"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.

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.”

Anglocat at the Feast: Speaking at the Trollope Society

From The Trollope Society USA:

2015 Annual Dinner
May 18 @ 6:45 pm - 10:00 pm | $150
“I Run After Units”: Returning to Trollope Country

Our Speaker: John Wirenius, Author of Phineas at Bay

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 7:15 p.m.

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.

I am very honored to be asked to speak at the dinner of the Society, which not only promotes scholarship and discussion of the great Victorian writer's work, but does so with warmth and wit.

If you are interested in attending, you can register here. I can't guarantee the quality of the speaker--but the company will be superb.

By the bye, Amazon rankings fluctuate wildly enough to give an author agony and ecstasy in a short period. I'm currently ranked #35,789 in Books--by tonight I could sink below the 1 million mark. But for now, just for now, mind you, my sales are better than abject.

Something to savor.

The Lost Masterpiece

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

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

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

From the Folio Society:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, better yet, read it.

Trollope in the Times: A Jumping Off Point

Asked the question what is the best portrayal of a marriage in literature, Charles McGrath writes:

But there are exceptions to the unhappy marriage rule, the union of Kitty and Levin in “Anna Karenina,” for one, and to me even more satisfying, the marriage of Plantagenet Palliser and Lady Glencora in Trollope’s Palliser novels. Not the least of the appeal of this fictional marriage is that it takes place over some 20 years or so in six different novels (seven if you count “The Small House at Allington,” though it’s strictly speaking one of Trollope’s Barsetshire novels, not a Palliser book), in which Plantagenet and Glencora are sometimes major characters, sometimes minor ones. The books are like a mini-series (and, indeed, became a famous BBC 26-parter in the early ’70s): We get to watch the characters evolve, grow old and surprise themselves.

Blond, clever, charming, witty, Glencora is easily the most beguiling of Trollope’s heroines. Trollope as much as admitted that he was in love with her himself. But except for his tremendous fortune, there’s nothing lovable about Plantagenet, who actually prides himself on being dull. All he cares for is politics and a mind-numbing scheme for switching British currency to the decimal system. Glencora is bullied into marrying him by her guardians, who fear that she is about to run away with a handsome scapegrace named Burgo Fitzgerald.

Trollope, a much sexier writer than he is given credit for, leaves no doubt that the attraction between Burgo and Glencora is powerful and erotic, or that Glencora’s feelings for her husband never heat up to the same degree. Marriage, both here and in his other books, is not necessarily ecstatic but, rather — when it works — a shifting arrangement of trade-offs. The relationship of Plantagenet and Glencora begins in antagonism and misunderstanding and gradually, over the course of thousands of pages, warms to understanding and to a fond attachment that is erotic in its own, understated way. She thaws him out and he loves her for it.They also quarrel and reconcile a lot. The marriage’s most volatile period comes in the penultimate book of the series, in which Plantagenet, though he is really too thin-skinned and self-righteous for the job, becomes prime minister. Newly energized, Glencora throws herself into advancing his career and becomes a kind of 19th-century Pamela Harriman, meddling in elections, spending her own considerable fortune on parties, dinners, receptions. Plantagenet hates the vulgarity of it all but gets swept up all the same. You feel on both sides (and hers especially) a growing ardor, a new understanding of what they can do for each other.

And then, shockingly, it’s over. Too stiff-backed to compromise, Plantagenet loses an election and the premiership. He and Glencora leave for Europe to lick their wounds, and on the very first page of the next, and last, volume, Glencora is dead. Plantagenet, though in his way just as repressed and socially hidebound as Walter Bridge, finds himself even more in love. “He had at times been inclined to think that in the exuberance of her spirits she had been a trouble rather than a support to him,” Trollope writes. “But now it was as though all outside appliances were taken away from him. There was no one of whom he could ask a question.”

This is a lovely analysis by McGrath, and I am reluctant to cut it, because it so ably sketches the characters' arc. It's quite on point.

We don't see enough of Marie and Phineas Finn to be sure, but the glimpses we have of them in Trollope (in The Prime Minister and in The Duke's Children, we see a very close-knit couple--a love match, yes, but one in which each has a sphere of autonomy--Marie has her business, Phineas his career in the Commons. But they are fiercely mutually protective, and seem attuned to each other in a way that childless couples often can be.

