Between Books

Ronald Knox, who was, among other things, enough of a Trollope fan that he wrote the charming (if slight) Barchester Pilgrimage, was a Catholic priest, Sherlockian, detective story writer, and amiable eccentric.

He was also a formidable scholar. And who but Knox could begin his magnum opus with a dedicatory epistle to a novelist, his friend Evelyn Waugh? The opening of the epistle, though, speaks to every scholar who has put pen to paper, or keystroke to pixel, for that matter:

There is a kind of book about which you may say, almost without exaggeration, that it is the whole of a man's literary life, the unique child of his thought. Other writings he may have published on this or that occasion; please God, the work was not scamped, nor was he indifferent to the praise and blame of his critics. But it was all beside the mark. The Book was what mattered--he had lived with it all these years, fondled it in his waking thoughts, used it as an escape from anxiety, a solace in long journeys, in tedious conversations. Did he find himself in a library, he made straight for the shelves which promised light on one cherished subject; did he hit upon a telling quotation, a just metaphor, an adroit phrase, it was treasured up, in miser's fashion, for the Book. The Book haunted his day-dreams like a guilty romance.

Barring his restricting of writers to whom this feeling would be known to men, and disregarding women writers, even those of his own day and in his own field, such as Evelyn Undehill, the sentiment is profoundly true, although in my own case, each phase of life has produced a different Book.

When I was a young man, I read in the biographies of Oliver Wendell Holmes of his ambition to write his magnum opus, The Common Law (1881) before his 40th birthday (he just made it). In a fit of bravado, I resolved to write my book on freedom of speech before my own 40th birthday, and published First Amendment, First Principles in 2000; the revised edition with two added chapters came out while I was still under 40. It was the Book for me through my young manhood, finished and expanded before I hit the line of middle age. A young man's book, not to be mentioned in the same breath as the classic Holmes wrote, but it was the very best I could do, and it defined an era in my own life. It was, for that time, the Book, and I never thought I'd write another.

But then came the great surprise--Phineas at Bay, a novel, for me the greatest form of literature, and one which I had aspired to write when I scribbled a few stories by hand in off hours as an English major at Fordham College, or at Columbia Law School. But I had no staying power, and the stories waned and died. But then I had the Book, First Amendment, First Principles, and counted myself lucky to have written that.

In my mid-40s, though, I was gripped as I had been a decade before, and wrote the continued adventures of Phineas Finn, Marie Finn, and their set. I had another Book. It sells, a few copies little here and there, now and again, and I have been paid and have used that money to pay the light bill, so I meet Stephen King's criteria to be deemed a talented writer (thankya big big, sai King!).

In just a few weeks, I will be 52.

As I move into the latter half of middle age, I wonder: will lightning strike thrice? I don't mean in the quality of the books--I'm no Holmes, no Trollope, no King--but will the tank refill, inspiration ignite, and the wonderful madness of pursuing the Book again be mine to revel in? Frankly, I feel guilty hoping for it--once was luck, twice was inexpressibly joyful, but three times--why, it feels almost greedy to hope for it.

Almost.

And earlier this week, I found that a drying up point at another novel I'd started over a year ago suddenly was not a stopping point. It's too early to tell if this will be a third "the Book"--but hope--well, hope comes unbidden.

Only time will tell.

A Forgotten Influence

In writing Phineas at Bay, I tried to give credit to (most of) the influences and references I included in the book. (In fact, the Author's Note, titled "For Those Who Who Enjoy Peering Behind the Curtain,"runs 12 pages.) But there's one I signally failed to credit, largely because I'd forgotten how it moved me.

In "Behind the Curtain" I note that I based the feelings of my young heroine Clarissa Riley, prior to her wedding, on those of Eleanor Roosevelt before her wedding to Franklin. In particular, I was struck by her framing of the ideal of love around Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "A Woman's Shortcomings".

I'd forgotten, though, the extent to which that poem, used as a framing device in the television films Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, fretted at me. Even more than in the biographies, the film hearkens back again and again to Browning's poem, holding out an ideal of love that is--dare I say it? Yes, I rather think I do--an ideal of love that is quite simply impossible to live up to.

I was reminded of that when I re-viewed one of the TV films for the first time in oh, well over a decade.

So here is my answer to Mrs. Browning's poem as used in those films. For the non-initiate, Phineas Finn's first wife Mary Flood Jones dies in childbirth at the beginning of Phones Redux (1874). Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes a widower at the beginning of The Duke's Children (1880).

****

Now that the day itself had begun, Clarissa felt keyed up, but not exactly anxious. Excited, that was the word. Early on in her engagement, she had been fearful that she had plunged too quickly, leaped before sufficient looking. Words in her mother’s old copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning had driven her to her uncle’s study late one night for comfort. Finding him at his desk reviewing a brief, despite the lateness of the hour—had it been for Ifor, whom she was starting to think of as the brother she had always longed for, but never had? Perhaps—in any event, she had not hesitated to interrupt him.

Wordlessly, she had showed her uncle the passage:

Unless you can think, when the song is done,
No other is soft in the rhythm;
Unless you can feel, when left by One,
That all men else go with him;
Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath,
That your beauty itself wants proving;
Unless you can swear “For life, for death!” —
Oh, fear to call it loving!

Uncle Phineas had read the poem carefully through. He looked at her over his reading glasses, and said to Clarissa, “Mrs. Browning was a gifted poet, no doubt, but she puts things forcefully, simply, as poets often do. Look here, at the next stanza.” He pointed, and Clarissa read:

Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbehoving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past —
Oh, never call it loving!

Uncle Phineas had waited until she had looked up from the page, and said, in his gentlest voice, “My friend the Duke of Omnium did not die when the dream was past—and his love was not perfect or idyllic, but tempestuous, and with all the contrarieties and squalls of life. Yet he loved, and she loved, as truly as ever a couple did. Do not let Mrs. Browning frighten you, my dear.”

“Uncle Phineas, you were married once before, Mother told me.”

“Yes, Clarissa, I was.”

“Did you love my Aunt Mary?”

Phineas had then paused a moment. “When I first told her I did, I thought that was the case. I later came to realize that, although I cared for her, I did not love her as I could best love a woman, and I married her nonetheless. In doing so, I did us both a great injustice—she was a lovely girl, and could have found someone who would have loved her as she deserved.”

After a little while, Clarissa had asked, in a small voice, “Did she know?”

“I sincerely hope not, Clarissa. She died so soon, you see, that she may not have.” The pain in his voice startled her. “I lost not only Mary, but the son she bore me—he died only a few hours after his mother.”

“What was his name?” she asked.

“Malachi. After my father, your grandfather, my dear girl. How he would have loved you.”

She leaned up against him for a moment, and then murmured:

“So I should not let Mrs. Browning frighten me, then?”

“Do you love Savrola—in your heart, truly, as far as you know your heart?”

“Yes.”

“Then be at ease,” he had said, “and trust to your heart.”

In the months since, her feelings had become ever more clear, and ever stronger. Her love had been confirmed by a barrage of experiences—the suspenseful ordeal of viewing Ifor’s trial together, Savrola’s willingness to assist her uncle, and then later his assiduous care, not only for her, but for her uncle and for Aunt Marie when her uncle had been injured, his regular letters sent from the House when speeches were dull, enlivened by little drawings of the long-winded speakers, and of Savrola himself, as a little be-suited pig, snoozing in his seat. All these things had endeared him to her, and the terrible fear that she had undergone when his own life was endangered had taught her that her uncle had been right. She knew, on her wedding day, that she loved and was loved, and could acknowledge it without fear.

Her bath ready, Clarissa prepared to meet the day.

High Praise: The Trollope Jupiter on Phineas at Bay

I'm with Missy; isn't this review of Phineas at Bay by Mark Green brilliant:

Wirenius is avowedly a fan of Trollope but it is apparent from the earliest chapters that he is an able writer and so any fears on that head are allayed. He understands the demands of plot development, building tension and the importance of character which are the basic stock in trade of the writer of fiction.

