Politics as soap opera . . . then and now

Though Trollope's Palliser novels, the fifth of which I've been reading this week, draw their cast of characters from Parliament, its Members and the various Ministers who make up successive governments, the books are ultimately far less about politics than they are about the society and culture that grow up around politics. Trollope's focus is on the members of society rather than its problems, and while political issues do arise in the novels, the important votes and debates to which they give rise are far more likely to be hinges of plot than occasions for deeper thought.

In that sense, Trollope's account of the political life of his time isn't all that unlike our experience of our own politics: though I'll admit to flat-out enjoying the soap opera aspect of politics, I'm at least a casual policy wonk, and this speech from Lady Glencora, Duchess of Omnium and wife of Prime Minister Palliser, sounds distressingly familiar, almost as if it could have come from the mouth of a Sunday morning talk host today:

Of course I don't mean about politics. Of course it must be a mixed kind of thign at first, and I don't care a straw whetehr it run to Radicalism or Toryism. The country goes on its own way, eithe for better or for worse, which ever of them are in. I don't think it makes any difference as to what sort of laws are passed. But among ourselves, in our set, it makes a deal of difference who gets the garters, and the counties, who are made barons and then earls, and whose name stands at the head of everything.

Thus, I suppose, has it always been, frustrating as that may be.

Trollope's characters

One of the great pleasures of reading Anthony Trollope, whose Palliser novels I've returned to this past week, is his abiding trust in the techniques of realist fiction. If Trollope ever felt or worried about the limitations of his medium--or thought of possibilities beyond it--you'd never detect it from his novels, which are rich in the sort of straightforward descriptions of people and places that we think of as the backbone of Victorian fiction.

From The Prime Minister (1876), the fifth of the six Palliser novels, two early characters sketches stood out as worthy examples of Trollope's skill with authorial description. First, from his introduction of Ferdinand Lopez, an untrustworthy adventurer who, through determination and skillful manipulation makes his way into the upper reaches of English political society, there's this paragraph:

For he was essentially one of those men who are always, in the inner workings of their minds, defending themselves and attacking others. He could not give a penny to a woman at a crossing without a look which argued at full length her injustice in making her demand, and his freedom from all liability let him walk the crossing as often as he might. He could not seat himself in a railway carriage without a lesson to his opposite neighbour that in all the mutual affairs of travelling, arrangement of feet, disposition of bags, and opening of windows, it would be that neighbour's duty to submit and his to exact. It was, however, for the spirit rather than for the thing itself that he combated. The woman with the broom got her penny. The opposite gentleman when once by a glance he had expressed submission was allowed his own way with his legs and with the window. I would not say that Ferdinand Lopez was prone to do ill-natured things, but he was imperious, and he had learned to carry his empire in his eye.

With those two examples, Trollope conjures up the character of a self-righteous, domineering man; from there on, all the actions and descriptions of Lopez are essentially embellishments.

Then there's Trollope's description of Lady Glencora Palliser, the Duchess of Omnium, whom we've come to know through the earlier novels in the sequence:

She already possessed all that rank and wealth could give her, and together with those good things a peculiar position of her own, of which she was proud, and which she had made her own not by her wealth or rank, but by a certain fearless energy and power of raillery which never deserted her. Many feared her, and she was afraid of none, and many also loved her,--whom she also loved, for her nature was affectionate. She was happy with her children, happy with her friends, in the enjoyment of perfect health, and capable of taking an exaggerated interest in anything that might come uppermost for the moment. . . . She had a celebrity of her own, quite independent of his position, and which could not be enhanced by any glory or any power added to him. Nevertheless, when he left her to go down to the Queen with the prospect of being called upon to act as chief of the incoming ministry, her heart throbbed with excitement.

The Duchess--formidably strong-willed, enthusiastic, personable, and intelligent--is one of the strongest, most memorable female characters I know in Victorian fiction, a reminder that, while Trollope unquestionably lacks the formal invention or linguistic verve of his contemporary Dickens, he does offer some pleasures that Dickens, whose female characters almost all remain ciphers, cannot.

Trollope's formlessness

Nathaniel Hawthorne once described Anthony Trollope's writing as

just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.

Hawthorne was referring to Trollope's broad canvas and commitment to a detailed realism, but as I was reading Phineas Redux (1873), I began to interpret his remarks in a different light. If Trollope's characters in Phineas Redux don't know they're in a novel, it may be because the book bears little of the shape or structure of a novel. Though the book begins with Phineas Finn's return to Parliament and ends with a wedding, the first two-thirds of the novel offers almost no sense of a narrative arc; the reader has very little idea what to expect next, or where Trollope might be taking his story.

Instead--without, I should say, being in any way experimental or un-Victorian--Phineas Redux offers a hint of the formlessness of everyday life. Incidents succeed one another--Phineas is re-elected, Parliament debates the disestablishment of the church, Phineas takes counsel with his passel of female friends--but until the murder of one of Phineas's political antagonists nearly 400 pages in, there is little sense that these developments are leading anywhere. Even the murder, which takes place between chapters, offers little in the way of traditional suspense: though Phineas is accused, Trollope tells the reader point-blank the identity of the real murderer, and even the outcome of Phineas's protracted trial seems a foregone conclusion.