In projecting them out in Phineas at Bay, that is the direction I followed. However, the question remained:

What about the Duke? Where would Planty Pall be, some ten years after Glencora's death?

And, most of all, should I leave him there?

True confession time: I thought of it--just leave him where Trollope did, alone again, building bridges to the next generation without Glencora. Keep him a minor character, a walk on, really. After all, he's not that integral to the two Phineas novels.

But then I remembered a pair of scenes in Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset. When Mrs. Proudie, the domineering virago who has split the diocese and ruled over her husband through five novels, suddenly dies, he is transfixed by profoundly mixsed emotions:

He was free now. Even in his misery,—for he was very miserable,—he could not refrain from telling himself that. No one could now press uncalled-for into his study, contradict him in the presence of those before whom he was bound to be authoritative, and rob him of all his dignity. There was no one else of whom he was afraid. She had at least kept him out of the hands of other tyrants. He was now his own master, and there was a feeling,—I may not call it of relief, for as yet there was more of pain in it than of satisfaction,—a feeling as though he had escaped from an old trouble at a terrible cost of which he could not as yet calculate the amount. He knew that he might now give up all idea of writing to the archbishop.

She had in some ways, and at certain periods of his life, been very good to him. She had kept his money for him and made things go straight, when they had been poor. His interests had always been her interests. Without her he would never have been a bishop. So, at least, he told himself now, and so told himself probably with truth. She had been very careful of his children. She had never been idle. She had never been fond of pleasure. She had neglected no acknowledged duty. He did not doubt that she was now on her way to heaven. He took his hands down from his head, and clasping them together, said a little prayer. It may be doubted whether he quite knew for what he was praying. The idea of praying for her soul, now that she was dead, would have scandalized him. He certainly was not praying for his own soul. I think he was praying that God might save him from being glad that his wife was dead.

That last brilliant sentence (echoing a description of Archdeacon Grantly in Barchester Towers, at a time when he will, if his father, then the bishop, dies before the Government falls, be appointed to the See) is where a lesser novelist would have left the Bishop forever. But Trollope knows that life goes on. We adapt, we begin to rebuild. So Bishop Proudie, still I'm mourning, appears again, and reaches out to his former foe, the Archdeacon, at the funeral of Mr Harding, the Warden of the first novel:

And in the transept they were joined by another clergyman whom no one had expected to see that day. The bishop was there, looking old and worn,—almost as though he were unconscious of what he was doing. Since his wife's death no one had seen him out of the palace or of the palace grounds till that day. But there he was,—and they made way for him into the procession behind the two ladies,—and the archdeacon, when he saw it, resolved that there should be peace in his heart, if peace might be possible.

What I took from this was that I would be breaking faith with Trollope if I left Planty Pall where I found him. The story must move forward, or not be attempted at all.

What McGrath calls--quite rightly, in my opinion--the best depiction of marriage in literature deserves no less.

December with Phineas Finn & Co.

Over at the Trollope 19th Century Studies Group, we are reading my own book, Phineas at Bay. The schedule is not too tight, and, thanks to Ellen Moody's kindness in letting me set it, it breaks down into a rather nice episodic structure. We are beginning November 30, and continuing straight through. Not too late to join if you have a mind.

Anyway, here is the schedule:

Week 1: Prologue--Chapter 10 (Facilis descensus Averno);

Week 2: Chapter 11 (Sir William McScuttle)-Chapter 18 (Matching Priory);

Week 3: Chapter 19 (Phineas for the Defence)-Chapter 27 (A Drink From the Soup-plate of Honour);

Week 4: Prologue-Chapter 10 (Nunc Dimittis);

Week 5: Chapter 11 (Barchester Towers)-Chapter 20 (In the Midst of Death, We Are in Life);

Week 6: Chapter 21 (Ill Met By Moonlight) to Chapter 27 (The Turn of the Wheel).

"For Those Who Enjoy Peering Behind the Curtain " is just what it says, and so should be optional.

Come on the prowl with us!

65,000 Words

That's how much Anthony Trollope was required to cut from the Duke's Children:

It is a remarkable fact that one of the best-known novels by one of the greatest 19th-century English novelists has never been published in the form its author intended. Anthony Trollope wrote The Duke’s Children as a four-volume work but then reduced it to three, necessitating the loss of almost a quarter of his original text. The precise reason is lost to posterity but is likely to have been a demand from his publishers on the grounds of economy; it would not have come from Trollope himself, who had earlier written in his Autobiography: ‘I am at a loss to know how such a task could be performed. I could burn the MS., no doubt, and write another book on the same story; but how two words out of every six are to be withdrawn from a written novel, I cannot conceive.’

