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.
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.
In the case of Robert Thomas this ‘noise’ is not just a metaphor, but a traumatizing reality. Robert Thomas is a young graduate chemist stuck in the monotony of production, living in the seclusion of lodgings, alone with his own grand designs, whose encounter with Katherine Bott, a teacher of necessity rather than vocation, unifies the two parallel lives that drive the narrative forward. With Robert and Katherine, Trevelyan created a pair of remarkably unsympathetic protagonists – neither of whom are overly endowed with strength of character or conviction, both with the ability to say a lot without saying anything at all, and ultimately willing to yield to the demands of convention. But, they are precisely these deficits that allow Trevelyan the freedom to explore a duality of the one idea: progress happens; progress can be a stabilizing factor for social order and improvement, or progress can be messy and disruptive and create new inequalities. The courtship of Robert and Katherine, their marriage, their choices, their falling apart while still staying together; all this symbolic of the conflicts going on about them – at home and in the big wide world – and suggests that a resolution comes only with compromise and at a high cost: the parties involved are almost always compromised.
David Trotter makes some interesting references in his LRB piece, some of which I must mention; some requiring a browse back on my part, and some more than that – to be pursued on another day.
Firstly, Trotter sees many of the notions, as put forward by, for instance, Ian Colvin, to be nothing new rather a continuum from the previous century when contrasts were already being made between the rapidly modernizing West and the still traditional, labor-intensive East. Here, he gives as an example an essay written by Charles Dickens and Richard Horne for Household Words in 1851, and via the wonders of the internet available here. There are a couple of passages where information is delivered numerically in a style that – minus that peculiarly Dickensian flair – could have been an idea-giver to some of Colvin’s thoughts presented in his Universal History chapter (and, it follows, as Colvin is for Trevelyan), but the message is subtly (or not?) other: his emphasis is on the replacement of human labour by machines whilst Dickens and Horne, writing in the mid-19th century and only a few years before Dickens published Hard Times (first serialized in Household Words by the way) were moved by the de-humanization of labor through unfettered industrialization and its replacement by mechanization, and wanted to imagine a progress that mitigated this effect and was beneficial to the whole life of the worker. In terms of Trevelyan’s novel, Trotter has Katherine at least flirting with this latter notion, but then Katherine flirts with a lot of things and was generally more committed to the idea that progress in all its myriad of components was good for the working classes, whilst Robert remains his skeptical self; his commitment is to facts and evidence – as he is of the communists so is he wary of those striving for progress at all costs. Again, their anxiousness and, by extension, that of society, is telling, and only exacerbated by an attempt to rise above the masses and shroud practical dilemmas in a veil of theoretical jargon.
Then, there is The Years, a Woolf late work with which Trotter claims Two Thousand Million Man-Power bears comparison. Now, with the exception of both being essentially ‘London’ novels and both having been published in 1937, I would not immediately have thought of that comparison. And in terms of place, Trevelyan, irrespective of her diligent social-realist pen, would always come up short – very few can bring the historical London streets and nook and crannies to life with the ghostly grace and aplomb of Woolf. And having spent an awful lot of time previously castigating the blokes on their flights into social-realism, whatever Woolf’s original intentions (see The Pargiters), The Years did not go there. Trotter states that real world, real time, allusions remain (Mussolini!), but I guess I have forgotten – or didn’t recognize them in the first place.
Speaking of the blokes. Trotter also recognizes similarities between Trevelyan’s novel and the works of one of those – Woolf’s forever literary (not personal) antagonist, Arnold Bennett, specifically his Clayhanger Family trilogy (or quartet). Of Bennett and his work I have mostly only the Woolf version of (and whilst having previously been prompted to do so, I admit to not having pursued the matter); especially through her wonderful essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in which he has a starring role, adequately supported by his Clayhanger protagonist Hilda Lessways – if only to be boo-ed from the stage. I find it, therefore, surprising that Trevelyan should find inspiration in two (at the time) diametrically opposed literary traditions (as described by Woolf in response to Bennett’s criticism). Or maybe not. Perhaps that’s her point – they don’t have to stand in opposition but rather can complement one another.
Still speaking of blokes: there is this December 2020 piece from The Guardian titled ‘If she was a bloke, she’d still be in print’: the lost novels of Gertrude Trevelyan concerning the reissue of Trevelyan’s first novel Appius and Virginia, first published in 1932. (Yes, I know, it just had to be a Virginia! And I will be reading it. The very premise demands that I do so!) The quote in the header does not come directly from him but I would be remiss in not mentioning Brad Bigelow, who is single-handedly responsible for the rediscovery of Trevelyan. Bigelow who lives in this wonderful corner of the internet called Neglected Books writes the afterword for the edition of Two Thousand Million Man-Power read by me and will be involved in the reissue of other of her titles. (Here is the tag collection on his website where all sorts of information and reviews can be browsed.)
So hermetic was her life that there are so many things we don’t know about Gertrude Trevelyan, but about the circumstances surrounding her death we do know some things: During the Blitz of October 1940 her flat in Notting Hill was bombed leaving her gravely injured; and she died at her parent’s home in Bath on 22 February of the next year. The death certificate further stated that she suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis, which leads one to wonder whether this doesn’t go some way to explaining the life of relative solitude she appeared to choose. She was only thirty-seven years old and had written an extraordinary eight novels.
At about the same time that Trevelyan’s flat was hit, a few kilometers away on the other side of Regent’s Park, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury residence suffered the same fate; fortuitously they had relocated to their Sussex home. But Fortune doesn’t always favor the brave; as Fate would have it, Virginia was to die only weeks after Trevelyan on 28 March 1941. A very different death, of course, but Woolf apparently shared with Trevelyan various degrees of vulnerability, and both were somehow casualties of Civilization as it was in their time – the terror brought by War and what that could do to the body and mind.
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