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.

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."