Yet this is precisely what he was obliged to do, and 65,000 words ended up on the cutting-room floor. As he wrote to John Blackwood not long after making the revisions: ‘I am bound to say that I have never found myself able to effect changes in the plot of a story. Small as the links are, one little thing hangs on another to such an extent that any change sets the whole narrative wrong. There are so many infinitesimal allusions to what is past, that the whole should be rewritten or it will be faulty.’ It was meticulous, exacting and soul-destroying work.

That's over a quarter of the book missing. But here's another fact: It's also a hair beneath the recommended low end of length for a modern novel, with 115 as the high end and 90,000 as "the sweet spot."

Now, Phineas at Bay clocks in at 171,461 (including the Postscript and Table of Contents, so a bit less, really). That's still well under either of the two Phineas novels by Trollope.

The factor that tipped me in favor of self-publishing was just that--a length such as that recommended by agents would not have allowed for a Trollopian feel. You need details for that, what the Folio Society calls "the massive accumulation of details." There has to be a feeling of capaciousness, of breadth. Self-publishing meant I could avoid the dilemma that Trollope himself had to face.

Trollop's "Butchered" Book Returns to Life

This is something to look forward to, all right:

He's one of the best-loved novelists of the 19th Century, whose work has been read and studied by academics and an army of fans, including Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes.
But remarkably, none of them has been getting the full story of Anthony Trollope's work – until now. A novel 'butchered' at the time of its original publication has been restored after 135 years, and is being hailed as virtually a whole new book.
When The Duke's Children was submitted for publication in 1879, Trollope was forced to hack away more than 65,000 words – a quarter of the original text. But now the sixth and final instalment in his series of novels about the Palliser family is to be published as he intended.
Last night Lord Fellowes said: 'I couldn't be more pleased. The truncated version is an ineffective conclusion to the Palliser novels but this is tremendous and does justice to the series which came before.'

Now, I'll disagree with Julian Fellowes calling the present text of The Duke's Children "ineffective," but I will agree that it is something of an anti-climax. Certainly the descending action of the book, which focuses more on the next generation with the Duke acting as a foil to his children, loses some of the impetus that the preceding novels had created. Also, losing Lady Glen (oh, all right, the Duchess) in the first chapter, while a truly gutsy move, also deprives the move of Trollope's most reliable source of action and warmth in the series. Lady Glen is missed sorely. As Ellen Moody has pointed out, Simon Raven's adaptation of the novels puts off Lady Glen's death, and extends her role fairly dramatically.

But the novel has its glories. The Duke's jealousy and his anger at Glencora's championing of Frank Tregear's courtship of Lady Mary (which he sees as a repudiation of their forced marriage) is excellently portrayed, and his injustice to Marie Finn (the former Madame Max) is even more so. We see Plantagenet's shadow side here, and Marie stands up to him with vigor. He is entirely in the wrong, and, ultimately, his own decency forces him, most reluctantly, to admit it.

It is in this novel that we get a glimpse into the Duke's feelings for Phineas Finn, in his answer to a question posed by his son over dinner at the Beargarden:

"To tell the truth it's a matter I don't care much about. They've got into some mess as to the number of Judges and what they ought to do. Finn was saying that they had so arranged that there was one Judge who never could possibly do anything."

"If Mr. Finn said so it would probably be so, with some little allowance for Irish exaggeration. He is a clever man, with less of his country's hyperbole than others;—but still not without his share."

"You know him well, I suppose."

"Yes;—as one man does know another in the political world."

"But he is a friend of yours? I don't mean an 'honourable friend,' which is great bosh; but you know him at home."

"Oh yes;—certainly. He has been staying with me at Matching. In public life such intimacies come from politics."

"You don't care very much about him then."

The Duke paused a moment before he answered. "Yes I do;—and in what I said just now perhaps I wronged him. I have been under obligations to Mr. Finn,—in a matter as to which he behaved very well. I have found him to be a gentleman. If you come across him in the House I would wish you to be courteous to him. I have not seen him since we came from abroad. I have been able to see nobody. But if ever again I should entertain my friends at my table, Mr. Finn would be one who would always be welcome there." This he said with a sadly serious air as though wishing that his words should be noted. At the present moment he was remembering that he owed recompense to Mrs. Finn, and was making an effort to pay the debt.