All this should not, however, be taken to mean that Phineas Redux is a bad or uninteresting novel; it's decidedly neither. In fact, Trollope's reduction of plot to a mere succession of lived days is bracing--and surprisingly well-suited to the real aim of the six Palliser novels, of which Phineas Redux is the fourth: to demonstrate how people and societies change over time. Readers of all the Palliser novels will have spent more than 3,000 pages with some of the characters by the end of Phineas Redux, and at least 1,300 with almost all of them. Through the accretion of detail and the piling up of seemingly minor decisions, we have come to deeply know these characters, and the growth of that knowledge is the reason we keep reading; the erstwhile plot is at best secondary.

Along the way, the pleasures are countless. Though Phineas Redux does have its longeurs--what 600-plus-page novel doesn't?--Trollope's prose is always elegant and interesting. He is as capable of loosing a wicked generalization--such as

A man who is supposed to have caused a disturbance between two married people, of a certain rank of life, does generally receive a certain meed of admiration.

--as a powerfully compact character sketch, such as this one of Duke Plantagenet Palliser:

Our old friend Plantagenet Palliser was a man who hardly knew insolence when he met it. There was such an absence about his of all self-consciousness, he was so little given to think of his own personal demanour and outward trappings--that he never brought himself to question the manners of others to him. Contradiction he wuld take for simple argument. Strong difference of opinion even on the part of subordinates recommended itself to him. He could put up with apparent rudeness without seeingit,a nd always gave men credit for good intentions. And withit all he had an assurance in his own position--a knowledge of the strength drecived from his intellect, his industry, his rank, and his wealth--which made him altogether fearless of others. When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.

Trollope's dialogue is also exceptionally good; his characters--especially the female ones, who tend to be strong-willed and outspoken--frequently speak to one another with a startling directness. Take this exchange between one of the sequence's most interesting characters, Palliser's wife, Duchess Glencora, and Mr. Maule, whose impending marriage she has just facilitated. As the Duchess opens the dialogue, it's important to remember that she is not one to be mean, merely--like so many of Trollope's characters--frank:

"People go on quarrelling and fancying this and that, and thinking that the world is full of romance and poetry. When they get married they know better."

"I hope the romance and poetry do not all vanish."

"Romance and poetry are for the most part lies, Mr Maule, and are very apt to bring people into difficulty. I have seen something of them in my time, and I much prefer downright honest figures. Two and two make four; idleness is the root of all evil; love your neighbour like yourself, and the rest of it."

That sort of directness--especially when set against the manic mannerisms of Dickens characters or the sour satire of Thackeray--can be remarkably refreshing. It strips away much of the natural distance between us and the Victorians, making us, however temporarily, their intimates, and forcing us to think as they think, ache as they ache.

In his Autobiography, Trollope wrote,

By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in making any reader understand how much these characters and their belongings have meant to me.

I think he sold himself short; his love is obvious, and infectious. With two more Palliser novels to go, I can already foresee the sadness to come when the last page is turned and their story is told.

Trollope and politics

I picked up Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux (1874) this week primarily because Trollope's careful plotting and Victorian confidence seemed like the perfect way to break, at least temporarily, the hold that Roberto Bolano's fractured narratives has exerted on me in recent weeks. What I didn't expect was that it would fit so nicely with another book I was reading, John F. Harris's The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (2004). I grabbed The Survivor off my shelf the night after Obama's victory, and I've been reading it slowly ever since, ten pages here and there, as both a way to familiarize myself with the challenges Obama faces in shaping an administration and a reminder of the distance we've come--for both good and bad--since the last time a Democrat occupied the White House.

Harris's account is detailed and impressive, giving the reader a ringside seat at the often asinine battles of the mid-nineties, while also offering a memorable portrait of the complicated and frustrating man at their center. What's most striking, however, is the way it brings home the constant personnel churn of political life. I tend to think of political change as slow-moving, with the same Congresspeople holding office year after year, but the reality is that following politics is somewhat like following baseball: watch long enough, and you'll see every piece of your team replaced, but the process moves so slowly that you'll barely notice. When Clinton took office, his party's power was still anachronistically rooted in the South, and relatively conservative figures such as Sam Nunn and Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the power to make or break his agenda. Fast-forward a decade and a half, and the entire map has changed: Obama's majority, while broad, is based in the Northeast and Midwest, far less reliant on any fractious conservatives.

That sense of constant change, of politicians in and out of office, is what makes The Survivor resonate unexpectedly with the first chapters of Phineas Redux, the fourth in the series of Palliser novels, Trollope's insider account of the workings of British government in the mid-Victorian era. When last we saw Phineas, in Phineas Finn (1869), he had resigned his seat over a question of principle and retreated to his Irish estate. His political career was over, we thought, as did Finn himself:

He had told himself over and over again that that life which he had lived in London had been, if not a dream, at any rate not more significant than a parenthesis in his days, which, as of course it had no bearing on those which had gone before, so neither would it influence those which were to follow.