If I might consider his characters first; it is important, where established characters from previous novels are resurrected that they should be recognisable from the Trollopian incarnations. Phineas Finn, as the principal character is the most important in this respect, but so too is his wife Marie – Madame Max from the Palliser series of novels. Here Wirenius succeeds for me. His Phineas would not be out of place in Trollope’s novels. He is older, certainly – the novel is set in the last decade of the 19th century – and perhaps wiser but, importantly for those who wish to see him rediscover his youthful energy and willingness to take on an unpopular cause, he is once more something of an outsider from the establishment. He is a member of the ruling Liberal party but not a member of Barrington Erle’s cabinet. His somewhat Quixotic decision to champion the cause of the Welsh miner Ifor Powlett-Jones is in keeping with this reinvigorated character.

Marie Finn is also recognisably the character Trollope created. Her wisdom and insight are intact as is her ability to see how people will react and match her actions to the needs of the case in a way that would be an example to her husband if he were not the man he is. I found their relationship described with greater frankness than the Victorian Trollope was able to commit to the page. It was a salutary reminder that this was a couple who were not only intellectually but physically drawn to one another

****

If I have a quibble with this book it is that, unlike Trollope, whose most villainous characters were always shown to have finer qualities that gave them a rounded humanity, we are presented with an obdurate antagonist with whom Phineas must grapple. The industrialist Sir William McScuttle is vindictive in his prosecution of Ifor Powlett-Jones and uses improper subterfuge to undermine Barrington Erle in pursuit of power and to continue a vendetta against Phineas. He is painted too black and lacks the redeeming features which Trollope gave even his meanest characters. In this, perhaps, the book reflects a modern requirement for a simplified unambiguous narrative to which Trollope was not subject or could, at least, choose to ignore.

That concern aside, I found the plots worked – inasmuch as the actions of the characters which drive the plots forward are “in character”. Jack Standish is impetuous like his father was before him. Lizzie Eustace schemes and always has a weather eye on the main chance to do what is best for Lizzie. If there is sometimes a lack of the sense of inevitability about how things will go wrong that is a hallmark of Trollope (no good ever came out of a young man signing bills!) there is never implausibility. I believed in the stories as they developed and wanted to follow the developments. As a result, even though it weighs in at 500 pages, the book is a page-turner. Indeed, I did not find it long. By Trollope’s standards, of course, it isn’t – a mere two volume novel.

Sorry to borrow so much--there's lots I didn't borrow, and the reader will, I think, find the whole review of interest--but it's music to my ears. Green has other notes of praise and blame, but the overall assessment has made my day.

I will say that I wrote Phineas at Bay without the benefit of the much more nuanced depiction of Plantagenet Palliser
afforded by the finally released edition of The Duke's Children, having before me only the severely cut version published in Trollope's own lifetime. While I think my characterization of Palliser is consistent with Trollope's, I agree that the unabridged version could have led me to go deeper into his psyche. I also acknowledge that Sir William McScuttle has little to say for himself--not nothing, mind you; he's a practitioner of realpolitik who genuinely believes he's surrounded by hypocrites, and, having clawed his own way up the social ladder, is quite afraid of plummeting back down. I admit though, that he's less fully developed than he could have been. (Though I'm quite pleased with how Rev. Emilius and Lady Eustace came out, as my villains go.)

Still, how can I not be pleased with Green's conclusion:

Is it a worthy continuation of Trollope’s political novels? Does it provide Phineas with the third outing which John McCourt believes his character calls out for? I think the answer to both questions is “yes”. Wirenius has done his research on the issues which his book touches upon and his understanding of the characters he has borrowed from Trollope (I cannot speak to the borrowings from other writers which also feature as amusing asides) is evident. He has, therefore, satisfied my test of paying sufficient respect to his original source. And he has produced a story which moves quickly, more quickly than Trollope might have had it, and entertains. His writing style is clearly modern and if at times he attributes to his hero slightly anachronistic views that are ahead of his time (and out of sync with what Trollope might have given him), then I, for one, most definitely can forgive him.

What author could not be happy to read that?

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.

End of an Industrial Era

Reading about the closure of the last deep coal mine in Great Britain moved me in a way I didn't expect. When I read the headline, I thought "Thank God!," remembering all the stories I read about mining working conditions and accidents in researching Phineas Finn's and the Earl of Brentford's visit to the Pontnewydd coal mine for Phineas at Bay.

But as I read the article, I remembered the stories of the coal miners themselves; the everyday courage shown by underpaid men and, all too often boys, working under conditions we would blanch at, with death or serious physical injury a daily risk, so familiar as to go unthought of until it eventuated. I thought also of the wives and children who grew up in these environments, and whose stories are generally only ever hinted at.

My research was not of the depth to tell those stories--I was, after all, only stopping off in a fictional mine in a real Welsh mining town (as Pontnewydd then was, but is no longer). No, I used such a locale as a backdrop for an event, the catalyst of the main plot of my novel. But I'm glad that my editior pushed me further, and impelled me to go into the bowels of the mine, to try to add some flesh to the bones of my plot. Because the miners deserved more, and while I hope they all find a safer and more remunerative way of making a living, I am glad I got to delve a little into the culture of that difficult, dangerous job.

I can't regret the closing of collieries, but I regret the dispalcement of the miners, even as I hope for a better future for them and their families. And I'm glad I got to look into their lives a little bit.

The Way We Read Now: Surmounting the Stereotypes

I missed George Packer's well deserved paean of praise to Anthony Trollope's magnificent The Way We Live Now. Packer praises Trollope's book for man of the right reasons; this, for example, is admirably well put:

Trollope’s London is a satirical distortion of the city that he found upon returning from eighteen months of overseas travel: the luxurious center of a vast empire floating on limitless credit, a society defined entirely by commercial interest, a hothouse of financial speculation and status competition, a place where relationships have become purely transactional.

***
The mysterious figure looming at the center of “The Way We Live Now” is Augustus Melmotte, a financier (the term had just been coined) of obscure origins—French? Irish-American? Jewish?—and unsavory reputation. No one knows how Melmotte made his fortune—there are rumors of jail time in Germany and fraud in France—but he’s rich, unimaginably rich, maybe the richest man in the world, and that’s enough for almost everyone in London society to swallow their blue-blood prejudices and distaste for his upstart manners. City investors beg to buy shares of Melmotte’s newly incorporated South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, a murky project for a rail line from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz that has all the signs of being a fraud. A lucky few are given seats on the company’s board; young aristocrats chase after the hand and income of Melmotte’s unlovely but unexpectedly tough-minded daughter, Marie; socialites trade favors to score scarce tickets to his sumptuous dinner in honor of the emperor of China; the Conservative and Liberal Parties vie to put Melmotte forward as their parliamentary candidate for Westminster (the Tories win). Whether or not he’s a fraudster doesn’t matter, as long as the music keeps playing.

Just about everything in this money-soaked world is false. Love and marriage, for example. The female characters in “The Way We Live Now” are sold off in marriage to the highest bidder like horses at a bazaar. Marie Melmotte’s prospects turn so decisively on up-to-the-minute appraisals of her net value that, after being wooed and dropped by several suitors, she finally abandons her romantic fantasies and comes to a clear-eyed conclusion: “I don’t think I’ll marry anybody. What’s the use? It’s only money. Nobody cares for anything else.” The man who finally wins her hand, a California businessman named Fisker, does so by pitching marriage as a straightforward deal, minus the pretty words: “Let us go in for life together. We’ve both done uncommon well.”

But then Packer hits a sour note. He writes:

One character tries to stand athwart the tide of finance and falsehood. Roger Carbury, Lady Carbury’s cousin, is a bachelor in his late thirties, doomed to love a much younger woman (Lady Carbury’s daughter, Hetta) who can’t bring herself to reciprocate. He’s an old-fashioned country gentleman with disdain for just about everything that England, with its stupendous new wealth, is becoming. He’s the only character who isn’t dazzled by Melmotte and his money: “A miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end,—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of the age. What are we coming to when such as he is an honoured guest at our tables?”


Trollope always complicates the moral starkness of his portraits. Carbury—the closest thing in the novel to an authorial stand-in—is not only a man of unshakeable principle but also a self-righteous prig who never hesitates to tell friends and family how to live their lives.

