A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan (1935)

I write this piece with a mixture of sadness and disappointment. Sadness because this is the last novel by the remarkable G. E. Trevelyan I have to write about. And disappointment because A War Without a Hero is not a book I would recommend to anyone not interested in becoming a G. E. Trevelyan completist.

Over the last year and a half, I have tracked down, either purchased (usually at greater expense that I’m used to) or copied (thanks to the British Library), read, and written about all eight novels that Trevelyan wrote between 1932 and 1939. And I’ve become convinced that her utter absence from any history or study of the English novel between the two wars has nothing to do with her merit or significance as a writer and everything to do with the tendency of literary academics to stick to well-travelled paths. I’ve contacted several dozen researchers specializing in this period over the last year and in every case had the same responses: ignorance (“Who? Never heard of her.”) and uninterest (“Good luck with your research. Goodbye.”).

G. E. Trevelyan, perhaps more than any writer of the generation that came after Virginia Woolf, followed Woolf’s advice in “A Room of One’s Own.” An only child whose father’s occupation on census forms is always listed as “independent means,” she came down from Oxford, found herself a flat in Kensington and went to work writing novels. Though she once said that she went through three drafts of every novel, she managed to produce eight in the space of as many years and in each case, to produce something that was not in any way like the others. It may have been health problems that kept her from developing a wider circle of connections to the literary world: though she died from injuries sustained when a German bomb hit her building, her death certificate also mentions that she suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis. She didn’t review other people’s books, didn’t get her photo taken at other people’s parties, didn’t travel much, didn’t lose herself to drink, sex, or politics. She sat in her room and wrote.

And took enormous creative risks. If she took anything from the example of Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, it was to commit fully to her artistic vision and hold nothing back in trying to realize it. In some cases — Appius and Virginia (1932); As It Was in the Beginning (1934); Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937); and William’s Wife — she succeeded. In others — Hot-House (1933); Theme with Variations; and Trance by Appointment — her experimentation had mixed results. And in the case of A War Without a Hero, she failed.

If she failed, it was not due to half-heartedness. In A War Without a Hero, Trevelyan built upon the experience of writing As It Was in the Beginning, which takes place entirely in the mind of a woman in her dying days and uses the stream of consciousness approach developed by Woolf, Richardson, May Sinclair and others of the generation before hers. Where As It Was involves one character’s thoughts and perceptions, A War interweaves the streams from multiple sources.

Unfortunately, none of these sources is fully convincing — and the story itself implausible if not unbelievable. The book opens as Ann Cavan, a London woman with some money and artistic interests, approaches the tiny Channel Island where she’s decided to lay low while waiting for her divorce decree. In her late twenties or early thirties, attractive, well-dressed and used to good food and fine accommodations, she has for no obvious reason set upon taking a room in a rough cottage on a tiny island accessible from a slightly larger and more populated one only at low tide.

Four people live in the house: Mrs. Hymes, a widow, her sons Matthew and Joshua, fishermen, and Davey, who is blind. They live off the fishing and a few cows and pigs that roam freely around the island. The cottage has no electricity and no running water. The island is enveloped in fog much of the time, rough and rocky all of it. This is not B&B territory.

Once settled in her upstairs room at the cottage, Ann quickly realizes there is nothing to do. She’s not a reader, not a sketcher or painter or whatever her vague artistic inclination might actually manifest itself as. And the Hymes are not much for conversation. Matthew and Joshua spend most of their time out fishing and when on land communicate in grunts and monosyllables. Mrs. Hymes is bitter, tired, and contemptuous of the silly useless woman renting her room. Davey spends his days doing little besides sitting in a chair outside the cottage.

“This is utterly hopeless and sickening and impossible,” Ann thinks early on in the book and it’s this sense that Trevelyan is most effective in expressing. Things like listening for hours to water drip from the gutters:

Water ran into the butt almost continuously. Foghorns boomed without an interval through the darkness. Revolution, earthquake, half London wiped out: lot of difference it would make, she thought bitterly. The drips were joining up, drip drip drip drip and then the pause of a heart-beat. And drip again, and pause, and drip, and drip drip dri-i-p, and a thin, trickling stream.

This is not fertile ground from which any vibrant drama is likely to spring … and it doesn’t. Ann convinces herself that Davey is a prisoner of his family’s ignorance and arranges to take him to London to see if a Harley Street specialist can restore his sight. Once Davey can see, Ann then decides the two of them will marry and break free of Mrs. Hymes’ tyranny.

