A Sample of Taffy

Right, progress on my second novel, Taffy was a Welshman, has been slowed by some great joys in life, but we're underway again. And to celebrate that fact, I thought I'd share a bit of the opening chapter, entitled The Call.

***

The trick, he thought to himself, was to take his time. Yes, the lighting could be better; the sun’s rays slanting in through the windows at the top of his garret bedroom helped; it was just the right hour for the task, but had he accepted the bedroom one floor below, there would be more light overall.

But then he would not have had the backstairs entrance, allowing him to come home late from his cramming sessions without disturbing the household. And—truth be told—he did not feel entirely comfortable living en famille with the Finns now that he was going to be called to the bar, and would be practicing as a junior barrister with the younger of his two mentors. He needed some room of his own, and the two large rooms making up his quarters were ample, albeit the little bathroom could be somewhat dim, making it difficult for a man to shave, especially when his hands were trembling just a bit with excitement.

For today was the day. No longer would he be Ifor Powlett-Jones the coal miner, the defendant, the convict reprieved, or even the student he had been these past years. No, he would be Ifor Powlett-Jones, barrister-at-law. If, in fact, people used that term—a question he had meant to ask Mr. Low, but had omitted to, he realized.

Powlett-Jones drew the razor upwards, rasping against his throat, until it reached the cleft of his chin. And then again, and again. With the swift, economical movements he had learned as a youth in Pontnewydd, mimicking the deft, small strokes of his Da before he died in a cave-in all too similar to the one that had changed Ifor’s destiny forever. He applied more soap with the brushes, and began the all-too-familiar task of scraping his cheeks clean—only to pause at the new obstacle: the slightly drooping moustache he had grown. He quite liked it, really, and felt that a barrister should be a man of note, not a cherubic stripling. But for all the dignity the moustache conferred, the sobering of his features came at a cost: the perpetual fear that he would cut the damned ends unevenly. No matter how hard he tried, he could not be sure of success until it was too late to remedy any defect.

Phineas Finn, who had not only defended Ifor when accused of crimes ranging from riot to assault, but had gambled his own political future to secure the young Welshman’s pardon and release, had not been helpful when Powlett-Jones had sought his guidance on the matter of the moustache over breakfast yesterday. He had, rather, bubbling with laughter, merely said “Why the deuce do you think I just gave up and grew a full beard, Ifor?”

Mrs. Finn had smilingly suggested a valet, or, at least, a barber. But that seemed wrong to Ifor—surely a man could learn to attend his own daily needs without a servant he could ill afford. Yes, yes, the Finns made him a generous allowance, and very grateful he was, too, but it he could not take such largesse for granted. It was not, after all, as if he was the Finns’ son.

***
“A valet, Marie?”

“Why not, my dear?” The ever-practical Marie Finn replied to her husband’s question. He raised the coffee cup to his lips, and drank, and replaced the cup, meeting his wife’s amused glance from the other side of the breakfast table.

“For a white-wig?” At his wife’s interrogatorily raised eyebrow, Phineas rephrased his sentence. “A newly-called barrister. A young man with his way to make. A young man,” Phineas continued, unaware that the young man in question, on his way to being impeccably dressed, but still in shirtsleeves, had entered the room and was behind him, “whom I mean to see settled in life, as he deserves, and of whom I could not be more proud if her were my own--”

Something dancing in his wife’s eyes—her features were otherwise immobile—alerted him, and the older man’s manner changed. More gruffly, he concluded the thought: “Pupil. My own pupil.” Phineas Finn stood, and turned to face his pupil, whose eyes bore a suspicious sheen. He smiled at the boy, remembering what it was to be young, and on the verge of being called to the bar. And unlike the young man who stood before him, Phineas had enjoyed a comfortable upbringing, as the son of a doctor who had earned the patronage of the local magnate. No digging in the coal mines for young Phineas Finn! The memory of inspecting, albeit briefly, that hellish underground flickered across the screen of Phineas’s mind, and he dropped the bantering tone he had been adopting.

“It’s all right, Ifor. We’re Celts, not Englishmen, after all, so the Queen won’t have to abdicate if I admit to being proud of you today. But where’s your frockcoat?”

“I, er, left it upstairs, d’ye see, Mr. Finn,” the young man was clearly embarrassed, “because I might have to go back upstairs.”

“Oh? Why is that?”

“I can’t tell if my moustache is even, and tonight is Call Night, and--” Phineas, observing the young man’s dreadful earnestness in this matter, as in all matters touching upon his new social status, forbore to smile. Instead, Phineas simply turned to his wife, even as Ifor spoke, and said, “A valet, then. D’you think Meier can turn one up at short notice?”

“I am quite sure he can,” she answered in the tone that informed him, based on their many years together, that the valet had already been engaged, and was due to report later in the day.

“Well, then you may as well break your fast, Ifor—all will be taken care of before you have to leave for Call Night.” Phineas resumed his chair and Marie rang for another pot of coffee, as Ifor helped himself to eggs and bacon from the sideboard.

Some things, Phineas Finn reflected gratefully, never changed.

Further teasers will be dropped as the whim may strike.

Be Not Another. . .

Well, here's a new one:

I was the envy of my 30-something friends in Palo Alto, Calif. I had my own law office right on California Avenue. People charged with crimes handed me cash, in advance, over a big oak desk. Occasionally, I’d make a couple of grand in an afternoon.

But soon, my body started giving out one part at a time. First a shoulder, then my lower back, knee cartilage, neck vertebrae. Two groin hernia surgeries later, at 33 years old, I could not lift a bag of groceries, or sit without an orthopedic pillow. After 10 years as a law student and lawyer, working in a profession I didn’t like was taking its toll.

I sold my practice and fled to San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.

And, ultimately, found his bliss in the right profession:

Studying want ads one evening, the one that got my blood moving promised to train me as a party clown, and send me out at $25 per show. Years earlier, I’d dreamed of becoming so weightless that I bounced off the ceiling. I could see myself in a billowy clown suit. After a free training session, I purchased the starter kit for $59 and waited for them to call.

Within a week, the company dispatched me to a party for a 7-year-old at a Ground Round restaurant in Yonkers. I applied colorful makeup, donned oversize shoes, orange wig, bag of tricks. It took a minute to decide on “Bobo” as my name. I silly-walked up to a table of children in the party room. By the end of the performance, the birthday boy said to me, “Bobo, I love you.” In the car later, I rested my head on the steering wheel. An unexpected feeling surfaced: happiness.

Right, you're all expecting me to have a little fun with this guy, right? A sarcastic jibe, perhaps, a little sly humor?

Nope.

Well done, Robert Markowitz. Really, I mean it. There are far too many miserable lawyers out there. Many are trapped in jobs that aren't right for them, but could be happier in a better fitting position (I myself was miserable as a big firm attorney but have loved my public interest work--and even then, other things have called to me to supplement that career--the diaconate, writing, to name the two most important), but a lot shouldn't be lawyers at all.

Seriously, I mean that. If you don't love legal practice, it'll kill ya. It requires a lot of steady hard slog, wading through materials that are very dry, and gratification is delayed for years. If you aren't a natural born lawyer, if the stuff hasn't got a hold of your heart for whatever reason (la Caterina is one, too, but somewhat differently than me)--get out and save yourself, like Robert Markowitz did. Because life's too short.

In his excellent novel The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies quotes Paracelsus: "Be not another if thou canst be thyself."

Good advice, very good advice.

So bravo to Robert Markowitz, and best wishes for another 20 years of success to Bobo the Clown.

As long as nobody expects me to don the red nose, that is.

Watchman: The Shadow Side of a Classic

Well, I've read Go Set a Watchman, and I see what all the angst is about.

The novel is in its first half sweet without being cloying--Jean Louise Finch, 26 years old, living in New York, makes her fifth annual return to Maycomb to see her ailing father Atticus. He's icing from severe rheumatoid arthritis, and some days he's in such pain, he needs his sister (Aunt Alexandra, as starchy as in To Kill a Mockingbird, has, rather surprisingly, spared Jean Louise moving back home by moving in herself with Atticus) to help him dress. His brother, Dr. Jack, has fashioned specially large-handles utensils to help Atticus eat.

Jem has been dead for two years.

