A Forgotten Influence

In writing Phineas at Bay, I tried to give credit to (most of) the influences and references I included in the book. (In fact, the Author's Note, titled "For Those Who Who Enjoy Peering Behind the Curtain,"runs 12 pages.) But there's one I signally failed to credit, largely because I'd forgotten how it moved me.

In "Behind the Curtain" I note that I based the feelings of my young heroine Clarissa Riley, prior to her wedding, on those of Eleanor Roosevelt before her wedding to Franklin. In particular, I was struck by her framing of the ideal of love around Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem "A Woman's Shortcomings".

I'd forgotten, though, the extent to which that poem, used as a framing device in the television films Eleanor and Franklin (1976) and Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, fretted at me. Even more than in the biographies, the film hearkens back again and again to Browning's poem, holding out an ideal of love that is--dare I say it? Yes, I rather think I do--an ideal of love that is quite simply impossible to live up to.

I was reminded of that when I re-viewed one of the TV films for the first time in oh, well over a decade.

So here is my answer to Mrs. Browning's poem as used in those films. For the non-initiate, Phineas Finn's first wife Mary Flood Jones dies in childbirth at the beginning of Phones Redux (1874). Plantagenet Palliser, Duke of Omnium, becomes a widower at the beginning of The Duke's Children (1880).

****

Now that the day itself had begun, Clarissa felt keyed up, but not exactly anxious. Excited, that was the word. Early on in her engagement, she had been fearful that she had plunged too quickly, leaped before sufficient looking. Words in her mother’s old copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning had driven her to her uncle’s study late one night for comfort. Finding him at his desk reviewing a brief, despite the lateness of the hour—had it been for Ifor, whom she was starting to think of as the brother she had always longed for, but never had? Perhaps—in any event, she had not hesitated to interrupt him.

Wordlessly, she had showed her uncle the passage:

Unless you can think, when the song is done,
No other is soft in the rhythm;
Unless you can feel, when left by One,
That all men else go with him;
Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath,
That your beauty itself wants proving;
Unless you can swear “For life, for death!” —
Oh, fear to call it loving!

Uncle Phineas had read the poem carefully through. He looked at her over his reading glasses, and said to Clarissa, “Mrs. Browning was a gifted poet, no doubt, but she puts things forcefully, simply, as poets often do. Look here, at the next stanza.” He pointed, and Clarissa read:

Unless you can muse in a crowd all day
On the absent face that fixed you;
Unless you can love, as the angels may,
With the breadth of heaven betwixt you;
Unless you can dream that his faith is fast,
Through behoving and unbehoving;
Unless you can die when the dream is past —
Oh, never call it loving!

Uncle Phineas had waited until she had looked up from the page, and said, in his gentlest voice, “My friend the Duke of Omnium did not die when the dream was past—and his love was not perfect or idyllic, but tempestuous, and with all the contrarieties and squalls of life. Yet he loved, and she loved, as truly as ever a couple did. Do not let Mrs. Browning frighten you, my dear.”

“Uncle Phineas, you were married once before, Mother told me.”

“Yes, Clarissa, I was.”

“Did you love my Aunt Mary?”

Phineas had then paused a moment. “When I first told her I did, I thought that was the case. I later came to realize that, although I cared for her, I did not love her as I could best love a woman, and I married her nonetheless. In doing so, I did us both a great injustice—she was a lovely girl, and could have found someone who would have loved her as she deserved.”

After a little while, Clarissa had asked, in a small voice, “Did she know?”

“I sincerely hope not, Clarissa. She died so soon, you see, that she may not have.” The pain in his voice startled her. “I lost not only Mary, but the son she bore me—he died only a few hours after his mother.”

“What was his name?” she asked.

“Malachi. After my father, your grandfather, my dear girl. How he would have loved you.”

She leaned up against him for a moment, and then murmured:

“So I should not let Mrs. Browning frighten me, then?”

“Do you love Savrola—in your heart, truly, as far as you know your heart?”

“Yes.”

“Then be at ease,” he had said, “and trust to your heart.”

In the months since, her feelings had become ever more clear, and ever stronger. Her love had been confirmed by a barrage of experiences—the suspenseful ordeal of viewing Ifor’s trial together, Savrola’s willingness to assist her uncle, and then later his assiduous care, not only for her, but for her uncle and for Aunt Marie when her uncle had been injured, his regular letters sent from the House when speeches were dull, enlivened by little drawings of the long-winded speakers, and of Savrola himself, as a little be-suited pig, snoozing in his seat. All these things had endeared him to her, and the terrible fear that she had undergone when his own life was endangered had taught her that her uncle had been right. She knew, on her wedding day, that she loved and was loved, and could acknowledge it without fear.

Her bath ready, Clarissa prepared to meet the day.

Book Gloat: Brattle Book Shop Edition

Well. now that I am beginning to settle back into life, a short book gloat seems in order. Or, What Did I Buy on My Summer Vacation (Highlights Reel):

Let's begin with the best--the copyright edition of a novel of great importance ego me--



Note the beautiful design on the page ends:



And here's the title page:



As near to a true first as I ever expect to own.

We now move to a nice find from the bargain table of Brattle Book Shop in Boston:



So, um, what are they? Two linked volumes by George R. Tyrrell, they together rate a chapter )and their author a whole Part) in Alec R. Vider's 1934 study The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church. They represent Fr. Tyrrell's effort to open Roman Catholicism to new learning and new political realities. He was excommunicated for these efforts, but in many ways anticipated Vatican II.

From the bargain table also:



All three volumes of George Eliot's masterpiece, in very nice shape, thankee, and all for $5 per volume. The "Holly Lodge" edition was a complete set of Eliot's works in 24 volumes, limited to 500 copies. These were part of number 97. Alas, the rest of my Eliot's do not match. However, I now have all the big ones, though my copy of "Scenes from Clerical Life" appears to have gone walkabout.

Not from the bargain table, but irresistible for a newly ordained deacon:



All one needed to know about vestments as of 1896. Maybe I can now understand why the Church uses the amise and the apparel. (I know, wild optimism. Still the apparel at least inspired Anthony Ainley's collar as the Master in Doctor Who, so nothing is ever entirely wasted.)

One last, and you can have a break.

First, I'm a great admirer of Werner Jaeger's Paideia. So it was a great pleasure to come across this:

Home is the Sailor, Home from the Sea...

Back from a cruise filled with incident and amusement--


--

No, no, nothing like that, but the damned song did keep running through my head. Although not an unflawed experience (serious problems on one day with passengers returning to the ship being stuck in an appallingly long line in the blazing sun, leading to at least two requiring medical attention), the cruise was an opportunity for rest, lots of time with my parents, sister, brother-in-law nephew and niece, and my beloved la Caterina. (My nephew has grown into a splendid young man whose company is most enjoyable, and my niece had the waitstaff eating out of her hand with her charm.)

We saw some magnificent sights--dolphins dancing outside on our last night, a whale sighting on our first, and some beautiful churches along the way. St. Luke's Episcopal Cathedral in Portland Maine was a highlight with its breathtaking Lady Chapel:



The service at St. Luke's was marvelous, and the hospitality the Cathedral's Dean and parishioners showed la Caterina and myself couldn't have been warmer. One member of the parish not only recommended a good place for a fresh lobster lunch, he drove us there so that we'd beat the rush.

I did very well in bookstores throughout the trip, filling she gaps in my theological library, completing my set of Randolph Churchill & Martin Gilbert's official Churchill biography, and even finding a Tauchnitz Copyright edition of Phineas Finn, a work that is, of course, quite dear to me. (There'll be a special book gloat post in a couple days.)

But the best part of vacation, any vacation, is the loafing. Reading books of dubious merit, spending time with family and celebrating both my Dad's birthday and la Caterina's (in celebration date order) was what made the time so special.

I could touch on the news, but I'm still on vacation mode, and staying that way a bit longer, I think. There'll be time for discussion of other things later. I'm probably going to have some thoughts about the religious liberty issues raised by the Kim Davis affair.

But I did just want to note that while I was gone, this little one-person blog, which has veered from religious matters to political, to literary, has surprised me by blowing past the 100,000 page views mark. In fact, it's at 100,265 as of this writing. I've sometimes feared that I was merely writing for myself and a handful of others, and maybe that's so--but at least you keep coming back. I'm grateful for that, and for your company here in this little corner of cyberspace. Many thanks.

"I Run After Units": Returning to Trollope Country

An Address to the Trollope Society USA
At The Knickerbocker Club,
New York City
May 18, 2015


Well, If I had known that I would be following not only Melanie Kirkpatrick, but Jack Hall, the world's leading Trollope scholar, I might have hesitated when Randy Williams asked me to speak tonight. We also have with us in the room Robert Wiseman, one of the two men who have given us the restored text of The Duke's Children, as well as several scholars who have enriched my own understanding of Trollope’s works.

