Trollope on tape
Peter Levi
This is the last column that Peter Levi wrote for The Spectator before his death this month.
The first attractive thing about The Way We Live Now is its title which, in happier days when no one but Harold Macmillan read Trollope, I think I stole to use in a poem. But this is the mere confectioner's sugar on a most brilliant and in some ways a rather deep book. I prefer Trollope to Dickens and I think with certain important exceptions where Dickens is supreme among all novelists, this is a legitimate preference. Of course, one cannot tell because Trollope was not on the school syllabus or in the school library, and one therefore encountered him quite late in life, when one has already read Dickens and Thackeray and perhaps some Balzac or Zola and probably Tolstoy too. I have not added Dostoevsky, because I think his star has fallen in the last century. But Trollope has a wonderful freshness and cleverness. He is the only novelist of his time who ranks above all living novelists now, and he wins by a nose over his great contemporary Mrs Gaskell, whose rustic style about the effect of a railway on very simple low- church farmers in the North does seem to me more moving than even Great Expecta- tions.
This book succeeds all the better for being read by Timothy West. I have just lis- tened to one of the Flashman books, also read by West, and, taking the two together, his abilities are stunning. This Trollope is very long and consequently costly. But I was lucky enough to hear it first in an early copy, because Cover to Cover make their books available to their private subscribers up to a year before they come into the shops and are sent anywhere for review. This leads to some confusion about what is available, of course, but no doubt they have their reasons. The result was, in my case, that I have been through the whole work twice in one year, and I must own that the second reading showed a far more remark- able book than I had first discerned. I am not sure what it was supposed to be about, but one character emerges so strongly that others fade by comparison — rather like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, even though other characters in that play may have been closer to Shakespeare's heart. Melmotte is a charlatan, a financial wizard and an extremely bad man, and this book is the story of his rise and fall. His end is sat- isfactory in a Dickensian way, by prussic acid, but his rise, the climax of his career and his wonderful German accent are amazing and thrilling. What corresponds to the court cards in this novel are a little weaker, but enlivened by some remarkable character sketches. I was fond of the lan- guid Lord Nidderdale and the lackadaisical Lord Lovegrass, the Marquis of Aul- dreekie, the lawyers Mr Bideawhile and Mr Slurkum; it was only the completely good characters whom I thought less impressive.
One is constantly pulled up in Trollope by tiny details which date back to an age no one now remembers. A footman, for exam- ple, is noticed for the huge dimensions of his calf, which must go back to a time when footmen actually had to run with the coaches. I have once seen a painting of this meant to hang on the two sides of a door- way, where the footmen were quite naked below a short kilt: that I suppose explains the addiction of heroines to their footmen. Now of course people remember, and may even have encountered, footmen but their dress was duller, and they were not picked for activity. Reading Trollope is as thor- oughly interesting as reading Saint-Simon, or any other account of an unknown time and place. It is curious that his mother went to America and wrote an important book about it. Indeed his mother is one of the clues to his style. But in this novel, which is set in 1873, Trollope introduces a whole wilderness of the American West rather like Shylock's wilderness of mon- keys. The American girl, who is constantly compared to a wild cat, has shot one intending rapist and divorced her husband, Caradoc Hurtle, out of hand though only in Kansas, which, it seems, scarcely counted. I `When I first came here I couldn't add two and two.' liked the name Caradoc, but alas we never meet him, and it was half way through the second reading that I became certain she was called Mrs Hurtle and not Mrs Hurdle. She is not at all probable as a character and not really well treated by the plot.
In the English country chapters on the other hand, Trollope reveals a splendid dexterity with language. He presents a sub- plot in which a young baronet who has had to leave the army interferes with a country girl and is in the end beaten up in the street in London for molesting the same girl by her rustic admirer. The whole scene is splendidly managed and ends with the rustic going off happily to jail for the night with a policeman who becomes his friend for life. What makes less sense is the baronet who is supposed to be a youth of amazing beauty with a little golden mous- tache. It is hard to see how anyone could be such a poltroon. One of the sub-plots necessary to a novel so ambitious in its scope is that of the unhappiness of his mother who dotes on him. She is constantly trying to get editors to support in print what sound like her perfectly appalling books, but succeeds in the end only in marrying one. That would not happen in modern London, though I suppose Mr Mount of the TLS might be a target. One might conceive that another of these edi- tors, Mr Mph, is named after Coleridge, but the enterprise he shows in standing for parliament is not as shocking now as it would have been 150 years ago.
When I first read Trollope I was a young clerical student, and what I read was only the Barsetshire books. Then ten or 20 years later television made the political novels famous, and now the whole opus is open to us all. For The Warden I retain the deepest respect. Indeed, the memory of the old man seeking comfort before God in Westminster Abbey still comes back to me whenever I think of the modern horrors of that once sacred building. But this novel is better than The Warden and fuller and goes deeper into society. The only theme that comes to nothing and is abandoned is that of the Catholic priest in Suffolk who, I think, was meant to have converted Roger and given an alarming end to the book, but Trollope sheared off from that, probably wisely, after all. Trollope is true to what novels are meant to do and be, and the small touches of conventional behaviour and melodrama that are still to be found in The Way We Live Now are not enough to detract from that thrust. The scenes of the wicked Melmotte in the House of Com- mons are as brilliant as one might expect from Trollope. His American liberated woman does not quite come off, but she does try, and her London landlady Mrs Pipkin succeeds. It is something we owe in the end to Harold Macmillan that this trea- sure house has now been rediscovered.
Cover to Cover, unabridged, 24 cassettes, 30 hours 30 minutes, £79.99.
Previous page