He's also a borderline stalker, harassing Hetta, and aching to quarrel with his protégé Paul Montague who has committed the unutterable sin of winning her love. More to the point, Trollope has missed the moral center of the novel. It's Roger Carbury, in part. But Roger shares that role with it's also a character Packer describes in distinctly unflattering terms:

A pronounced streak of xenophobia and anti-Semitism runs through “The Way We Live Now”—mostly attributed to Trollope’s high-society characters, but the author doesn’t completely escape the taint. He describes a Jewish financier named Brehgert as “a fat, greasy man of fifty, conspicuous for hair-dye.” When Brehgert proposes to a young Englishwoman who’s overestimated her own worth for too many years to be picky, the reaction is nearly universal horror, but she’s more pragmatic: as long as the man is rich, why should anyone care about his religion? Greed can be the leading wedge of freedom.

Yes, Breghert is at first sketched in profoundly unflattering terms, but he and Roger Carbury are the only thoroughly honest men in the book. In fact, Breghert treats those around him with equity and kindness, even when they treat him with contempt. As the book progresses, these two men--the old fashioned Tory whose day has passed and the seeming stereotype--are the only ones who try very hard to render to every one about them their due. And they're both outsiders, in a very real way--Roger has outlived his time; the High Victorian virtues he admires have been lost in the corruption of the age, and his embittered nature strips them of some of heir value. Breghert takes insult, scorn and polite contempt from his social "betters" and returns it with decency, but firmness.

I couldn't resist bringing Breghert back in Phineas at Bay, to explore that kindly, subfusc decency a little more, to spend a little more time with the nicer of the two honest men our Diogenes found in his search through a profligate London.

Down for the Count

When I was eleven, my grammar school had a book fair, and I bought a copy of Dracula, the original Bram Stoker novel. It was in December, I remember, and later that day, my sister and I found out that our beloved grandmother had died. I fled into the book, the stunning opening sequence of which--Jonathan Harker's trip to Transylvania, his meeting Count Dracula, his encounter with Dracula's wives--gave me a nightmare that kept me from reading any further for some time. (I strongly suspect, but don't know, that this nightmare was some part of my processing my sense of loss.) Two years later, I saw the Frank Langella version, and returned to Stoker's original.

I have visited Dracula recurrently ever since.

The book itself is brilliant, and no film adaptation has done it justice--Francis Ford Coppola's misleadingly namedBram Stoker's Dracula (1992) flirts with elements of the book, but overlays a romanticized version of Vlad the Impaler and a cheapening of the core group hunting him--Coppola deprives Jonathan Harker of his stature in the novel, and Anthony Hopkins's Van Helsing is, well...



Yeah. "She is the Devil's concubine" is probably the nadir of a great acting career.

Another not-so-much version at least had the benefit of introducing me to Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, and to classical music, so, that's another one I owe the Count.



In any event, every year around Halloween I read a supernaturally themed work--ranging from classics to modern genre fiction. I'm not a snob about it; Peter Straub's underrated, chilling Julia, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, even the deservedly despised Varney the Vampyre (James Malcolm Ryder or Thomas Preskett Prest, depending on whom you believe). My late, lamented professor and thesis adviser, Walter Kendrick boasted of being the only man to actually finish reading Varney, and, alas, he still holds the title.

Two years ago, I read Kim Newman's Anno Dracula, in which he felt free to hijack not only Stoker's plot and characters but those of other Victorian writers, and of other novels set in the era. (Yes, I was writing Phineas at Bay at the time, and Newman's borrowings, like Trollope's own, encouraged me to let rip and follow my own allusive turn of mind.) Newman knew enough to keep the Count offstage as much as possible, and his presence, almost never seen, but always looming over the scene, makes the book work--a trick he repeats in his Johnny Alucard, a seemingly disconnected series of stories that suddenly clicks into a coherent whole, with a brilliant twist.

This year I am re-reading one of the very few Dracula pastiches to restore the Count's mystery and ability to frighten, despite his cultural ubiquity. I refer to Elizabeth Kostova's 2005 debut novel The Historian, a subtle, slowly unravelling skein that I am enjoying on this go as much as I did when I first read it, ten years ago.

All because, in a time of terrible loss, a book gave a child a lesser fear to distract him from a very much greater one.

Thank you, Bram Stoker.

Quoth the Raven...a Brief Blog on Borrowing

I've just re-read Simon Raven's last novel, entitled The Troubadour (1992), which ended the sequence of seven novels grouped under the general title The First Born in Egypt, generally considered lesser work but connected to and sometimes as vital as his justly praised and unjustly neglected Alms for Oblivion sequence.

There's a lovely little moment after the death of Captain Detterling, the caddish and yet somehow impressive cricketer, soldier and pretender to the marquisate, rejoicing in the absurd title Captain the Most Honourable Marquess Canteloupe of the Aestuary of the Severn, when one of his fellow former members of the regiment tells his wife that he has decided not to attend Canteloupe's funeral:

"But surely he counted as a friend? The girls wrote to me that you seemed very pleased to see him at that cricket match at the school the other day."

"So I was. I like being reminded of the past. And Canteloupe never fails to arouse in me a kind of pleasurable astonishment, that creatures such as him are still permitted to exist. But I am not and never have been his intimate, and truth to tell I have always disapproved of him. What was it that Trollope said of the old Duke of Omnium--the one played by Ronald Culver in that admirable dramatization by Simon Raven? 'No man should dare to live idly as His Grace had lived--something like that. Whether as Detterling or as Canteloupe, this man has lived idly. I doubt if he ever performed a single useful act.

It's a good joke, and a nice bit of metafiction, making Simon Raven a character in a Simon Raven novel. (It's also as close as Detterling gets to an epitaph, although his death scene is rather mythic in nature.) But my own borrowings in Phineas at Bay go well beyond the world of Trollope--there are real historical personages hob-nobbing with their own fictional analogues, or the characters they created, in the case of Bernard Shaw. There are characters from good novels now obscure and from literary curiosae (which may have more meaning than they seem to at present). And there are several doffings of the hat to Raven, and through the actors who enacted his adaptation, to Doctor Who. A plethora of references flew through my mind and into the book as I wrote--and I left most of them in place. And most of them unflagged. (Though I did do an essay on sources.)

It's been suggested to me that an annotated Phineas at Bay might be desirable--to explain some of the topical references I didn't address in the essay, and to reveal the "Easter Eggs" as I called my little tributes. But I don't know. I'm rather pleased at how many have gone uncommented on--that suggests that they didn't feel out of place, or squeezed in.

Still, since I'm working on a follow up, the question seems relevant--to annotate or not to annotate?

A (Belatedly Found) Nice Word

This is quite lovely to see:

It is customary to look backward on the year just gone at this time before looking forward tomorrow to the year to come. In the case of Trollope there is so much to look forward to next year in his Bicentenary Year that there is a risk that 2014 will be overlooked as a mere prelude to the Big Thing. But that would be to overlook what a great year 2014 has been for Trollopians.

****

We have also seen the publication of a new novel, continuing the (mis-)adventures of Phineas Finn, Trollope’s Irish-born politician who featured as a central character in Trollope’s political novels. The novel, Phineas at Bay, by John Wirenius, takes up the eponymous hero’s story some years after the events described by Trollope in Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux and features the next generation heavily. Not a new Trollope, but perhaps the next best thing.

Many thanks to Deborah Teramis Christian, who pointed out this entry to me--and has identified the Jupiter as the blog of Steven Amarnick, who led the team that unearthed the unexpurgated The Duke's Children, which received a well-deserved rave from Charles McGrath in today's Times.

Book Gloat: Brattle Book Shop Edition

Well. now that I am beginning to settle back into life, a short book gloat seems in order. Or, What Did I Buy on My Summer Vacation (Highlights Reel):

Let's begin with the best--the copyright edition of a novel of great importance ego me--



Note the beautiful design on the page ends:



And here's the title page:



As near to a true first as I ever expect to own.

We now move to a nice find from the bargain table of Brattle Book Shop in Boston:



So, um, what are they? Two linked volumes by George R. Tyrrell, they together rate a chapter )and their author a whole Part) in Alec R. Vider's 1934 study The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church. They represent Fr. Tyrrell's effort to open Roman Catholicism to new learning and new political realities. He was excommunicated for these efforts, but in many ways anticipated Vatican II.

From the bargain table also:



All three volumes of George Eliot's masterpiece, in very nice shape, thankee, and all for $5 per volume. The "Holly Lodge" edition was a complete set of Eliot's works in 24 volumes, limited to 500 copies. These were part of number 97. Alas, the rest of my Eliot's do not match. However, I now have all the big ones, though my copy of "Scenes from Clerical Life" appears to have gone walkabout.