Among this starry crowd, I admit that I feel something of a fraud. While you have been restoring Trollope’s words, or illuminating his life, I have been brewing not real coffee, but ersatz. Finest quality ersatz, I hope, but still—I have added to the Trollope corpus only by using his writings as a jumping off point for my own tale.

My first job out of law school was doing criminal appeals for the Legal Aid Society here in New York City. Here’s the funny thing about criminal cases. Even when it’s not necessary to prove a case, police and prosecutors always want to know why.

Why do people violate the social contract? Why do they cross the lines we have drawn between right and wrong? Between good and bad? Why do people steal?

Or, in my case, why do we write sequels to classic works of fiction? Why do we appropriate the characters and stories of great writers? Like I asked a second ago, why do we steal?

Look, it’s not as if I’m the only one to do it. In fact, I’m in pretty good company. Shakespeare pillaged his plots from history, from myths—he even ripped off Homer. Dumas based the d’Artagnan Cycle—The Three Musketeers and its sequels—on an earlier novel, the fake Memoirs of d’Artagnan published in 1700 by Courtilz de Sandras (we think; nobody’s proven it, really).

John Gardner retold Beowulf from the point of view of the monster. P.D. James’s last novel was yet another sequel to Pride and Prejudice. No zombies, but plenty of bodies in Death Comes to Pemberly. George MacDonald Fraser made an entire career off Harry Flashman, the school bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

But why do we do it?

I think it’s because writers are readers.

What gave me the audacity to continue the story of Phineas and Marie Finn, of Plantagenet Palliser and his children, of all their friends and enemies?

A sense that the story wasn’t finished. To steal a phrase form T.H. White, I was haunted for years by the feeling that Trollope had not left the tale “round and bright and done.”

We don’t know if Trollope had finished with the Duke, or with Phineas, for that matter. From my first reading of the Palliser novels, while I was in college, to the day I began my continuation of the story, two plot threads were left dangling into my cerebral cortex, itching away at me.

First, the strange complacency of Phineas Finn in The Prime Minister, where he and the Duke get into a debate about equality—with Phineas attacking it, and the Duke defending the idea, at least in the abstract. What had happened to the radical Member of Parliament to strip him of his fire and passion? How strange that he is on the sidelines in The Duke’s Children, despite Marie’s much more prominent role.

That was the really irritating itch, but there was second one.

Trollope leaves the Duke at Lady Mary’s wedding. We are told that “One who did not know him well might have said that he was a man with few cares, and who now took special joy in the happiness of his children” but that in fact he was reminding himself of all that he had suffered. A classic Trollope moment—the Duke is transfixed in a moment of time, like Bishop Proudie praying that he might not be glad that his wife was dead, or the Archdeacon, at his beloved father’s bedside suddenly horrified that he’s watching the clock in hope that he can get the telegram off announcing his father’s death so that Government can appoint him bishop before it falls.

But here’s the thing—Trollope never leaves his characters in those revelatory tableaux moments. Life goes on. Bishop Proudie shambles out to join Reverend Harding’s funeral. Archdeacon Grantly mourns, and then sends the telegram, anyway—only to miss becoming the bishop.

That great last glimpse of Plantagenet, doing the done thing, while he is secretly adrift in self-pity? I do not believe for an instant that Trollope meant to leave him their forever.

And neither can I believe that Phineas Finn would end up as a mere political drone, a more intelligent version of Lawrence Fitzgibbon, being shuffled from office to office.

Think about that for a moment. Phineas endures the slamming of Society’s doors on him by the poison of Quintus Slide’s journalism and Mr. Bonteen’s malice. Worse, he goes through the searing ordeal of being tried for Bonteen’s murder. He discovers how few of his friends know him well enough to squarely reject his guilt of murdering a man in the street.

Phineas discovers that Lady Laura can offer him nothing but a dramatic scene in his cell, but that his fellow outsider, Madame Max throws herself into saving his life.

Saving it for what?

For Phineas to diminish into just another politico, living on his wife’s money?

Or to age into a forgettable role as a good, dull, graying functionary?

I just could not believe that the brief glimpses we get of Phineas in The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children represent Trollope’s full development of the character who had made his way to the center of high society only to see its hollowness.

Only two years after publishing The Duke’s Children, Trollope died, and so we cannot know what, if anything he would have done. So the itch at the back of my brain became barely noticeable, only flaring up when I periodically dipped into the novels again.

Then, nearly ten years ago, my wife and I binge-watched the the 1974 television adaptation by Simon Raven. At the end of it, Catherine had to listen to a Festivus-style airing of these grievances. When I’d finished, she said simply. “You write it.”

Well, in general, when Catherine tells me to do something, it’s usually a good idea. So I started it.

I began thinking of how to approach Phineas and Marie. I immediately knew I could not continue the story right where Trollope breaks off—to do that, I would have to imitate his style to perfection, which simply couldn’t be sustained for a long book.

And a long book, at least by modern standards, it would have to be. A short novel just wouldn’t provide the feeling of capaciousness, of leisurely development of character over time, that typifies Trollope’s work. And in fact, by today’s standards, where an average debut novel is between 70,000 and 90,000 words, Phineas at Bay, weighing in at a little over 180,000 words is long. 100,000 words shorter than either of Trollope’s Phineas novels—but, by today’s standards, long.

To carry off a lengthy, Trollope-style book, I made three initial decisions.

First, I would set the story some twenty years after the ending of Phineas Redux—somewhere in the unspecified 1890s. That would give me some cover for the inevitable differences in style, and would allow for some difference in characterization.

Second, Phineas’s slight staleness in The Prime Minister would be my starting point, and his rekindling of his radicalism would be the primary story line.

But how to get him there?

Well, Phineas was a barrister, we know. He devilled under Mr. Low, remember? And a practicing barrister can easily find himself face-to-face with injustice. In fact, he could be dragged into doing something about it against his will. As a barrister, Phineas could, simply by being present in Court at the wrong moment, be handed a “dock brief.”

What, I hear you ask, is a “dock brief”?

Before England had a Legal Aid scheme, judges had the right to let a prisoner in the dock who could not afford a barrister to pick one out in court. And that barrister would be required to defend the case. That served my purpose—Phineas could be picked out by a defendant in a politically sensitive case.

Of course, there’s one problem with that; why would Phineas return to the law, with his seat in Parliament, and Marie’s money?

Thinking of Trollope killing off Mrs. Proudie because of an overheard complaint, I remembered dear, loyal Mr. Low, and handed him a debilitating heart condition.

Phineas returned to the law to keep his old pupil-master’s practice afloat.

And while in Court to defend Larry Fitzgibbon’s son, as a favor to his old friend, Phineas is assigned a dock brief representing a young Welsh miner accused of riot. What he sees re-awakens his social conscience, and brings him into collision with his own party.

Meanwhile, I needed a romantic plot. Phineas’s sister Barbara was another casualty, so that her daughter could become Phineas’s ward, and bask in the attentions of a young Tory MP, and in the new Lord Chiltern, the son of the current Earl of Brentford, Phineas’s old friend Oswald.

Season with Lizzie Eustace and Reverend Emilius to reflect the darker side of the fin de siècle, and with the surprising romantic reawakening of the Duke of Omnium, and I had a plot.

I wrote three whole chapters—and then I went dry. I lost the manuscript with Catherine’s edits, the computer it was stored on crashed.

Phineas at Bay appeared to have been stillborn.

Until just about two years ago, right around my birthday, I found that manuscript, and, typing it into a new computer just to save it, found myself knowing what happened next. And so to the end of the book.

The very last line, and its context , I had known from the moment I started re-typing. How I got there was not really down to me; The characters took me there on their own.

I used to suspect that Trollope was exaggerating when he described himself as weeping with his characters in their sorrows, and laughing with them in their joy. Then I started writing for them—and no. No, Trollope was not exaggerating a bit.

I found myself seeing through eyes not my own. Oswald, now the Earl of Brentford, as a worried father, evoked a level of sympathy in me that I never expected him to. The despair of Lady Laura, inconsolable after two decades, required exorcism. Marie’s courage and active nature led her to once more seize the initiative to protect those whom she loves.

And the Duke—well, the Duke’s re-awakening to life and the imperative to go on living takes him away from our last glimpse of him in Trollope. But it takes him in a direction that honors his past, while asserting that a man now nearly sixty could still have a future.

The writing of Phineas at Bay was amazingly freeing. I found myself playing—there are all kinds of literary allusions and jokes throughout the book. Characters from Trollope’s other novels make cameo appearances, characters from other Victorian writers make appearances, and if you look closely enough, I managed to hint at just how naughty Lady Eustace is without writing more than two sentences that would have been disapproved of by Mudie’s Select Library.

I’m still rather proud of that.

