The anonymous TLS reviewer described G. E. Trevelyan’s third novel, As It Was in the Beginning (1934) as “almost unreadable in its intensity.” Thumbing through the book after getting it in the mail last month, I could see that was an apt assessment, and somewhat dreaded the level of attention I would have to devote to it.
Thank God for airplanes. I have by now developed a reliable regime in which I strap myself into the seat and strap myself into a book and fairly successfully tune out the rest of the world for however long the flight takes. And so I took As It Was in the Beginning with me on a short work trip to Turkey this week. It proved a wise decision, particularly when we sat on the tarmac in Istanbul for several hours waiting for some mechanical work.
As It Was in the Beginning takes place entirely in the mind of Millicent — Lady Chesborough, widow of Lord Harold — as she lies in a nursing home bed in the last days before her death from the effects of a stroke. Childless, her only visitor is one of her late husband’s nieces. Nurses come in and go out, always adjusting her sheets, lifting her numb left arm as they do. Her thoughts dwell on Phil, the young man she took as a lover, who left her not long before.
This is a tour-de-force of stream of consciousness writing and construction. As Millicent lies in bed flowing in and out of consciousness, she revisits repeatedly certain moments from her life, rerunning these memories as one sometimes does in the same way as a bit of song gets caught in the head. The servant coming to her in the garden of the house at Chesborough, which she had turned into a rehabilitation hospital for wounded soldiers, with a small orange envelope bearing the message that Harold had been killed on the Western Front. Her sense of dread at that sight, combined with her fear that the young man she was tending to would sense her distress. Phil’s approaching her in the lounge of the hotel in Brighton where they met: if there hadn’t been that shelf under the table that forced her to turn herself sideways, facing the entrance, would they not have met?
At the same time, though, Trevelyan gradually and almost imperceptibly steps Millicent back through her life. She traces her affair with Phil from his leaving in anger over her refusal to purchase a new automobile to their road trips in his first one, their nights out in London as she scanned the faces in clubs and restaurants, wondering who took her for an old fool, to their first meeting there in Brighton. And though her longing for Phil and her self-recriminations — both for losing him and giving in to his dubious romancing — remain constants in her thoughts, we see her in the first years as a widow, in the claustrophobic world of Chesborough, where “I always felt I was something very small cowering inside a figure labelled The Squire’s Wife.” She leaves for London, where she can enjoy the freedom of anonymity:
It was like a tonic, sometimes, to stroll along the High Street in the sunshine and hardly be glanced at. And in a ‘bus one person is very much like another. I remember being grateful, even, to a ‘bus conductor, when he punched a ticket and pushed it at me, looking the other way. Just the right amount of notice. One must have a ticket: one exists. But not expected to be anything.
This view of life as older woman in London contrasts with that of the spinster in her first novel, Appius and Virginia: “Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the ‘bus … and the half compassionate, half contemptuous had of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle, as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement.”
But unlike Virginia Hutton, who sought ferociously to imprint her will upon another being, Millicent struggles throughout her life for a sense of identity. Much of the time, she feels herself “there, but not in the body: watching it from the outside and feeling responsible for it, without having it firmly in hand. Having to creep back in to pull the strings.” Looking at herself in a mirror as a newlywed, she thinks, “I’m much too small for this huge room…. Harold ought to have married somebody imposing.”
The one place she feels most at peace is in a London cinema, where she can be lose all sense of herself:
People aren’t people, they haven’t any faces. And all quite quiet, looking at the screen. They’ve left their anxieties outside in the street, in that big, glaring porch with the big posters. They’ve chained them up. Anxieties, waiting and hissing outside.
So many people. That’s why they come here you know. In here they needn’t be people. It’s dark in here, it’s dark in my room, I like my room. And I’m not separate. I don’t think I am, I’m part of the darkness, and the people who aren’t people. All part of the darkness.
I’m like anyone else. All alike and nothing, staring at the screen.
Some reasons why Millicent has such a fragile sense of self become clear as we go back into her youth and childhood. The only child of a country doctor, her main playmates are Dick and Hilda, children of the local Lord, who make it clear her invitations are at their bidding. Her first brush at romance ends before it even begins, with the young man barely aware of her presence. Her parents have little time to spend with her. Her tutor, Miss Cresset, has little patience for her needs: “Tell me a story.” “You’re old enough to tell them to yourself.” Only her Nanny, open and affectionate, notices the strange absence in Millicent’s life:
“It’s nice when there’s nobody here.”
“Why, there never is anybody here, is there? You’re a funny little thing. Don’t you want to have other little girls and boys to play with?”
“There’s only Dick and Hilda.”
“Well, don’t you want to have them?”
“No.”