But the political sands are always shifting, and as Phineas Redux opens, Finn is offered a chance to stand once more for Parliament. He jumps at the chance, for once bitten by the dramatic world of government and the attractive social whirl of London--at that point, essentially the capitol of the world--he's flat-out bored by his rural isolation in Ireland:

There are certain modes of life which, if once adopted, make contentment in any other circumstances almost an impossibility. In old age a man may retire without repining, though it is often beyond the power even of the old man to do so; but in youth, with all the faculties still perfect, with the body still strong, with the hopes still buoyant, such a change as that which had been made by Phineas Finn was more than he, or than most men, could bear with equanimity. He had revelled in the gaslight, and could not lie quiet on a sunny bank. To the palate accustomed to high cookery, bread and milk is almost painfully insipid. . . . After five years spent in the heat and excitement of London society, life in Ireland was tame to him, and cold, and dull. He did not analyse the difference between metropolitan and quasi-metropolitan manners; but he found that men and women in Dublin were different from those to whom he had been accustomed in Dublin. . . . When in London he had often told himself that he was sick of it, and that he would better love some country quiet life. Now Dublin was his Tibur, and the fickle one found that he could not be happy unless he were back again at Rome.

Phineas's enthusiasm and naivete as he restarts his political life are, surprisingly enough, occasionally echoed by Harris's account of Bill Clinton in the early days of his administration. Master operator though Clinton was, in his early days he was nevertheless frequently surprised and even overawed by the intensity of the White House: everything in Washington was just so much bigger and more complicated than Arkansas, far more so, it seems, than he had ever expected.

It will be interesting to see whether any further similarities arise; surely Finn, at least, will have the Victorian good sense not to sleep with any interns. Meanwhile, after reading Phineas's lament, can you blame a certain media-hungry governor from Alaska for not wanting to simply settle back into the quiet duties presented by her far-flung state?

The Eustace Diamonds

Like many readers, I love Victorian novels in part for their sprawling capaciousness. Needing to fill out each monthly number drove Victorian novelists to layer plot twists and characters in a way that contemporary novelists have no real pressure to do. (In fact, I recently figured out why Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006) left me unsatisfied: it was Victorian in ambition but nearly 300 pages short of Victorian in length, and that absence was evident in the way that crucial facets of central characters felt sketched rather then fully imagined, let alone fully drawn.) Anthony Trollope was not much for plotting--Dickens, whom he criticized for his melodrama, could have plotted circles around him. But he was such a professional (committing himself to writing 250 words every hour he was at his desk) and such a perceptive observer of human nature that the heft of his novels usually goes unnoticed, filled as they are with detailed explications of interesting characters. The Trollope novels I've read feel less like treks through a plot, from a start to an obvious finish, than they do visits with some interesting people and their society, to be begun at any point and to be ended at the first convenient marriage; that they come up to the length of a typical three-decker Victorian novel seems incidental.

In The Eustace Diamonds (1873), however, Trollope fails to hide the padding. The perils of serial publication make themselves known, as the plot is repeatedly summarized and conversations, if not exactly repeated, are at least echoed. Midway through the book, Trollope, who rode to hounds a couple of times each week, lets his love of hunting love get the better of him in an extended scene of a hunt, one that has none of the drama of the hunt in Phineas Finn (1869). In addition, at that point in the novel he introduces several new characters who, while individually at least somewhat interesting, as a group slow the novel and draw attention away from its central characters.

Despite that, The Eustace Diamonds is worth the occasional slog, offering many typical Trollopian pleasures. His authorial statements about human nature, though never so aphoristic or philosophical as George Eliot's, are as usual confident and convincing. Here, for example, he shows us Lizzie Eustace, the perpetual dissembler at the center of the book's events, exploding with frustration:

"And is there to be no punishment?" she asked, with that strong indignation at injustice which the unjust always feel when they are injured.

Then there's his usual facility with the minutiae of character, as in this gently ironic description of a marriage proposal offered by the remarkably unremarkable Lord Fawn:

He was now standing upright before her, with the fingers of his right hand touching his left breast, and there was something almost of dignity in his gesture and demeanor.

That "almost" is nearly worthy of Waugh, who also came to mind (along with Ivy Compton-Burnett) when I read this batch of conversation between a young governess, about to be married, and the crotchety old lady whose companion she's to be until the wedding:

"Dear me;--sent you up in the carriage, has he? Why shouldn't you have come by the railway?"

"Lady Fawn thought the carriage best. She is so very kind."

"It's what I call twaddle, you know. I hope you ain't afraid of going in a cab."

"Not in the least, Lady Linlithgow."

"You can't have the carriage to go about here. Indeed, I never have a pair of horses till after Christmas. I hope you know that I'm as poor as Job."