Frank Greystock, the honorable Tory MP who marries for love in The Eustace Diamonds, remains honorable here. His rivalry with Phineas is collegial, his partisanship leavened by an abiding respect for personal ties.

Mr. Roby and Mr. Rattler, alas, are beyond reform. But we knew that.

And, reaching all the way back to the beginning of the Palliser novels, George Vavasor’s legacy makes itself felt.

Although I had to do quite a lot of research, the writing itself was more natural than the legal writing I have done over the past quarter century. My editor, Karen Clark had to push me to take us with Phineas down into the coal mine, but once I set my hand to it, the characters made sure I arrived in one piece.

I had come back to Trollope Country.

I didn’t coin that phrase; Ellen Moody, who’s here with us tonight, did. She used it to describe both the familiar territory comprised by the Barset and Palliser novels but also the less familiar, more atypical locations and milieus in which Trollope's less comfortable, less widely read novels are set--Prague, in the case of Nina Balatka, or revolutionary France as explored in La Vendee.

Often sequels to classic novels are discussed in terms of working in the "world" or "land" of the original authors. But I adopted Ellen's coinage of "Trollope Country," because it brought to mind a thought from George MacDonald Fraser, who wrote the Flashman novels I mentioned earlier. In a non-Flashman novel, titled Mr American, Fraser draws a distinction between “land” and “country.” He writes that:

“When it has been enclosed, and worked and farmed for centuries, it's land; when it's open, unbroken, waiting to be possessed, it's country.”

And that's the thing about Trollope Country--it's country the way Fraser uses the word. Oh, Angela Thirkell appropriated the geography of Barsetshire, and Ronald Knox in his Barchester Pilgrimage gives us a couple of fleeting glimpses of Trollope's characters, but neither of them actually spend much time with Trollope’s characters or concerns.

So I had open country to explore and to work in. And I had one other strong conviction: The story has to matter for it to be worth telling. For all of the charm of Barchester Pilgrimage, it’s just that—a reverential, nostalgic daytrip. For a story to matter, the writer has to take risks.

So in Phineas at Bay we see the Duke move on from that moment in which Trollope left him suspended. We see his years of grieving Glencora end, and in this book, the Duke, at long last, dances.

Phineas Finn defies Prime Minister Barrington Erle, and his standing with the Liberal Party is in jeopardy.

Reverend Emilius finds himself drawn back to London, compelled once more to try to win Lizzie Eustace. He does so at great risk, and some cost. And Lizzie herself, no longer a young beauty, has to decide who she is at heart—if she can only find some truth in her heart.

Great liberties to take with Trollope’s characters. But in the writing, I felt in my own heart that I was keeping faith with Trollope. Now that the book is out, and I have experienced it recently as a reader, I still feel that way. Let me tell you why.

Lady Glencora—sorry, the Duchess of Omnium, if we’re being formal—once chided her husband “We must go after our nature, Plantagenet. Your nature is decimals. I run after units.” She’s right, of course. The Duke is most comfortable with policies and ideas—decimal coinage, Blue Books, and the means of implementing good public policy.

But Lady Glen—sorry, I just can’t keep up the formality—like her creator, Lady Glen is fascinated by people. Their individuality, their hopes and fears. By turns, she’s drawn inexorably into the lives of Alice Vavasor, Madame Max, Lady Eustace, Phineas Finn, Adelaide Palliser, Ferdinand Lopez, Frank Tregear.

Her interest isn’t based on the worth of those she cares about, either; she’s as solicitous of Lopez as she is of Phineas Finn. Good or bad, once Lady Glen takes you under her wing, she’ll do her best to see you get your due.

And that’s where Lady Glen and her creator are as one.

Just two days ago, I was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church-the American Anglican Church, in Communion with Trollope’s beloved Church of England. So, like Trollope’s clergymen, from Septimus Harding to Joseph Emilius, I find a sermon text helpful to me when I speak.

Here’s one, to go with Lady Glen’s observation that she, like Trollope, runs after units. This is from from He Knew He Was Right:

“The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.”

And it’s these two qualities—Trollope’s deep love of the individual as she or he is, and his recognition that we are all of us, every one, a mixture of our good and bad traits, that constantly bring me back to Trollope Country.

I was a voracious, if uncritical, reader when I was a boy--I read Agatha Christie by the yard, as eagerly as I read Mark Twain. Rex Stout alongside Dumas with the occasional sci fi relic from my father’s collection, and a deep soak in Bernard Shaw's plays and prefaces.

But it was reading Trollope--The Warden and Barchester Towers, specifically--that crystallized my own literary taste forever. Oh, I'd read some Dickens, some Poe (a lot of Poe. Did you know he wrote comedy too? It's terrible, but he tried.)

Hawthorne shed a light into who I would become as a reader--I read The Scarlet Letter, and thirsted with curiosity to understand the workings of Roger Chillingworth’s mind. (Still do; I may be driven one day to re-tell that tale from the Doctor's perspective if only to get him the hell out of my head.)

Because he was real to me in a way very few characters in fiction were. Conflicted, a mix of impulses, cruel and kind. The ruins of a man once great, at least in potential. Hurt, and hurting others.

Then I met Septimus Harding, the Warden. A devout, good man of God who has, without even noticing it, become enmeshed in a genteel, kindly administered, corruption. A loving soul, generously running a charitable institution, most of the funds of which support--er, him. His critic, John Bold, is right. On paper, at least. And yet, without Mr Harding, Hiram's Hospital declines into desuetude, and when Rev. Harding dies, his creator writes of him: "And so they buried Mr. Septimus Harding, formerly Warden of Hiram's Hospital in the city of Barchester, of whom the chronicler may say that that city never knew a sweeter gentleman or a better Christian." He has become the moral touchstone of the Barsetshire novels, this compromised, well-meaning, vacillating man.

People are complicated.

In the decades since I first read Trollope, my admiration for him has only grown. I have often enough pointed out that Phineas Redux, in which members of two despised minorities--an Irish Catholic and a Viennese Jewish widow--are the hero and heroine, and Trollope makes the readers cheer their happy union--readers who would despise Phineas Finn and Madame Max Goesler were they to meet on the street, mind you. And that's a sign of something.

Trollope is not safe. As life is unsafe, so too Trollope isn't safe.

Lady Glencora, the charismatic, charming coquette who matures into a great lady without losing her wit and her vivacity (and incidentally provided Susan Hampshire with the best role of her career), dies in the opening sentence of The Duke's Children, leaving us with the stolid, good, dutiful Plantagenet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium.

You know, the much less interesting one. Except--without her, he becomes more interesting.

Less fair than he used to be (he's downright cruel to Marie Finn, who has on multiple occasions been his and Glencora's benefactor), he is brusque with the children he inarticulately but deeply loves.

Without the raffish, mercurial Glencora, sober Plantagenet cannot be who he is. He's lost for much of the novel.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

And I'm just dealing with the two novel sequences that are Trollope's best known, nostalgically remembered books, let alone his less well known works. Take his descent into madness in He Knew He Was Right, the sympathetic bigamists in Dr. Wortle's School, or the acidulous satire in The Way We Live Now.

On the surface blander than Dickens or even Thackeray, bluff, old, "safe" Anthony Trollope outdated them all, pushing boundaries they didn't dream of, and getting away with it, too, because he was "a safe pair of hands."

It was a brilliant shell game. He didn't get caught in his lifetime, or even by the critics for the most part. But we know. We know.

Trollope influenced my own view of human nature more than his more pyrotechnical peers, more than the writers of my own era, who all too often seemed to me to oversimplify, to not quite get it.

From him I learned that we are none of us just our worst moments, and that we cannot live on the summit of our best moments, either.

Phineas at Bay is a thank you to the great psychologist who taught me about human nature, who gave me the understanding to endure the myriad small betrayals and wounds we experience from those who love us both before and after they hurt us--and to forgive them, and accept forgiveness for the hurts we have inflicted in our own turn.

And people surprise for good as well as for bad.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

We cannot be reduced to our worst moments. Or even our best.

In Phineas at Bay, I tried to evoke Trollope's characters, but also his realistic generosity and tolerance. His insistence that nothing God has created is without worth. In sum, to pass on what I learned from him.

That’s one of the wonders of literature—why we write, why we read. I learned these truths from a man I have never met in the flesh, and yet was among my greatest teachers.

I hope my novel gives you pleasure. But it’s all right if it doesn’t. There is plenty of room in Trollope Country; I’m just one of the first homesteaders. You can go over to Father Knox’s corner, or Angela Thirkell’s patch. Or you can cultivate your own.

There’s plenty of room, and you can go anywhere. Maybe we’ll meet in the Cathedral, as Septimus Harding chants the Great Litany.

Didn’t I see you at the Beargarden, the night Dolly Longestaffe solved the crisis of the mouse in the orchestrelle? Or maybe you were at one of the old Duke’s dinners, alongside Doctor Thorne.