In Raven's screenplay, they have become closer than this; however, for Palliser, this is not nothing. It is the primary basis, in fact, from which I projected the relationship between the Duke and Phineas in Phineas at Bay.

An expanded text will certain;y be richer with those character moments that make Trollope unique among his contemporaries. I'll be buying mine as soon as it's available, with thanks to The Trollope Society for keeping on it!

Clearing the Decks, Back to the Mines

Well, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, but the next few months should be interesting. In my writing life, I have an idea for a second novel. Which is not to give up on the first--later this year, there will be a long-standing Trollope-19th Century book group online (founded and led by by the redoubtable Ellen Moody, whose excellent book Trollope on the Net discusses the group's early days) reading Phineas at Bay, and there should be some very exciting news for May 2015.

--which promises to be a very large month for me, because, independent of the very exciting news (to be shared later), there is, barring unforeseen circumstances, also, on the morning of May 16, my ordination to the vocational diaconate. It's been 7 years in the making, and the goal is in sight.

Of course, the goal is a way station--ordination begins a different phase of life, not an endpoint. It is extraordinary to be nearing that moment of transition.

So as summer is now most decidedly over, and I am settled into the new gig, it's time for me to begin my winter project--beginning the next novel. Working title: Taffy Was a Welshman. Back to Pontnewydd, and the mines.

High Praise from a Great Source

I have received a wonderful endorsement for Phineas at Bay:

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

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

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

Phineas Redux: The Final Proof

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



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

Oh, and here is the back:



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

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

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

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

The Crossover Not Taken...

Over at the Anthony Trollope Society Facebook page, things got a touch silly last night. When I pointed out all the overlaps between Doctor Who and The Pallisers --I wrote, "in the 1970s adaptation of the Pallisers, Derek Jacobi (Professor Yana/the Master in the Doctor Who episode "Utopia" played Lord Fawn; Anthony Ainley (the Master in classic Doctor Who) played Rev. Emilius, and Philip Latham (Lord President of Gallifrey Borusa) played Plantagenet. This led to a suggestion: "an episode in which Trollope is a vampire hunter, Henry James is a vampire, and George Eliot is the intended victim (saved by the hero at the last minute, naturally)."

Right. That's all I ever need:

TARDIS lands in an alley opposite the Universe Club. THE DOCTOR (David Tennant, I rather think) steps out, followed by, oh, let's make it DONNA NOBLE]

DOCTOR: London, but what era?

A scream is heard]

DONNA: Oi, Alien boy, that's our cue.

[GEORGE ELIOT runs past, calling over her shoulder]: Sir, your bloodthirst is as endless as your sentences!

DOCTOR: What?

DONNA:: That was George Eliot, yeah? Silas Marner, Mill on the Floss?

DOCTOR WHAT?

HENRY JAMES follows in hot pursuit, calling out: Come, Mary Ann; Yield to me! Let us mingle our inkwells!

DONNA: Yeah, that's a terrible chat-up line.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE runs past, arms with stake and hammer; sees Doctor and Donna.

TROLLOPE: You! Young Man! Aid me, against this word-spewing fiend, lest he revise the novels he wrote in life yet again!

DOCTOR (whips out sonic, pursues) Allons-y!

[sting; cue theme]

Anthony Trollope, Graphic Novelist

(Photo: The Trollope Jupiter)

In today's moment of awesome:

Anthony Trollope is one of the most celebrated novelists in the English language, a towering icon of the Victorian era who is feted by critics and adored by readers to this day.
But now one of his famously lengthy works is being recast in the unlikely form of a comic book, pared down to fewer than a hundred pages of cartoon strips.
The first Trollope ‘graphic novel’ is based on his relatively obscure work John Caldigate. and has been re-named Dispossession
Published in 1879, it is a story of bigamy, blackmail and betrayal set during the Australian gold rush, a very different milieu from the political and ecclesiastical intrigue of the Palliser novels and The Barchester Chronicles for which Trollope is best known.
Under the new title of Dispossession, the comic book will be published next year in time for the bicentenary celebrations of Trollope’s birth.