And even earlier: “Nanny, why am I inside this?” “Inside what?” “Arms and legs and things. Why am I inside it? It’s nasty.” And on to her earliest sensations: “And want and full and nothing, and want and warm and nothing. And want and want and want and want. Alone and alone and alone.” Her only sense of security comes at the very beginning: “Back, back: sheltering darkness and safe, yielding warmth…. Strong, perpetual beat of the dark.”
I found Trevelyan’s handling of the final rush back through infancy, through birth, back to the womb surprisingly moving. She manages to convey quite effectively how enormous and intimidating the world can seem to a little thing, particularly without a strong maternal presence, without any base from which to look out at the world. As Millicent nears her birth, she also nears her death and her thoughts reach out in desperation for her lost lover, Phil. You know exactly where this story is going, yet Trevelyan makes it intense and unfamiliar.
One could see As It Was in the Beginning as something of a set piece, the kind of assignment a writer might give herself to test and hone her skills. But this is far more than that. Trevelyan builds a powerful sense of a woman whose life was a constant struggle to reassure herself of her own identity — a struggle she often lost. Considering that she did it within the narrow confines of a single room in a nursing home and in the span of perhaps a week or less, it’s a bravura performance. Having read five of Trevelyan’s novel now, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that she was the only English woman writer of her generation to pick up Virginia Woolf’s baton and run with it. And sadly, due to injuries suffered in a Blitz raid on London, she died barely a month before Woolf at the early age of 37 and was quickly and utterly forgotten. The time for her rightful recognition is long overdue.
Reviews
- • Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1934
- Once again Miss Trevelyan has used her gifts of psychological insight and imagination to produce, in As It Was in the Beginning, a work of striking talent. And once again, as in Appius and Virginia and Hot House, she has written a book which is almost unreadable in its intensity, but which compels one to go on reading in spite of almost physical discomfort, by the admiration one feels for the author’s ingenuity and her uncanny insight into human beings….
- Miss Trevelyan has here chosen a more everyday type of character than she did in the other two, but even so she has not yet produced anything universal: the agonies, the twists, the cravings of futile and hapless people still obsess her; she has a genius for suffering and such power in describing it that the reader feels worn out after a few chapters. Should Miss Trevelyan ever write of beauty and kindliness, using for purposes of stimulation the powers which she now employs to sear and suffocate her readers, it is hard to set limits to what she might achieve.
- • Vernon Fane, “The Book World,” The Sphere, 2 June 1934
- “Technically interesting” is the description of Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s As It Was in the Beginning (Seeker. 7s. 6d.). Life is laid bare by comments and reveries and the sustained delusions which precede death.” There is a dearth of verbs an abundance of full stops a fumbling at word patterns. Technical fiddlesticks Miss Trevelyan is suffering from an overdose of Gertrude Stein.
- • Sheffield Independent, 21 May 1934
- As her previous novels (Appius and Virginia and Hot House) showed, Miss G. E. Trevelyan cannot be classed as a conventional novelist, but the strange technique she has used in her latest book, As It Was in the Beginning, though extremely interesting, proves rather irritating. The book is a mass of comments by a woman of fifty who is dying in a nursing home. These comments, reveries and delusions cover her whole life, gradually working back to her birth.
- • Aberdeen Press and Journal, 30 May 1934
- To translate into unemotional print the disjointed memories of a nursing home patient re-living the past before “death’s kiss” is a technical feat of daring, for another’s experiences presented in this form can be so easily boring. The fact that Miss Trevelyan succeeds. remarkably well in sustaining interest is at once a tribute to her skill and the pathos of her tale, the tale of a woman grown too old for love, her passion for a, man younger than herself, desperate, vain resistance of the attacks of old age, and the shock of his ultimate desertion. Here is all the tragedy of ari ageing woman unwilling to give up what she never had in youth. Memories, memories, an unhappy marriage, a boy and girl fruitless friendship, childhood (particular effective word-building) birth, and birth and death unite — “light and blinding space, blank and boundless and without shadow: stark unending light.”
- • The Tatler, 13 June 1934
- … if you are fond of pointing out to people in distress that we all must like of the beds of our own making, then Miss G. E. Trevelyan’s new novel, As It Was in the Beginning, is not for you. You will find in her a ruthless destroyer of that optimism which, in reality, is either a desire to be left emotionally undisturbed, or a pretty shelving of all life’s ugliness and pain on God’s understanding of what is best for us after all…. Not a pleasant story, nor a happy one.
- • Northern Whig and Belfast Post, 21 July 1934
- The cleverness of it is indisputable, it is also effective in passages, yet one cannot agree that this method has perceptible advantages over that adhered to by most of the writers of fiction.