We’ll all run into each other along the way; everybody does, you know, in Trollope Country.

Phineas at Bay: Further Reviews

You know, I like to post reviews, but I'm surprised that I forgot to check out my British listings, where I in fact not one, but two.

First, from Mr. Michael Baxter:

I had Iong been scouring Amazon and elsewhere for any sequel to the Palliser novels so I was delighted when my efforts were finally rewarded. I read this book quickly and enjoyed it very much. Phineas Finn and his wife are especially well captured. I liked the guest appearances of characters from other novels by Trollope and I also appreciated the mention of a certain Mr Polteed from another author's famous trilogy. The only aspect of the story I couldn't quite accept involved Plantagenet Palliser - hadn't a certain person been too touched by scandal in the past for him to contemplate such a connection? He was always very conscious of the family name, after all!

Hmmm…an interesting point that last--and nice to see poor old Polteed get spotted. For the defense, I can only point out that Plantagenet did have his own minor scandal to live down, and that, of course, many years had passed.

Second, from David R. Gilbert:

A fascinating (and plausible) follow-up for Trollope addicts. It is well written despite a few anachronistic idioms. I am only sorry that in references to nineteenth century authors there was no reference to Anthony's estimable mother Frances Trollope. The only plot incongruity which rankled was the saga of Vavasor from Can You Forgive her with the tenacious American lady from The Way We Live Now. I think the author perhaps allowed more than their deserts both to Emilius and Finn, but I am very happy for Palliser!

Both readers most kindly awarded the book 4 out of 5 stars.

As ever, I am most grateful to readers who care enough to review.

Trollope Two Hundred Years Later

In England right now it is already April 24, 2015--the bicentennial of the birth of Anthony Trollope.

I can hear a lot of people saying, so what?

Ah, but I can't be one of them.

That giant orange-ish head looming over the caricatures of Susan Hampshire and Philip Latham? That's him. The Giant Trollope-head, la Caterina and I called that rather odd design choice in the opening credits of The Pallisers, the 1975 BBC adaptation of Trollope's masterful novel cycle. And yet, aesthetics aside, there is a truth to the omnipresence of that bewhiskered face, hovering over his characters. They were real to him, you see, and that is why, as he wrote in his Autobiography:

When my work has been quicker done,--and it has sometimes been done very quickly--the rapidity has been achieved by hot pressure, not in the conception, but in the telling of the story. Instead of writing eight pages a day, I have written sixteen; instead of working five days a week, I have worked seven. I have trebled my usual average, and have done so in circumstances which have enabled me to give up all my thoughts for the time to the book I have been writing. This has generally been done at some quiet spot among the mountains,--where there has been no society, no hunting, no whist, no ordinary household duties. And I am sure that the work so done has had in it the best truth and the highest spirit that I have been able to produce. At such times I have been able to imbue myself thoroughly with the characters I have had in hand. I have wandered alone among the rocks and woods, crying at their grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel.

And they become real for us, his readers.

I was a voracious, if uncritical, reader when I was a boy--I read Agatha Christie by the yard, as eagerly as I read Mark Twain. Rex Stout alongside Dumas with the occasional sci fi relic and a deep soak in Bernard Shaw's plays and prefaces.

But it was reading Trollope--The Warden and Barchester Towers, specifically--that crystallized my own literary taste forever. Oh, I'd read some Dickens, some Poe (a lot of Poe. Did you know he wrote comedy too? It's terrible, but he tried.) Hawthorne shed a light into who I would become as a reader--I read The Scarlet Letter, and thirsted with curiosity to understand the workings of Hester's husband, Roger Chillingworth. (Still do; I may be driven one day to re-tell that tale from the Doctor's perspective if only to get him the hell out of my head.) Because he was real to me in a way very few characters in fiction were. Conflicted, a mix of impulses, cruel and kind. The ruins of a man once great, at least in potential. Hurt, and hurting others.

Then I met Septimus Harding, the eponymous Warden. A devout, good an of God who has, without even noticing it, become enmeshed in a genteel, kindly administered, corruption. A loving soul, generously administering a charitable institution, most of the funds of which support--er, him. His critic, John Bold, is right. On paper, at least. And yet, without Mr Harding, Hiram's Hospital declines into desuetude, and when Rev. Harding dies, his creator writes of him: "And so they buried Mr. Septimus Harding, formerly Warden of Hiram's Hospital in the city of Barchester, of whom the chronicler may say that that city never knew a sweeter gentleman or a better Christian." He has become the moral touchstone of the Barsetshire novels, this compromised, well-meaning, vacillating man.

People are complicated.

In the decades since I have read Trollope, my admiration for his has only grown. I have often enough pointed out that Phineas Redux, in which members of two despised minorities--an Irish Catholic and a Viennese Jewish widow--are the hero and heroine, and Trollope makes the readers cher their happy union--readers who would despise Phineas Finn and Madame Max Goesler were they to meet on the street, mind you. And that's a sign of something. Trollope is not safe. A blog post from Oxford University Press pointed this out recently, though confining its analysis to sexual innuendo in Barchester Towers. But yes; as life in unsafe, so too Trollope isn't safe.

Lady Glencora, the charismatic, charming coquette who matures into a great lady without losing her wit and her vivacity (and incidentally provided Susan Hampshire with the best role of her career), dies in the opening pages of The Duke's Children, leaving us with the stolid, good, dutiful Plantagenet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium. You know, the much less interesting one. Except--without her, he becomes less fair (he's downright cruel to Marie Finn, who has on multiple occasions been his and Glencora's benefactor), he is brusque with the children he inarticulately but deeply loves. Without the raffish, mercurial Glencora, sober Plantagenet cannot be who he is. He's lost for much of the novel.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

And I'm just dealing with the two novel sequences that are Trollope's best known, nostalgically remembered books, let alone his less well known works. Take his descent into madness in He Knew He Was Right, sympathetic bigamists in Dr. Wortle's School, or acidulous satire in The Way We Live Now. Seemingly blander than Dickens or even Thackeray, bluff, old, "safe" Anthony Trollope outdated them all, pushing boundaries they didn't dream of, and getting away with it, too, because he was "a safe pair of hands." It was an a brilliant con game. He didn't get caught out.

Trollope influenced my own view of human nature more than his more pyrotechnical peers, more than the writers of my own era, who all too often seemed to me to oversimplify, to not quite get it.From him I learned that we are none of us just our worst moments, and that we cannot live on the summit of our best moments, either.

My own novel, Phineas at Bay is, of course, a sequel to the two Phineas novels, and, indeed, to the whole Palliser series. But it is more than that, in intent: It's a thank you to the great psychologist who taught me about human nature, who gave me the understanding to endure the myriad small betrayals and wounds we experience from those who love us both before and after they hurt us--and to forgive them, and accept forgiveness for the hurts I have inflicted in my own turn.

And people surprise for good as well as for bad. Once, many years ago, I was at a social event where a newly engaged couple, both of them friends of mine, were present. One of the women there spitefully insulted the bride to be. Her first defender? A old enemy, eyes flashing with indignation, past dislike forgotten at the sight of the hurt in her old rival's eyes. A very Trollope moment.

People are complicated.

Life isn't safe.

We cannot be reduced to our worst moments. Or our best.

I learned these truths from a man I have never met in the flesh, and yet was among my greatest teachers.

In Phineas at Bay, I tried to evoke Trollope's characters, but also his realistic generosity and tolerance. His insistence that nothing God has created is without worth. In sum, to pass on what I learned from him.

Happy birthday, Anthony Trollope. May your novels be read, re-read and adapted for another two centuries.

Letter to the NYT Book Review On Marriage, Trollope & Phineas at Bay

From the letters page of the New York Times Book Review:

Bookends: Marriage

To the Editor:

I enjoyed Charles McGrath’s penetrating analysis of the marriage of Lady Glencora and Plantagenet Palliser, later the Duke of Omnium (Bookends, Feb. 15), but was surprised he did not point out how Trollope sets their marriage in counterpoint to the much less conventional pairing of Marie “Madame Max” Goesler and Phineas Finn. That happy couple constitutes a rare instance of a Victorian novelist celebrating the union of two outsiders — a Viennese Jewish widow and an Irish Roman Catholic — who become insiders, and their story takes center stage in two of the six novels.

The continuing fortunes and misfortunes of Phineas, Marie, the Duke and other characters from the Palliser books have become the subject of an intriguing follow-up novel, John Wirenius’s recently published "Phineas at Bay," set roughly 10 years after the end of the series. Wirenius’s book not only continues the story but fleshes out Trollope’s hints regarding the marriage of Marie and Phineas in a credible way, as well as providing an amusing subplot featuring everyone’s favorite adventuress, Lizzie Eustace (who made off with the eponymous diamonds in Book 3 of the series), and her former husband Joseph Emilius, who is not, as it turns out, quite as former as Lizzie thinks.

