I look into the bright tube at those small, suffering, dangerous eyes under the shining scalp and think: You’ve won, Chester, you’ve won.
OUR KINSMAN, MR. TROLLOPE
THREE-QUARTERS of a century have slipped away since Bloomsbury last sneered at the British Victorians; fiction’s new career, in the form of Ulysses, began over seventy years ago. We post-moderns are by now so far from the modernist repudiation of Victorian influence that we can look with an unembarrassed eye—an eye of one’s own, we might say—at the three-decker Victorian novel’s subplots and coincidences, its bloated serializations, its unnaturally heightened and speechifying dialogue. We can see past their potboiler mechanisms into what these baggy old novelists humanly, and sometimes half-divinely, knew.
Anthony Trollope has long been excluded from this percipient, and undeceived, reassessment. He is nearly the only Victorian novelist who has been critically doomed to remain a Victorian. He alone appears to be unforgiven. Dickens and Henry James and George Eliot and Thackeray—even the colonialist-imperialist Kipling!—are permitted, and sometimes prodded, to transcend the accident of their chronology and the confines of their mores. Only Trollope is regarded as still mired in his devices—devices that are, in their pre-video yet cinematic way, archetypes of our present-day story-machines, glowing like colored apothecary globes in rooms where pianos used to stand. Trollope, in brief, is dismissed as a kind of antiquated television set; he is said to be “undemanding.” Dickens, by contrast, survives in all his greatness as caricaturist; George Eliot as moralist; Thackeray as ironist; Hardy as determinist. (Shorthand, it goes without saying, for the orchestrally manifold.)
But there is no organizing epithet or central insight for Trollope. He is all those sharp-edged things: caricaturist, moralist, ironist (very strong here), determinist (to a degree). And still he is flicked off as shallow. So he is left behind among the unemerged Victorians, deprived of the stature of transcendence. Much of the fault is extrinsic: a case can be made that the blame falls on those preening bands of Trollope cultists, farflung votaries in Papua, Tel Aviv, and Hay-on-Wye (not to mention certain pockets of the Upper West Side)—coterie enthusiasts and credit-seekers who suppose that to esteem a writer is to take on some of that writer’s cachet. Trollope’s reputation has rested (or foundered) too long and too stickily on the self-congratulation and misdirection of Trollopean zealots. These, like the even more notorious Janeites, or like the pious devotees of an apotheosized George Eliot, are misled in assuming that their hero is all tea-cozies and country comforts, in the style of Masterpiece Theater’s bright palette. Worse, single-author addicts have the naive habit of equating literature with the easy pleasures of self-approval.
But there is, I think, a more significant reason for the omission of Trollope from most contemporary reappraisals. It isn’t only that serious readers will run from what the zealots praise. The truth is that Trollope is more ours than any of those honored others (Dickens, for instance)—which may be why the current generation has the instinct to undervalue him. Writers who describe for us precisely the way we live now tend to be scorned—a single glance at how the so-called multiculturalists and other politico-literary trendists have slighted Saul Bellow is a sufficient sampling. Trollope is ten times slyer than his adorers (adorers of village parsonages) can dream—slyer and colder, with a brainy analytic laughter so remote it can register nearly as indifference. Trollope, like Bellow, is a meticulous and often ferocious anatomizer of character and society. His hand can be both light and weighty; he gets to the bottom of vileness, and also of decency; he is magisterially shrewd—shrewd in the manner of Cervantes; he likes to write about churchmen but is easy on belief; nothing in the pragmatic workings of worldliness escapes him.
Henry James complained early and nastily about Trollope’s “devotion to little things,” and charged him with “the virtues of the photograph.” “Mr. Trollope is a good observer,” James said, “but he is literally nothing else.” A surprisingly grudging comment from the novelist whose most celebrated dictum is “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost,” and who was himself possessed by the voyeurism of the ardent observer. Well, yes, there is in Trollope something of a camera mounted on a helicopter—the Olympian looking down at a wide map strewn with wriggling mortals and their hungers; I mean by this that Trollope is at heart a cynic. But a cynic is a great deal more than an observer; a cynic is a metaphysical necessity. Trollope is not much concerned with retributive justice: his comeuppances come and go. He accepts and will not judge; or, if he judges, he will not invest his soul in the judgment. He may be a moralist—he certainly responds to the discriminations of the moral life—but he is too dispassionate to jubilate or grieve. Whatever is is exactly what one might expect.
