I’ll admit that I bought G. E. Trevelyan’s novel, Appius and Virginia, on the briefest of descriptions: “A story of a spinster who raises an ape in isolation in hopes of turning him into a man.” It seemed to promise another His Monkey Wife, John Collier’s sublime account of … well, as the title says. And, indeed, one of the consistent criticisms made of Appius and Virginia is that it’s not another His Monkey Wife.
Once I began reading, however, several things became clear. First, this is a riveting story. Taking in a few pages before turning over for the night, I ended up staying up for fifty pages and finished the book the next day. As Leonora Eyles wrote when she reviewed the book for the TLS on its first publication, “There are times when it is painful to go on reading, but impossible to shirk it….” Second, if there is anything comedic about Appius and Virginia, it’s only in the sense that Balzac used the term “comedy.”
There is nothing farcical here. Instead, this is the tragedy of two souls utterly incapable of understanding each other. Virginia Hutton, a single woman deep into spinsterhood, decides to undertake an experiment. She purchases an infant orangutan she christens Appius and raises him in complete isolation, treating him in every way as if he was a human child: “If it succeeded she would indeed have achieved something. She would have created a human being out of purely animal material, have forced evolution to cover in a few years stages which unaided it would have taken aeons to pass….”
The price of failure, however, is absolute: “… if this experiment failed her existence would no longer be justified in her own sight.” The alternative to throwing herself completely into the experiment is continuing to living in her single woman’s club in Earl’s Court, “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus”: “an existence subdued and rounded and worn smooth by the little comforts and habits of her warm nonentity.”
And so as the book opens, we find Virginia sitting in the nursery of the cottage to which she has taken Appius, watching him sleep in the crib. Each time he attempts to burrow into his blanket, she commands, “Head out!” Night after night, through relentless repetition, she will teach Appius to sleep like a human. This is the sum of her technique. Caring for Appius, keeping the house, tending to the yard and garden, avoiding in every way possible not only any contact between Appius and any other ape but also any disclosure of the experiment to any other human being.
Gradually — very gradually — her efforts produce some effects. She gets Appius to say her name: “Ma-ma.” She manages to train him to feed himself with a spoon. Through years of daily training, she teaches him to read.
Or so she assumes. In fact, Appius merely learns to recognize the pictures in the lesson book and to produce the sounds he has come to know that “Ma-ma” will make as Virginia reads and repeats the text to him. Nearly none it reflects the cognition she thinks is going on. Instead, Trevelyan shows how very different is Appius’s understanding of his world compared to Virginia’s. One night, he watches a thunderstorm from his nursery window:
Blackness. Big moving things. Big still things. Big black things. Stillness, whiteness, dazzle.
White lights shooting: bright blades cleaving the black branches. Big silent things swaying and shiverying. Big moving things rotating: bending, sinking, swaying, crouching under the light.
Dazzle, giddiness. Blackness, brightness. Round and round, down and down.
In the first few years, Virginia seems impervious to the effects of her constant physical and mental toil: “The constant excitement, the unrelaxed tension, the unwavering hope, intermittently fed by minute signs, that before long he would communicate with and understand her, these not only sustained her through each day; she flourished upon them.” Appius, on the other hand, does not understand the pictures, does not understand the meaning of the sounds he has learned to make, does not understand the sounds that “Ma-ma” makes. “What was she saying now? He’d better repeat it, or she’d shake him, and then he’d be jerked right up into the nursery so suddenly that he wouldn’t be able to get back again for a long time.”
Appius’ progress slows, of course, and the years of constant work wear Virginia down. The kitchen grows black with filth, dust accumulates everywhere, the garden goes to weed. Virginia spends hours reading to Appius and the ape is happy to sit, comfortable and half asleep, in her arms, one hand on hers. “They had discovered the perfect relationship,” Virginia thinks. “Darling child, you can’t know how lonely mama was before she had you.” But of course, Appius truly can’t know how lonely mama was. Neither can Virginia understand that Appius has learned nothing more than to reproduce desired actions and sounds.
One could read Appius and Virginia as an allegory for marriage or the relationships between men and women in general. Indeed, one could argue that Trevelyan demonstrates that understanding may be secondary or even completely dispensable in a relationship. In reality, the only thing Appius and Virginia share is coexistence. In Virginia’s case, though, this is preferable to the invisible nonexistence of an aging single woman in the city. Which is why Appius and Virginia may be one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written.
Better God’s creatures should teach us to be more like them! What a selfish, self-absorbed, self-serving, useless, narcissistic, abusive human.