“Phineas at Bay” also movingly depicts the Duke’s life after his children are all married, and how he ultimately comes to terms with life after Lady Glencora’s death. Like Tolstoy, Trollope paints on a broad canvas and gives us characters who are first, last and always true to the drives and motivations their creator envisioned as he constructed them as lively and vivid individuals.

KAREN CLARK
NEW YORK

That's awfully nice to see in print, and I can only quote Michelle Gomez's Missy, "That is a good point well made. I'm proud of you, sister."

The Lost Masterpiece

Imagine a novel sequence, building to a climax after five preceding volumes, reaching what is meant to be its grad conclusion in volume six.

And then imagine that the publisher made the author cut fully one-quarter of that last volume,solely for production costs purposes.

How good mist the author be to make that last volume a classic of English literature anyway, and what must the full uncut version be?

From the Folio Society:

24th April 2015 is the bicentenary of the birth of Anthony Trollope; commemorative events will be taking place throughout the year culminating in a service at Westminster Abbey in December. The Folio Society will mark the anniversary with the first ever publication of The Duke’s Children in its complete, unabridged form.

The final volume of Trollope’s Palliser novels and widely regarded as one of his finest, The Duke’s Children, in its current form, is considerably shorter than the preceding titles in the series. However, as originally written, it was of equal length, containing additional threads of plot and far richer characterisation. Due to economic constraints, Trollope was instructed to reduce the book by one quarter, cutting no less than 65,000 words.

The original manuscript of The Duke’s Children lay neglected in the Beinecke Library of Yale University for many years. Over the last decade several researchers, led by Professor Steven Amarnick, have been patiently working to restore the book to the original form the author intended. The first page of the manuscript, reproduced here, demonstrates not only the extent of the cuts – almost half the page was lost – but the problem of legibility the researchers had to overcome: Trollope’s handwriting is hard to decipher at the best of times, and even more so when struck through.

No knowledge of the earlier books is necessary to enjoy the plot chronicling the vicissitudes of the Palliser family, and the perilous paths of true – and false – love. To accompany the first complete edition of The Duke’s Children The Folio Society has commissioned essays from those closely involved in the restoration project; Professor Steven Amarnick, Robert F. Wiseman, Susan Lowell Humphreys and, chairman of The Trollope Society, Michael G. Williamson. These are printed in a separate commentary volume.

The new edition, made possible through a partnership between The Folio Society and the Trollope Society, also includes an introductio which has, fittingly, been written by Joanna Trollope, 5th generation niece to the author. The books will be half-bound in Indian goatskin with green canvas sides, gold blocking, gilded top edge, hand-marbled endpapers and a limitation page numbered by hand. Some special copies, forming part of the same hand-numbered limitation, will be made available full-bound in Indian goatskin, blocked in 22-carat gold, with hand-marbled edges and endpapers, and presented in a solander box.

It is an extraordinary literary event, and most fortuitously timed to fall in this bicentennial year.

Of course, I own several copies of the truncated edition--one the Copyright edition published by Tauchnitz, another part of a nice leather-bound set of the Barsetshire and Pallisers novels I picked up, and the 1970s OUP hardcover edition.

But those lost 65,000 words--who knows what they will add, in terms of the in depth characterization Trollope specialized in? 65,000 words--that's almost the entire recommended word count for a contemporary novel. Imagine what Anthony Trollope could do with all that?

Or, better yet, read it.

Love and Monsters

[Lady Eustace (Sarah Badel) and Rev. Emilius (Anthony Ainley) (Photo Courtesy of Ellen Moody)]

In writing Phineas at Bay, one of the key issues was how to deal with romance and sexuality in a modern way and still be true to the Trollopean ethos. It's not that Trollope is sex-averse. Far from it; by the standards of his day, he pushes the boundaries, what with La Signora Madeline Vesey NeroniCarry Brattle in The Vicar of Bullhampton to that unreformed old roué, the old Duke of Omnium, to Lady Glencora's frankly sexual yearning for Burgo Fitzgerald, to name but a few instance. Trollope held his own day's standards on an intellectual level, but he did not blink from the fact that they were often flouted, and that the cost of the flouting often was left to the more vulnerable party to pay. (One more instance--that rat George Vavsor's discarded mistress.)

Now, I could have hewed to the safe pattern --an ingenue or two, chaste young love,that sort of thing. But, although Trollope often included that classic Victorian safe plot-line, he dared to go beyond it, and so, it seemed, must I.

I didn't want to lose the feeling of authenticity and unbalance the novel by including matter that was clearly outside of what Trollope could have published, nor did I want to uncritically embrace the social and sexual mores of Victorian England, with their concomitant repression and hypocrisy. In other words, I wanted to have, in addition to my story of young love, have two parallels. One (which I do not wish to spoil for the casual reader who has not yet, but might wish to, read the novel), involves a troubled young man who finds love with a woman of a different social class, but one whose life experiences allow her to understand him. Their coming together is facilitated by his parents' own troubled courtship in one of Trollope's novels, and the fact that their own marriage had become highly undesirable socially for very different reasons.

The third relationship--ah, here is where I tried to evoke both Trollope's own characters' development over time and the fin de siècle setting. As portrayed by Trollope, Lizzie Eustace, raised to be a demimondaine, who "liked admiration [and] liked the power of being arrogant to those around her" (and indeed to domineer over her unfortunate companion, Miss McNulty), was tailor-made for the era. So too her now-divorced (or annulled, more properly speaking), husband, the Rev. Jospeh Emilius--a shady clergyman who uses his talents to gain profit and power. In exploring his psyche and hers together, a common interest in power, and an inability to let go, seemed to bind them. In Phineas at Bay, their relationship is reignited--and the question is can two power-driven, sexually unconventional monsters find in themselves something beyond mutual exploitation, or an unending battle for dominance?

The question is by no means intended to be easy for them. It is very current in the world in which Lizzie and Emilius live. Indeed, it's one that (as I discovered after publication) at least one Trollope scholar found already present in his works, as well as in other Victorian works. Certainly the fin de siècle loosening of moral restrictions saw an upswing of such themes in literature in England and on the Continent. So Lizzie and Emilius are very much of their time (as demonstrated by the allusions in the description of her home, to give but one example). But I did not want to just leave it as simple as a pair of debauchees exploiting or even just enjoying each other.

And so I allowed myself one small deviation from the self-imposed rule of no scene that Trollope could have been published. Emilius reflects on having seen a scar on Lizzie's abdomen in (obviously, but inferentially) sexual circumstances. A scar that she did not bear during their (erased) marriage. In seeing time at work on her flesh, Emilius feels something beyond lust, or even obsession.

The two of them are moral monsters in many ways. He is a murderer, she is a thief and a rarefied blackmailer. But each has a glimmer of something better, whether or not they can find their way to it.

The strength of the reaction this plot thread has drawn is surprising to me--some love it, some hate it. But that readers are passionate about these two profoundly compromised and even tainted figures nonetheless trying to cope with the risks and fears of becoming more than monsters seems to suggest that, like Frankenstein's monster, it's alive.

Another Review for Phineas at Bay

Novelist Tyler R. Tichelaar, has posted a review of Phineas at Bay, in which hewrites:

"Phineas at Bay" is an intriguing sequel to Trollope's Phineas novels and indeed to the entire Trollopian world.

The Phineas novels are not among my favorites by Trollope, but Wirenius introduces so many of Trollope's characters from not only the Palliser novels but also the Barchester series, The Way We Live Now, Orley Farm, etc. that it's a treat just to try to pick them all out and try to remember which ones are Trollope's, separating them from the few new ones Wirenius invents. Major characters include Plantagenet Palliser, Madame Max, Lizzie Eustace, Lady Laura, and Samuel Grantly, among many others.

I also found Phineas more likeable and appealing in this book than previously. He seems more focused in his legal and political efforts and a bit more mature. The novel is set in the 1890s and many historical and literary references are made that are fun to pick out as well.

I did feel the characters needed more development in terms of their internal worlds - I never felt the absolute misery that Trollope can sometimes show us in his characters' heads, but I was delighted by many of the characters and the plot twists. Best of all, I loved the ending. I think it is exactly how Trollope would have left Phineas had he written one more novel about him.

If you love Trollope and enjoy sequels to the classics--this is one of the best--you'll enjoy this book. If only Trollope had written it or a few zombies or vampires had been thrown in, I'd give it 5 instead of 4 stars.

Well, I am not, alas, Trollope, and the zombies are reserved for the sequel--but in all seriousness, having a professional's praise is very meaningful. Tyler participated in the discussion of Phineas at Bay on the Trollope and his Contemporaries reading group, and one of the great pleasures of the group is getting to know him and my fellow Trollopeans by discussing novels of "the long 19th Century" together.

Another Review for "Phineas at Bay"

Ooh, I like this...