Dispossession has the same characters and plot as the original novel but it tells the story in a way that will surprise the writer’s legion of fans.
Trollope is often to referred to as the Establishment’s favourite author, and his admirers include former Prime Minister Sir John Major, the Bishop of London Richard Chartres and Lord Fellowes, the Oscar-winning creator of Downton Abbey.
Anthony Trollope is one of the most celebrated novelists in the English language, a towering icon of the Victorian era who is feted by critics to this day
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Anthony Trollope is one of the most celebrated novelists in the English language, a towering icon of the Victorian era who is feted by critics to this day
Whereas Trollope’s novel ran to more than 600 pages and included no illustrations, the graphic version has just 96 pages and 576 separate images.
Much of the narrative is delivered in the form of speech bubbles.
It also includes 700 words of Wiradjuri, an Aboriginal language that does not feature in the original book.
John Caldigate is a Victorian ne’er-do-well who graduates from Cambridge with gambling debts and begins a new life in the Australian goldfields.
On the voyage he meets feisty widow Euphemia Smith, and the pair set up home in Australia.
Caldigate returns to England alone after making his fortune and marries his childhood sweetheart, Hester Bolton.
But his past comes back to haunt him when Euphemia turns up and accuses him of bigamy.

More from The Trollope Jupiter:

Dr Grennan explained that he had been commissioned to produce the new book by the University of Leuven in Belgium where the graphic novel enjoys a very different position than it does in the UK. He explained that in the Francophone world, the graphic novel has the status of literature and that children graduate from comics to more serious adult themed (in all senses) graphic novels. It is not unusual, therefore, to find a graphic novel version of Camus’s L’Etranger on the best-seller lists.

In response to an audience question, Dr Grennan said that the market for graphic novels in the UK is less mature (again, in all senses) being predominantly a niche market with a younger target demographic (under age 30).

The new book is being produced in both French and English language versions using the same illustrations but, Grennan noted, with rather larger speech bubbles for the French edition, which will also include an academic foreword which will not feature in the English language version.

The speakers explained that the most significant challenge in adapting the book for the graphic novel format was how to represent the author’s voice. Trollope’s narrator interventions are well known and often shed interesting lights on the characters and plots of his novels. In a radio play adaptation, which Dr Grennan used as an example, this can be achieved by having a narrator speak, but the illustrations of a graphic novel cannot include an author figure. That would breach one of the conventions of the form.

Dr Grennan explained that the approach they had taken to address this conundrum was, in fact, to play with the rules of the graphic novel form a little. The graphic novel is essentially cinematic in its treatment of a story – cutting from long shot to close up and showing different points of view. in Dispossession, Dr Grennan has subverted this convention and maintained a consistent distance from the action in the illustrations – all figures are full length, no close ups – thereby conveying a sense of authorial/narrator distance from the action.

An interesting project, and one which I will most certainly get myself. John Caldigate is one of the handful of AT's works I haven't yet read, and it's clearly time.

I'm a little cross, though, to be denied the academic foreword, as I do not read or speak French.

Dare I say that this looks like an auspicious augury for Phineas at Bay?

The Continuing Viability of the Book

One of the questions I get when people find out I'm independently publishing is "Sure? On Kindle, right? Or Nook?" (The more informed might add Smashwords, but nobody has, in fact). "But not a book book, right"

Wrong.

Phineas at Bay will be available in a paper book format thanks to the wonderfully helpful people at CreateSpace (seriously, even when I cause the problems, they're very good at straightening them out). And I wouldn't have it any other way. (Oh, well, I'll admit it; I wouldn't turn down a deluxe hardcover edition if the Trollope Society wanted to add to their publications list.) But, yes, I wanted Phineas to return to the world in his proper setting: a proper book.

And not just because it was Phineas, and a Trollope sequel, and set in the Nineteenth Century. No, it's because I believe that what Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) so perfectly articulates to Jenny Calendar (Robia LaMorte) is true of me and many other readers:

Jenny Calendar: Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?
Giles: The smell.
Jenny Calendar: Computers don't smell, Rupert.
Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a - it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It's-it's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.

Not that I don't enjoy my Kindle, and my Kindle app on my iPad; I do. Stuck in jury duty, and realizing the theological book I wanted to immerse myself in at long last is just too heavy going thanks to the ambient noise? No problem; conjure up the complete works of Conan Doyle, and immerse myself in Sherlock Holmes's gaslit London. Or want to read a new novel, but not sure I can use precious shelf-space for it? Ah, there it is.