Not from the bargain table, but irresistible for a newly ordained deacon:



All one needed to know about vestments as of 1896. Maybe I can now understand why the Church uses the amise and the apparel. (I know, wild optimism. Still the apparel at least inspired Anthony Ainley's collar as the Master in Doctor Who, so nothing is ever entirely wasted.)

One last, and you can have a break.

First, I'm a great admirer of Werner Jaeger's Paideia. So it was a great pleasure to come across this:

"Everybody Knows it's Me or You..."

The story on Amazon's work environment has drawn a great deal of attention, and some pushback. It's a sobering account of workplace trends that asks just who we are as a culture, and what kind of lives we intend to lead. Because the story isn't just about the lower level employees, but its high-flyers. And is an ever-intensifying, cutthroat-competitive pressure cooker with data as the fuel really where we need to go as a society? Because some of the employees sound downright embracing of just that. And so I say the article raises questions of our aspirations, for ourselves, not just of market pressures.

It strikes a bit close to home, in that I published Phineas at Bay through an Amazon company, CreateSpace, and I was very pleased with the care and creativity they invested in supporting my book. The physical book is attractive, the Kindle edition as well, and the result was most gratifying. But even more than that, the fact that the team was available for questions, hand-holding, and concerns (rational or not), was a comfort. They made the production of the edited manuscript into a book easy. I'm uneasy at the thought that I may be complicit in so all-consuming an atmosphere.

Some will speak in defense of the company, and point out ameliorating factors--policies not followed, anecdotes of supportive managers and co-workers. Others may defend the stark nature of the workplace depicted in the article, whether true or not, and valorize its efficiency. I have no easy answers, here. But I am reminded of the ending to the book Cheaper By the Dozen, the story of the family life of the early efficiency experts Frank Gilbreth and Lillian Moller Gilbreth:

"Someone once asked Dad: But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it? "
For work, if you love that best, said Dad. For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure. He looked over the top of his pince-nez. For mumblety-peg, if that's where your heart lies."

We must not become so efficient and single-minded that we lose all the time we are saving.

"I Run After Units": Returning to Trollope Country

An Address to the Trollope Society USA
At The Knickerbocker Club,
New York City
May 18, 2015


Well, If I had known that I would be following not only Melanie Kirkpatrick, but Jack Hall, the world's leading Trollope scholar, I might have hesitated when Randy Williams asked me to speak tonight. We also have with us in the room Robert Wiseman, one of the two men who have given us the restored text of The Duke's Children, as well as several scholars who have enriched my own understanding of Trollope’s works.

Among this starry crowd, I admit that I feel something of a fraud. While you have been restoring Trollope’s words, or illuminating his life, I have been brewing not real coffee, but ersatz. Finest quality ersatz, I hope, but still—I have added to the Trollope corpus only by using his writings as a jumping off point for my own tale.

My first job out of law school was doing criminal appeals for the Legal Aid Society here in New York City. Here’s the funny thing about criminal cases. Even when it’s not necessary to prove a case, police and prosecutors always want to know why.

Why do people violate the social contract? Why do they cross the lines we have drawn between right and wrong? Between good and bad? Why do people steal?

Or, in my case, why do we write sequels to classic works of fiction? Why do we appropriate the characters and stories of great writers? Like I asked a second ago, why do we steal?

Look, it’s not as if I’m the only one to do it. In fact, I’m in pretty good company. Shakespeare pillaged his plots from history, from myths—he even ripped off Homer. Dumas based the d’Artagnan Cycle—The Three Musketeers and its sequels—on an earlier novel, the fake Memoirs of d’Artagnan published in 1700 by Courtilz de Sandras (we think; nobody’s proven it, really).

John Gardner retold Beowulf from the point of view of the monster. P.D. James’s last novel was yet another sequel to Pride and Prejudice. No zombies, but plenty of bodies in Death Comes to Pemberly. George MacDonald Fraser made an entire career off Harry Flashman, the school bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

But why do we do it?

I think it’s because writers are readers.

What gave me the audacity to continue the story of Phineas and Marie Finn, of Plantagenet Palliser and his children, of all their friends and enemies?

A sense that the story wasn’t finished. To steal a phrase form T.H. White, I was haunted for years by the feeling that Trollope had not left the tale “round and bright and done.”

We don’t know if Trollope had finished with the Duke, or with Phineas, for that matter. From my first reading of the Palliser novels, while I was in college, to the day I began my continuation of the story, two plot threads were left dangling into my cerebral cortex, itching away at me.

First, the strange complacency of Phineas Finn in The Prime Minister, where he and the Duke get into a debate about equality—with Phineas attacking it, and the Duke defending the idea, at least in the abstract. What had happened to the radical Member of Parliament to strip him of his fire and passion? How strange that he is on the sidelines in The Duke’s Children, despite Marie’s much more prominent role.

That was the really irritating itch, but there was second one.

Trollope leaves the Duke at Lady Mary’s wedding. We are told that “One who did not know him well might have said that he was a man with few cares, and who now took special joy in the happiness of his children” but that in fact he was reminding himself of all that he had suffered. A classic Trollope moment—the Duke is transfixed in a moment of time, like Bishop Proudie praying that he might not be glad that his wife was dead, or the Archdeacon, at his beloved father’s bedside suddenly horrified that he’s watching the clock in hope that he can get the telegram off announcing his father’s death so that Government can appoint him bishop before it falls.

But here’s the thing—Trollope never leaves his characters in those revelatory tableaux moments. Life goes on. Bishop Proudie shambles out to join Reverend Harding’s funeral. Archdeacon Grantly mourns, and then sends the telegram, anyway—only to miss becoming the bishop.

That great last glimpse of Plantagenet, doing the done thing, while he is secretly adrift in self-pity? I do not believe for an instant that Trollope meant to leave him their forever.

And neither can I believe that Phineas Finn would end up as a mere political drone, a more intelligent version of Lawrence Fitzgibbon, being shuffled from office to office.

Think about that for a moment. Phineas endures the slamming of Society’s doors on him by the poison of Quintus Slide’s journalism and Mr. Bonteen’s malice. Worse, he goes through the searing ordeal of being tried for Bonteen’s murder. He discovers how few of his friends know him well enough to squarely reject his guilt of murdering a man in the street.

Phineas discovers that Lady Laura can offer him nothing but a dramatic scene in his cell, but that his fellow outsider, Madame Max throws herself into saving his life.

Saving it for what?

For Phineas to diminish into just another politico, living on his wife’s money?

Or to age into a forgettable role as a good, dull, graying functionary?

I just could not believe that the brief glimpses we get of Phineas in The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children represent Trollope’s full development of the character who had made his way to the center of high society only to see its hollowness.

Only two years after publishing The Duke’s Children, Trollope died, and so we cannot know what, if anything he would have done. So the itch at the back of my brain became barely noticeable, only flaring up when I periodically dipped into the novels again.

Then, nearly ten years ago, my wife and I binge-watched the the 1974 television adaptation by Simon Raven. At the end of it, Catherine had to listen to a Festivus-style airing of these grievances. When I’d finished, she said simply. “You write it.”

Well, in general, when Catherine tells me to do something, it’s usually a good idea. So I started it.

I began thinking of how to approach Phineas and Marie. I immediately knew I could not continue the story right where Trollope breaks off—to do that, I would have to imitate his style to perfection, which simply couldn’t be sustained for a long book.

And a long book, at least by modern standards, it would have to be. A short novel just wouldn’t provide the feeling of capaciousness, of leisurely development of character over time, that typifies Trollope’s work. And in fact, by today’s standards, where an average debut novel is between 70,000 and 90,000 words, Phineas at Bay, weighing in at a little over 180,000 words is long. 100,000 words shorter than either of Trollope’s Phineas novels—but, by today’s standards, long.

To carry off a lengthy, Trollope-style book, I made three initial decisions.

First, I would set the story some twenty years after the ending of Phineas Redux—somewhere in the unspecified 1890s. That would give me some cover for the inevitable differences in style, and would allow for some difference in characterization.

Second, Phineas’s slight staleness in The Prime Minister would be my starting point, and his rekindling of his radicalism would be the primary story line.

But how to get him there?

