all!) But, more generally, for its sweeping panorama of the social and cultural landscape of the sixties and seventies told through diverse narratives – I mean, the whole kit and caboodle are touched upon: Vietnam, Black Panthers, Manson, The Doors, Joplin, and so forth, and including of course dead Kennedys. And it is on this latter, specifically the circumstances behind why we find Didion watching Robert Kennedy’s funeral on television at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968, and that seemingly corresponding to an appalling mental health diagnosis revealed in this opening section of her essay, that has evidently been speculated upon by a faction out there in literary nirvana that could be labelled (Denevi does so) as Didionologists. Now, I haven’t ever given too much thought to the whys and wherefores of her brief mention of being in Hawaii at this time, but presumably for the über Didion fan there must be more to the story.
And they were not wrong it seems. For, in considering the interview with Stein, it is clear from Denevi’s article that it was there in the glaring light of Hawaii in that first week of June 1968 that Joan Didion became overwhelmed by the darkness engulfing her country, became acutely aware of its cemented inequalities and lack of cohesion and, as observed by her in Hawaii, the delusional state of her fellow country men and women – their obsessions; their consumerism; their opportunism and an extreme self-possession: JFK, MLK, RFK – well, WTF, not my problem.
A whole nation was in the midst of a breakdown and belonged on the couch. Hardly to be wondered that it was there that Didion soon landed on her return to Los Angeles. Nor that, upon reflection and with or without a clinical diagnosis, she would have found her symptoms unsurprising.
[…] By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 15). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Dunne and Didion revealed in the Jean Stein interview the profound affect Bobby Kennedy’s murder had upon them, and how they saw it as the culmination of years of societal disturbance, what Dunne called “the final unraveling of a very dark tapestry”.
Unfortunately, Stein’s audio tapes are not available on-line so I can only give credence to Tim Denevi’s version, but a very thoughtful, well-informed one it appears to be. He may not be one of those above mentioned -ologists, but he is obviously an admirer of Didion and well-versed in the cultural time that she has come to personify. A really interesting read, to which I would only add two further vignettes from the essay.
Firstly, towards the end of that horror year, one cold rainy morning, Didion was driving between Sacramento and San Francisco on her way to report on the latest campus “revolution” when a line from Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: Petals on a wet black bough began pulsating in her head. At the end of the day she considers whether “[the petals] represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie…”. An interesting interpretation. A very famous line for sure, but she doesn’t say whether it may had been planted there by a particular episode, the state of society in general or at least as she saw it or her state of mind – these last two being the sort of same thing anyway. This perhaps something else for the Didionologists!
And, then, in August 9 1969, Didion is in a swimming pool in Beverley Hills when she hears about the murders at the Tate Polanski house on Cielo Drive. Contradictory, seemingly bizarre, reports and rumours spread like wild-fire. Everyone is appalled, but …
I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.
Didion, Joan. The White Album: Essays (p. 42). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
Towards the end of the essay, Joan Didion writes that many in Los Angeles believed this day to be the abrupt end of the sixties. She says: The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
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