A phenomenon not a genius
Anita Brookner
TROLLOPE by Victoria Glendinning Hutchinson, £20, pp. 551 Let us begin with the almost unbeliev- able statistics. Imagine a man so attuned to business, or perhaps simply to activity, that he began his writing day at five in the morning (latterly at four) and finished it by breakfast time, after which he would go to his work at the Post Office. This Post Office work involved almost constant trav- el to places near and far, and immense physical exertion (he was easily capable of walking 24 miles a day). Imagine the writ- ing thus undertaken to be as regular as a metronome, each word on each page of 250 words counted and and accounted for as the work was in progress. Imagine this procedure as being less of a rule than an intimate workmanlike satisfaction. Imagine the ensuing prose (for he had no compensating fantasies about art) as being `entirely free from alterations and addi- tons,' according to his friend Frederick Pollock. - 'It seemed to have flowed from his pen like clean liquor from a tap.' Imagine a man capable of completing one novel on a certain day and starting another on the next, as Trollope did with Dr. Thorne on 31st March 1858, and The Bertrams, begun on 1 April. Imagine this feat being performed in the course of a sea journey to Egypt, the regular and regulat- ed output only interrupted by visits to his stateroom to be sick. Imagine writing 19 novels between 1860 and 1871. Imagine the three very greatest - Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, and The Way We Live Now - being produced in less than a decade.
This lucid but always unpoetic activity (`gross fertility', aecording to Henry James) was achieved with an ease which seems to us utterly mysterious. Nor did Trollope make anything of it. In An Auto- biography he praises his own regularity of production, adding, 'I have never fancied myself a man of genius, but rather as an honest workman, comparing himself to a shoemaker. The comparison was valuable. `Think about your business as a shoemaker thinks of his', is the advice the Duke of St. Bungay gives to the Duke of Omnium. Nor does Trollope consider his obligation to write as he does a burden. In these days of literary prizes and Arts Council grants it is a corrective to read his views on the life of a novelist. Writing, he says, 'requires no capital, no special education, no training, and may be taken up at any time without a moment's delay'. He is the most expert of witnesses in his own defence. An Autobiog- raphy is essential reading for all those who aspire to put pen to paper.
But it does not explain the peculiar charm of the novels, which, oddly enough, do not convey the impression that the author was a man or genius. These novels were written to charm, to instruct, to please (and to make money). So easy is the style, so inexhaustible the characterisation, that one accepts them without question, not as being true to life but as being true to the conventions of the novel. In many of them the same theme is repeated, with agreeable variations: a young man will declare his love for a blameless girl and will then go off and become ensnared by an artful and superior woman, before returning at the end to his true love, as Frank Greystock returns to the faithful Lucy Morris. In the meantime the snares of this world will be represented by those clever women - Lady Glencora Palliser, Lizzie Eustace, Mme. Max Goesler - with whom Trollope has a great deal of sympathy. These lively women offer a great temptation to young men, like Phineas Finn, who have their way to make in the world, and it is only the honourable and dull Plantaganet Pallisers who would groan at their impetuosity. Trollope could create a male charmer - and Burgo Fitzger- ald and Phineas Finn are the genuine arti- cle - but it is his porkraits of women which particularly appeal to the English reader. It is not insignificant that John Major ad mires Lily Dale, although I would rather he had gone for Mme. Max.
The author of these novels (47 of them) was a bluff, coarse, noisy, and generally dishevelled person,`the dullest Briton of them all', according to Henry James. That he became such a person, combining physi- cal ugliness with the sweetest of affections, affections which are palpable in all his writ- ings, was something that could not have been forseen. The son of a depressive father and a highly adventurous mother, he remembered the bitterness of his-deprived early years with a strength which was never to be diminished by the passage of time. He particularly disliked his failure of a father, who sent him to Harrow and to Winchester to suffer poverty, beatings, and a feeling of inferiority at being excluded from the 'social paradise' enjoyed by wealthier, luckier and more graceful boys. Yet these painful years were to be vanquished by the great success and popu- larity of his maturity. He writes of easy people, in easy circumstances: there are to be no Dickensian victims and martyrs. Yet, in his greatest novel, The Way We Live Now, and in the character of Melmotte, Jewish speculator and crook, he is able to sympathise with the man and even to admire him. The scene in which Melmotte gets up 'on his legs' in the House of Com- mons and makes his blustering and disas- terous speech contains the seeds of his own early humiliation. It is the finest thing he ever wrote.
It was fortunate, and no doubt fortu- itous, that Trollope followed in the foot- steps of his mother rather than his father. Frances Trollope, an inveterate chancer and a fearless traveller, wrote 41 books herself, starting her day's work at four and joining the family for breakfast at eight. In addition to being industrious she was an accomplished social climber, and in the days of her fame and prominence was able to dine with Metternich and converse with Louis-Philippe. In the intervals she was a fond but more or less absent parent, pre- ferring her elder son, the finicky Tom, to bearish Anthony. The family was enor- mous: relations crowd the pages of Victoria Glendinning's altogether excellent biogra- phy, much as they must have crowded the author's life. But this large family became a solace to Trollope, and it may be assumed that it went some way to overlaying memo- ries of his own unsatisfactory parentage. In old age Frances Trollope became anxious for Anthony's love. He gave it, but distant- ly. Readers of this spendid book will do well to master the intricacies of Trollope's fami- ly life. They would also do well to commit to memory the 47 novels, the five volumes of short stories, and the capacious travel writings. Victoria Glendinning does not make the mistake of searching for symbols or for hidden agendas, or for adducing the- ories about Trollope's intimate psychology. It may well be that the man is as transpgr- ent as his writing, having successfully inter- nalized, overcome, and dismissed his earlier conflicts. She does mention Proust's theory that the life lived in writing and the life lived in society are two disparate enti- ties, that it is the inaccessible moi profond which produces the books. Apart from this she is as sensible as Trollope was himself. This a first class account of a writer more phenomenal than he was ever to appreci- ate. No doubt he would have dismissed many of the claims one is tempted to make for him. Victoria Glendinning treats him with affection and respect, and thus does him full justice.
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