Well, Phineas was a barrister, we know. He devilled under Mr. Low, remember? And a practicing barrister can easily find himself face-to-face with injustice. In fact, he could be dragged into doing something about it against his will. As a barrister, Phineas could, simply by being present in Court at the wrong moment, be handed a “dock brief.”

What, I hear you ask, is a “dock brief”?

Before England had a Legal Aid scheme, judges had the right to let a prisoner in the dock who could not afford a barrister to pick one out in court. And that barrister would be required to defend the case. That served my purpose—Phineas could be picked out by a defendant in a politically sensitive case.

Of course, there’s one problem with that; why would Phineas return to the law, with his seat in Parliament, and Marie’s money?

Thinking of Trollope killing off Mrs. Proudie because of an overheard complaint, I remembered dear, loyal Mr. Low, and handed him a debilitating heart condition.

Phineas returned to the law to keep his old pupil-master’s practice afloat.

And while in Court to defend Larry Fitzgibbon’s son, as a favor to his old friend, Phineas is assigned a dock brief representing a young Welsh miner accused of riot. What he sees re-awakens his social conscience, and brings him into collision with his own party.

Meanwhile, I needed a romantic plot. Phineas’s sister Barbara was another casualty, so that her daughter could become Phineas’s ward, and bask in the attentions of a young Tory MP, and in the new Lord Chiltern, the son of the current Earl of Brentford, Phineas’s old friend Oswald.

Season with Lizzie Eustace and Reverend Emilius to reflect the darker side of the fin de siècle, and with the surprising romantic reawakening of the Duke of Omnium, and I had a plot.

I wrote three whole chapters—and then I went dry. I lost the manuscript with Catherine’s edits, the computer it was stored on crashed.

Phineas at Bay appeared to have been stillborn.

Until just about two years ago, right around my birthday, I found that manuscript, and, typing it into a new computer just to save it, found myself knowing what happened next. And so to the end of the book.

The very last line, and its context , I had known from the moment I started re-typing. How I got there was not really down to me; The characters took me there on their own.

I used to suspect that Trollope was exaggerating when he described himself as weeping with his characters in their sorrows, and laughing with them in their joy. Then I started writing for them—and no. No, Trollope was not exaggerating a bit.

I found myself seeing through eyes not my own. Oswald, now the Earl of Brentford, as a worried father, evoked a level of sympathy in me that I never expected him to. The despair of Lady Laura, inconsolable after two decades, required exorcism. Marie’s courage and active nature led her to once more seize the initiative to protect those whom she loves.

And the Duke—well, the Duke’s re-awakening to life and the imperative to go on living takes him away from our last glimpse of him in Trollope. But it takes him in a direction that honors his past, while asserting that a man now nearly sixty could still have a future.

The writing of Phineas at Bay was amazingly freeing. I found myself playing—there are all kinds of literary allusions and jokes throughout the book. Characters from Trollope’s other novels make cameo appearances, characters from other Victorian writers make appearances, and if you look closely enough, I managed to hint at just how naughty Lady Eustace is without writing more than two sentences that would have been disapproved of by Mudie’s Select Library.

I’m still rather proud of that.

Frank Greystock, the honorable Tory MP who marries for love in The Eustace Diamonds, remains honorable here. His rivalry with Phineas is collegial, his partisanship leavened by an abiding respect for personal ties.

Mr. Roby and Mr. Rattler, alas, are beyond reform. But we knew that.

And, reaching all the way back to the beginning of the Palliser novels, George Vavasor’s legacy makes itself felt.

Although I had to do quite a lot of research, the writing itself was more natural than the legal writing I have done over the past quarter century. My editor, Karen Clark had to push me to take us with Phineas down into the coal mine, but once I set my hand to it, the characters made sure I arrived in one piece.

I had come back to Trollope Country.

I didn’t coin that phrase; Ellen Moody, who’s here with us tonight, did. She used it to describe both the familiar territory comprised by the Barset and Palliser novels but also the less familiar, more atypical locations and milieus in which Trollope's less comfortable, less widely read novels are set--Prague, in the case of Nina Balatka, or revolutionary France as explored in La Vendee.

Often sequels to classic novels are discussed in terms of working in the "world" or "land" of the original authors. But I adopted Ellen's coinage of "Trollope Country," because it brought to mind a thought from George MacDonald Fraser, who wrote the Flashman novels I mentioned earlier. In a non-Flashman novel, titled Mr American, Fraser draws a distinction between “land” and “country.” He writes that:

“When it has been enclosed, and worked and farmed for centuries, it's land; when it's open, unbroken, waiting to be possessed, it's country.”

And that's the thing about Trollope Country--it's country the way Fraser uses the word. Oh, Angela Thirkell appropriated the geography of Barsetshire, and Ronald Knox in his Barchester Pilgrimage gives us a couple of fleeting glimpses of Trollope's characters, but neither of them actually spend much time with Trollope’s characters or concerns.

So I had open country to explore and to work in. And I had one other strong conviction: The story has to matter for it to be worth telling. For all of the charm of Barchester Pilgrimage, it’s just that—a reverential, nostalgic daytrip. For a story to matter, the writer has to take risks.

So in Phineas at Bay we see the Duke move on from that moment in which Trollope left him suspended. We see his years of grieving Glencora end, and in this book, the Duke, at long last, dances.

Phineas Finn defies Prime Minister Barrington Erle, and his standing with the Liberal Party is in jeopardy.

Reverend Emilius finds himself drawn back to London, compelled once more to try to win Lizzie Eustace. He does so at great risk, and some cost. And Lizzie herself, no longer a young beauty, has to decide who she is at heart—if she can only find some truth in her heart.

Great liberties to take with Trollope’s characters. But in the writing, I felt in my own heart that I was keeping faith with Trollope. Now that the book is out, and I have experienced it recently as a reader, I still feel that way. Let me tell you why.

Lady Glencora—sorry, the Duchess of Omnium, if we’re being formal—once chided her husband “We must go after our nature, Plantagenet. Your nature is decimals. I run after units.” She’s right, of course. The Duke is most comfortable with policies and ideas—decimal coinage, Blue Books, and the means of implementing good public policy.

But Lady Glen—sorry, I just can’t keep up the formality—like her creator, Lady Glen is fascinated by people. Their individuality, their hopes and fears. By turns, she’s drawn inexorably into the lives of Alice Vavasor, Madame Max, Lady Eustace, Phineas Finn, Adelaide Palliser, Ferdinand Lopez, Frank Tregear.

Her interest isn’t based on the worth of those she cares about, either; she’s as solicitous of Lopez as she is of Phineas Finn. Good or bad, once Lady Glen takes you under her wing, she’ll do her best to see you get your due.

And that’s where Lady Glen and her creator are as one.

Just two days ago, I was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church-the American Anglican Church, in Communion with Trollope’s beloved Church of England. So, like Trollope’s clergymen, from Septimus Harding to Joseph Emilius, I find a sermon text helpful to me when I speak.

Here’s one, to go with Lady Glen’s observation that she, like Trollope, runs after units. This is from from He Knew He Was Right:

“The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.”

And it’s these two qualities—Trollope’s deep love of the individual as she or he is, and his recognition that we are all of us, every one, a mixture of our good and bad traits, that constantly bring me back to Trollope Country.

I was a voracious, if uncritical, reader when I was a boy--I read Agatha Christie by the yard, as eagerly as I read Mark Twain. Rex Stout alongside Dumas with the occasional sci fi relic from my father’s collection, and a deep soak in Bernard Shaw's plays and prefaces.

But it was reading Trollope--The Warden and Barchester Towers, specifically--that crystallized my own literary taste forever. Oh, I'd read some Dickens, some Poe (a lot of Poe. Did you know he wrote comedy too? It's terrible, but he tried.)

Hawthorne shed a light into who I would become as a reader--I read The Scarlet Letter, and thirsted with curiosity to understand the workings of Roger Chillingworth’s mind. (Still do; I may be driven one day to re-tell that tale from the Doctor's perspective if only to get him the hell out of my head.)

Because he was real to me in a way very few characters in fiction were. Conflicted, a mix of impulses, cruel and kind. The ruins of a man once great, at least in potential. Hurt, and hurting others.