It's the characters you know, for the most part--we get a visit from Dill in a flashback, even--and they're mostly the same.

Certainly in that sunlit first half, with flashbacks to Scout and Jem and Dill playing together, Uncle Jack being amusing, and Atticus facing disability and mortality pretty much as you'd expect him to.

--And then Harper Lee shatters the cozy little world of Maycomb. Jean Louise stumbles on a racist pamphlet among her father's books and papers, and blames Aunt Alexandra for it. Aunt Alexandra holds her tongue, but is innocent. Jean Louise follows her father to an unusual gathering in the courthouse--the same place where he heroically defended Tom Robinson--and finds that he's a leader of the Maycomb Citizen's Council.

It hits Scout hard, and the reader, too. Lee has done such a grand job of evoking the Atticus that lives in our hearts (extraordinary, really, because Go Set a Watchman was written before Mockingbird) that we are hit as hard as Scout.

I won't spoil the book for you; the first half has all the magic of the innocent comic scenes in Mockingbird, and yet virtually no overlap. The Robinson trial is portrayed in a quick two pages, and is less heroic, and less tragic than in the first-published book.

The "back 9" of the book depicts Jean Louise's reaction, her anger and sense of betrayal. She finds an unlikely ally, has a wrenching confrontation with her father, and one with her uncle.

Scout dies, but Jean Louise lives.

Any more, and I'll end up spoiling the book.

But let me say, if Mockingbird is important to you, read this book.

Harper Lee is saying something important about racism (oh, Calpurnia!), about growing up, about fathers and daughters--and about human frailty.

It is an extraordinary achievement, even though you can see the seams, as the editorial process led to the abandonment of Watchman and the creation of Mockingbird--one critical scene is too talky, though most of the talk is good talk. Most of it.

Atticus is not, at the end of the book, a hero. He's a man. Flawed, loving, wrong-headed, passionately just-- a mass of contradictions.

Like many of us. I'm reminded of my favorite passage from C.P. Snow, with his protagonist, Lewis Eliot, engaged in a debate with a young Nazi official in 1938:

"No one is fit to be trusted with power," I said..."No one. I should not like to see any group of men in charge--not me or my friends or anyone else. Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. If he does not know it, he is not fit to govern others. And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate, I am not speaking of you specially, you understand; I should say exactly the same of myself."

Our eyes met. I was certain, as one can be certain in a duel across the table, that for the first time he took me seriously.

"You do not think highly of men, Mr. Eliot."

"I am one."

Atticus, in either novel, would, I think, understand and approve.

Return to Macomb: Atticus Finch's Dark Side

The release of Go Set a Watchman isn't until next week (July 14, to be precise), and it's already controversial. From the New York Times review:

We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.

Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

"Go Set A Watchman," a follow-up to Harper Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird." Credit HarperCollins
In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”

In “Mockingbird,” Atticus was a role model for his children, Scout and Jem — their North Star, their hero, the most potent moral force in their lives. In “Watchman,” he becomes the source of grievous pain and disillusionment for the 26-year-old Scout (or Jean Louise, as she’s now known).

Cue the consternation of the legion of Atticus admirers, some of whom speak of boycotting the new book to escape disillusionment. No, really. I'm not kidding.

The story is news--big enough that it has the prime real estate in this morning's paper:



I am going to push back against my fellow Atticus admirers, here. Historically, a great many of those who championed legal equality reflected in their lives the racism of their times--Hugo L. Black was a member of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth; Abraham Lincoln was, as Frederick Douglass said, by turns "emphatically, the black man’s President,” in fact, “the first to show any respect for their rights as men,” and, alternately,“preeminently the white man’s President.” Douglass noted that both views were true.

Harper Lee struggles with this in Go Set a Watchman, and I'm glad of it. It adds a layer of nuance, of realism that the child's eye view of To Kill a Mockingbird can allow us to obscure. It's easy, but facile, to treat Atticus as a plaster saint among sinners. But hold on. In Mockingbird itself, most of the characters are flawed--Miss Dubose (the "wicked old hell-cat" as Scout calls her, before weeping for her), Uncle Jack, Aunt Alexandra, and, yes, Atticus himself. The noble lawyer portrayed by Gregory Peck is there, but there are indications of depression, of bewilderment in his widowed status, in the younger Atticus. And yes, he can be patronizing toward his social inferiors. Just ask Bob Ewell. Or Mayella.

My copy of the book hasn't arrived yet, and I look forward to reading it. But I don't start off from the place that a depiction of a flawed, even morally tainted, older Atticus is by its nature a bad thing. If it is done well, it can enrich the character of Atticus profoundly, allowing us to see him more in the round. A very Trollopian view, frankly. As I said at the Trollope Society's Annual Dinner this year:

Trollope influenced my own view of human nature more than his more pyrotechnical peers, more than the writers of my own era, who all too often seemed to me to oversimplify, to not quite get it.

From him I learned that we are none of us just our worst moments, and that we cannot live on the summit of our best moments, either.

Phineas at Bay is a thank you to the great psychologist who taught me about human nature, who gave me the understanding to endure the myriad small betrayals and wounds we experience from those who love us both before and after they hurt us--and to forgive them, and accept forgiveness for the hurts we have inflicted in our own turn.

And people surprise for good as well as for bad.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

We cannot be reduced to our worst moments. Or even our best.

Add Atticus Finch to the roll of Trollopean heroes--too complex to reduce to a cardboard figure of nobility, more alive than that.

Good on Harper Lee for challenging us to look the complexity of human nature in the eye--to risk her "brand" and offer us a more complex, difficult reality.

The Lost Masterpiece

Imagine a novel sequence, building to a climax after five preceding volumes, reaching what is meant to be its grad conclusion in volume six.

And then imagine that the publisher made the author cut fully one-quarter of that last volume,solely for production costs purposes.

How good mist the author be to make that last volume a classic of English literature anyway, and what must the full uncut version be?

From the Folio Society:

24th April 2015 is the bicentenary of the birth of Anthony Trollope; commemorative events will be taking place throughout the year culminating in a service at Westminster Abbey in December. The Folio Society will mark the anniversary with the first ever publication of The Duke’s Children in its complete, unabridged form.

The final volume of Trollope’s Palliser novels and widely regarded as one of his finest, The Duke’s Children, in its current form, is considerably shorter than the preceding titles in the series. However, as originally written, it was of equal length, containing additional threads of plot and far richer characterisation. Due to economic constraints, Trollope was instructed to reduce the book by one quarter, cutting no less than 65,000 words.

The original manuscript of The Duke’s Children lay neglected in the Beinecke Library of Yale University for many years. Over the last decade several researchers, led by Professor Steven Amarnick, have been patiently working to restore the book to the original form the author intended. The first page of the manuscript, reproduced here, demonstrates not only the extent of the cuts – almost half the page was lost – but the problem of legibility the researchers had to overcome: Trollope’s handwriting is hard to decipher at the best of times, and even more so when struck through.

No knowledge of the earlier books is necessary to enjoy the plot chronicling the vicissitudes of the Palliser family, and the perilous paths of true – and false – love. To accompany the first complete edition of The Duke’s Children The Folio Society has commissioned essays from those closely involved in the restoration project; Professor Steven Amarnick, Robert F. Wiseman, Susan Lowell Humphreys and, chairman of The Trollope Society, Michael G. Williamson. These are printed in a separate commentary volume.

The new edition, made possible through a partnership between The Folio Society and the Trollope Society, also includes an introductio which has, fittingly, been written by Joanna Trollope, 5th generation niece to the author. The books will be half-bound in Indian goatskin with green canvas sides, gold blocking, gilded top edge, hand-marbled endpapers and a limitation page numbered by hand. Some special copies, forming part of the same hand-numbered limitation, will be made available full-bound in Indian goatskin, blocked in 22-carat gold, with hand-marbled edges and endpapers, and presented in a solander box.

It is an extraordinary literary event, and most fortuitously timed to fall in this bicentennial year.

Of course, I own several copies of the truncated edition--one the Copyright edition published by Tauchnitz, another part of a nice leather-bound set of the Barsetshire and Pallisers novels I picked up, and the 1970s OUP hardcover edition.