"I didn't know."

"I am, then. You'll get nothing beyond wholesome food with me. And I"m not sure it is wholesome always. The butchers are scoundrels, and the bakers are worse. What used you to do at Lady Fawn's?"

"I still did lessons with the two youngest girls."

"You won't have any lessons to do here, unless you do 'em with me. You had a salary there?"

"Oh, yes."

"Fifty pounds a year, I supose."

"I had eighty."

"Had you, indeed; eighty pounds;--and a coach to ride in!"

"I had a great deal more than that, Lady Linlithgow."

"How do you mean?"

"I had downright love and affection. They were just so many dear friends. I don't suppose any governess was ever so treated before. It was just like being at home. The more I laughed, the better everyone liked it."

"You won't find anything to laugh at here; at least, I don't. If you want to laugh, you can laugh upstairs, or down in the parlor."

Most of the drama of the novel is precipitated by characters feeling forced by circumstance to make impossible choices: marry for love or marry for money; break an engagement one knows to be wrong, or marry, and keep the approval of society while losing one's conscience. One of the book's relatively minor characters, the young Lucinda Roanoke, throws those dilemmas into stark, even shocking relief, crystallizing the themes of the novel in her horror at the concept of her impending marriage. She speaks frankly, cruelly, and with a strain of deep, angry fatalism, refusing to pretend that the marriage is anything but forced. She hates her fiance--hates the very idea of marriage--and her disgust after their first embrace is unexpectedly blunt:

When she was alone she stood before her glass looking at herself, and then she burst into tears. Never before had she been thus polluted. The embrace had disgusted her. It made her odious to herself.

Yet she marches onward towards the fateful day, unable to see a way out.

George Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), refused to allow a compromise with society once she'd put her heroine into a situation where there could be no right choice; instead, she brought on an apocalyptic flood. Thomas Hardy, too, who was just launching his career at the time of The Eustace Diamonds, would time and again reach for the tragic and violent in that sort of situation. In the story of Lucinda Roanoke there are hints that Trollope may yet surprise us with a turn in that direction. The night before the wedding, Lucinda's grasping, overbearing aunt has a moment of worry as she sees her to her bedroom:

An indistinct, incompleted idea of some possible tragedy had flitted across the mind of the poor woman, causing her to shake and tremble, forbidding her, weary as she was, to lie down.

Could Miss Roanoke's story possibly end with a suicide? Trollope, it turns out, is not willing to go that far. Though he does not back down from his portrayal of the cruelty of her position--the marriage is called off, but Miss Roanoke remains in some sense permanently damaged--he allows it to fade into the background, as his primary characters meanwhile do find themselves able to make some accommodation, however flawed, to the demands of society.

But even as Lucinda's aunt waited outside her door, we knew that Trollope would not choose the tragic. It is not his form. He will criticize, satirize, lay out our failings for us to see--but if we are obstinate he will not force us to acknowledge those failings by foreclosing the possibility of individual happiness. I can imagine Trollope recoiling from the relentless gloom of Jude the Obscure, for he always remains conscious that his role is at least as much that of entertainer as of commentator. A novel, he wrote in his posthumously published Autobiography,

should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos.

If that creed led him to turn away from the darkness and fatalism that would fuel a writer such as Hardy--and would be part of the reason his critical standing fell after his death and remained low for decades--it still left him a broad palette on which to present to us characters and situations that, more than a century later, still teem with life and insight.

"They were long, large eyes--but very dangerous."

After a few months of actively staying away, I've succumbed once again to the seductions of Anthony Trollope, continuing with the next novel in the Palliser sequence, The Eustace Diamonds (1873). I'm not that far into it--in fact, after thirty-six pages, I'm only just now getting past Trollope's introduction of the dramatis personae. At the end of the fourth chapter, which was the end of the first serial installment of the book (in the July 1871 issue of the Fortnightly Review), Trollope himself laments the dilated nature of his introductions:

Dramatists, when they write their plays, have a delightful privilege of prefixing a list of their personages;--and the dramatists of old used to tell us who was in love with whom, and what were the blood relationships of all the persons. In such a narrative as this, any proceeding of that kind would be unusual--and therefore the poor narrator has been driven to expend his four first chapters in the mere task of introducing his characters. He regrets the length of these introductions, and will now begin at once the action of his story.

I could imagine coming to the end of that first installment in the Fortnightly Review and being frustrated that you got so little action and drama for your shilling. We, however, have the advantage of holding the whole book in front of us, so we can instead revel in Trollope's extended descriptions, which are enjoyable for their careful, balanced prose and their unapologetic declarativeness. Trollope is not one for vagueness or beating around the bush--he leaves little to inference. Instead, he tells you, straight-out, what his characters are like; that established, the interest comes in figuring out how these fully imagined--and fully laid out--characters will affect each other, how they will deal with new or unexpected situations.

