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.

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.]

Chronicling Barchester

In writing my own Trollope pastiche, now titled Phineas at Bay, I brought back into the mix the scoundrelly Rev. Emilius, lately married to Lady Eustace. However I wanted a counterpoint to this rascal, and bethought myself of the son of Archdeacon Grantly, Samuel, called "Soapy Sam," as he is a parody of Samuel Wilberforce, a High Churchman of the Tractarians' generation. Here is Trollope's description of Samuel in The Warden (1855):

But perhaps Samuel was the general favourite; and dear little Soapy, as he was familiarly called, was as engaging a child as ever fond mother petted. He was soft and gentle in his manners, and attractive in his speech; the tone of his voice was melody, and every action was a grace; unlike his brothers, he was courteous to all, he was affable to the lowly, and meek even to the very scullery-maid. He was a boy of great promise, minding his books and delighting the hearts of his masters. His brothers, however, were not particularly fond of him; they would complain to their mother that Soapy's civility all meant something; they thought that his voice was too often listened to at Plumstead Episcopi, and evidently feared that, as he grew up, he would have more weight in the house than either of them; there was, therefore, a sort of agreement among them to put young Soapy down. This, however, was not so easy to be done; Samuel, though young, was sharp; he could not assume the stiff decorum of Charles James, nor could he fight like Henry; but he was a perfect master of his own weapons, and contrived, in the teeth of both of them, to hold the place which he had assumed. Henry declared that he was a false, cunning creature; and Charles James, though he always spoke of him as his dear brother Samuel, was not slow to say a word against him when opportunity offered. To speak the truth, Samuel was a cunning boy, and those even who loved him best could not but own that for one so young he was too adroit in choosing his words, and too skilled in modulating his voice.

Now, as Samuel was modeled on a bishop, it seemed to me, why not make him achieve the rank of one in later life? In the 1890s (when Phineas at Bay is set) , Samuel, born roughly in 1840-1845, would be just the right age to be one. And what better see for him to have than his grandfather's see of Barchester?

But I envision Samuel as having improved much since childhood, through association with his grandfather--and of having been, through the influence of his uncle, Mr. Arabin, one of that interesting second wave of Anglo-Catholics, such as Charles Gore, whose High Church piety coexisted with a social liberalism, and passionate belief in social justice. That made him an effective counterpoint to Emilius. It then occurred to me that, being about ten years older than Gore, the fictional Grantly would be just the right age to get caught up in the ritualism controversies of the late 1870s. And this, in turn, could give me another story to tell, after that of Phineas, or even alongside it, should I try to continue my sojourn in Trollope-land. And a story came to hand.

However, when I heard a couple of weeks ago about Ronald Knox's Barchester Pilgrimage (1934), an earlier continuation of the Barchester stories, and obtained a copy, I was saddened to see a brief appearance of "Samuel Grantley" (Knox adopts an alternative spelling that Trollope sometimes used) as--you guessed it!--Bishop of Barchester. Still, he is drawn in that cameo appearance as a rather unattractive figure, consistent with the worst of the childhood description. So I am not considering myself bound by Knox's tales, entertaining though they are; I view them as non-canonical. Some of his spade-work I may adopt--his classic map of Barchester, and some of his family trees, say, but he goes well beyond where I intend to go chronologically in Barchester, and in a very different direction.

And Samuel Grantly? His story is hinted at in Phineas at Bay; if that works out to my own satisfaction, I may move on to The Book of Samuel.

Bisy Backson

Sorry; between taking care of Elspeth--who is eating food on her own--working on what will be volume II of Phineas at Bay, as I have titled my novel--my Victorian family saga of which I have completed approximately 90,000 words out of a projected 150,000, I have allowed the blog to suffer these past few days.

The timing of my work on the novel has been fortuitous; the Trollope Society, of which I am a member, hosts an annual fall lecture. This year's, on October 8 in Manhattan, is remarkably apropos:

“Phineas Finn and the Bildungsroman” is the title of our 2013 Annual lecture, by Prof. Nicholas Birns, The New School.

Professor Birns, who was so captivating this past February in discussing La Vendee at our Mid-Winter Reception, has agreed to return as the Annual Lecture speaker. His subject will include both Phineas books — Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux — as well as cameo appearances in the last two Palliser books.

As Prof. Birns puts it: “One can ask: how and why did Trollope split the Phineas story into two books, with the second book also finishing the Lizzie Eustace story? What does it mean formally for the Bildungsroman to be spliced into a roman-fleuve like the Palliser series? The Bildungsroman changes when it is set in a complex, modernizing mid-Victorian society — as opposed to some thing like David Copperfield, written in the Victorian era but really set in the earlier era of Dickens’ childhood, in a simpler and less diversified milieu. Is Trollope’ s portrait of an Irish Catholic becoming socially acceptable in British society accurate or as it a kind of fairy tale, somewhat like Branson in Downton Abbey? Why is Phineas one of Trollope’s most appealing characters? Did Trollope see himself in Phineas, despite the manifest differences? (Most Bildungsromans are about characters roughly based on the author). We can also talk about other instances of the Bildungsroman in Trollope: The Claverinqs, the entire idea of the “hobbledehoy”, and instances of the Trollope’s female Bildungroman (Lady Anna? Can You Forgive Her?)”

The link between Phineas and Branson in Downton Abbey is suggestive, but I think that Trollope's Phineas, rooted in his own experience in Ireland, and in the reality of Irish politicians like Sir John Pope Hennessy (believed by the latter's grandson to have been the model for Phineas) is more deeply rooted in reality.

I look forward to Professor Birns' lecture; an expert on Trollope and Anthony Powell? Most promising.

By the bye, for those who think that writing sequels to Trollope is an abomination before the Lord? Msgr. Ronald Knox beat me to it, with a sequel to the Barset novels--published by the Trollope Society in a handsome edition...