But those lost 65,000 words--who knows what they will add, in terms of the in depth characterization Trollope specialized in? 65,000 words--that's almost the entire recommended word count for a contemporary novel. Imagine what Anthony Trollope could do with all that?

Or, better yet, read it.

Reflections on Trollope Country

Ellen Moody has published a thought-provoking essay online regarding Phineas at Bay. As the author of the book under consideration--not review, because what Ellen Moody has done is as much a meditation on the possibilities of post-texts yet unwritten as it is an assessment of of Phineas at Bay--I have some thoughts, as is natural. But I offer them with a caveat: I am not attempting to dispute her reactions to my novel. The reader is, to my mind, absolutely privileged in her reaction to the book. As the author, the legitimate scope of my reaction is limited to (1) sharing thoughts sparked by that reaction--insights I have gained; or (2) explaining what I have attempted to convey, sources, influences, etc.

In fact, to the extent I will discuss Ellen Moody's reaction to the book qua novel, I'll say this: It's nothing short of delightful to see something I have worked on and lived with so long treated with the high seriousness that I have seen Ellen bring to works by established authors and to undisputed literature. Praise is always welcome, but sugary bon-bons are not. Ellen's essay does Phineas at Bay the high courtesy of treating it seriously.

Still, it is an undiluted pleasure for this first-time novelist to see his work described thus:

The providential pattern of the book could be put down to its being (in effect) a historical novel whose main (but only main) franchise is Trollope except that another skein of allusion shows the deep structure is a creation of its contemporary author. Wirenius said that when he began the book he had the uplifting (if ironically so) final lines of the book in mind. He wanted to get there. Religious music (sung exquisitely by Marie), allusions to church fathers, liturgy, the use of Christmas make it not a book more Victorian than our sceptical and secular (and darker) Trollope, but one intended to speak today in the way praised by John Gardner (once a best-selling novelist who wrote a post-text himself, to Beowulf, Grendel) in his On Moral Fiction. Its politics are benevolent, left-liberal, and some of the best long-running stories of the book are effective dramatic analyses of politicking within parties, between rivals and enemies and friends, scenes in courts (at least two trials) and parliament, at elections, pressure dealing, very Trollopian some of these (including a politicized sermon). Hunting scenes, dinners, parties, weddings figure too. Good people finally mostly win out and we are invited to celebrate the figures within a pleasing faery aesthetic pattern (or carpet as Henry James would put it).

****

Phineas at Bay is a strongly realized, highly intelligent book with many believable characters, some bite and beauty in its use of allusions and reality-feel in its depictions of places (including mines).

This is heady stuff for one just out the gate.

Of course, in stringing together these bits of the essay, I am eliding the themes of the essay which Ellen drew out, and these are--to anyone but my authorial vanity--far more interesting than the purely evaluative parts. I'd like to look at one or two, and share what I learned from the essay and from the group reading Ellen Moody led, and which informs her essay.

1. Influences and Masculinist Texts

In her essay, Moody writes of my section of Trollope Country:

It’s more than a specific region of Trollope country (upper class, lots of lawyers). It represents a readership or perspective on that specific region. Phineas at Bay is a highly intertextual literary book, allusive, bookish (I see nothing wrong with that) whose references are just about wholly to books favored by males, mid-20th century to late Edwardian. A central text is R. F. Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, as embodied and shaped by Andrew Davies’s 1980-81 16 part mini-series which rehearses an archetypal nostalgic schoolboy to teacher story. One of the most (for me) appealing characters in Phineas at Bay is named Ifor Powlett-Jones, clearly after David Powlett-Jones as memorably portrayed by John Duttine[.]

....

Ifor is a miner in Wales who risks his life to save the lives of fellow miners who have been abusively mistreated by the mine-owner, a ruthless obtuse, sadistic and spiteful industrialist, McScuttle (the book’s one full villain) who accuses the young man of destroying private property and by influence manages to have him thrown in jail for a number of years. We have powerful scenes of a life in prison in this period before Powlett-Jones is rescued (naturally) by Phineas Finn who, with Marie, adopts, has educated by Mr Low (now retired) and makes a sort of nephew-son of the boy, providing him with a career he could not have dreamed of.

Other similar authors, texts alluded to and used significantly are Beerbohm, Mortimer (Rumpole of Bailey), Walter Scott, Tennyson, Wodehouse (a lot), Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Winston Graham’s Poldark series, Thackeray, Dumas’s Three Musketeers, M. R. James (the ghost story writer). Individual lines are plucked from Hugo’s Les Miserables. The inter-related imaginary carved out here is the one Mark Turner (Trollope and the Magazines) first described as central to understanding how Trollope assumed his readership would react. We follow the trajectory — coming of age — of several newly invented young adult male characters, the next generation of the Palliser and Chiltern sons, e.g., Savrola Vavasour, son of George (remember the escapee from Can You Forgive Her?) who met and married Mrs Winifred Hurtle while in the US. Savrola courts Clarissa Finn, despite her Richardsonian name, a fugitive from an innocent girl’s 19th century novel, protected by a series of benevolent parent figures — rather like Lady Rose McClaren in Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey is in evidence too with a butler who acts paternal roles towards Clarissa and anticipates Marie, his mistress’s every need, including sleuthing.

She later cites "Galsworthy (another masculinist book of upper class life alluded to)."

She's got me dead to rights here. The book is allusive, as Ellen writes, as indeed my mind is allusive. I can't adequately describe the fun I had in writing Phineas at Bay, salting the text with little hommages I described to the reading group as "easter eggs" for my own amusement. Ellen catches many o them--she also notes echoes of specific performancesSimon Raven's adaptation of the Palliser novels for the BBC, broadcast as The Pallisers. I'll admit to one that nobody in the book group rumbled me on: certain actors in The Pallisers later appeared in my beloved Doctor Who, and I couldn't resist giving Rev. Emilius, played by Anthony Ainley in The Pallisers a famous bit of business from his more familiar role. But here's the thing--they came to me in the writing; I didn't plan them in advance, it just flowed exuberantly.

A brief word on the texts referenced. I think it's absolutely fair to describe Delderfield as "masculinist," fond though I am of him. I devoured all of his novels as a teen, have read most of them more than once, and I think that it is a very fair critique. He's one of the generation that thought of D.H Lawrence as opening up the world of sexuality to literature, and his adoption of tropes in which domineering women are "cured" by a spanking in several of his novels by their husbands/lovers/fiancés is a genuine blot on those novels. I think RFD grew to realize this himself, because in To Serve Them All My Days, his most mature and well-done book, he explicitly brings the trope up to have David Powlett-Jones reject it as unbefitting a real man. My affection for Delderfield survives these scenes, but they are blots on a writer who was that rare and wonderful kind of author: a first-rate second rater.

Galsworthy's a bit more complicated. I think The Man of Property does not really fit that description, although one can see Irene as oddly passive and acted upon; as I have suggested elsewhere, I suspect that this is more a function of Galsworthy's effort to shield his wife from the real-life scandal that gave rise to the novel.

2. Virtue and Vice Alike Rewarded

Ellen Moody notes a certain tension in the book between the fates of the good and evil characters. After writing that "There’s a lot of kindness in the book, to Lady Laura Kennedy and the Duke of Omnium (Plantagenet Palliser that was), happy at last, fittingly. Phineas works hard in this book, is as acute and successfully manipulative as Hercule Poirot, and for the public good..." she observes that "[t]here is at the same time a real tolerance for amoral worldly-vicious types of people, the disruptive, the mean, and those complicit with, obedient to those who do evil." She acknowledges that the villains are not punished; that "are not post-modern nor at all nihilistic because the book and its main characters recognize them as reprehensible. They are framed more like Fielding’s Blifil in Tom Jones, their punishment is to go on being what they are."

Yes. Just yes. To me, the experience of reading Trollope was startling because his good characters were sometimes bad (Archdeacon Grantly can be awful, and yet is basically one of the white hats by the tend of the Barsetshire novels; even Rev. Harding lives for years on income that properly isn't his), and his bad characters are sometimes kind--look at Burgo Fitzgerald and the prostitute, or la Signorina in steering Eleanor Bold and Dr. Arabin together. After the absolutes of Dickens, this moral complexity of Trollope was rejuvenating, and part of why I fell in love with his fiction.