It's the antithesis of the show-don't-tell ethos of contemporary writing instruction, and it's easy to imagine it being a turgid mess in the hands of a lesser writer. But Trollope's prose is unfailingly engaging, even charming, and when used to convey his nuanced understanding of how society constrains, alters, and forms character, it makes for compelling reading. Here, for example, is how he opens the novel:

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies--who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two--that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. We will tell the story of Lizzie Greystock from the beginning, but we will not dwell over it at great length, as we might do if we loved her.

Lizzie is certainly not lovable, being frequently compared, even by Trollope himself, to the ruthless gold-digger Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Trollope's early description of her delivers some wonderfully Victorian physiognomical analysis of her deeply flawed character:

Her chin was perfect in its round, not over long--as is the case with so many such faces in which such length utterly spoils the symmetry of the countenance. But it lacked a dimple, and therefore lacked feminine tenderness.

Who knew a dimple was the minimum requirement for feminine tenderness? Writers of personal ads may have to come up with a new acronym. But the absence of a dimple isn't the only clue to Lizzie's character:

How few there are among women, few perhaps also among men, who know that the sweetest, softest, tenderest, truest eyes which a woman can carry in her head are green in colour! Lizzie's eyes were not tender--neither were they true.

Though this photo doesn't give any clue, I do hope that Mrs. Trollope had green eyes--or, failing that, that she was better at sussing out the differences between Trollope's narrative voice and his actual self than I am.

{Digression: now that I've dug up that photo of Rose Trollope, I can't resist sharing a photo of Anthony as well, in case you've never seen him in his full, bearded glory.



End digression.}

Lizzie of course isn't the only character on whom Trollope lavishes his descriptive powers. His presentation of her aunt, Lady Linlithgow, serves as a nice reminder of one of the pleasant differences between history and literature. If history at its best often brings us up short by reminding us of just how different the world and its people were in the past, one of literature's most striking powers is to do the opposite, revealing unexpected continuities and personality types and traits that have remained surprisingly resilient, even common, over time. The category of person to which Trollope assigns Lady Linlithgow will, I think, be familiar to everyone:

Lady Linlithgow, too, though very strong, was old. She was slow, or perhaps it might more properly be said, she was stately in her movements. She was one of those old women who are undoubtedly old women--who in the remembrance of younger people seem always to have been old women--but on whom old age appears to have no debilitating effects. If the hand of Lady Linlithgow ever trembled, it trembled from anger; if her foot ever faltered, it faltered for effect.

Trollope, however, always has more words at his disposal, and he likes to use those words to complicate the character he is presenting:

In her way Lady Linlithgow was a very powerful human being. She knew nothing of fear, nothing of charity, nothing of mercy, and nothing of the softness of love. She had no imagination. She was worldly, covetous, and not unfrequently cruel. But she meant to be true and honest, though she often failed in her meaning;--and she had an idea of her duty in life. She was not self-indulgent. She was as hard as an oak post--but then she was also as trustworthy. No human being liked her;--but she had the good word of a great many human beings.

That's a fairly typical description for Trollope. He is forever turning his characters around and around to point out facets that we might not otherwise have seen. For me, that alone goes a long way toward justifying his tell-don't-show approach, however much he may pretend to regret it.

But enough writing--there's nearly 700 more pages to read and a lovely Sunday stretching before me!

Trollope, the Victorians, and us, part two

Part one is here.

Phineas Finn himself, meanwhile, is a stunning creation. We watch as he grows from a thoughtless (though essentially harmless) youth to a serious, responsible adult--yet the change is so gradual as to be almost imperceptible as it happens. Actions and decisions and experiences simply accrete, as they do in life, and Phineas is changed thereby, though not without missteps along the way, as when he mistakenly seeks Lady Laura's assistance in his quest for the hand of her friend Violet Effingham:

When making this resolution, I think that he must have forgotten much that he had learned of his friend's character; and by making it, I think that he showed also that he had not learned as much as his opportunities might have taught him. He knew Lady Laura's obstinacy of purpose, he knew her devotion to her brother, and he knew also how desirous she had been that her brother should win Violet Effingham for himself. This knowledge should, I think, have sufficed to show him how improbable it was that Lady Laura should assist him in his enterprise. But beyond all this was the fact,--a fact as to the consequences of which Phineas himself was entirely blind, beautifully ignorant,--that Lady Laura had once condescended to love himself. Nay;--she had gone farther than this, and had ventured to tell him, even after her marriage, that the remembrance of some feeling that had once dwelt in her heart in regard to him was still a danger to her. She had warned him from Loughlinter, and then had received him in London;--and now he selected her as his confidante in this love affair! Had he not been beautifully ignorant and most modestly blind, he would surely have placed his confidence elsewhere.

Phineas's faults mostly lie in his odd combination of modesty and entitlement: he feels that he should have a place in English society, but he is at the same time regularly surprised when others agree and use their power to help him find one.