Then I met Septimus Harding, the Warden. A devout, good man of God who has, without even noticing it, become enmeshed in a genteel, kindly administered, corruption. A loving soul, generously running a charitable institution, most of the funds of which support--er, him. His critic, John Bold, is right. On paper, at least. And yet, without Mr Harding, Hiram's Hospital declines into desuetude, and when Rev. Harding dies, his creator writes of him: "And so they buried Mr. Septimus Harding, formerly Warden of Hiram's Hospital in the city of Barchester, of whom the chronicler may say that that city never knew a sweeter gentleman or a better Christian." He has become the moral touchstone of the Barsetshire novels, this compromised, well-meaning, vacillating man.

People are complicated.

In the decades since I first read Trollope, my admiration for him has only grown. I have often enough pointed out that Phineas Redux, in which members of two despised minorities--an Irish Catholic and a Viennese Jewish widow--are the hero and heroine, and Trollope makes the readers cheer their happy union--readers who would despise Phineas Finn and Madame Max Goesler were they to meet on the street, mind you. And that's a sign of something.

Trollope is not safe. As life is unsafe, so too Trollope isn't safe.

Lady Glencora, the charismatic, charming coquette who matures into a great lady without losing her wit and her vivacity (and incidentally provided Susan Hampshire with the best role of her career), dies in the opening sentence of The Duke's Children, leaving us with the stolid, good, dutiful Plantagenet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium.

You know, the much less interesting one. Except--without her, he becomes more interesting.

Less fair than he used to be (he's downright cruel to Marie Finn, who has on multiple occasions been his and Glencora's benefactor), he is brusque with the children he inarticulately but deeply loves.

Without the raffish, mercurial Glencora, sober Plantagenet cannot be who he is. He's lost for much of the novel.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

And I'm just dealing with the two novel sequences that are Trollope's best known, nostalgically remembered books, let alone his less well known works. Take his descent into madness in He Knew He Was Right, the sympathetic bigamists in Dr. Wortle's School, or the acidulous satire in The Way We Live Now.

On the surface blander than Dickens or even Thackeray, bluff, old, "safe" Anthony Trollope outdated them all, pushing boundaries they didn't dream of, and getting away with it, too, because he was "a safe pair of hands."

It was a brilliant shell game. He didn't get caught in his lifetime, or even by the critics for the most part. But we know. We know.

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.

In Phineas at Bay, I tried to evoke Trollope's characters, but also his realistic generosity and tolerance. His insistence that nothing God has created is without worth. In sum, to pass on what I learned from him.

That’s one of the wonders of literature—why we write, why we read. I learned these truths from a man I have never met in the flesh, and yet was among my greatest teachers.

I hope my novel gives you pleasure. But it’s all right if it doesn’t. There is plenty of room in Trollope Country; I’m just one of the first homesteaders. You can go over to Father Knox’s corner, or Angela Thirkell’s patch. Or you can cultivate your own.

There’s plenty of room, and you can go anywhere. Maybe we’ll meet in the Cathedral, as Septimus Harding chants the Great Litany.

Didn’t I see you at the Beargarden, the night Dolly Longestaffe solved the crisis of the mouse in the orchestrelle? Or maybe you were at one of the old Duke’s dinners, alongside Doctor Thorne.

We’ll all run into each other along the way; everybody does, you know, in Trollope Country.

One More Review

I know, I know--but, really, this is what we authors live for (not, on, mind you, but for). From Kimberlie G. Fixx:

This book was such a pleasure to read. The plot was true to Our Author, the writing excellent, and being able to visit with old friends from Trollope's novels--a treat not to be missed.

Succinct and to the point, and with a lovely 5 star rating.

Many thanks, Kimberie--and so glad you enjoyed it.

And as I'm finalizing my text for the keynote at the Trollope Society Annual Dinner, all encouragement is especially welcome.

Phineas at Bay: Further Reviews

You know, I like to post reviews, but I'm surprised that I forgot to check out my British listings, where I in fact not one, but two.

First, from Mr. Michael Baxter:

I had Iong been scouring Amazon and elsewhere for any sequel to the Palliser novels so I was delighted when my efforts were finally rewarded. I read this book quickly and enjoyed it very much. Phineas Finn and his wife are especially well captured. I liked the guest appearances of characters from other novels by Trollope and I also appreciated the mention of a certain Mr Polteed from another author's famous trilogy. The only aspect of the story I couldn't quite accept involved Plantagenet Palliser - hadn't a certain person been too touched by scandal in the past for him to contemplate such a connection? He was always very conscious of the family name, after all!

Hmmm…an interesting point that last--and nice to see poor old Polteed get spotted. For the defense, I can only point out that Plantagenet did have his own minor scandal to live down, and that, of course, many years had passed.

Second, from David R. Gilbert:

A fascinating (and plausible) follow-up for Trollope addicts. It is well written despite a few anachronistic idioms. I am only sorry that in references to nineteenth century authors there was no reference to Anthony's estimable mother Frances Trollope. The only plot incongruity which rankled was the saga of Vavasor from Can You Forgive her with the tenacious American lady from The Way We Live Now. I think the author perhaps allowed more than their deserts both to Emilius and Finn, but I am very happy for Palliser!

Both readers most kindly awarded the book 4 out of 5 stars.

As ever, I am most grateful to readers who care enough to review.

Trollope Two Hundred Years Later

In England right now it is already April 24, 2015--the bicentennial of the birth of Anthony Trollope.

I can hear a lot of people saying, so what?

Ah, but I can't be one of them.

That giant orange-ish head looming over the caricatures of Susan Hampshire and Philip Latham? That's him. The Giant Trollope-head, la Caterina and I called that rather odd design choice in the opening credits of The Pallisers, the 1975 BBC adaptation of Trollope's masterful novel cycle. And yet, aesthetics aside, there is a truth to the omnipresence of that bewhiskered face, hovering over his characters. They were real to him, you see, and that is why, as he wrote in his Autobiography:

When my work has been quicker done,--and it has sometimes been done very quickly--the rapidity has been achieved by hot pressure, not in the conception, but in the telling of the story. Instead of writing eight pages a day, I have written sixteen; instead of working five days a week, I have worked seven. I have trebled my usual average, and have done so in circumstances which have enabled me to give up all my thoughts for the time to the book I have been writing. This has generally been done at some quiet spot among the mountains,--where there has been no society, no hunting, no whist, no ordinary household duties. And I am sure that the work so done has had in it the best truth and the highest spirit that I have been able to produce. At such times I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.

And they become real for us, his readers.

I was a voracious, if uncritical, reader when I was a boy--I read Agatha Christie by the yard, as eagerly as I read Mark Twain. Rex Stout alongside Dumas with the occasional sci fi relic and a deep soak in Bernard Shaw's plays and prefaces.

But it was reading Trollope--The Warden and Barchester Towers, specifically--that crystallized my own literary taste forever. Oh, I'd read some Dickens, some Poe (a lot of Poe. Did you know he wrote comedy too? It's terrible, but he tried.) Hawthorne shed a light into who I would become as a reader--I read The Scarlet Letter, and thirsted with curiosity to understand the workings of Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth. (Still do; I may be driven one day to re-tell that tale from the Doctor's perspective if only to get him the hell out of my head.) Because he was real to me in a way very few characters in fiction were. Conflicted, a mix of impulses, cruel and kind. The ruins of a man once great, at least in potential. Hurt, and hurting others.

Then I met Septimus Harding, the eponymous Warden. A devout, good an of God who has, without even noticing it, become enmeshed in a genteel, kindly administered, corruption. A loving soul, generously administering a charitable institution, most of the funds of which support--er, him. His critic, John Bold, is right. On paper, at least. And yet, without Mr Harding, Hiram's Hospital declines into desuetude, and when Rev. Harding dies, his creator writes of him: "And so they buried Mr. Septimus Harding, formerly Warden of Hiram's Hospital in the city of Barchester, of whom the chronicler may say that that city never knew a sweeter gentleman or a better Christian." He has become the moral touchstone of the Barsetshire novels, this compromised, well-meaning, vacillating man.

People are complicated.

In the decades since I have read Trollope, my admiration for his has only grown. I have often enough pointed out that Phineas Redux, in which members of two despised minorities--an Irish Catholic and a Viennese Jewish widow--are the hero and heroine, and Trollope makes the readers cher their happy union--readers who would despise Phineas Finn and Madame Max Goesler were they to meet on the street, mind you. And that's a sign of something. Trollope is not safe. A blog post from Oxford University Press pointed this out recently, though confining its analysis to sexual innuendo in Barchester Towers. But yes; as life in unsafe, so too Trollope isn't safe.