So I took it a step further--looking at two of Trollope's most amoral (indeed, immoral) characters, Lizzie Eustace and Rev. Emilius, I asked myself: "What, if anything, is genuine within them?" My answer may not please everyone,but as I see it, they have taken a step forward in one sense, while remaining deplorable in most every other way. Progress not perfection.

3. Lighting Out for the Territory

In writing that Phineas at Bay "is easily arguably the first full completely realized true sequel to Trollope’s books", Ellen Moody implicitly acknowledges the existence of Knox's Barchester Pilgrimage (1934). I admit, I think it doesn't make the cut as a sequel--it evokes Trollope's own characters only fleetingly, and does not continue their stories or explore their characters in any meaningful way. It is, rather, a series of vignettes spanning the time from Trollope's day to Knox's, connected tenuously to his novels, but paying loving tribute. It is a love letter to Trollope's creation, but far too cautious to advance the storyline. Moody suggests that Phineas at Bay raises a question I did not in fact consider, but one well worth asking:

The most interesting question for me that this book raises is, What does and will this book tell us about Trollope’s mainstream readership? what they value in Trollope? One reason there has not been a true sequel before is there is so much Trollope and really so varied. He wrote 47 novels, 42 short stories, 5 travel books, his autobiography, essays, criticism. Among these he has written his own sequels in his Barsetshire and Palliser books, Ayala’s Angel is a kind of sequel to The American Senator, he planned to (he said) to write an Australian set of books out of Lady Anna; his Anglo-Irish books carve out a Trollope terrain or another country in western and across Ireland. When I taught a course wholly devoted to Trollope for the first time this past fall, I found I had surprised those in the class who thought they knew Trollope and had read numerous of his books before. This book would’ve fulfilled their expectations much better than my syllabus.

****

Wirenius’s Phineas at Bay is an analogous first step to Raven’s mini-series in the textual arena. We have a reconstituted world of Trollopian fiction. How will it affect Trollope’s novels as understood by a wider readership? Reinforcement? Raven was a pessimistic atheist, strong cynic, sceptical; Wirenius turns back to Trollope and softens what is there. Modern film adaptations often make what is back-story of a 19th century book and make it front present story. Wirenius chose instead to make a new group of young mostly male upwardly mobile winning-out protagonists.

****

If a woman should write a post-text, which story and characters in Trollope would she appropriate? What books would be alluded to, what 19th to mid-20th century intertextualities? Will anyone develop out the Anglo-Irish fiction so different from the Palliser world? and reverse front stories to become back-stories, and of course bring out the implied sexualities. What will future Trollope fan fiction be like? Will it help to extend Trollope’s readership beyond the usual 15 books read? Or not.

Her suggestion that Phineas at Bay is "a world just begun, meant to be continued and invites others to do likewise" would represent a wonderful result of my work. I hope we get post-tests by women, with different allusions and foregrounding stories that I have not thought to. And I hope the darker, the Irish, European, and Australian Trollope texts find their own way into the newly rekindled Trollope Country. Yes, I'll keep exploring for as long as my imagination lives in Trollope Country, but there is room for us all. And if--I say if--I have opened a door to such exploration, then I have done more than I thought.

[Edited to correct some typos and solecisms.]

Who Will Walk Through the Mirror Door?

This song from the Who's 2006 album Endless Wire (which doesn't get enough love, by the way; see David Fricke's perceptive review) gets something about the creative process, as far as I can see.

There's an unpredictability, and a vulnerability, when you--ok, when I--undertake something creative. I don't know what's coming out. Oh, I have a vague plan, some bullet points, I admit--but something takes over; a typo leads to a whole new digression, a prior character changes from his planned arc, an unplanned character announces her arrival.

The mind and spirit are effervescent, I follow, as bemused any future reader will ever be.

And, like the Who in "Mirror Door," I find myself invoking my specters--my predecessors in writing, my teachers, even though I have only met them from their books.

They enter through my own mirror door….

Tony Trollope, RFD;
Powell, A and Snow, CP;
GBS and Mark Twain;
Saki bearing extra dry champagne.

Simon Raven, still unhailed;
Oscar Wilde, who thought he'd failed;
Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, J;
Alex Dumas, Bronte,A;
Jane Austen by no means least,
Make room for TH White at the feast.
AS Byatt and Barbara Pym,
Conan Doyle and Newman, Kim.

There are legions more, of course, but I'm no Townshend. It's just that his song gets across the strange solitary intimacy of writing better than anything else I've ever read.

But enough--time to start the next chapter...

Another Review for Phineas at Bay

Novelist Tyler R. Tichelaar, has posted a review of Phineas at Bay, in which hewrites:

"Phineas at Bay" is an intriguing sequel to Trollope's Phineas novels and indeed to the entire Trollopian world.

The Phineas novels are not among my favorites by Trollope, but Wirenius introduces so many of Trollope's characters from not only the Palliser novels but also the Barchester series, The Way We Live Now, Orley Farm, etc. that it's a treat just to try to pick them all out and try to remember which ones are Trollope's, separating them from the few new ones Wirenius invents. Major characters include Plantagenet Palliser, Madame Max, Lizzie Eustace, Lady Laura, and Samuel Grantly, among many others.

I also found Phineas more likeable and appealing in this book than previously. He seems more focused in his legal and political efforts and a bit more mature. The novel is set in the 1890s and many historical and literary references are made that are fun to pick out as well.

I did feel the characters needed more development in terms of their internal worlds - I never felt the absolute misery that Trollope can sometimes show us in his characters' heads, but I was delighted by many of the characters and the plot twists. Best of all, I loved the ending. I think it is exactly how Trollope would have left Phineas had he written one more novel about him.

If you love Trollope and enjoy sequels to the classics--this is one of the best--you'll enjoy this book. If only Trollope had written it or a few zombies or vampires had been thrown in, I'd give it 5 instead of 4 stars.

Well, I am not, alas, Trollope, and the zombies are reserved for the sequel--but in all seriousness, having a professional's praise is very meaningful. Tyler participated in the discussion of Phineas at Bay on the Trollope and his Contemporaries reading group, and one of the great pleasures of the group is getting to know him and my fellow Trollopeans by discussing novels of "the long 19th Century" together.

In Memoriam, P.D. James

I was sorry to hear this morning of the death of the great crime novelist, P.D. James. I have long enjoyed her wonderfully complex characters, their ethically fraught interactions, and the slow, leisurely eliciting of the nature of her people. A James character, even the obligatory victim, is not a cipher. She spends time with them, and we get to know them. As the New York Times obituary phrases it:

Many critics and many of her peers have said that by virtue of the complexity of her plots, the psychological density of her characters and the moral context in which she viewed criminal violence, Ms. James even surpassed her classic models and elevated the literary status of the modern detective novel. She is often cited, in particular, for the cerebral depth and emotional sensibilities of Adam Dalgliesh, the introspective Scotland Yard detective and published poet who functions as the hero of virtually all of her novels.

Her intention with Dalgliesh, she told the British critic and writer Julian Symons in 1986, was to create a detective “quite unlike the Lord Peter Wimsey kind of gentlemanly amateur” popularized by Dorothy L. Sayers. Ms. James envisioned a realistic cop as her protagonist, a dedicated and skilled professional, and yet “something more than just a policeman, you see, a complex and sensitive human being,” she said.

James's work always struck me as Trollopian in this way, and indeed she paid handsome tribute to Anthony Trollope in a a 1994 interview with the Paris Review:

JAMES

….I read Dickens and recognized his genius, but he is not my favorite. I find many of his female characters unsuccessful—wonderful caricatures, wicked, odd, grotesque, evil, but not true. There isn’t the subtlety of characterization you get, say, in Trollope, whose understanding and description of women is astonishing. Jane Austen never described two men talking together if a woman was not present—she would have thought that was outside her experience. In Trollope, by contrast, you get continual conversations between women—for example Alice Vavasor and Lady Glencora Palliser in Can You Forgive Her?—without a man there, and he gets it absolutely right. This plain, grumpy looking man had obviously an astonishing knowledge of women’s psychology.

INTERVIEWER

Trollope has become a hero of the feminists, especially his The Way We Live Now in which he proclaims women’s rights before anyone else did.