That place is in politics, so along the way we get a full course in British Parliamentary politics during one of its most fascinating and crucial periods, the sessions leading up to passage of the Reform Bill and the expansion of the vote. Trollope, who had entertained hopes of a political career, knows well the workings of Parliament and the push-pull-kick-scratch of politics. The story of the Government's efforts to pass the Reform Bill, which runs through the book and forms the spine on which the interpersonal dramas are hung, would satisfy any political junkie.

The impression Trollope gives of these inherently unjust governing arrangements--rife as they were at the time with rotten boroughs, pocket boroughs, and the privileges of nobility and wealth--is actually not dissimilar to reformist outsiders' takes on contemporary Washington (or, presumably, Westminster). Parliament is presented as at least as much clique as representative body, and only the prospect of wide-ranging, irrevocable change can cut through the clubby cordiality and turn political opponents into real enemies. Similarly, the primary question facing Phineas still vexes honest politicians today: how does one balance the demands of party, constituents, and conscience when they are at odds? Late in the novel, Phineas's friend and fellow MP Laurence Fitzgibbon remonstrates him about his convictions:

"Convictions! There is nothing on earth that I'm so much afraid of in a young member of Parliament as convictions. There are ever so many rocks against which men get broken. One man can't keep his temper. Another can't hold his tongue. A third can't say a word unless he has been priming himself half a session. A fourth is always thinking of himself, and wanting more than he can get. A fifth is idle, and won't be there when he's wanted. A sixth is always in the way. A seventh lies so that you can never trust him. I've had to do with them all, but a fellow with convictions is the worst of all."

Phineas's frustration with that attitude is not too distant from Atrios's contemporary lament that the DC insiders don't understand that the reason we can't all just get along and be centrists in politics is that people who aren't professional politicians or pundits actually care about these issues.

In the introduction to the Penguin edition of Can Your Forgive Her?, Stephen Wall quotes Trollope, from his Autobiography, on the Pallisers:

By no amount of description or asseveration could I succeed in making any reader understand how much these characters and their belongings have meant to me.

And later in the Autobiography he also wonders:

Who will read Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister [and The Eustace Diamonds] consecutively, in order that he may understand the characters of the Duke of Omnium, of Plantagenet Palliser, and Lady Glencora? Who will even know that they should be so read?

Reading the first two of the sequence has shown me that the Trollope is serious about his love for these characters; I can surely do him the favor of reading the others.

Trollope, the Victorians, and us, part one

Though I love Victorian novels, sometimes while reading one I find that I'm unconsciously discounting it a bit for being Victorian, and thus hemmed in by the web of restrictions and proprieties that mark the period. In a sense, I'm just setting the novel in its context--but making allowances for the period, which should enrich my reading, instead detracts from it. I suddenly realize that that I've fallen into an odd condescension, feeling an unearned superiority to the book and its writer.

I don't think I'm the only person who does this. We, after all, are modern; the Victorians were decidedly not. We are free to read and write--and think?--in a way that they were not. Openness is all, few subjects are taboo, and we therefore assume ourselves to have a more clear and direct access to the depths of human emotions, motivations, and hidden desires than Victorians could have. So we can imagine ourselves on high ground when we read them, easily understanding their meaning when they hint at events of which they aren't allowed to speak clearly--but also, we think, seeing through them, as if our x-ray goggles of modernity let us see what the authors are denying even to themselves, the deeper (often sexual) roots of their characters' behavior. In a sense, we subconsciously lower the bar of perspicacity, assuming that, trapped in their society, the Victorians couldn't possibly have understood their characters as well as we do--and thus when they try, when they do allow their characters to express deep emotion, we expect it to be sentimentally drawn, or overblown, or melodramatic.

It's a ridiculous thought, of course, one that doesn't stand up to any real scrutiny or close reading--for example, it's hard to think of anyone who understands human character better than (aside, that is, from Tolstoy, who was also of their time). But all the same, every once in a while I find my thoughts slipping in that direction--until a passage like the one below, from Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn (1869), stops me short. In this scene, Lady Laura is talking with Phineas Finn, whom she once loved but who, because of his relative poverty and lack of position, she bypassed for a sensible marriage to a prominent and wealthy man.

"The truth is," she said, "that I have made a mistake.

"A mistake?"

"Yes, Phineas, a mistake. I have blundered as fools blunder, thinking that I was clever enough to pick my footsteps aright without asking counsel from any one. I have blundered and stumbled and fallen, and now I am so bruised that I am not able to stand upon my feet." The word that struck him most in all of this was his own Christian name. She had never called him Phineas before. He was aware that the circle of his acquaintance had fallen into a way of miscalling him by his Christian name, as one observes to be done now and again in reference to some special young man. Most of the men whom he called his friends called him Phineas. . . . But still he was quite sure that Lady Laura had never so called him before. Nor would she have done so now in her husband's presence. He was sure of that also.

"You mean that you are unhappy?" he said, still looking away from her towards the lake.

"Yes, I do mean that. Though I do not know why I should come and tell you so,--except that I am still blundering and stumbling, and have fallen into a way of hurting myself at every step."