“Cynic” commonly suggests a detached pessimism, a pessimism sans bitterness—but a cynic is acutely alert to an element of strangeness in the way matters fall out. From the Olympian’s view, everything is strange—love, hate, religion, skepticism, exultation, apathy, domesticity, class, greed, infatuation, mercilessness, godliness. That may be why, having witnessed in our own century the strangest and the worst, we seem finally to be disconnected from the impersonal though earnest virtues of the photograph. What is a photograph if not a stimulus to the most deliberate attentiveness: time held motionless in a vise of profound concentration, so that every inch of the seized moment can be examined? Bellow, in his own version of James’s exhortation, adds it all up as follows: “Writers are naturally attentive; they are trained in attentiveness, and they adduce attentiveness in their readers (without a high degree of attentiveness, aesthetic bliss is an impossibility).” The term “aesthetic bliss” Bellow borrows from Nabokov, linking it to the “recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life” by “artists who write novels or stories.” The notion of the photograph as one likely key to (or recognizer of) human essence is useful enough; though we know the camera can be made to lie, we also know it as reality’s aperture. We say we are in earnest about the importance of being earnest, but we frequently choose (it is the way we live now) social superstition over social truth; or the partisan simulacrum over historical reality; or furry pointillism over the unrelenting snapshot; or sentimental distortion over exact measure. All of this is just what Trollope will not do; it takes a peculiar literary nerve to admit to the way we live now. And nerve (or call it courage) is the foundation of the aesthetic (or call it, more plainly, art).
Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels. Out of that bottomless inkpot flowed, besides, biographies, histories, travel books, sketches, and five collections of short stories. There is a tradition that Trollope damaged his own reputation by revealing, in his Autobiography, how he daily sat with his pocket watch before him on his writing table. This is presumed to be a confession that the Trollopean Muse is mainly and merely mundane diligence (as if diligence were not the only reliable means of securing the Muse’s descent); but industry of this kind is itself the artist’s portion, indistinguishable from literary passion. There is no question that quantity—added, of course, to genius—is what separates major writers from minor ones. (If only E. M. Forster had written forty-seven—or even fourteen—novels to accompany A Passage to India!) Yet Trollope, for all his abundance, is somehow still relegated among the minor.
Restitution is necessary. Trollope’s recognition of certain perilous human essences lifts him out of the Victorian minor. Let beginners who have never before read Trollope test this thesis—genuine readers not susceptible to cultism. The cultists, proselytizers all, will usually send novices to The Warden, or else to Barchester Towers. I would recommend The Way We Live Now—Trollope’s thirty-third novel, written in 1873 and set in that same year. I would recommend it because it is very long (Trollope’s longest) and very contemporary, despite its baronets and squires and rustics, and despite its penniless young women whose chief employment is husband-seeking, and its penniless young lords whose chief emplo
yment is heiress-hunting. If all this sounds as far as possible from the way we live now, think again; or else wait and see. As for length: The Way We Live Now is nine hundred and fifty-two pages in the orange-framed Penguin softcover edition, and therefore will take longer to disappoint. What disappoints in any novel by Trollope is the visible approach of its end: when more has been read than remains to be read.
The Way We Live Now is best described as a business novel; it is above all about deal-making, and about how power can be nudged to tip, and about taking advantage. It is about all these marketplace things even when what is at issue is romance, or marriage, or religion, or law, or book reviewing, or gambling, or property, or altruism, or running for office. There is almost no character who does not have an eye out for the main chance, whether it is a London millionaire or an American frontierswoman, a raffish solicitor or an unmarried elder sister worried about being left on the shelf.