Politics. Sex,Scandal and a Trial: What more could you ask in a book?,

I loved this book for all the wrong reasons. Not merely as a continuation of the Palliser series of which i have read one and a half: not all. I love a good trashy novel with historical facts and a civics lesson on what it costs to live in a democracy.WORK!
I am more a Jackie Collins fan than an Anthony Trollope fan and this book has the best of both those worlds. Phineas at Bay is fast paced yet requires a dictionary. It had a good trial with a surprise witness and lots of suspense and some bloody combat. it had costumes, scenery, travel, Americans who were not stupid, lots of passionate relationships , it paid tribute to the lost art of flirting and its importance to human relationships of all ages!. And women are allowed even encouraged to age and still be sexy and loving. You don't see that everyday or even any day. These days.These are the reasons I loved this book.
If you are lucky enough to have day in bed reading and you're smart and unpretentious enough to choose a fun read that you just might learn something from you won't be sorry to choose Phineas at Bay

You don't have to be a Trollopean to Phineas at Bay; no prior knowledge required!

Writing a Sequel: What It's Like

Over at the Trollope and his Contemporaries reading group, I was asked about my writing process--particularly in terms of characterization. I thought that it was an interesting question, and one worth addressing here, as well.

The precipitating factor was, when my wife and I watched Simon Raven's 1974 adaptation The Pallisers together, we talked about our shared affection for the novels, and I got to complaining about how Phineas Finn seems shorn of his fire in The Prime Minister and The Duke's Children. I suggested that AT wasn't done with him--that the failure of the Prime Minister to sell at his usual level had discouraged and maybe diverted him. She urged me to write it up. I wrote the first three chapters--and dried up. Then my computer crashed. Six years later I found the manuscript, and typed it into my new computer. When I finished retying chapter 3, I knew what should happen in chapter 4.

From the moment I started the book, the ending--I mean the last two lines of dialogue and their context--were known to me. That Emilius and Lizzie would return was, too, and that Lord Chiltern's and Violet's son would fall for Phineas's niece--all this I had from the start. The character of Savrola Vavasour was a later idea, but he fit--his historical antecedent had a mother who was of a higher American social class than Winifred Hurtle, but the idea of putting her in play was irresitible. And George Vavasor was not a bad analog to the historical father.

By and large, the characters ran the show. The book just poured out of me, although I had to do some research, looking up geographic details, reading about mining, and 19th Century criminal procedure in Britain. But the interactions were pretty spontaneous; most of the characters came enough alive at least in my own mind that I felt I knew who they were and what they were about--how they would and wouldn't speak.

In the writing, the identities of characters would resolve--the magistrate became John Toogood after I wrote the opening part of his courtroom scene.

Keeping track of the primary characters was reasonably easy; keeping track of where they lived was not. I had to do a chart with all the locations of the various homes of the London-based residences. The cameos were trickier yet. Somewhere along the line, I decided to have cameos, not just from Trollope, but from other writers in the same era. Some were fleeting appearances (blink, and you miss Zuleika Dobson or Paul Montague. Some will be of considerable importance. I think of them as my "Easter eggs." The more important ones appear in more than one scene; they were brought in to fit the story, but to enrich Trollope Country by visiting--to make my fictional universe a broader place, with its ethos from Trollope, but with some (hopefully successful) visitors interpolating themselves. I liked the idea of bringing not just these other characters but their implications and milieu adding weight to their interactions with the Trollope characters.

Phineas Redux Redux--a Re-reading

Phineas Redux long been my favorite of Trollope's Palliser or Parliamentary novels, and, after mining it for my own purposes (my sequel Phineas at Bay carries on the story that reaches its conclusion here), it was nice to go back to this great novel with no agenda.

A couple of thoughts in lieu of a more detailed review:

1. Interestingly, after heightening Madame Max's age in Phineas Finn (PF), Trollope lowers it again here--he makes her younger, describes her in more attractive terms, and generally recasts her as a heroine, without depriving her of her more interesting character aspects. Barbara Murray, who played her in the 1974 adaptation nails the character. It's a magnificent performance.

2. Lizzie Eustace comes off as almost benign in this book--until she realizes that Emilius (whom she has been denouncing in stereotypical terms) has surely murdered Bonteen:

She knew the man who claimed her as his wife, and did not think that Phineas Finn was guilty of the murder. Her Emilius,—her Yosef Mealyus, as she had delighted to call him, since she had separated herself from him,—was, as she thought, the very man to commit a murder. He was by no means degraded in her opinion by the feeling. To commit great crimes is the line of life that comes naturally to some men, and was, as she thought, a line less objectionable than that which confines itself to small crimes. She almost felt that the audacity of her husband in doing such a deed redeemed her from some of the ignominy to which she had subjected herself by her marriage with a runaway who had another wife living. There was a dash of adventure about it which was almost gratifying.

'Myes. So much for benignity.

3. The semi-tamed Lord Chiltern: The development of the relationship between Lord and Lady Chiltern is subtle, but quite effective. His temper is still there, but channeled into his work as Master of the Hunt, and upbraiding the occasional twit (Gerard Maule, I'm looking at you…) They're a happy couple, but recognizably the same people in PF.

4. Chaffanbrass: In the best of his appearances, Chaffanbrass is sly, funny, knowledgeable, and yet touched by Phineas's sincerity. He's a proto-Rumpole in many ways, though Mortimer said he drew Rumpole from life.

5. Phineas himself--in this novel, our friend has all the naiveté pummeled out of him. His learning curve is steep, and he's much less whiny than in the first book (or perhaps it's that his complaints are better founded). He is also far more committed to doing the right thing in this volume, though still desirous of office. Desperation becomes him; this is where he becomes a man, and, unlike John Eames, a man who is not violent, who can stop flitting. (I think that rejecting John Eames shows sense on Lily's part; all through his appearances he wants it both ways and is quite cruel to the women lower than he is in the social scale.) Phineas was unintentionally unthinkingly cruel in PF; here, he tries mightily to avoid that sin, and atone for it.

6. Adelaide and Maule. Boring. Maurice Maule, a little less so. What Dolly Longestaffe could become if he doesn't develop.

7. Phineas & Madame Max: Brilliantly realized throughout. From her caring for the Duke to her business, Madame Max sticks to her decisions. She is also quite credibly unwilling to show her hand a second time to Phineas. But that composed mask comes off in front of Lady Glen (ok, the Duchess). But--and here's what makes her Madame Max--after the outbreak of fear and the tears, she does what she always has--apply that cool, razor sharp mind to the problem, and take action. No useless wailing for Marie--she uses her intellect, cash, and charm to do what she can do.

And Phineas? Unintimidated by her brains, her wealth, her self-sufficiency. This is one of his nicest traits-lots of men in the situation would like the lolly, but find Marie dangerous. Phineas recognizes his luck and their compatibility, and doesn't cavil at their unconventional union--she still runs her business interests, has her own relationships with the Pallisers (much closer than his). Each has a separate sphere of autonomy (his is Parliament) and yet they are fiercely supportive and protective of each other. (In The Duke's Children, she hides the Duke's insult to her she because she knows quite clearly that Phineas will resent it, and damage his own political career, testament to their mutual protectiveness.)

December with Phineas Finn & Co.

Over at the Trollope 19th Century Studies Group, we are reading my own book, Phineas at Bay. The schedule is not too tight, and, thanks to Ellen Moody's kindness in letting me set it, it breaks down into a rather nice episodic structure. We are beginning November 30, and continuing straight through. Not too late to join if you have a mind.

Anyway, here is the schedule:

Week 1: Prologue--Chapter 10 (Facilis descensus Averno);

Week 2: Chapter 11 (Sir William McScuttle)-Chapter 18 (Matching Priory);

Week 3: Chapter 19 (Phineas for the Defence)-Chapter 27 (A Drink From the Soup-plate of Honour);

Week 4: Prologue-Chapter 10 (Nunc Dimittis);

Week 5: Chapter 11 (Barchester Towers)-Chapter 20 (In the Midst of Death, We Are in Life);

Week 6: Chapter 21 (Ill Met By Moonlight) to Chapter 27 (The Turn of the Wheel).

"For Those Who Enjoy Peering Behind the Curtain " is just what it says, and so should be optional.

Come on the prowl with us!

65,000 Words

That's how much Anthony Trollope was required to cut from the Duke's Children:

It is a remarkable fact that one of the best-known novels by one of the greatest 19th-century English novelists has never been published in the form its author intended. Anthony Trollope wrote The Duke’s Children as a four-volume work but then reduced it to three, necessitating the loss of almost a quarter of his original text. The precise reason is lost to posterity but is likely to have been a demand from his publishers on the grounds of economy; it would not have come from Trollope himself, who had earlier written in his Autobiography: ‘I am at a loss to know how such a task could be performed. I could burn the MS., no doubt, and write another book on the same story; but how two words out of every six are to be withdrawn from a written novel, I cannot conceive.’

