Fame & Folly (16 page)

Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels. Out of that bottomless inkpot flowed, besides, biographies, histories, travel books, sketches, and five collections of short stories. There is a tradition that Trollope damaged his own reputation by revealing, in his
Autobiography
, how he daily sat with his pocket watch before him on his writing table. This is presumed to be a confession that the Trollopean Muse is mainly and merely mundane diligence (as if diligence were not the only reliable means of securing the Muse’s descent); but industry of this kind is itself the artist’s portion, indistinguishable from literary passion. There is no question that quantity—added, of course, to genius—is what separates major writers from minor ones. (If only E. M. Forster had written forty-seven—or even fourteen—novels to accompany
A Passage to India
!) Yet Trollope, for all his abundance, is somehow still relegated among the minor.

Restitution is necessary. Trollope’s recognition of certain perilous human essences lifts him out of the Victorian minor. Let beginners who have never before read Trollope test this thesis—genuine readers not susceptible to cultism. The cultists, proselytizers all, will usually send novices to
The Warden
, or else to
Barchester Towers
. I would recommend
The Way We Live Now
—Trollope’s thirty-third novel, written in 1873 and set in that same year. I would recommend it because it is very long (Trollope’s longest) and very contemporary, despite its baronets and squires and rustics, and despite its penniless young women whose chief employment is husband-seeking, and its penniless young lords whose chief employment is heiress-hunting. If all this sounds as far as possible from the way
we
live now, think again; or else wait and see. As for length:
The Way We Live Now
is nine hundred and fifty-two pages in the orange-framed Penguin softcover edition, and therefore will take longer to disappoint. What disappoints in any novel by Trollope is the visible approach of its end: when more has been read than remains to be read.

The Way We Live Now
is best described as a business novel; it is above all about deal-making, and about how power can be nudged to tip, and about taking advantage. It is about all these marketplace things even when what is at issue is romance, or marriage, or religion, or law, or book reviewing, or gambling, or property, or altruism, or running for office. There is almost no character who does not have an eye out for the main chance, whether it is a London millionaire or an American frontierswoman, a raffish solicitor or an unmarried elder sister worried about being left on the shelf.

In the very first chapter, called “Three Editors,” we come upon Lady Carbury in the act of insuring a fraudulent reception for work she knows is shoddy; she is a hack writer in urgent need of financial rescue via bestsellerdom. (Nothing dated in that. Ambitious mediocrities nowadays chase after blurbs with equal oil and chutzpah.) Lady Carbury is a widow supporting a reprobate son whom she coddles and a neglected daughter too love-struck, and too recalcitrant, to yield to a sensible marriage. Marriage—or, rather, matchmaking—is the center, and not only because it is the late nineteenth century, when few women have careers (though Lady Carbury herself surely does, and tends it assiduously), but because a perspicacious match is, then and now, the nexus of every business deal. Exploitation, after all, signifies a contract between two parties: the greed of the exploiter is ideally met by the need of the exploited. Trollope’s great theme is people making use of
other people, especially in the accumulation of money, and who can doubt the contemporaneity of a novel about money?

The commanding money-man who is, so to speak, the lubricant of
The Way We Live Now
, greasing its wheelings and dealings with promises and promissory notes, is Augustus Melmotte, a foreigner arrived in London with his daughter and his cowed Bohemian Jewish wife to become the City’s most powerful financier. Now and again Trollope will play the game of giveaway names, so we may look into “Melmotte” and see a Latinic glimmer of “honey-word.” Melmotte is, in short, a mighty con artist: we are on to him almost instantly. Our interest is not in finding out his scam, but in watching him inveigle and enmesh the gullible. What he has to offer is air—the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, “which was to run from the Salt Lake City, thus branching off from the San Francisco and Chicago line, and pass down through the fertile lands of New Mexico and Arizona, into the territory of the Mexican Republic, run by the city of Mexico, and come out on the gulf at the port of Vera Cruz,” a distance of more than two thousand miles. As for the probable cost of this grand undertaking, and the actual laying of track, “no computation had or perhaps could be made.”