JAMES

I tend not to think of books in terms of contemporary issues and passions; it diminishes them. But that particular book is a kind of contemporary novel. The main character was a sort of Robert Maxwell, a monster. Trollope describes women’s lives at a time when marriage was the only possibility for personal fulfillment.

Apart from my enjoyment of her books (and by the way, although dwarfed in public perception by the Dalgliesh novels, her Cordelia Grey books are quite good as well), I owe her a personal debt. James's last novel, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), was a Jane Austen pastiche, continuing Austen's Pride and Prejudice. When it came out, I had already written the first three chapters of my Trollope pastiche, Phineas at Bay. But James's publication of Death Comes to Pemberley was a real shot in the arm for my morale when I returned to the book in 2013. After all, if P.D. James could write a Victorian pastiche, who was to say the thing was not worth doing?

The best of James's work will, I think, live. I'm grateful for the pleasure she gave me as a reader, and the example she set me as a writer--reaffirming the Trollopian rule that the writer must give every character her due.

And my complete set of her work in hardback is on my shelves, where it will remain. I'll want to visit Adam, Cordelia, Piers, Kate, and the vivid characters she created again, and more than once.

The Colors of Autumn

I am currently embracing the season of Autumn--always my favorite, in fact--and the pleasures it brings. I've been traveling more than usual, due to new job, and have enjoyed driving through country roads, past incredible vistas with a peculiar, transfiguring autumn sunlight that has an almost supernatural effect on the objects it strikes, just so. There aren't words adequate to describe the quality of the light--pearlescent, weak and yet astonishingly clear--these words come close to capturing it, but, no; they're inadequate.

Maybe this will help: a world normally seen in the hues of oil paints becomes, for a little under an hour, the work of a preternaturally skilled watercolorist.

Some people don't like the fall, with its intimations that winter is near, and the end of the year, an allegorical stand-in for death, will fast be upon us. It stirs my soul--from memories of the new school year, to the scent of burning leaves.

And the "autumnal" feel in novels has always appealed to me, too. Dumas's Inseparables are never more real to me than when divided by time, other alliances and loyalties, and yet still insistently loyal to each other in the long novel The Vicomte de Bragelonne (often published as three separate volumes, the first under the original title, the second as Louise de la Valiere, and the third as The Man in the Iron Mask).

My own first novel, Phineas at Bay, which takes its main characters from Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, is not particularly autumnal--it's a story of several characters each finding the way home to his or her own best, truest self. The main characters are in middle age, but each has been balked in some way, and is laboring to get through a personal Sargasso Sea. Ultimately, Phineas at Bay is the conclusion to the season of summer, albeit a delayed summer for some of my characters.

Its sequel, which I have just started, is a very different work. It's a story, with roots in real history, of a very talented criminal, of a young barrister's learning his trade, and of the beginning of a life's work. For Phineas Finn, it will be a story of loss, and of consolation.

For the older characters--Trollope's own, mostly, but a few others--autumn has arrived. What to make of that late, last flush of supernal beauty, is the question before them. Because, after all, for everyone, ultimately, winter must follow.

On Forsyte Changes

So, after viewing the entire 1967 adaptation, I decided to re-engage with the 2002-2003 adaptation of The Forsyte Saga, the first season of which I had not liked when I first saw it. Upon re-viewing, the reasons for my half-remembered distaste became clear: The series tilts the balance of the equities stiffly against Soames, who begins as an obsessive and degenerates over the first season to a Quilp-like grotesque. Seriously, Damian Lewis plays the part of the older Soames with a sneering, jerky mien, mouth twisted into a snarl, voice constricted. His virtues do not evolve as in Galsworthy's novels--his art collection is solely about possession. In the early episodes, he is given a non-Galsworthian role as a trustee for Young Jolyon which enables Soames to smugly and moralistically deny his cousin the opportunity to buy even a modest home. Soames keeps Young Jolyon in poverty, off-loading some of the blame from Old Jolyon. (Soames likewise, in this version, keeps Winifred and her rakish, gambling husband poor, thus off-loading some responsibility for that marriage's failure onto Soames--the default position of this adaptation.)

Irene, by contrast, is considerably warmed up from Galsworthy's remote, rather abstract heroine whose thoughts and should we are never afforded access to. Gina McKee is given far more to work with than was her predecessor, Nyree Dawn Porter, who played pretty much Galsworthy's Irene; McKee does a smashing job (as does Lewis, by the way), but she's playing a very different woman.

In the second season, The Forsyte Saga: To Let, this continues for much of the run. Monty Dartie, the extremely unsatisfactory husband to Winifred, is sentimentalized further, being allowed a magnificent last run of luck, in which he wins enough money to leave Winifred an income after he is killed in accident due to a panicky horse in a car in which he is not even driving. His last words are about wanting to take Winifred away--a far cry from Galsworthy's unredeemed, but not entirely lacking in charm, sot, who dies under mysterious circumstances, in Paris, "which no one had quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide."

Soames goes down to plead for Fleur as in the novel, but (unlike in the novel), corners Irene, and almost begins making advances on her again. It's a betrayal of Soames's one virtue: his unselfish love of Fleur, and leads to Jon slamming him up against the wall, seeing his mother physically menaced by the man who raped her (albeit with social and legal sanction). At a stroke, all of Soames's slow, and hesitant growth in the novels, is denied, and he remains a caricature, despite Lewis's best work. Likewise, Fleur's subsequent one cruel explosion at Soames becomes an extended estrangement. She is cruel to him because, as Soames's wife Annette observes, she can be.

Yet the second series complicates the moral absolutes of the first series. Early on, when Jolyon confronts Soames about the inappropriateness of Fleur and Jon coming together, Lewis has a field day stripping the hypocrisy of Graves's exponent of free love (when it suited him) falling back on the exact possessiveness that Jolyon had despised in Soames. Graves plays Jolyon as stricken by this accusation against which he cannot defend himself. Soames wins that round, fairly.

And Soames's relationship with Annette has some complexity, too. After her lover Profond ditches her, he hesitantly, shyly, offers comfort, which she recognizes and is grateful for. She runs back to Profond later, but when Soames, desperate for the well-being of the daughter who has rejected him, calls for her help, she returns, and helps not just Fleur but Soames as well. He pays Annette a simple, shy tribute, thanking her with patent sincerity.

Jon and Irene are cruel, too--she plays piano to drown out Fleur's despairing cries at having been rejected by the man who abandoned her minutes after taking her virginity; Jon no longer fully loves her (thanks to the doubt his mother has sown) but does not want her to marry someone else--he is possessive in the most Forystean way. Soames wanted Irene, but wanted her to be happy with him; Jon wants Fleur to suffer with him, without alleviating her suffering.

And then the series does something even more startling in its last hour. Soames, still receiving the cold shoulder from Fleur as they get ready to depart for her wedding to Michael Mont, finally snaps. He tells her that "It's far better to be with someone who loves you more than you love them. There's nothing worse than always trying to please someone; hoping they'll look at you, smile at you…" And then, in his concern for her, speaks the hitherto unspeakable truth:

Fleur Forsyte:I don't want to hear about her!
Soames Forsyte: I'll tell you anyway, shall I? The great sin your father committed? Then you can write me off altogether.
Fleur Forsyte: I said, I don't want to hear!
Soames Forsyte: I married her because I loved her! Very simple. It's why Michael's marrying you. She abused my trust; she denied me my rights as a husband. She ignored me. She flaunted her lover in my face. She locked me out of her life, her body...
Fleur Forsyte: Please!
Soames Forsyte: One night, her door was open, and she was lying there, looking very beautiful. She is very beautiful, don't you think? I whispered her name, but she was asleep.
Fleur Forsyte: Stop!
Soames Forsyte: I must have been mad. I think I was; Mad for her. So I took her, forcibly... as punishment! And now when I see her, whenever she looks at me, I know she's thinking only of that.
[breaks down in tears]

At this point, Fleur empathizes with her father's years of agony, and cannot withhold forgiveness; she knows only too well what he has felt, and what drove him t uncharacteristic behavior.