When I did my Clinical Pastoral Education at New York Presbyterian, I met more than one patient, bored to tears, who just didn't realize that by installing a Kindle App on their iPad or even their phone they could instantly gain access to a world of books to make their time pass with some enjoyment. I swear to you, on at least two occasions, installing that free app was the greatest service I could have done.

So technology, as Buffy might say, "is of the good." and there are Jenny Calendars in the world, for whom the experience of accessing "texts" on a computer is superior to a book. I'm not one, but so what? Takes all types to make a world.

But count me in with Rupert.

Phineas at Bay: The Editor's Report

Simon Raven (who adapted Trollope for television, in addition to his own many novels) once defined himself as a writer: "I arrange words in pleasing patterns in order to make money". A short definition for a tall order, even leaving aside the money part.

Karen Clark, my editor who rejoices in the dread title "Domineditrix" (she is the queen of the double, and even triple, entendre, but credits me with this soubriquet) has now provided me with the third and, we feel pretty sure, final edited manuscript. (I'm not sure where Karen's choice of three drafts and done came from, but I agreed, based on the advice of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote somewhere (can't recall where, at the moment), that three drafts was about right--any more and you risk sucking the spontaneity out of the work, as witness The New York Edition of Henry James).

So, as we near completion, where are we? Well, obviously, I'm terribly biased. So it was very nice to see her blog post about P at Bay, which she described as a "tour de force sequel to Anthony Trollope's "Palliser" novels. It's a hell of a good book, and the reason I know it's a hell of a good book is that I am now reading it for the third time . . . and, if anything, I am enjoying reading the book more than I did the first time around." (I've left out a nice triple entendre, so you can click the link to Karen's place.

Also, this follow-up post is awfully encouraging:

I finished re-reading Sister Carrie in record time, having found an edition with nice big print that didn't strain my eyes - and, after that was gone, I needed something good to read. Well - John's book fit the description like a kid elbow glove on an Edwardian Professional Beauty. It's a good read. In fact, third time around, it's an even better read. (You will, I hope, pardon me for preening a bit if I say, "And that's because I edited the first two drafts.")

Don't get me wrong - it was an excellent novel the first time around, before I ever had anything to do with it. But John is one of those rare writers who can take his ego completely out of the way and think about "What is the best thing we can do in the service of this book?" The book itself - das Buch an sich! - and getting it as good as it can be, is all. By the time I had finished Round One of the editorial process, I was already rejoicing in the half-affectionate, half-sardonic nickname John had bestowed upon me - Domineditrix. I think the fiercest crack of the whip I gave was when I sent John and his main character, Phineas Finn, down into a Welsh coalmine...he hadn't written a description of the horrors endured by nineteenth century colliers, and I implored and argued and harangued, and finally used my ultimate weapon - "Your reader will feel cheated if it's not in the text!" - until he said, "Right, I'll give it a go and see how it turns out," and wrote it just to shut me up. And it's one of the best things in the book, by gum.

Karen's editing has been tremendous--not just reading for grammar, clarity, and typos, but, as she indicates, for character, consistency, and that intangible something Ronald Dworkin called fit. Not to mention the clothes. She did a helluva job researching the Victorian costuming I needed to describe, and gave me the opportunity to make my use of an old legal chestnut into a credible comic bit.

I should add that I have had four other readers who have given me invaluable feedback--one a professional novelist herself, as well as a Trollope-lover (she caught a badly-off character beat), one a scholar whose insights into what he has called "the Phineas Diptych" inspired a scene that I didn't even realize I needed until I'd heard him speak. My Dad came up with a great approach to bring in non-Trollope readers, and which led to my Prologue. Finally, another non-Trollopean served as a reality check. But Karen has toiled over this long novel, with enthusiasm and persistence, bless her. It's a better book for her efforts.

It's a little daunting--and extremely exciting--to realize that I'm nearing the point where I have no more excuses, but must, as Robertson Davies once wrote, enter the public square, tell the tale, and see how it fares.

Victory is Mine, Victory is Mine!

Great day in the evening, folks…

I'm behind on the blogging, I'm afraid--I want to engage with Evangelii Gaudium, for one thing, but that will have to open December.

I have an excuse: I just finished the first complete draft of Phineas at Bay: 158,592 words. I blew past (in word length, that is, not quality) Watership Down (which was a watershed moment), and Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, which weigh in at 156,154 and 157,165, respectively.