In the very first chapter, called “Three Editors,” we come upon Lady Carbury in the act of insuring a fraudulent reception for work she knows is shoddy; she is a hack writer in urgent need of financial rescue via bestsellerdom. (Nothing dated in that. Ambitious mediocrities nowadays chase after blurbs with equal oil and chutzpah.) Lady Carbury is a widow supporting a reprobate son whom she coddles and a neglected daughter too love-struck, and too recalcitrant, to yield to a sensible marriage. Marriage—or, rather, matchmaking—is the center, and not only because it is the late nineteenth century, when few women have careers (though Lady Carbury herself surely does, and tends it assiduously), but because a perspicacious match is, then and now, the nexus of every business deal. Exploitation, after all, signifies a contract between two parties: the greed of the exploiter is ideally met by the need of the exploited. Trollope’s great theme is people making use of other people, especially in the accumulation of money, and who can doubt the contemporaneity of a novel about money?
The commanding money-man who is, so to speak, the lubricant of The Way We Live Now, greasing its wheelings and dealings with promises and promissory notes, is Augustus Melmotte, a foreigner arrived in London with his daughter and his cowed Bohemian Jewish wife to become the City’s most powerful financier. Now and again Trollope will play the game of giveaway names, so we may look into “Melmotte” and see a Latinic glimmer of “honey-word.” Melmotte is, in short, a mighty con artist: we are on to him almost instantly. Our interest is not in finding out his scam, but in watching him inveigle and enmesh the gullible. What he has to offer is air—the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, “which was to run from the Salt Lake City, thus branching off from the San Francisco and Chicago line, and pass down through the fertile lands of New Mexico and Arizona, into the territory of the Mexican Republic, run by the city of Mexico, and come out on the gulf at the port of Vera Cruz,” a distance of more than two thousand miles. As for the probable cost of this grand undertaking, and the actual laying of track, “no computation had or perhaps could be made.”
In fact, there will never be a railway to Vera Cruz. Melmotte and his several shady sidekicks (one of whom is named Cohenlupe—ancient priestly honorific joined to the wolfish) are successfully engaged in selling shares in a phantom project. It is a ruse—a Ponzi scheme—to attract investors. Melmotte’s prestige and influence are themselves phantoms, seductive constructs in the minds of the ignorant young dupes invited to serve on his board of directors. These are aristocratic wastrels, gamblers and boozers, some good-natured enough, one or two of them actual louts, many bearing hereditary titles. Lady Carbury’s son, Sir Felix, a baronet, is certainly among the louts. The search for respectability is double-edged: Melmotte requires the presence of titles to legitimate and adorn—and Anglicize—his imperfect status, and the raw young nobles, glad to take on the appearance of being seriously occupied, are hoping for quick and lavish returns. The clever business buccaneer may be a commonplace of public ambition (and not only in novels: Melmotte’s uncannily exact real-life counterpart is the notorious late tycoon Robert Maxwell), but Trollope’s high-flying swindler is one of those masterly figures who break through the membrane of invention to go on electrifying the living imagination ever after.
Melmotte at the pinnacle of his London fame takes everyone’s measure, mentally auditing the value of properties, titles, inherited wealth: his aim is to find footholds on an ascent to the loftiest plane of London society. Having himself no claim to English blood, he means to attain it through his only daughter, the unprepossessing Marie Melmotte. Marie is up for sale in a marriage of mutual service: the asking price is the best available title. A bargain is to be struck: the rich foreign intruder with no background (or, as the rumors have it, a soiled and possibly crooked history in far-off places) will negotiate hard for a visibly aristocratic son-in-law. Gold in exchange for the bluest blood.
Sir Felix Carbury, at his mother’s urging, is enlisted as suitor; he botches the job through drunkenness and half-hearted dallying with a brash country girl. But Marie is not the only young woman who is buffeted and thwarted by matrimonial opportunism: there is Hetta, Sir Felix’s sister, maternally pressed toward marriage with her propertied older cousin Roger; and Georgiana Longe-staffe, desperate to marry anyone who can supply a house in London during the high season; and Ruby Ruggles of Sheep’s Acre Farm, shoved into taking a husband for the sake of a dry roof over her head. Not all these coercions are conceived in unkindness; some, in fact, are rooted in sense and solicitude; but they are coercions.
