Trollope's Comeback

BARCHESTER TOWERS -- Anthony Trollope--Doubleday Doran ($ 10).

Is HE POPENJOY?--Anthony Trollope --Oxford University Press (2 vol.--95-c- each).

In 1882, 67-year-old Anthony Trollope. dean of British novelists, friend of Thackeray and George Eliot, suffered a fatal paralytic stroke. One year later, his many devoted readers were shocked by what they considered one of the most vulgar books they had ever read--Author Trollope's posthumously-published Autobiography.

Readers readily admitted that there was nothing about the Autobiography so shamelessly coarse as the current novels by young Thomas Hardy (whose fictional county of "Wessex" was slowly replacing Trollope's "Barsetshire"), nothing so sensual and pagan as the lyrics of up-&-coming Poet Oscar Wilde, nothing so effete as the art-for-art's-sake of Oxford's esthetic Walter Pater.

Trollope's Autobiography contained no indiscretions, no embarrassing confessions --all that Mr. Trollope would say, for instance, about his marriage, was: "It was like the marriage of other people, and of no special interest to any one except my wife and me." In fact, what so horrified the sentimental public was that by the end of the Autobiography not a shred of romance was left to clothe its burly author.

Grocer Novelist. A man writing a novel, said Mr. Trollope briskly, is comparable to a grocer weighing out tea. Mr. Trollope professed scorn for "inspiration," described how he rose at 5:30 every morning, set his watch at his elbow, and wrote without stopping until the breakfast gong brought him back to the important things of life. He always wrote, he said, at the rate of 250 words per 15 minutes.

When he had written enough to fill a three-volume novel, he tied up the loose ends of his story in as neat a bow as possible (it was sometimes very untidy), reached for a fresh sheet of paper and started another novel. In this way, he said cheerily, he had amassed nearly 170,000 in 30 years. He had spent most of it on fox hunting--in fact, he admitted, his main reason for writing romances was to make money to buy horses with.

"I look upon the result," he concluded blandly, "as comfortable, but not splendid . . . and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written."

Out of Oblivion. Perhaps it was more of an adieu than Trollope expected. Throughout the Naughty Nineties and the Edwardian and Georgian eras, Trollope's 41 novels were considered as dead as their author. As late as 1929 a student could win a master's degree in 19th Century English literature at Columbia University without being required to read a word of Trollope. Not until the 1930s did the first stirrings of reviving interest come; not until the first years of World War II did Trollope's stock begin, very perceptibly, to rise again.

Last month, with London booksellers concurring, Dr. Cyril Garbett, Archbishop of York, nominated Trollope for first place in wartime British reading popularity (Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters tied for second place, Dickens and Thackeray for third). Nostalgia for the days when English life could be portrayed as a comedy of manners was the general, if perhaps too simple, explanation.

Last week it seemed that Trollope was making a popular comeback in the U.S. too. "I am asked for 'anything by Trollope' five times a day," reported the owner of one of Manhattan's largest second-hand bookshops. The San Francisco Public Library reported Trollope withdrawals to be 76% greater than last year. Boston booksellers "simply can't supply the demand."

In 1940, Random House reprinted one of Trollope's finest, most appealing novels, The American Senator (with an enthusiastic preface by the late, famed bibliophile, A. Edward Newton, founder of the U.S.'s tiny Trollope Society). The sales were negligible. This year, Oxford University Press's reprinting of Is He Popenjoy? has been completely sold out, along with most other reprints of Trollope in Oxford's admirable World Classics Series. To crown the Trollope revival, Doubleday Doran has republished, at a fancy price and with lavish, Dickensian illustrations. Trollope's most popular novel, Barchester Towers.

Father in Cincinnati. Cincinnati is one of the U.S. cities which has reported no interest in Trollope--perhaps because Trollope's parents are part & parcel of Cincinnati history. To the young Midwest metropolis, in 1828, went eccentric Frances Trollope who was later followed by her equally eccentric lawyer husband, Thomas, (they left their 13-year-old son, Anthony, back in England with his brothers and sisters).

To Cincinnati's astonishment, the Trollopes proceeded to erect what one traveler described as "the great deformity of the city" -- a brick bazaar with "Gothic windows, Grecian pillars ... a Turkish dome, and Egyptian devices." Therein, they planned to sell the gewgaws of Manchester and Birmingham to the savages of Cincinnati.

Within three years, the Trollopes were back in England, so destitute that they could hardly buy shoes for their five children; "Trollope's Folly" remained standing until 1881, becoming successively the home of the Ohio Mechanics Society and a popular bawdyhouse. No whit discouraged, Thomas Trollope set to work erecting a new folly -- this time, an eight-volume encyclopedic history of the world's monasteries and convents, "with all their orders and subdivisions." The family began to sicken and starve. Frances Trollope decided that only she could save it.

Prolific Mother. At 50, with no pre vious experience, she began to pour out volume after volume of remunerative fiction and travelogue. Most of the characters she introduced were old friends and acquaintances: "Of course," she said airily, "I always pulp (them) before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage." This was no consolation to the American public, which foamed at the sprightly invective and caricature in Mrs. Trollope's first book, Domestic Man ners of the Americans. The book was a financial success, but not sufficiently so to relieve the author as she shunted her family to & fro over Europe in an endless flight from moneylenders and hotel bills.