Lady Glencora, the charismatic, charming coquette who matures into a great lady without losing her wit and her vivacity (and incidentally provided Susan Hampshire with the best role of her career), dies in the opening pages of The Duke's Children, leaving us with the stolid, good, dutiful Plantagenet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium. You know, the much less interesting one. Except--without her, he becomes less fair (he's downright cruel to Marie Finn, who has on multiple occasions been his and Glencora's benefactor), he is brusque with the children he inarticulately but deeply loves. Without the raffish, mercurial Glencora, sober Plantagenet cannot be who he is. He's lost for much of the novel.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

And I'm just dealing with the two novel sequences that are Trollope's best known, nostalgically remembered books, let alone his less well known works. Take his descent into madness in He Knew He Was Right, sympathetic bigamists in Dr. Wortle's School, or acidulous satire in The Way We Live Now. Seemingly blander than Dickens or even Thackeray, bluff, old, "safe" Anthony Trollope outdated them all, pushing boundaries they didn't dream of, and getting away with it, too, because he was "a safe pair of hands." It was an a brilliant con game. He didn't get caught out.

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.

My own novel, Phineas at Bay is, of course, a sequel to the two Phineas novels, and, indeed, to the whole Palliser series. But it is more than that, in intent: It's 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 I have inflicted in my own turn.

And people surprise for good as well as for bad. Once, many years ago, I was at a social event where a newly engaged couple, both of them friends of mine, were present. One of the women there spitefully insulted the bride to be. Her first defender? A old enemy, eyes flashing with indignation, past dislike forgotten at the sight of the hurt in her old rival's eyes. A very Trollope moment.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

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

I learned these truths from a man I have never met in the flesh, and yet was among my greatest teachers.

In Phineas at Bay, I tried to evoke Trollope's characters, but also his realistic generosity and tolerance. His insistence that nothing God has created is without worth. In sum, to pass on what I learned from him.

Happy birthday, Anthony Trollope. May your novels be read, re-read and adapted for another two centuries.

Book Gloat

Ok, I bought it. Well, of course I would.

I mean, it's the actual, Anthony Trollope version of the last of the Palliser Novels. The sequence of novels are my favorite of his works, and among my favorite novels, period. (There are only a few others that share the top tier with Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux).

The Duke's Children, the end of the series (though possibly not where AT planned to end it), is a great novel in its previously published three volume form. I own a copy of the copyright edition, published in Germany simultaneously with the first British edition to prevent pirated editions being published:



I'm very glad to have both versions, but I am especially glad that I'll have the chance to read it as AT intended.

Here's what Melanie Kirkpatrick, who will be speaking with me at the Trollope Society Dinner in May, has to say about the new edition:

Trollope’s drastic abridgment of “The Duke’s Children” “meant that, although most of the plot was retained and the book has been rightly admired in his shortened form, much of the in-depth characterization has been lost.” In cutting “The Duke’s Children,” Trollope did not eliminate any of the book’s 80 chapters. Instead, he deleted numerous passages and individual words. In doing so, he excised thousands of details about his characters.

The richer characterizations found in the restored version include that of the eponymous hero, the duke of Omnium, who is a former prime minister also known as Plantagenet Palliser. The duke is an aloof, enigmatic figure who plays key roles in the preceding Palliser novels. But it is only in “The Duke’s Children” that his inner life is explored in depth. That is part of the book’s appeal—to see a familiar character, a man readers thought they knew—emerge as a more fully formed person.

As the book opens, the duke’s wife—the vivacious Lady Glencora—has died, and the duke is left to deal with his three nearly grown children, their unsuitable suitors and their youthful peccadilloes. The duke, who has always been better at political maneuvering than at managing personal relationships, is at sea. The duke’s three children—Lord Silverbridge, Lord Gerald and Lady Mary—seem beyond his understanding or control. Trollope’s subject is the joys and sorrows of fatherhood.

“The Duke’s Children” is also about grief, about which Trollope’s descriptions may be unsurpassed in English literature. The book’s moving opening line is the same in both versions: “No one, probably, ever felt himself to be more alone in the world than our old friend, the Duke of Omnium, when the Duchess died.”

The restored version explores the duke’s grief in greater depth than in the abridged version. There is a poignant passage in which Trollope describes the duke’s guilt at having taken his wife for granted: “In those former days many a long evening he had passed all alone in his library, satisfied with blue-books, newspapers, and speculations on political economy, and had never crossed the threshold of his wife’s drawing-room; but now, when there was no longer a threshold that he could cross, he felt himself to be deserted.”

Silverbridge, the duke’s elder son and heir, emerges as a far more likable and sympathetic character in the restored version. “He comes alive,” said Mr. Amarnick, in a way he doesn’t in the cut version. Silverbridge starts out as a boy but becomes a man by the end of the book “and you see the steps along the way” to his maturity. It’s the “accumulation of subtle details that makes the difference.” Trollope is sometimes criticized for not devoting enough attention to his male characters, who often pale against the vibrant women who walk through his pages. In the extended version of “The Duke’s Children,” Trollope’s young men are as complex and credible as his women.

Both versions end happily, with the duke finally agreeing to accept Silverbridge’s and Mary’s choices of whom to marry. In the abridged text, the book’s final lines have to do with the duke’s grudging acceptance of Mary’s new husband. The concluding words of the restored version, however, set a different tone. Gerald, the younger son, gets the last word: “‘It will be my turn next,’ said Gerald, as he was smoking with his brother that evening. ‘After what you and Mary have done, I think he must let me have my own way whatever it is.’”

This ending raises the intriguing possibility that Trollope didn’t intend to end the Palliser series with “The Duke’s Children.” Did he have another Palliser book in mind? Did he plan to carry on with the story of Silverbridge, Gerald and Mary? We’ll never know. The author died two years after “The Duke’s Children” was published.

My own Phineas at Bay continues the story, and I try to keep faith with Trollope. Reading the restored edition will help me in continuing to do so in my next work.

A Keynote Address on Phineas at Bay...

The 2015 Trollope Society Dinner Just Got even better; from the website:

Trollope Society 2015 Annual Dinner
May 18 @ 6:45 pm - 10:00 pm | $150

A Special Address by Melanie Kirkpatrick

We are delighted that Melanie Kirkpatrick, former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, will be joining us at our 2015 Annual Dinner. Kirkpatrick will report on the proceedings of the U.K. Trollope Society’s bicentenary dinner held in London at The Athenaeum on Anthony Trollope’s birthday, April 24, 2015. Kirkpatrick recently wrote an outstanding assessment of the new edition of The Duke’s Children for The Wall Street Journal entitled “A Bigger, Better Trollope.”

Keynote Address by John Wirenius, “‘I Run After Units’: Returning to Trollope Country”

The title of the address that our speaker, John Wirenius, has prepared for our Annual Dinner comes from Lady Glencora’s admonition to her husband in Phineas Redux: “We must go after our nature, Plantagenet. Your nature is decimals. I run after units.” Wirenius’s experiences in his early career as a public defender, and in recognizing his own call to the Church, were informed, he says, by Trollope’s compassion for flawed humanity. This empathy extends to characters others would relegate to the category of simple villains, but as Trollope observed in He Knew He Was Right, “The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.” With this view firmly in mind, Wirenius has continued the story of Phineas Finn, his wife Marie, and their friends (and enemies) in Phineas at Bay (2014). Wirenius picks up twenty years after Phineas’s acquittal for murder, deftly weaving a tale that involves a number of favorite characters from the Trollope canon with elements of romance, political intrigue, and labor strife.

The dinner will be held on May 18, 2015 at The Knickerbocker Club, 807 Fifth Avenue at 62nd Street, New York, NY. The reception will begin at 6:45 p.m., with dinner following at 7:30 p.m. Black tie.

John WireniusJohn Wirenius is a lawyer and will be ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church in May 2015. He is the author of a series of scholarly articles on freedom of speech, legal history, and, most recently, of theology and the intersection of law and religion. His love for Anthony Trollope’s writing dates back to his first year of college, where, as an English major, he stumbled on first the Barsetshire and then the Palliser novels. Phineas at Bay is his second book, and first novel.