But then they return to the island and make themselves at home in that upper bedroom. Able to see, Davey is transformed. Once a bore, he’s now a brute. Mrs. Hymes takes revenge by carrying out her own transformation, turning Ann from a woman of the world and into a slave:

Mrs. Hymes slapped their food on the table; she pinched her mouth. And him that’s been brought up so nice. Never let to get into no rough ways. She saw Annie standing, looking at him. “What you standing there for?” Gaping at him that you’ve done your best to drag him down and down. Done your best you have, and aren’t fit to black his boots. “Get out and shut up the chickens.”

And so it goes. Life on the island is nasty, brutish, and endless. Everything is painted in shades of grey. There is a lot of staring and hopelessness. A War Without a Hero is like the written equivalent of a bad art film. Fin.

Reviews in the Thirties tended to run under 300 words and offer little insight into a book, but in the case of A War Without a Hero, the reviewers took its measure with deadly accuracy:

• A. G. Macdonell, The Bystander:

It is very seldom that a true-blue, hard-boiled reviewer, born and bred in the trade — a tough baby, in fact — reads a book that makes him want to go and shoot himself. But if ever a book was liable to induce insanity, melancholia, tendencies towards suicide, inflammation of the eyes, and general Dostoievsky-complex, it is A War Without a Hero by Miss G. E. Trevelyan. Consider the plot for yourselves. Just run your eye over it and let me know by post-card, duly stamped, whether you think it is a reasonably likely one. An artistically-minded lady wants to be divorced from her husband. During the six-months time-lag she decides to go to a remote Channel Island, and there she lodges with a fearful family of illiterate yokels. One of them, David, a lad of twenty, is blind, and the artistic lady decides to marry him. This she does. Her life is then devoted to looking after this fiendishly dull, semi-witted youth and to washing up dishes and scrubbing floors in mid-Channel. I ask you. The real trouble about the book is that the moment the arty lady decides to marry the blind youth, all interest vanishes. You simply cannot believe that such a thing is possible, and the moment you find yourself doubting the possibility of a plot you find yourself either bored to tears, as with Miss Trevelyan, or excited beyond works, as with the late Mr. Edgar Wallace.

• Peter Quennell, The New Statesman:

A War Without a Hero is an intelligent book, but not very readable. Miss Trevelyan certainly knows how to write; but I wish that she did not mistake abruptness for vividness, and that her characters’ thoughts were not perpetually cropping up in broken bits and pieces of interior monologue scattered broadcast all over the printed text. Her story would be twice as impressive if it were half as long. Incidentally, the complete aimlessness of the central character — a young woman of means who marries the blind boy she discovers on an imaginary Channel Island — lends a sort of reflected aimlessness to the whole narrative…. After almost four hundred gloomy, capable and unsparing pages, the reader’s spirits have declined to their lowest ebb.

• The Observer:

If Dostoievsky had laid a wager that he could write an even gloomier book than The Brothers Karamazov, and if, while trying to win the wager, he had been attacked by biliousness, gout, arthritis, and neuralgia, and if he had lost all his money, and if he had been sent back to Sideria, he might well have written A War Without a Hero. And if he had, he would undoubtedly have won his bet hands down.

• Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement:

In each of her previous books Miss G. E. Trevelyan used her talent to delve into morbidity to such a degrees that they fascinated while repelling the reader. In her latest novel, A War Without a Hero, the same talent for atmosphere is there, but we get very little of the compassion and humanity that lightened the others. And the story is so incredible — even more incredible than that of the woman and the ape [Appius and Virginia] — that it sometimes tasks the reader to go on with it…. In this book, as in the others, the reader gets a sense of unendurable spiritual claustrophobia, a sense of life lived in unutterable degradation of mind and body from which there is no escape. The style is very difficult; sometimes it becomes so allusive as to be hardly comprehensible. Once again Miss Trevelyan has given us an insight into things that seem to find their real place in a psychiatrists’s notebook.

• Francis Iles, The Daily Telegraph:

In A War Without a Hero, Miss G. E. Trevelyan set herself a difficult task: to depict a marriage between a lady and an oaf, and the slow deterioration of the lady to the oaf’s level. The task was too difficult; for never for an instant does the book carry conviction…. None of this will do. Ann, as she is first shown to us, would (a) never have married the young oaf, (b) if she had done so, would never have stayed with him, to be buffeted and bullied. There is a D. H. Lawrence vague fog over it all, in which ideas become personified and actions stultified because real human character is disregarded.

As an experiment in fictional technique, A War Without a Hero is a failure. As a book … well, it’s waiting there in the British Library and a few others around the world for the next time a Trevelyan completist comes along.

A War Without a Hero, by G. E. Trevelyan
London: Martin Secker, 1935