Yet this is precisely what he was obliged to do, and 65,000 words ended up on the cutting-room floor. As he wrote to John Blackwood not long after making the revisions: ‘I am bound to say that I have never found myself able to effect changes in the plot of a story. Small as the links are, one little thing hangs on another to such an extent that any change sets the whole narrative wrong. There are so many infinitesimal allusions to what is past, that the whole should be rewritten or it will be faulty.’ It was meticulous, exacting and soul-destroying work.

That's over a quarter of the book missing. But here's another fact: It's also a hair beneath the recommended low end of length for a modern novel, with 115 as the high end and 90,000 as "the sweet spot."

Now, Phineas at Bay clocks in at 171,461 (including the Postscript and Table of Contents, so a bit less, really). That's still well under either of the two Phineas novels by Trollope.

The factor that tipped me in favor of self-publishing was just that--a length such as that recommended by agents would not have allowed for a Trollopian feel. You need details for that, what the Folio Society calls "the massive accumulation of details." There has to be a feeling of capaciousness, of breadth. Self-publishing meant I could avoid the dilemma that Trollope himself had to face.

Phineas at Bay Meets the Experts

There is a reading group, Trollope and His Contemporaries, hosted by Ellen Moody, whose blog is a daily read for me, and who wrote Trollope on the Net, a truly innovative work.

I have been a member of the group since the summer, and will be in an unusual role when we turn to its next book, my own Phineas at Bay. Having read both Uncle Silas and Phineas Finn with these folks, let me tell you: They know their 19th Century literature, and especially their Trollope. (Seriously,the level of the commentary and the reactions is extremely high.)

Answers to Readers # 1: "Rushforth & Bindtheboy?"

A reader of Phineas at Bay has enquired about the provenance of the name of Lady Eustace's solicitors, "Rushforth & Bindtheboy."

Well, I didn't want to reveal all my easter eggs in the postscript, so this one wasn't spoiled, but for those who'd like to know, here goes. There is, it is true, and as my reader suggested, a certain thematic resonance in the name, in view of the nature of the action at law Lady Eustace is filing (breach of promise), and in view of Lady Eustace's own relationships (an example of my taking a direct but subtle thread in Trollope, and projecting it out). There is, however, also a double-barreled literary reference of which I am rather fond, and that no one has (at least that I have seen) remarked on.

As the late Sir John Mortimer explained in an interview:

Ramona Koval: I'm interested in that first interest in the arts and interest in theatre, because from your writing, you say that basically you weren't really encouraged by your parents in this area.

John Mortimer: Oh, well I was, because my father went blind when I was a bit older than that, about sixteen. And I had to read aloud to him, so I read a lot of poetry and things I might not otherwise have read. But there were two things I didn't have to read, which were the Sherlock Holmes stories and the plays of Shakespeare. And my father knew all the plays of Shakespeare by heart and he used to quote Shakespeare at very inapposite moments. Some people hum popular tunes when they're lonely, but he would say Shakespeare. And every time the cook brought him the breakfast - which we had, a cook to bring in the breakfast - my father used to say to her, 'Nymph in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.' And the cook would say, 'Well here's your breakfast.'

And every time he caught sight of me, when he could see, when I was about five, he used to say, 'Is execution done on [Cawdor]?' Well, I mean, when you're five, it's a pretty tough question to have to answer. And he also loved to take quotations and use them for something totally different. There's a quotation from King John when Hubert the Jailer has to take out Little Arthur's eyes. And the executioners are behind the curtain. And Hubert's line is, 'When I strike my foot upon the ground, rush forth and bind the boy.' And my father used to say, 'Rush forth and bind the boy - sounds like a rather unsatisfactory firm of solicitors.'

And then every time he saw a solicitor he didn't know, he'd say, 'Are you from Rushforth and Bindtheboy?'

I had not read the interview, then, but had read the same story in Mortimer's memoir Clinging to the Wreckage.

So--Rushforth & Bindtheboy.

Another reader--a fellow lawyer, and clearly an astute one--observed that the analysis the partners give of the doctrine of consideration is incorrect. Quite Right. The reader in her generally favorable review kindly suggests that "since Wirenius is a lawyer, one can assume that the inaccurate description by Lady Eustace's lawyer of 'consideration' as an element of a contract is a deliberate tribute to Trollope's tendency to fudge a bit on legal details when convenient to the plot." Well, yes, and no. Yes, in that my intention was that both Rushforth and Bindtheboy are not very good academic lawyers (In English law, the ring is generally not deemed to be consideration for the promise at all, but at most a gift that is conditional upon the marriage taking place--just to give one forum's similar approach; a more general analysis, with some American cases finding the ring to be consideration, while noting that is a minority position, is here).

Notably, Bindtheboy, in particular, is so eager to ingratiate himself with Lizzie that he does not think through what he is saying either consequentially or jurisprudentially. Rushforth, more energized by cupidity than Cupid, is a pragmatist. He is less inaccurate than his partner, aware that an exchange of executory promises is increasingly (in the 1890s) acceptable as consideration each for the other, but has no idea why. He also realizes that the engagement ring Lizzie is sporting is far too out of fashion to have been given to her by Jack, and deduces that it originated from Lizzie's first husband, Sir Florian Eustace, and does not want to have the ring play any part in the action. So Rushforth is no fool; just not a legal scholar.

Mind the Gap!

(Barbara Murray and Donal McCann as Madame Max Goesler and Phineas Finn in The Pallisers)

Although no precise date is given, textual evidence, as well as the couple's childlessness, suggest that Marie ("Madame Max") Goesler is roughly a decade older than her second husband, Phineas Finn. Refreshingly, this was honored in Simon Raven's adaptation of the novels; Barbara Murray (who died earlier this year, alas!) was born in September, 1929; Donal McCann in May, 1943. The almost 14 year age gap shows on screen, but the actors have tremendous chemistry, even in the early episodes where McCann's Phineas is a bit raw. In the later episodes, especially as Phineas's woes mount, the ageless elegance Murray brings to the role (she was 45 at the time the adaptation was filmed, McCann was 31) and her charisma, as well as McCann's impetuous performance, rule out any mercenary motives; Phineas wants her, in this adaptation, as well as in the text.

Now, this is far from the usual pattern in Victorian mores; quite to the contrary, according to Ginger A. Frost:

Age differences were common among late-Victorian couples. According to Jalland in her study of the upper classes, 'The husband was expected to be older than the wife; ideally by three to seven years, since women were supposed to age faster than men.'. . .[In the breach of promise here under study,] defendants were older than plaintiffs 84 percent of the time, but the ranges were quite often higher than the ideal, since half of the older defendants were more than ten years senior to the plaintiffs. However, few people involved in the trials disapproved of these age ranges. In several cases a woman in her twenties was considered well suited to a man in his forties or fifties.

In fact, the older woman-younger man pairing is rare, and usually either comic or critical; as John Mullan notes,"Only one man in all Jane Austen’s novels marries a woman older than himself: Mr Collins, aged 25, marries Charlotte Lucas, aged 27. The disparity speaks of the unselectiveness of both parties. Yet three of Jane Austen’s own brothers married women older than themselves."

So one thing about Marie's and Phineas's marriage from the start--it's subversive. She is older--considerably so--and she is wealthy, with all the power that money brings. A total inversion of the Victorian patriarchal ideal, no? And both are from normally despised minorities--the Viennese Jewish woman, the Irish Roman Catholic man.

In trying to project out this couple's future after Anthony Trollope drew the curtain, I thought quite a lot abut their atypicality. Marie and Phineas are an uncommon partnership in Victorian literature. Much of the obvious power resides in her, yet he is not diminished thereby. Phineas has the virtue of ease in his own skin, most of the time; it it enables him to cheerfully accept the benefits of Marie's money and power just as he was willing to learn from Lady Laura the arts of politics. In continuing that trajectory and projecting it out two decades, I believe that Phineas at Bay keeps faith with the creator of these wonderful aberrations from the norms of Victorian fiction.

In Which I Steal a Post: A Good Review

My friend and editor Karen Clark has penned a remarkably generous and detailed analysis of her reaction as a reader to Phineas at Bay, now that her role as editor is behind her. I think she touches on some aspects of the book that I would not have, so here it is, submitted for your approval:

The curious thing about my friendship with John is that we don't always like the same books. We can agree on Saki, but his urgings of C.P. Snow and John Galsworthy as "must reads" leave me politely evasive. He, for his part, can drive me to frantic sputtering with a well-placed jibe at some of my own favorites. I did, some years ago, at his behest, undertake to read Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels - six books that follow the fortunes and follies of a series of interconnected characters, and two of which, Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux, share the eponymous protagonist John chose to center his own novel upon in Phineas at Bay.