Lady Laura's anguish is real, and her words, fettered as they remain by custom and bred-in-the-bone reticence, are fully, deeply expressive. It is the language of a person truly pushed to the edge, and it is hard to imagine how a more self-consciously sophisticated, modern approach could render it more powerful. And this is Trollope, generally considered to be one of the least of the Victorian giants--and one of the most conventional. It's all I need to remind myself not to condescend, however slightly, to the Victorians.

Not everything in Phineas Finn is that impressive--Lady Laura's wild and troubled cousin, for example, rarely becomes much more than a mix of Steerforth, Heathcliff, and Lord Byron, and Trollope has a habit of improbably resolving plot complications when they're no longer of use to him--but overall it's a remarkably engaging and powerful book.

Phineas Finn follows Can You Forgive Her? (1864) as the second of Trollope's series of Palliser novels, and, like its predecesor, it features a complex and distinctly drawn portrayal of marriage, with a wife who, while understanding the severe limits placed on her, is determined to fully employ every available lever of power to achieve some level of independence. In Can You Forgive Her? Lady Glencora Palliser, after eschewing illusions of romantic abandon, discovers that what she took to be the hardness of her husband Plantagenet Palliser was instead an inability to express his deep, moving love for her. But in Phineas Finn, Trollope presents Lady Laura's husband, Lord Kennedy, as so stringent, determined, and self-centered that he leaves no space for the real, independent existence of anyone else. Here, for example, is his response to the realization that he had been in the wrong in one of his many arguments with Lady Laura:

He was a just man, and he would apologize for his fault; but he was an austere man, and would take back the value of his apology in additional austerity.

There is no hope, Lady Laura quickly realizes, from a marriage that pits her liveliness and open heart against his desire for complete control. Unlike the Palliser marriage, which Trollope would go on to describe as it deepened and grew over the years, this one from the start seems more likely to wither than to grow, and when Lady Laura considers leaving her husband, her thought process is as heart-wrenching as her initial appeal to Phineas:

Nor, if I am driven to leave him, can I make the world understand why I do so. To be simply miserable, as I am, is nothing to the world.

More tomorrow, including some words about Phineas Finn himself, whom Trollope refers to throughout as "our hero."

Can You Forgive Her?

When winter makes a surprise reappearance, is there anything more pleasant than sinking into a big Victorian novel? For the past week, I've been immersed in Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1865), which has one of the best titles in the history of the novel. Years ago, a favorite English professor introduced the book to me by saying, "Of course you can forgive her! She's the most forgivable creature ever!" The "her" of the title is a young woman, Alice Vavasor, who spends the novel vacillating between a pair of starkly different suitors: John Grey, a quiet, respectable, impressively steadfast country gentleman to whom she has been engaged in the past, and her cousin George Vavasor, an ambitious, fiery sort who, though without means, hopes to make his way in politics. From our vantage, her sin--uncertainty and an unwillingness to be trapped into a marriage, and a life, about which she's unsure--seems at worst minor, but Alice herself, seeing the deep contradictions of her nature, her fear of living with the consequences of a decision, feels that she is unworthy of the forgiveness that John Grey unstintingly offers.

Trollope offers none of the high drama, energy, or, most obviously, the inventively captivating prose of Dickens; the action of the book is mostly domestic and staid. While he is frequently funny, his humor is essentially gentle, neither the caricature of Dickens nor the vicious, even hateful, satire of Thackeray. And, though he is not afraid to speak up and comment as a narrator, he is not given to the sort of pronouncements about human nature that make George Eliot's work so fascinating. Instead, Trollope focuses closely on the individuals in his story, suborning general ideas to particular people and circumstances, and, most importantly, being willing to present his characters' motivations as a very real jumble of frequently contradictory impulses, deeply rooted in half-understood, half-rational desires. No one is entirely clear, to himself or to us, and, Trollope presents that understanding with gentle irony, an acknowledgment that we all suffer from these failings to some extent.

A good example of Trollope's willingness to allow his characters the full range of their contradictions is in this description of one of the novel's most unpleasant characters, Mrs. Marsham, who serves as an unasked-for spy on the behavior of one of Alice's impulsive friends, Lady Glencora Palliser. In true Victorian narrative style, Trollope introduces her by laying out, in detail, the basics of her character--but he does her the courtesy of beginning with her good qualities:

Mrs Marsham was a woman who had many good points. She was poor, and bore her poverty without complaint. She was connected by blood and friendship with people rich and titled; but she paid to none of them egregious respect on account of their wealth or titles. She was stanch in her friendships, and stanch in her enmities. She was no fool, and knew well what was going on in the world. She could talk about the last novel, or — if need be — about the Constitution. She had been a true wife, though sometimes too strong-minded, and a painstaking mother, whose children, however, had never loved her as most mothers like to be loved.