But the story is not yet over. Father and daughter reconciled, Fleur off on her honeymoon, Soames is tasked by her with destroying a copy of a Degas painting that looks like her. (In Galsworthy, the painting is a Goya, but Emma Griffiths Malin really isn't a Goya type, I guess--although in the novels, this painting is the one that topples toward Fleur, leading the 72 year old Soames to push her out of the way, and be fatally injured by it--so the adaptation goes decidedly AU here.)

Rather than destroying or discarding or selling it, he takes one last trip to Robin Hill. Irene answers the door, expecting a potential buyer or renter for the house. Soames offers Irene the painting, as a gift for Jon, and she asks him in. They speak a little bit. Irene, who is appalled at what has befallen their respective children due to the older generation's possessiveness, asks if they had really hurt their children. Soames, unwilling to betray Fleur's broken heart, asserts quietly that Fleur is happily married, and that grandchildren are expected. Irene smiles, understanding his loyalty and finding his reserve a little comic under the circumstances. Soames, leaving the painting, says goodbye--"I don't expect we shall ever meet again," he says, with which she agrees, and he then says that he will leave her to her packing.

Soames is almost out of the door, when Irene calls his name. She offers her hand--having rejected hers at their last meeting, before his old obsessiveness flared up--and he, awkwardly, humbly removes his glove, as a gentleman should, and takes her hand for a moment. The moment ends, and Soames leaves. Parfitt, Irene's butler comes in and asks what the caller had wanted. Irene smiles, a little wonderstruck. "He didn't want anything," she says, a bit amazed.

We join Soames, as he walks away from Robin Hill. His sneer is gone, his taut face relaxed; he looks normal, healed. Irene and Soames have communicated--his compassion for her son, who has lost his own love, and evoked Soames's inarticulate, preposterous offer of the painting as a comfort to Jon, has in turn evoked her forgiveness. The Man of Property's spontaneous act of unselfishness, however clumsy, has freed Irene to forgive him, and give him silent absolution.

They are, at long last, at peace.

***

It isn't Galsworthy's ending--in fact, Soames's having unloaded the picture that later is supposed to kill him rather negates Galsworthy's ending--but there's something to it. It has a form, and a kind of fittingness of its own. That's the thing with adaptations; once you start playing with them, there's no knowing where they will lead you--here, far from the original, and yet to a stopping point that honors the characters as they have come to life in the hands of new writers, new actors. Not Galsworthy's, but with a new perspective and life of their own.

Phineas in Review: How Did I Not Point This One Out?

I don't know how I did this, but I don't appear to have highlighted a very fine review (on Goodreads) of Phineas at Bay by Douglas Gerlach:

It's not an uncommon lament of fans of Anthony Trollope: "what shall we do after we've read all of his novels?" This even so, despite the Victorian author's output of 47 novels; more than the fictional output of Dickens, Eliot, and Thackeray combined.

Fortunately, Trollopians can add one more novel to their "to-read" lists, the frolicking just-published sequel Phineas at Bay by John F. Wirenius.

Phineas at Bay revisits the life of Phineas Finn, one of Trollope's most charming characters and the main character of two of the "Palliser" novels, the eponymous Phineas Finn and its sequel Phineas Redux.

In Wirenius's book, set 20 years after the events of Phineas Redux, the Anglo-Irish love-struck politico has settled into a comfortable life with his wife, the still-steadfast former Madame Max. He takes on cases as a barrister in London and still represents Tankerville as a Member of Parliament for the Liberal party.

A chance assignment to represent a Welsh miner in court, however, pits Finn against the forces of a changing industrial society, awakening past alliances both good and bad, and ultimately disturbing the politics of the two-party system. Challenges on the home front require Finn's honor-bound attention, as well, drawing him into a life-threatening imbroglio.

To the sure enjoyment of many readers, familiar characters from the Palliser novels appear in Phineas at Bay, such as a still-unreformed Sir Felix Carbury, a still-scheming Lady Eustace, a still-grieving Duke of Omnium, a still-odious Quintus Slide, and a still-boorish Lord Fawn. Part of the fun of the book comes from the inclusion of Trollope's characters and locations from outside the Palliser series, such as a number of friends from Barsetshire.

There are new faces in the book, too. Several of the cast are the offspring of Trollope's characters who have now grown to adulthood. Some clearly take after their parents, while others struggle to break out of the familial mold.

Obviously, Phineas at Bay will appeal to the growing league of Trollopians, who will take delight in discovering one answer to the question "what happens next?" raised in the final pages of the Phineas diptych. To the author's credit, the book also stands on its own for readers seeking drama, romance, social justice, and political maneuvering set in 19th century England.

Pleasing a discerning, no nonsense reader is a nice experience. I'm honored.

Forsyte Phonetics, Philology, and Fate

I have always been bemused by the fact that the received pronunciation of the first name of Irene Heron Forsyte, the heroine of John Galsworthy's masterful trilogy, The Forsyte Saga as "I-reen-ee," rather than the more common pronunciation, "I-reen."

In both the 1967 and 2002 adaptation, the less common is employed:



(By the way, that truncated clip, the poor quality, and the cheesy trailer don't do justice to a masterful adaptation, with great performances.)

and:



(Yeah, I know. But it was this or watch through a whole episode on Hulu--after subscribing--to hear someone say her name.)

Although either pronunciation is correct, the consistent use of the more rare pronunciation (other than in the botched 1949 film adaptation That Forsyte Woman), raises the question why.

I have a hunch.

Galsworthy's novels are generally viewed as all-of-a-piece, but in fact the difference between The Saga and its sequel, A Modern Comedy, is in its treatment of Soames, Irene's first husband, who is the anti-hero--almost the villain of the earliest novel. The Man of Property but who is, by the time of Swan Song, pretty well redeemed, if not exactly warms and fuzzy. The Man of Property was originally intended to be a one-off, and its starker tone is notable in comparison to the other volumes.

One of the aspects of the books that has baffled generations of readers is his risky decision to have Irene viewed solely through the outside, to be seen only through the perceptions of others, as he writes in the preface to the collected Saga: "The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world."

This makes it impossible for us to know her the way we know any of the other characters. I can't help but wonder if this is due to the fact that John Galsworthy played the part of Young Jolyon in his own life, marrying his cousin's wife, Ada Nemesis (!) Pearson after an affair with her--but was loathe to depict his much loved wife in print more clearly than he absolutely had to, and tried to disguise her in the tale.

Nemesis, of course, is the Greek goddess who "appears chiefly as the avenger of crime and the punisher of hubris, and as such is akin to Atë and the Erinyes." (Yes, its Wikipedia, but it's also correct.) The Erinyes were "three netherworld goddesses who avenged crimes against the natural order. They were particularly concerned with homicide, unfilial conduct, crimes against the gods, and perjury. A victim seeking justice could call down the curse of the Erinys upon the criminal." The Erinyes sound fairly close to the name "Irene" yes?

Nemesis makes her appearance in the Forsyte Saga, and, as I pointed out last week, she is dangerous--to Old Jolyon, to Philip Bossiney, and certainly to Soames, whose death is traceable, ultimately, to the rejection of his daughter's love by her son Jon, because of Irene's and her dying husband, Young Jolyon, opposition to the marriage.

Nemesis is in the warp and woof of the Forsyte Saga and, cloaked as the Erinyes, or, rather, Irene, indirectly, precipitates the tragic end of the Modern Comedy.

And Love Itself Have Rest: Indian Summer of a Forsyte

In his Indian Summer of a Forsyte, John Galsworthy returned to the story he had laid down, he thought, forever--that of Irene Forsyte, née Heron, fugitive wife of Soames, who finds a refuge from her drab--but free!--life in an unexpected place--at Robin Hill, the house that Philip Bossiney, the man who became her lover, designed for her husband.