Why have I been keeping an eye on this? Well, although in modern publishing, most new novels are recommended to be between 80-90,000 words, family sagas can go longer. And to make a proper Victorian pastiche, you want a certain length, especially if you are in the Trollope tradition. Here's a reality check: Phineas Finn is 260,343 words; Phineas Redux is 259,080. So by Trollope's standards, I'm a piker.

A piker, however, who has written his first novel (or two volumes with a cliffhanger?). So I've got that going for me.

The Good Villain

The tricky bit about writing a good villain is to find his or her core--his own viewpoint and motivations, I mean. Bringing back the Rev. Mr. Emilius (promoted to Bishop, so the Rt. Rev. Joseph Emilius, now) was something I knew I would do as soon as I wrote chapter 1, but it wasn't until later in the process I knew why I was going to bring him back.

In Phineas Redux, the two men never appear together--even in the television adaptation (scripted by novelist Simon Raven), they share the screen only in a brief scene in the courtroom where Phineas is standing trial for the murder committed by Emilius, and Emilius is brought in to demonstrate the grey coat he could have worn might have been the one identified by the shaky witness Lord Fawn (As Lord Fawn is played by Derek Jacobi, who, like Anthony Ainley (Emilius) played went on to play the recurring Doctor Who villain the Master, this episode is a Whovian's delight.) In the novel, it is Mr. Chaffanbrass's Solicitor's clerk Scruby who dons the coat, and so Phineas and Rev. Emilius do not meet, that we see.

And yet, vastly different as Emilius and Phineas are, there are some comparisons to be made. They both are charming outsiders, who rise in society due to their charisma and ability to win the admiration of others, especially of women. In a sense, Mr. Emilius is a tawdry, distorted mirror image of Phineas--Phineas as he might appear, say, to Mr. Kennedy, Lady Laura's insanely jealous husband. They have one other thing in common, as occurred to me in writing the introduction to a trial in which Phineas is defense counsel:

For the criminal trial is many things—a search for truth, a drama, a battle in which every technique of rhetoric and wit is brought to bear in the contest for victory. But it is nothing quite so much as it is a crucible testing the characters of all involved, though none so harshly as that of the accused, which must, unless it is of true steel, crack.

Phineas Finn had not cracked. Neither, though, had that other man, Joseph Emilius. If ever they were to meet again, each would have the measure of the other in a way that very few could understand, almost none who had not undergone the ordeal they each had survived. While the one man strove to use his days to do good, and the other sought to bend the precepts of what is good to his own uses, both had faced the extremity of fear and shame—and had come through intact.

After writing that, how could I not bring them together?

Finding his core required an evaluation of the outer man in trying to find the inner. The novel is informative, as Trollope always gives his characters their due, even the villains. Emilius' coolness under pressure, his seemingly unshakeable faith in his own rectitude is admirably well described, as is his slightly oily charm. Emilius has grit, whatever else he has--he never breaks, despite the mounting odds against him.

Anthony Ainley's performance was also suggestive. His portrayal of Emilius is highly stylized and theatrical--for Ainley, Emilius is a man conscious of playing a part, and aware that his every motion is calculated, planned, and affected. The real Emilius is only briefly glimpsed, as Ainley portrays him--once, in a moment of insolent ease with his then-wife Lizzie and once later in a hostile confrontation with her and Mr. Bonteen.

The clip above shows Anthony Ainley at his first Doctor Who convention, in 1981. He uses many of the mannerisms he brought to the screen as the Master, but also the conscious display of a very calculated, mannered performance of a character that made his Emilius so memorable. Note how he veers back and forth between the likable, unaffected cricket fan and the suave, musical tones of the Master. He knew who the fans wanted to see, and gave them enough of it to satisfy. That's just what Emilius does--he's constantly onstage, giving his devotees what they want, while the real man beneath is unseen, save in glimpses.

Which leads to the question: What is Joseph Emilius protecting?

And my answer to that question--consistent, I believe with every word Trollope wrote about the man in the two novels in which he appears--is what led me to what I believe to be the man underneath the mask.

Update: In a surprising bit of unconscious plagiarism, I did not mention that the point of the parallels between Phineas and Emilius (even their names echo each other) was brought into relief by Nicholas Birns in his lecture to the the Trollope Society on Phineas Finn and the Bidungsroman; after our discussion at the lecture, Professor Birns was kind enough to share with me his prepared text, which I have found very helpful in many ways, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge his insights.

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...