Still, in the company of Trollope, let no one pity the condition of nineteenth-century women! Trollope’s young marriageables are not so vulnerable, and not so easily crushed, as their dependent circumstances would lead us to think. Apart from Melmotte’s mammoth grip (both as charmer and as bully), all the sexual force and aggressive scheming are, in this novel, the province of women. The older men, the men of position, are mainly fools and bigots; the younger men are fools, too, and also idle and enervated. But the women are robust, demanding, driven, resolute, erotically insistent. Even Melmotte’s mousy daughter turns dangerously headstrong. And the remarkable Mrs. Hurtle of San Francisco, sophisticated, compassionate, ingratiating, yet a woman who can shoot to kill, is a dozen times sturdier than the wan and useless young lords who exchange empty IOU’s and cheat at cards. She is undoubtedly more authoritative than her erstwhile fiancé, the always equivocating Paul Montague, Hetta Carbury’s lover, whom Mrs. Hurtle pursues with a torrent of contrivance so single-minded that it nearly exhausts the narrative around her.
Yet nothing can really exhaust any part of this narrative; it is alive and stingingly provocative at every turn. The grotesquely overblown dinner party Melmotte gives for the Emperor of China, an elephantiasis of self-advertisement (Trollope based its braggadocio splendors on the royal visit of the Shah of Persia in June of 1873), is as baleful as it is comic: Melmotte here becomes a parodic Lear of the banquet hall, too much accommodated by unregarded luster. And always Trollope is after the clamor and confusions of temperament. An argument between an Anglican bishop and a Roman Catholic priest reflects their theological differences far less than it does the divide between tractable and intractable spirits. The fanatical priest lives humbly, the tolerant bishop in conspicuous luxury; and it is the recurrent scramble and contradiction of variable traits that seize the novelist’s relentless eye.
A trace of that scramble may be in Trollope himself: the inventor of the gaudily offensive Cohenlupe is also a furious satirist of antisemitism—there is no noisier Jew-hater than Trollope’s Mr. Longestaffe, and no more telling vindication of ethical nicety than Trollope’s Mr. Brehgert, a Jew. Melmotte, forger as well as swindler, is suspected all around of being a Jew, and is revealed in the novel’s last pages to be the son of “a noted coiner in New York—an Irishman of the name of Melmody”—i.e., an American adventurer. (A query. Did Melmotte become Melmody only after Trollope’s own exposure to the rantings of Mr. Longestaffe? Novels do frequently influence their authors.)
The Way We L
ive Now ends in four sensible weddings, the traditional signal that we have been present at a comedy, and one sensible exile. There is in Trollope a clear pull toward reasonableness; toward moderation; toward reason itself, in language precise, exuberant, substantive—in spite of which, the comic cannot suppress the grievous, and a naturalist’s brew of so many botches and blotches sends up its tragical fumes. Suicide, malice, stupidity, greed, manipulativeness, fakery, cowardice, dissoluteness, deceit, prejudice without pride, pretension, ambitiousness, even pathological self-abnegation—excess of every kind—dominate Trollope’s scrutiny of his “now.” If our now departs a little from his, it is only because we have augmented our human matériel with heightened technological debris. All the same, there is the impress of grandeur in Trollope’s account—or call it, with James, his photography. What James missed was the peculiarly elusive quality of a poetry akin to his own. Like it or not, Trollope is the poet of anti-poetry. His lens is wide, extraordinarily so: wide enough to let in, finally, a slim ghost of the prophetic.
WHAT HENRY JAMES KNEW
I. THE HORRIBLE HOURS
AS MODERNISM sinks in, or fades out—as it recedes into a kind of latterday archaism, Cubism turned antiquated, the old literary avant-garde looking convincingly moth-eaten—certain writers become easier to live with. It is not only that they seem more accessible, less impenetrable, simpler to engage with, after decades of familiarity: the quality of mystery has (mysteriously) been drained out of them. Joyce, Proust, Woolf, surely Pound and Eliot—from all of these, and from others as well, the veil draws back. One might almost say, as the twentieth century shuts down, that they are objectively less “modern” than they once were. Their techniques have been absorbed for generations. Their idiosyncrasies may not pall, but neither do they startle. Their pleasures and their stings, while far from humdrum, nevertheless open out into psychological references that are largely recognizable. What used to be revelation (Proust’s madeleine, the world that ends not with a bang but a whimper) is reduced to reflex. One reads these masters now with satisfaction—they have been ingested—but without the fury of early avarice.
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