Robin Hill has passed out of Soames's possession into that of his uncle "Old Jolyon," most philosophical of the old Forsytes, and head of the family. Jolyon's philosophy, and his compassion are touched by Irene's loneliness, and her beauty and charm stir him to go beyond the realm of safety and convention, as he realized on waking up from a cat-nap:

That night in his study he had just finished his cigar and was dozing off, when he heard the rustle of a gown, and was conscious of a scent of violets. Opening his eyes he saw her, dressed in grey, standing by the fireplace, holding out her arms. The odd thing was that, though those arms seemed to hold nothing, they were curved as if round someone's neck, and her own neck was bent back, her lips open, her eyes closed. She vanished at once, and there were the mantelpiece and his bronzes. But those bronzes and the mantelpiece had not been there when she was, only the fireplace and the wall! Shaken and troubled, he got up. 'I must take medicine,' he thought; 'I can't be well.' His heart beat too fast, he had an asthmatic feeling in the chest; and going to the window, he opened it to get some air. A dog was barking far away, one of the dogs at Gage's farm no doubt, beyond the coppice. A beautiful still night, but dark. 'I dropped off,' he mused, 'that's it! And yet I'll swear my eyes were open!' A sound like a sigh seemed to answer.
"What's that?" he said sharply, "who's there?"
Putting his hand to his side to still the beating of his heart, he stepped out on the terrace. Something soft scurried by in the dark. "Shoo!" It was that great grey cat. 'Young Bosinney was like a great cat!' he thought. 'It was him in there, that she—that she was—He's got her still!' He walked to the edge of the terrace, and looked down into the darkness; he could just see the powdering of the daisies on the unmown lawn. Here to-day and gone to-morrow! And there came the moon, who saw all, young and old, alive and dead, and didn't care a dump! His own turn soon. For a single day of youth he would give what was left! And he turned again towards the house. He could see the windows of the night nursery up there. His little sweet would be asleep. 'Hope that dog won't wake her!' he thought. 'What is it makes us love, and makes us die! I must go to bed.'
And across the terrace stones, growing grey in the moonlight, he passed back within.
How should an old man live his days if not in dreaming of his well-spent past? In that, at all events, there is no agitating warmth, only pale winter sunshine. The shell can withstand the gentle beating of the dynamos of memory. The present he should distrust; the future shun. From beneath thick shade he should watch the sunlight creeping at his toes. If there be sun of summer, let him not go out into it, mistaking it for the Indian-summer sun! Thus peradventure he shall decline softly, slowly, imperceptibly, until impatient Nature clutches his wind-pipe and he gasps away to death some early morning before the world is aired, and they put on his tombstone: 'In the fulness of years!' yea! If he preserve his principles in perfect order, a Forsyte may live on long after he is dead.
Old Jolyon was conscious of all this, and yet there was in him that which transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a Forsyte shall not love beauty more than reason; nor his own way more than his own health. And something beat within him in these days that with each throb fretted at the thinning shell. His sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he was living on his capital, he would have stared you down. No, no; a man did not live on his capital; it was not done! The shibboleths of the past are ever more real than the actualities of the present. And he, to whom living on one's capital had always been anathema, could not have borne to have applied so gross a phrase to his own case. Pleasure is healthful; beauty good to see; to live again in the youth of the young—and what else on earth was he doing!

There is something dangerous in beauty, in Galsworthy. Irene cares for Uncle Jolyon, and is conscious that she has something to give him, just as he shows kindness toward her. But, alone of the old Forsytes--except for his rattletrap brother Swithin--Jolyon chooses the riskier path.

And what is the risk? Hastening the day of which Byron warns:

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

In a quiet way, Old Jolyon rejects Forsyteism in his last days. He chooses transcendence, spontaneity, and love. It hastens his death--and yet enriches his life

High Praise from a Great Source

I have received a wonderful endorsement for Phineas at Bay:

In writing Phineas at Bay, John Wirenius has done the Trollope-loving world a great service. Phineas Finn was my first Trollope novel, at age 19 or 20, and ever since I think of him as the most charming character in English fiction. Now we have the chance to renew the acquaintance with Phineas later in life, and all of his world, in a novel Trollope himself would have thoroughly enjoyed: meaty, filled with humor, affection, drama, and above all, character – Trollope’s greatest genius and gift to the reading world. Read it at once, and, like all Trollope, again and again.

--Randolph Williams, President, the The American Trollope Society.

I couldn't be more pleased to have received praise form so knowledgeable and discerning a source.

The Base Metal Shows Through: Hem and Fitz

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the new edition of The Sun Also Rises:

Early drafts of the book are well known to scholars, and are available at the Hemingway Collection, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. But this new edition puts them in handy appendices, giving us lay readers a sense of Hemingway’s writing process, and, more importantly, of how different a novel “The Sun Also Rises” might have been.

All of Hemingway’s major changes to his manuscript move it toward a greater simplicity. In early drafts, the novel began in the middle of the story, at the bullfights during the festival of San Fermín, in Pamplona. Later, Hemingway opted for a more straightforward, chronological order, introducing the American expats Jake, Brett, and Robert Cohn in Paris, before they travel to Spain. In the manuscript that he sent to his editor at Scribner, Maxwell Perkins, the first two chapters detailed the characters’ histories and motivations. “This is a novel about a lady,” it began…
****

Jake Barnes was named Hem in the early drafts, and in the version he sent to his editor, Hemingway retained the conceit that the book was not merely based on his real-life experiences but was actually a memoir: “I made the unfortunate mistake, for a writer, of first having been Mr. Jake Barnes.”

All of this was cut at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, after reading the version that Hemingway had sent to Perkins, wrote a long, dismayed-sounding letter to Hemingway, in which he said, “I think that there are about 24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-at-nothing that mar the whole narrative up to P. 29 where (after a false start on the introduction of Cohn) it really gets going.” Though Hemingway would later downplay Fitzgerald’s editorial influence, the published novel begins with the sentence: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.”

In the letter, Fitzgerald also criticized Hemingway for injecting his own writerly persona into the text: “That biography from you, who allways believed in the superiority (the preferability) of the imagined to the seen not to say to the merely recounted.” With this fragment of a sentence, Fitzgerald gives Hemingway the familiar writing-class advice—show, don’t tell; less is more; and what is left out can sometimes be more meaningful than what is included. Earlier versions of the novel contained even more of this “biography”; Fitzgerald had caught the remnants of nervous self-consciousness that Hemingway himself had curtailed as he wrote.

So, after Fitzgerald helps make Sun the major book it in fact is--though I do not admire Hemingway's code hero nonsense, which I think rather richly deserved Kurt Vonnegut's scathing takeoff--how did Hem repay him?

Slamming him in print and in a letter to their mutual editor, Maxwell Perkinss, for "whining" when he wrote his confessional memoir, The Crack-Up.

Not a nice chap, Hem, for all of his abilities. And, in fact, the nihilism of his philosophy, embedded as early as Sun,--"Our Nada, who art in Nada, Nada be thy name"--shows in his bleak record of bad behavior toward his onetime friend and benefactor
.

Patricia Hampl, in the American Scholar, tells the tale::

Hemingway lost no time trashing Fitzgerald to Perkins, their mutual editor (a connection that Fitzgerald, already a literary star, had arranged for the unknown and struggling Hemingway when they met in Paris in the 1920s). In a letter dated February 7, 1936—right after the first “Crack-Up” piece was published—Hemingway complains to Perkins that Fitzgerald “seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The Esquire pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one coming. I always knew he couldn’t think—he never could—but he had a marvelous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public.”

Hemingway wasn’t done. He went on to savage Fitzgerald in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” a short story that also appeared in Esquire, in August 1936. He injects “poor Scott Fitzgerald” into the fiction, noting that Fitzgerald had been “wrecked” by his “romantic awe” of the rich. This short story also refers to an exchange in which Fitzgerald is supposed to have said, “The very rich are different from you and me,” thereby allowing Hemingway to write the arch reply, “Yes, they have more money.”

Except this exchange, much quoted ever since, never occurred. Even decent Max Perkins couldn’t manage to correct the inaccuracy, though he put the facts on record: he was present at a lunch in New York in 1936 when Hemingway said, “I am getting to know the rich.” To which the literary critic Mary Colum, the third person at the table, said, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Fitzgerald wasn’t at the lunch—or in the city at the time. No doubt Hemingway was glad to offload the exchange onto Fitzgerald and adopt for himself the memorable zinger.

Fitzgerald wrote to Beatrice Dance (who had been his lover that summer) to report that he had protested his old pal’s literary slam in “a somewhat indignant letter,” though Hemingway remained unrepentant. “Since I had chosen to expose my private life so ‘shamelessly,’ in Esquire,” Fitzgerald notes, “he felt that it was sort of an open season for me.”