A confession: I did not become a rabid Anthony Trollope fan. The sorrowful fact is, I petered out after The Eustace Diamonds - a book I rather enjoyed, as it had that delightful creature known to fans of East of Eden, Gone With the Wind, Forever Amber, and Vanity Fair as "a good bitch." Lizzie Eustace, pilferer of the diamonds of the book's title, is one of those monumentally selfish, unlawfully charismatic, and entirely mendacious women of fiction who seem to have gotten in line twice for Seductive Charm and not at all for Moral Rectitude or Sensitivity of Conscience, thus making them an enormous pleasure to read about, if not actually to be in the same book with. (I'd hate to be Suellen O'Hara and have my unattractive middle-aged beau stolen for the sake of his paltry bank account by my older sister,wouldn't you?) The problem with Trollope, I decided, was that there were not enough Lizzie Eustaces, and since leavening the story about the Good People with a generous sprinkling of gargoyle-like grotesqueries à la Dickens is not in the Trollopian style . . . well, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no further. There was the additional problem that Trollope has a way of writing labyrinthine sentences that meander on for much of the page - and so, in short, I quit.

Luckily, John Wirenius has taken into account that not all of us have read the entire Trollope oeuvre. If you have been fearfully contemplating the sextet of nineteenth century tomes you think you must plow through in order to tackle Phineas at Bay - fear not, I didn't read them all, either, and I had no trouble whatsoever figuring out what was going on. Fortunately for the reader, John is gifted at weaving exposition into his tale without making it glaringly obvious that he is weaving in exposition. If you need to know what happened in earlier books for purposes of understanding the actions and character motivations in this one, he will let you know, and he will do it far more subtly than J.K. Rowling, who, by Volume Seven, was clearly getting tired of telling people just how Harry Potter got that scar.

Furthermore (and the Trollope Society will probably descend upon me with pandybats and howls of execration for this) I happen to think that Phineas at Bay, while scrupulous in its adherence to its progenitors in terms of the integrity of its characters and its overall tone, is a better read than the other six. A certain sly literary wit that I associate with this contemporary author threads sinuously through the book, like the violin solo of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. And, like that fabled storyteller to the Sultan, John Wirenius is a spellbinder, a Pied Piper of the Pallisers, hypnotically leading us along from page to page, until, like the Sultan, we realize that dawn has broken and we've spent the entire night immersed in the tale, because we simply had to find out what happened next.

Having read through the book three times already, with gun and magnifying glass in hand to search for typos and root them out, I was already familiar with its contents. Another confession: There are still typos, and I am both mortified and mystified. In some cases, I am ready to swear in open court that I took them out and the nasty Bot-Gremlins put them back! (In others, I simply screwed up.) Feel free to hunt them down yourself and to berate me for them (privately) so that we can take them out of the second printing.

So I wondered, as I opened the book, whether it would pass the test I apply to any work of fiction that aspires to take a permanent place on my bookshelves. Do I still read it with pleasure, after the first time around? Or have I already read all the juice out of it? And - the real acid test, which even fewer books pass - do I get more enjoyment, as well as more food for thought and a keener artistic appreciation of its structural beauties, out of it with each subsequent re-read, rather than less? Most of us read for plot the first time around. At least, I do. It's on the later read-throughs that I begin to appreciate subtlety and nuance. I begin to note literary references that may have escaped me the first time around. I start to notice themes. I am startled into a bark of astonished delight at an audacious risk on the author's part. (What other author, for example, have I seen depicting a certain Irish-born playwright - under a pseudonymn, of course - at a Christmas party, acting out scenes from his forthcoming drawing-room comedy that involve a harridan and a handbag?)

For this is another of the delectable departures from Strict Trollopian Form that John Wirenius has chosen to utilize - the cameo appearances of sundry real-life historical personages, some under their own names, some not. The fun, of course, lies in spotting the Nots. (I'll give you a hint - one of them, who has more than a cameo role, will grow up to become a Prime Minister who looks remarkably like a bulldog. His enchanting American-born socialite mother is recognizably the subject of a best-selling two-volume biography, as well as of a television miniseries. )

But John Wirenius doesn't stop there. Having gone this far, he adds an assortment of fictional characters, as well - only not, necessarily, out of the fiction of Anthony Trollope. An admirer of G.B. Shaw, he coolly appropriates several of the dramatis personae of Candida, adroitly endowing the love-addled secretary with a more prominent part to play than he gives the pontificating pastor. The nonexistent Barchester Cathedral that lends its name to another Trollope opus is back - and so is a sinister trio of statuettes that aficionados of Victorian ghost stories will recognize, with a start, as having crept in from M.R. James' classic tale about that imaginary Cathedral and its stalls.

As for the dramatis personae drawn from the source material - it should come as no surprise that I hailed the return of Lady Eustace - a.k.a Lizzie the Liar - with enthusiasm. If anything, she's better than before. Without giving away too much, I will merely state that, should Masterpiece Theatre have the good sense to option this novel, they would be well-advised to approach Nina Arianda on bended knee and beseech her to reprise her recent Broadway triumph, this time in the character of Lady Eustace. Let's put it this way - in a slantindicular (a word that I first encountered in Phineas at Bay, and that I have adopted with relish) nod to dear Charles Dickens and his giddily evocative nomenclature, Lady Eustace's law firm of choice is known as Rushforth & Bindtheboy. Need I say more?

Lizzie the Liar has a worthy foil in her former husband, the Right Reverend Joseph Emilius, returned from a sojourn in the American West to win her back. A charming and entirely amoral scoundrel, Joseph is Rhett to her Scarlett. Joseph Emilius knows Lizzie Eustace through and through, exactly for what she is. And frankly, my dears, he doesn't give a damn . . . he wants her back at his bed and his board, and is willing to go to any lengths to get her, including putting in a midnight appearance in a certain Irish barrister's office that had me exclaiming, "Good Lord - Amadeus!" ("Oh, you noticed that, did you?" the author said offhandedly, when I excitedly called him up to report my discovery.)

The orphaned Finn niece, Clarissa Riley, is a spirited variation on the dewey-eyed ingenue so beloved of nineteenth century fiction, profiting as she does from her close association with Marie Finn (formerly Madame Max Goesler), the enigmatic Continental cosmopolite who married Clarissa's beloved Uncle Phineas. Marie is a heroine worthy both of Clarissa's admiration and emulation - she is her husband's partner as well as his closest friend and companion, Penelope to his Odysseus, fully his equal in both cunning and kindness. One of the book's great assets lies in its wealth of formidable female characters, all of them different, and each of them endowed with a peculiar fascination all her own. Among the many pleasures of this novel is the fact that each of the various characters is so distinctively drawn, and that the point-of-view shifts so seamlessly from one character to another, whether we are seeing events through the keen eyes of Phineas Finn, or the luminous blue orbs of his wife Marie, or through the bloodshot eyes of Sir Felix Carbury, dissipated sot and one of the novel's most delicious sketches in drawling, languorous villainy.

True, as well, to the conventions of the Victorian novel as a microcosm of the world of Society and its mores, John Wirenius has deftly woven a tapestry of plot and sub-plot, in which one event leads inevitably - if, at times, surprisingly - to another, and nothing is either wasted or left dangling in midair. His invented personae behave as they must behave, given the rich and complex psychologies with which they have been endowed. Never once do they step out of character in service of the exigencies of the plot - the action is propelled by the force and energy of the people with whom the author has populated his imaginary world.

Which is not to imply that this is a novel that touts the haut monde to the utter neglect of the less fiscally fortunate members of Victorian Society. One key plot line follows Phineas' attempts to obtain justice for Ifor Powlett-Jones, a young Welsh miner being railroaded into prison for the so-called crime of having rescued a dozen fellow miners from certain death during a cave-in, thereby disobeying orders from his foreman and inadvertently damaging company property in the course of the rescue. Ably assisting Phineas at every turn is his stern, yet withal warmhearted, majordomo, the German butler Meier - Marie's mainstay, Phineas's impromptu fencing master, and Clarissa's horticultural docent (the author is a fan of Nero Wolfe, and Meier raises prizewinning orchids in the Finns' conservatory.)

But why should I go on? Surely by now you are aware that, for the lover of Victorian fiction who has read everything on the library's shelves and despaired of ever finding another book "as good as the ones they used to write," this novel has the tonic effect of a long, newsy letter from home to an expatriate who has vainly longed for the beloved homeland. If you, like myself, are sorry that nobody seems to write a book anymore that doesn't teem with incest, rape, dismemberment, and casual violence . . . if you have been yearning for the happy days of yore, when novelists assumed that they had an intelligent, well-informed readership to whom they need not condescend with tiresome explanations of what they were up to with a literary reference . . . if you have sharp wits, a discerning critical faculty, and a taste for political intrigue, discreetly dangerous liaisons, philosophical and theological cogitations, and House of Worth couture, then waste no more time on this blog post, but go immediately toPhineas at Bay and order your copy at once!