The catalogue of her faults must be quite as long as that of her virtues. She was one of those women who are ambitious of power, and not very scrupulous as to the manner in which they obtain it. She was hard-hearted, and capable of pursuing an object without much regard to the injury she might do. She would not flatter wealth or fawn before a title, but she was not above any artifice by which she might ingratiate herself with those whom it suited her purpose to conciliate. She thought evil rather than good. She was herself untrue in action, if not absolutely in word. I do not say that she would coin lies, but she would willingly leave false impressions. She had been the bosom friend, and in many things the guide in life, of Mr Palliser’s mother; and she took a special interest in Mr Palliser’s welfare. When he married, she heard the story of the loves of Burgo and Lady Glencora; and though she thought well of the money, she was not disposed to think very well of the bride. She made up her mind that the young lady would want watching, and she was of opinion that no one would be so well able to watch Lady Glencora as herself.

Trollope's interest in complexity of motive--and his resulting willingness to accept that there are many different ways to approach the business of life--makes him particularly capable of studying the complicated realities of marriage. Can You Forgive Her? presents not only the indecision surrounding Alice's marital decision, it accompanies that situation with two other tales of relationships, one presented as comedy and the other beginning what would become Trollope's greatest project, the series of Palliser novels. The comic relationship concerns Alice's aunt, a wealthy widow who is choosing between a pair of goofy suitors who all but trip over each other in their race for her wealth. Trollope's generosity to the trio raises their scenes, which could easily be a distraction, from mere comedy to an actual reflection on the reasons and rewards of marriage. The other marriage presented is that of Lady and Lord Palliser, about whom Trollope would eventually write five novels.

From the moment the young, impulsive, vivacious Lady Palliser enters, she is the heart of the novel. Deeply tempted by a former lover to leave her upright husband--whom she was, essentially, forced to marry by her wealthy family--we watch as she is brought to realize and understand her husband's love for her, quiet and unspoken as it is. Her husband's character is slower to reveal itself, but Trollope's presentation of him is no less profound, and the testing of their marriage is compelling and believable. I've not read the later Palliser novels, but I am certain to do so now. Trollope, having already in this single novel shown his deep understanding of these characters, is sure to be fascinating on the ways that people--and the bonds between them--change and grow with time.

The following passage, though I think it carries more than a hint of disingenuousness, is a good way to end, focusing as it does on Trollope's sense that the human heart is a changing thing, and that though what we think we want today may not be quite what we want tomorrow, we are also inherently flexible, accommodating beings--if we will only remember that.

People often say that marriage is an important thing, and should be much thought of in advance, and marrying people are cautioned that there are many who marry in haste and repent at leisure. I am not sure, however, that marriage may not be pondered over too much; nor do I feel certain that the leisurely repentance does not as often follow the leisurely marriages as it does the rapid ones. That some repent no one can doubt; but I am inclined to believe that most men and women take their lots as they find them, marrying as the birds do by force of nature, and going on with their mates with a general, though not perhaps an undisturbed satisfaction, feeling inwardly assured that Providence, if it have not done the very best for them, has done for them as well as they could do for themselves with all the thought in the world. I do not know that a woman can assure to herself, by her own prudence and taste, a good husband any more than she can add two cubits to her stature; but husbands have been made to be decently good — and wives too, for the most part, in our country — so that the thing does not require quite so much thinking as some people say.

Books in the suitcase

"Weeks before any journey, I begin to worry about what books I'll bring."

Sound like any blogger you know? Though it could have been written by me, it's actually the opening sentence to a nice piece by Jay Parini in the Chronicle of Higher Education about picking books with which to travel. I've written before about how difficult it is to choose books for a trip, about the complex formulae involved in determining which and how many books to bring for a trip of x duration. First of all, you need to be sure you have enough books for the trip, but you also need to have an extra (or two) in case you find yourself not in the mood for one of the ones you brought--and you need at least one book in which you repose complete confidence so you know your attention will be totally diverted during the flight.

Parini's solution is a bit simpler than mine: he carefully arranges to be three-quarters of the way through a gripping novel when he sits down on the plane. But that seems wasteful to me, because you know from the start you'll be carting around a novel you've finished. I prefer to preview several novels, just to make sure they're not godawful, then bring a couple. Maybe when I'm older, my shoulders less willing to bear a multi-book burden, I'll take Parini's advice, but for now I'll keep carrying two or three too many books on every trip.

My friend and former coworker Jim sent me the link to Parini's story because we were discussing this topic over the weekend. With a vacation in prospect, Jim is starting to plan out his reading, simultaneously making sure that he'll not be in the middle of anything when the time comes to leave and starting to eye the books he might want to take along. At the time, I expressed sympathy . . . and then the other day Stacey and I decided to fly to London next month. So now I'm in the same spot: what to take along? I'm tempted to take Tess, since I've been thinking and writing about Hardy so much lately. Maybe we'll even go visit his home in Dorset. Or some Trollope? And no matter how many times I've read him, I always consider taking Anthony Powell to London; other than Dickens, there are few better books to read on the tube.

Anyone want to make other suggestions?