Ms. Kirkpatrick and I may have very different political views, but we share a love of Anthony Trollope, and his nuanced characterization, capturing the inner lives of such disparate figures as Phineas and Marie Finn, Plantagenet Palliser, and the lamented Lady Glen. I look forward to making her acquaintance, and hearing about the proceedings in London, as we mark Trollope's bicentenary date in New York.

Tickets may be purchased at the link; hope to see you there!

Phineas at Bay: A Tasting Menu Redux

Between the announcement that I will be speaking at the Trollope Society's annual dinner and letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review,We've had a lot of interest in Phineas at Bay the past two weeks.

Needless to say, I'm delighted. And the spike in sales was very welcome. But, I'd like to encourage the curious who have not yet taken the plunge.

So, to whet the appetite, here is the opening:

PHINEAS AT BAY

Prologue

Mr. Quintus Slide, newly returned from nearly two decades in Australia, where he had been fortunate enough to earn a considerable sum of money, surveyed his newly re-acquired kingdom. Many would have thought that the making of a fortune was enough to justify a man’s career, and would lead one to forget old grudges. Not Quintus Slide. He had been, until the mid-1870s, the editor of The People’s Banner, and when he had lost his job at the broadsheet for going past the line of scandal permitted even the second tier of journalism, it had rankled. So he had written a few scurrilities about a Duchess? As if that mattered, even if she was married to the Prime Minister! The Banner’s proprietor at the time had been weak-willed enough to give Slide the push, making him unemployable, thanks to his editorial zeal in doing the competition down.

With nowhere to go, he fled to the Antipodes, and had profited handsomely; his school of journalism seemed to take root and flourish quite naturally in Australia. And now, he had sold up, bought the Banner outright, and was proprietor and editor both. An unpleasant smile creased his face, and, walking into his old digs in the editor’s office, he called for his secretary.

“Miss Allen!”

“Mr. Slide?” Miss Allen was a petite, handsome woman, whose severe, almost predatory, face was framed by auburn hair and the spiked tips of the winged collars on her blouses. Her rare smiles showed that she could, under different auspices, have been taken for beautiful. As it was, she remained both handsome and a little chilling. Smoothing her tailored skirts to guard against the untidiness she so hated, she seated herself in the chair opposite him on the other side of her desk.

“The file, Miss Allen. Tell me what you have found out about them.”

“Very good, Mr. Slide. You have asked me to research several individuals, and their current status or involvement from a political or social point of view. These individuals were all, I believe known, to you in your previous tenure as editor.”

“Yes, yes; what have you found?”

“Shall we begin at the social summit? His Grace Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium. Liberal Member of the House of Commons for Silverbridge, until his uncle the prior Duke died, Prime Minister of the Coalition Government from 187--”

“I know all that, Miss Allen. Since the Coalition?”

“The Duke and his Duchess, Lady Glencora M’Cluskie as was, took an extended tour of the Continent when the Coalition fell. During that tour, the Duchess took sick, and died.”
“Good.”

“Indeed, Mr. Slide? My researches reflect that the Duchess was quite popular.”

“Not with me she b----y wasn’t. What next?”

“The Duke has effectively retired from politics since then—he held office in the early ‘80s, in Mr. Monk’s last Government, as President of the Board of Trade--”

“Rather beneath a Duke, eh, Miss Allen?”

“True, Mr. Slide. My informants tell me that the Duke hungered to be Chancellor of the Exchequer or even Prime Minister again, but the former position is barred to a member of the Lords, and as to the latter, the Duke is respected, but not popular.”

“No second go for Planty Pall, then. Good!”

“His children are all married: Lord Silverbridge to the daughter of the American Ambassador shortly after the fall of the Omnium Government, Lady Mary to Francis Tregear, Conservative M.P. for Polpenno--”

“Popinjay, more like! And how the Duke must hate having a Tory son-in-law! Go on, Miss Allen, go on.”

“And Lord Gerald Palliser to Lady Agnes Kirkness.”

“Never ’eard of ’er.”

“From Scotland, Mr. Slide.”

“Well, that explains that. What about”—and here Mr. Slide’s voice took on an especially eager, rather unpleasant tone, “Mr. Phineas Finn?”

“Mr. Finn held office under Mr. Monk—he was Secretary for Ireland, and First Lord of the Admiralty, as under Omnium. He might have risen further, but Mr. Monk’s retirement due to ill health led to a new Government, and Mr. Finn was not given office. Mr. Gresham did not approve of his independence.”

“Ha! No more did he in the old days. What about now? He used to be thick with Barrington Erle.”

“They remain on amicable terms, Mr. Slide, but Mr. Finn’s independence does not appear to please the Prime Minister any more than it did his predecessor.”

“I should have known. Erle always valued loyalty above all else.”

“He still does. One of my informants tells me that he was overheard at the theater saying that Richard III couldn’t have been as bad as he is painted, since his motto was Loyaulte me lie.”

“Eh?”

“‘Loyalty binds me.’ You were particularly interested, Mr. Slide, as to whether there were any connection between Mr. Finn and any ladies.”

“Yes, well?”

“No hint of any impropriety. Mr. Finn appears in public quite often with his wife, the former Marie Goesler, who was in former days commonly styled Madame Max Goesler. She was very close with the late Duchess of Omnium. Mr. and Mrs. Finn appear to be well-suited. His niece, an orphan, lives with them. He spends most of his time in the House, in chambers, or at the law courts.”

“Eh, Finn, practicing at the bar? But his wife’s as rich as Croesus!”

“Yes, Mr. Slide, and very actively engaged in her business. She has prospered these past five years, especially, although I have not been able to trace all her interests. A formidable woman.”

“Takes one to know one, Miss Allen.”

Bowing her head in acknowledgment of the compliment, Miss Allen resumed her report.
“Mr. Finn appears to have taken over his pupil-master’s practice.”

“Probably got the bug after he was acquitted.”

“You mean of the murder charges, Mr. Slide? Yes, no evidence has ever been found to establish who murdered the Duke’s proposed successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer, a Mr. Wilfred Bonteen. Mr. Finn’s innocence having been established, suspicion rested for a time on a clergyman, the Reverend Joseph Emilius, but nothing could be proved against him.”

“Nothing, d’you say? He was convicted of bigamy, at any rate.”

“Yes, leading to the dissolution of his marriage to Lady Elizabeth Eustace.”

“A rum customer herself, Miss Allen—almost certainly stole diamonds from the family she married into, and then had ’em stolen from her—what I calls poetic justice.”

“Yes, Mr. Slide. The bigamy conviction was vacated when the sole witness recanted her testimony, and Mr. Emilius disappeared shortly thereafter.”

“Nothing between Finn and Lady Laura Kennedy? He interfered in her marriage, I know that, though not how, or how much. Her husband went mad, you know, as a result. Aye, and then died, poor d---l.”

“Lady Laura lives a quiet life, Mr. Slide. She was, it is said, her cousin Barrington Erle’s principal tutor in politics, and it’s also said that he owes his premiership to her, but that he sees her seldom these days.”

“A falling out, Miss Allen?”

“I do not think so, Mr. Slide. She sees the Prime Minister periodically. He seems simply to feel no longer in need of her tutelage.”

“And Finn?

“Normally sees her at family gatherings of the Brentford family. The current Earl of Brentford, the former Lord Chiltern, is a good friend of Mr. Finn’s, and the two families spend a fair amount of time together. Indeed, Mr. Finn is godfather to the current Lord Chiltern.”

“A Papist godfather to the heir presumptive of an earldom! What’s the world coming to, Miss Allen? I ask you, what’s the world coming to?”

“The godson has possibilities, Mr. Slide. He is often in the company of ladies of a bohemian tendency, and proclaims himself a socialist. He declines to use his title, in fact.”

“Oh, yes?”

“And he is, lately, often to be seen in the company of Lady Eustace.”

“Really?” Mr. Slide stretched out the word to twice its normal length, chewing it over as though it were a particularly succulent bit of toffee, and added, “And her old enough to be his mother, and a bit of a naughty one, if I remember aright. Yes, that could be quite useful, Miss Allen.”

“I am glad to hear it, Mr. Slide.”

“Keep yer feelers out there, Miss Allen. The People’s Banner is back in business, and Quintus Slide has a few scores to settle, if he can.”