Fitzgerald then wrote Hemingway “a hell of a letter,” which, on second thought, he decided not to send. “Too often,” he says to Beatrice Dance, “literary men allow themselves to get into internecine quarrels and finish about as victoriously as most of the nations at the end of the World War.” Hemingway, he says in a final remark, “is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.” About as good a mutual character assessment as either of them ever got.

I've always been on Team Scottie. This is partially why, but Fitzgerald's tragic romanticism at least has a living ethos, unlike Hemingway's underlying Nada.

Confession of Errors

So, the thing about writing a 500+ page book is that, even with the best editorial review and will in the world, a few typos and errors will creep through. Listen, it's even happening at the major houses these days:

Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion. As Geoff Shandler, the editor in chief of Little, Brown and Company, told me, “Use of the word processor has resulted in a substantial decline in author discipline and attention. Manuscripts are much longer than they were 25 years ago, much more casually assembled, and beyond spell check (and not even then; and of course it will miss typos if the word is a word) it is amazing how little review seems to have occurred before the text is sent to the editor. Seriously, you have no idea how sloppy some of these things are.”

Well, and even the Times itself isn't exempt. But there's no point in whining about it; errors happen.

Still, the number of typos in Phineas at Bay is pretty small. There are a handful of blunders, though--one sentence fragment hanging out on a page, a few missed commas, and one place where I accorded the Countess of Brentford the wrong title.

Also, as a discerning and quite kind reader from England gently pointed out to me, there are a handful of errors in forms of address, particularly in the case of titled ladies (OK, pretty much Lizzie Eustace, who is not entitled to be addressed as "Lady Elizabeth" but only as "Lady Eustace." Like that would stop her, but, no--my narrator should know better.)

Although my reader was far more kind, I rather felt like I deserved a Trollopian version of the classic Rupert Giles rebuke:



So, all of this is to say that these errors are being tended to--the great thing about self-publishing is that they can be fixed, because the book is being printed by the order, and not as a full edition that would need to be withdrawn and pulped, or superseded, at least, if changes were required. All of you lovely people who have generously shelled thus far out will own the rare collectible copy with the printer's errors--not unlike the highly valuable, error-laced first edition of Huckleberry Finn, with the illustration in which somebody's fly appears to be open. That goes for $25 K, so you may yet be the winners on this deal.

Although I did manage to keep everyone's trousers zipped--in public, at any rate. So I've got that going for me, anyway.

My World With Bel Kaufman

I was saddened to see that Bel Kaufman died yesterday, aged 103.

Now, granted, 103 is a great age to attain, and somewhat mutes the mourning, but the fact is that there are some authors who touch you at just the right time and place, and no matter how long it's been since their last book, no matter how old they are when they die--it'll be a wrench. (I'm gonna be a wreck when--and may that day be far off!--the still active Herman Wouk is gathered to his fathers. And let me just note in passing that last year's The Lawgiver is a fine example of Wouk in "light" mode; not as good as City Boy, but with that novel's deftness, warmth and humor.)

But Bel Kaufman.

So, she wrote one masterpiece, Up the Down Staircase (1965), published the year before I was born, describing the first year on the job of an idealistic young school teacher, and made that tumultuous, frustrating, bureaucratically insane year into art. The book is funny as hell at points, wry, dark and occasionally verges into Joseph Heller territory.

I read it in the school library (brave choice, library staff!) at the lousy public junior high school at which I attended seventh grade, and, as a smart-mouthed nerd, I suffered for my art. Up the Down Staircase reassured me that my experience was not unique, at the same time it gave me enough distance to laugh at the sheer weirdness around me. So, when I saw an Eighth-grade girl's box of cigarettes fall out of her shirt pocket, in front of the Assistant Principal, a kindly avuncular, completely detached sort, and he stooped down, picked them up and returned them to her--well, "Kaufman!" I would think, and smile. When, on the bus home,a student fired a roman candle at the back of the driver's head (to be fair, one of the bullies had the decency to whisper to me, "Duck!"), again, I would ask myself how Kaufman would portray the incident, and how Miss Barrett would cope with the offenders. (I ducked, and said nothing.)

As to Kaufman herself:

For several years until she got her regular license, Ms. Kaufman was relegated to substitute teaching in a string of New York City high schools, any one of which could have been Calvin Coolidge.

“One morning a boy came to class three months late,” Ms. Kaufman wrote in 1991, in her introduction to a new edition of “Up the Down Staircase.” “I greeted him with a feeble joke: ‘Welcome back! What happened? Did you rob a bank?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘A grocery store.’”

“Up the Down Staircase” came along, Ms. Kaufman said afterward, at a low point in her life. She was teaching, selling the occasional short story to magazines and “living alone in a tiny apartment with very little money or hope for the future,” as she wrote in 1991. (In the 1940s, in order to sell a story to Esquire, which took a dim view of submissions by women, she began signing her work with the more androgynous first name Bel.)

****

Over the years, Ms. Kaufman was often asked whether the memorandums in “Up the Down Staircase” were real. Though they were inane enough to look real, she explained, in fact, she had invented most of them. (Ms. Kaufman did include a few actual New York City Board of Education memos, but had to tone them down to make them credible.)

The best indication of Ms. Kaufman’s skill at dead-on bureaucratic mimicry came from one of her former schools. After “Up the Down Staircase” was published, she wrote, an assistant principal there began annotating his official directives with a stern red-penciled admonition.

It read: “DO NOT SHOW THIS TO BEL KAUFMAN.”

Rest in peace--and thanks, Teach.

Phineas Redux: The Final Proof

So, as I mentioned, the last step before publication is my approval of the final cover as it has been applied to the actual physical book. This, of course, required the arrival of the final physical proof:



(The slight bumping to the top spine was my fault--I got caught in the torrential downpour today, and to save the book, which I had brought to lunch to show a friend, so I pushed it quickly, but not elegantly bak into the mailer sleeve.)

Oh, and here is the back:



(I'm not a great photographer, but I hope these convey the basic aesthetic of the book.)

Once I approve it, the book will be converted to be available in e-book form, and then we go live.

Very soon, now, Phineas will re-enter the lists. And the story's fate will be very much up to the market--readers, reviewers, and commenters.

But, for now, I have a book in hand that I have authored that looks very much as I hoped it would, and has a nice heft in hand.

A Real Thing in the World

Today I received a notification--actually just now, I received a notification--that my initial author's copy of Phineas at Bay has shipped to me. Assuming nothing has gone wrong in the process, the next move will be to go live in both paperback and Kindle form.

It feels like it's been a long time coming, since I first conceived of the book over six years ago, but when I remember that the complete first draft restarted from chapter 3 in April 2013, and a complete draft finished by the end of November of the same year, and that my extraordinary editor Karen Clark and I went through three drafts, not to mention the cover and book design, and proofs, and all of the marketing materials--why, it's been a whirlwind, really.

(Let me mention that Karen has her own novel, which she has entrusted to my care as editor, and which I think will deservedly make quite a splash when launched. It's a finely wrought story, contemporary in every way, and yet with powerful literary resonance. I won't say more yet, but I want to express my gratitude for the fact that I have had the benefit of being edited by a first-rate writer.)

So this isn't the post in which I urge you all to go to my Amazon page (it's not live yet, for one thing) and hope that many of you will find it interesting, and in whatever format, buy.

This is the post in which I ask you to share with me the strangest satisfaction, a calm before what I hope will be a storm. You see, I have since childhood loved books with a passion; fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and prose alike. I was an English major, and have read obsessively all my life--but with a special love for the novel, that seemingly simple, but endlessly variable, addictive art form. And I order a lot of books online, whether in e-book--I predominantly use Kindle--or from major publishers, or, most often, from independent bookstores.

But the book coming in the mail this time, jacketed, illustrated, finished, "rounded off and bright and done," (to steal from H.G. Wells via T.H. White, as applied to his own epic)--this finished work of fiction?

It's my own. I have written a novel, quality yet to be assayed. But--I have done the thing.

Something to savor while I wait for it to arrive. Something to savor, whatever its fate and reception.

Wish Phineas and me luck!