For years, Frances Trollope spent her life ministering to dying members of her family with one hand, while supporting the survivors with the other. When her son, Henry, caught tuberculosis, she moved her desk into his room, wrote desperately all through his dying hours. Before Henry died, he passed on his disease to his sister Emily -- and Mrs. Trollope wrote beside her daughter's deathbed too.

For Anthony, "a hobbledehoy of 19, without any idea of a career," Frances obtained a clerkship in the London Post Office. Tom, her other son, joined his mother in writing money-making fiction.

(Between them, Frances, Thomas Jr. and Anthony wrote more books than any family in history.) When she died, in Florence, aged 83, indomitable Frances Trollope had written 114 volumes in 33 years.

"Her career," remarks Son Anthony, in a classic understatement, "offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence." Post Office Hobbledehoy. For seven years, Trollope was the Post Office's black sheep. Moneylenders trailed him as they had trailed his mother; twice he was led off to jail for debt (but not locked up).

He spent his evenings, he admits, not in "reading good books and drinking tea," but lounging around with "a fast set ... given to cards and tobacco (and) spirits." He always "wished (he) had never been born," and looked so abject that once, after he had conducted the Queen of Saxony on an official tour of the Post Office, her gentleman-in-waiting pressed a half crown into his grimy hand. When he was offered a transfer to a bleak section of Ireland, Trollope gratefully accepted it.

It was the turning point of his life.

Through his postal-inspection tours, which he made on horseback, he discovered his greatest passion -- foxhunting. Ireland's informal manners and poverty not only made him feel at ease, but gave him dignity. To the amazement of his superiors in London, he became a respected, hard working civil servant. He made his first return to England at the age of 30 with a bride, a decent salary, and his first novel, The Macdermots of Ballycloran.

Paradise of Normalcy. In lonely adolescence, Trollope had spent hours day dreaming. But the stories he had fashioned in his mind had not been extravagant dreams of glory. Years of feeling himself an outcast had led him to picture paradise as a place in which everything was average and normal. Consequently, his dreams (and later, his novels) were built out of the most everyday events, moved precisely in the tempo of everyday Victorian life, and partook of that era's utter confidence in its own continuation:

"For weeks, for months . . . from year to year, I would carry on the same tale, binding myself down to certain laws, to certain proportions, and proprieties, and unities. Nothing impossible was ever introduced ... I myself was of course my own hero. . . . But I never became a king, or a duke. ... I never was a learned man, nor even a philosopher. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be fond of me."

To realize his vision of a country gentleman's everyday life, Trollope needed money; and his best way to make money was by making fiction out of his vision. He wrote for ten years, but it was not until the appearance of his fourth novel, The Warden, in which he first sketched the world of Barsetshire, that he earned anything from his work. His next novel,

Bar Chester Towers, brought him fame as a painter of everyday portraits -- and as his fame grew, Trollope saw to it that his understanding of his subject grew as well.

The higher he rose in the Post Office, the larger the districts to which he was assigned (as organizer of mail deliveries); the larger the district, the more avidly he studied it, riding its roads and lanes until he knew its people and its ways by heart.

The lanky, sullen youth turned into the beefy, bearded hunting gentleman-author who took a stubborn pleasure in denying that he was an artist.

Writing Machine. He was only too ready to give his readers what they wanted : "a little foxhunting, a little tufthunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant . . . much Church, but more love-making." Only fox-hunting could keep Trollope from his daily hours of writing.

When traveling by train on postal business, he wrote on a portable desk with a lamp (almost the whole of Bar Chester Towers was so written). En route to Egypt, to conclude a Postal Treaty with the Egyptian Government, he wrote his way across the Bay of Biscay, pausing between paragraphs to rush to the rail and vomit.

So determined was Trollope to be considered a writing machine that he gave the readers of his Autobiography little chance to note the creative passion that made the machine run. And yet, the passion was paramount. "I have wandered alone," Trollope wrote, "among the rocks and woods, crying at (my characters') grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. ... I have lived with my characters. ... a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the color of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear.

Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned." Earth Under Glass. Bar Chester Towers shows this gallery packed to the eaves with typically Trollopean peers, squires, High and Low Church clergymen, farmers, shopkeepers, each with his wife and family, all passionately involved in the everyday affairs and intrigues of an English cathedral town. It is, said Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a great admirer of Trollope, "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 in habitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of." But readers who do not buy Doubleday's expensive edition of this famed novel will find equal satisfaction -- and perhaps a more subtle Trollope -- in Is He Popenjoy?, an almost-forgotten work.

Written in Trollope's prime with the utmost deftness and simplicity, and not overloaded with characters, Popenjoy displays Trollope's astonishing powers of character portrayal in concentrated form.

Its plot -- which of two babies, one still unborn, is to succeed to the title of Lord Popenjoy -- is not so much the point of the story as the point at which feverish uncles, aunts and in-laws collect, each to fight for his or her chosen Popenjoy and, in the process, to stand self-revealed.

Like all Trollope's best novels, Popenjoy exists both in and between the lines; like the age in which it was written, there is a smooth, romantic surface on which the most innocent girl may skate without danger, and, just below, the murky waters of worldliness.

Trollope knew that even in their most idealistic moments the best men and women could be self-seeking -- not merely be cause they were naturally ambitious, but because ambition was demanded by the conventions. Perhaps this is what he meant to convey to the lady who, on seeing him devour a huge meal, remarked : "You seem to have a very good appetite, Mr. Trol lope!" "None at all, madam," he replied, "but, thank God, I am very greedy."

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