Feathers from the Eagle's Tail

DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS (454 pp.) -- Frances Trollope -- Knopf ($5).

Was it an "air castle," or was it "a Turkish Babel?" asked the wags. Or was it a mixture of "the Mosque of St. Athanase, in Egypt," plus "the temple of Apollinop-olis at Etfou?" Cincinnati citizens, who watched it abuilding in 1829 didn't know what the devil it was--except that it was to be named "Trollope's Bazaar" and to supply high-priced fancy goods and foreign culture. But "every rogue within cheating distance" was working on it for the nutty British owner, 49-year-old Mrs. Frances Trollope. They were selling her bricks at three times the market price, laying "gas pipes" that conducted nothing but a steady flow of hot air. So no one was surprised when one fine day "the old Trollope" gathered her bankrupt skirts around her "robust and masculine" limbs and fled back to England--one of the first, but not, alas, one of the last Britishers to invade the U.S. market without first carefully studying its price indexes and consumer needs.

But if the robust burghers of Cincinnati had ever known of the notebooks that bitter Mrs. Trollope was carrying home up her raveled sleeve, they would have found some way to keep her in town. "I cannot speculate," said the redoubtable old dame, "and I cannot reason; but I can see and hear." The London firm of Whittaker, Treacher & Co. thought so too. Barely two years later, when Cincinnatians were still guffawing every time they passed the crazy shell known as "Trollope's Folly," a book appeared that roused one of the loudest howls of pain and outrage ever heard in the Midwest.

Today, every well-read American has heard of Frances Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans--second of a long line of books that make life hard for generations of preachers of Anglo-American amity.* Now they will have a chance to read it in the best edition to date, with the original illustrations by France's Auguste Hervieu and copious notes, addenda, and a brief biography of Author Trollope supplied by Editor Donald Arthur Smalley of the University of Illinois.

Wind in the Willows. The U.S. in the age of Jackson was so raw, tetchy and snarling-proud that its "desire for approbation" and "delicate sensitiveness under censure" constituted "a weakness which amounts to imbecility." Other nations, said Mrs. Trollope, were "thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them,"

Mrs. Trollope came prepared to appraise and evaluate the Union: it never occurred to her that from the moment she landed (at New Orleans) she herself would be the one to be roundly devaluated. To begin with, it was a "singular" shock to find that though every man jack of her American fellow travelers on the Mississippi chewed tobacco, reeked of whisky, ate with a knife and grabbed for the table "viands" with "voracious rapidity," one & all had apparently "arrived at high rank in the army."

In fact, the whole of the egalitarian U.S. so teemed with high brass that, as another British traveler remarked, when a steamboat captain once called out: "General, a little fish?" 25 out of the 30 diners promptly passed their plates.

There'll Be No Changes Made. Poor Frances Trollope took a terrible beating from this nation of officers and gentlemen. Chomping their chaw-packed jaws and deluging her skirts with a running fire of mis-spits, they haw-hawed at the Royal Navy, punched King George in the snoot and tossed Britain (as Cincinnati tossed its garbage) out into the street. When Mrs. Trollope gently hinted at the "total and universal want of manners, both in males and females," she was either assured that the rudeness in question was a local "peculiarity" ("You know so little of America"), or she met the fierce retort: "Our manners are very good manners, and we don't wish any changes from England."

Bred to salons in which ladies & gentlemen together debated literary and topical matters, Mrs. Trollope was outraged by a nation in which the men were happiest alone with "a gin cocktail," their feet up on the backs of chairs, talking business, business, business, and spitting, spitting, spitting, while the women sat in a room apart and tittled and tattled by the hour. She made notes of their crude, fantastic speech, little suspecting that age and custom would lend much of it such a patina that such a horrendous phrase as "go the whole hog" would be used, in 1949, by a descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, addressing the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the House of Commons.

Freedom's Onions. Americans' "coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect," Mrs. Trollope decided, might serve as an object lesson to all Europeans who prated about republican "democracy" from a safe distance. "The theory of equality may be very daintily discussed by English gentlemen in a London dining room, when the servant, having placed a fresh bottle of cool wine on the table, respectfully shuts the door, and leaves them to their walnuts and their wisdom; but it will be found less palatable when it presents itself in the shape of a hard, greasy paw, and is claimed in accents that breathe less of freedom than of onions and whisky."

Domestic Manners of the Americans sold so well both at home and abroad that it established Frances Trollope as a professional writer (she wrote more than 20 novels and books of travels in the remaining 30 years of her life) and helped to recoup for herself and her five children (of whom Anthony Trollope was to become a far more famous author than his mother) the money lost in "Trollope's Folly." Her new readers of 1949 are likely to laugh, both at Britain's Trollope and Jackson's America. Like Mark Twain, they may even decide that of all books about the U.S. by visiting spitfires, they "like Dame Trollope best." Wrote Twain in one of the suppressed passages of his Life on the Mississippi:

"She found a 'civilization' here which you, reader, could not have endured . . . Nearly all the tourists . . . felt a sincere kindness for us; nearly all of them glossed us over a little too anxiously . . . Mrs. Trollope, alone of them all, dealt what the gamblers call a strictly 'square game.' She did not gild us; and neither did she whitewash us."

* The first: Royal Navy Captain Basil Hall's chilly Travels in North America (1829). Others: Charles Dickens' American Notes (1842); Matthew Arnold's Civilization in the United States (1888); C. E. M. Joad's The Babbitt Warren (1926).

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