In fact, there will never be a railway to Vera Cruz. Melmotte and his several shady sidekicks (one of whom is named Cohenlupe—ancient priestly honorific joined to the wolfish) are successfully engaged in selling shares in a phantom project. It is a ruse—a Ponzi scheme—to attract investors. Melmotte’s prestige and influence are themselves phantoms, seductive constructs in the minds of the ignorant young dupes invited to serve on his board of directors. These are aristocratic wastrels, gamblers and boozers, some good-natured enough, one or two of them actual louts, many bearing hereditary titles. Lady Carbury’s son, Sir Felix, a baronet, is certainly among the louts. The search for respectability is double-edged: Melmotte requires the presence of titles to legitimate and adorn—and Anglicize—his imperfect status, and the raw young nobles, glad to take on the appearance of being seriously occupied, are hoping for quick and lavish returns. The clever business buccaneer may be a commonplace of public ambition
(and not only in novels: Melmotte’s uncannily exact real-life counterpart is the notorious late tycoon Robert Maxwell), but Trollope’s high-flying swindler is one of those masterly figures who break through the membrane of invention to go on electrifying the living imagination ever after.

Melmotte at the pinnacle of his London fame takes everyone’s measure, mentally auditing the value of properties, titles, inherited wealth: his aim is to find footholds on an ascent to the loftiest plane of London society. Having himself no claim to English blood, he means to attain it through his only daughter, the unprepossessing Marie Melmotte. Marie is up for sale in a marriage of mutual service: the asking price is the best available title. A bargain is to be struck: the rich foreign intruder with no background (or, as the rumors have it, a soiled and possibly crooked history in far-off places) will negotiate hard for a visibly aristocratic son-in-law. Gold in exchange for the bluest blood.

Sir Felix Carbury, at his mother’s urging, is enlisted as suitor; he botches the job through drunkenness and half-hearted dallying with a brash country girl. But Marie is not the only young woman who is buffeted and thwarted by matrimonial opportunism: there is Hetta, Sir Felix’s sister, maternally pressed toward marriage with her propertied older cousin Roger; and Georgiana Longe-staffe, desperate to marry anyone who can supply a house in London during the high season; and Ruby Ruggles of Sheep’s Acre Farm, shoved into taking a husband for the sake of a dry roof over her head. Not all these coercions are conceived in unkindness; some, in fact, are rooted in sense and solicitude; but they
are
coercions.

Still, in the company of Trollope, let no one pity the condition of nineteenth-century women! Trollope’s young marriageables are not so vulnerable, and not so easily crushed, as their dependent circumstances would lead us to think. Apart from Melmotte’s mammoth grip (both as charmer and as bully), all the sexual force and aggressive scheming are, in this novel, the province of women. The older men, the men of position, are mainly fools and bigots; the younger men are fools, too, and also idle and enervated. But the women are robust, demanding, driven, resolute,
erotically insistent. Even Melmotte’s mousy daughter turns dangerously headstrong. And the remarkable Mrs. Hurtle of San Francisco, sophisticated, compassionate, ingratiating, yet a woman who can shoot to kill, is a dozen times sturdier than the wan and useless young lords who exchange empty IOU’s and cheat at cards. She is undoubtedly more authoritative than her erstwhile fiancé, the always equivocating Paul Montague, Hetta Carbury’s lover, whom Mrs. Hurtle pursues with a torrent of contrivance so single-minded that it nearly exhausts the narrative around her.

Yet nothing can really exhaust any part of this narrative; it is alive and stingingly provocative at every turn. The grotesquely overblown dinner party Melmotte gives for the Emperor of China, an elephantiasis of self-advertisement (Trollope based its braggadocio splendors on the royal visit of the Shah of Persia in June of 1873), is as baleful as it is comic: Melmotte here becomes a parodic Lear of the banquet hall, too much accommodated by unregarded luster. And always Trollope is after the clamor and confusions of temperament. An argument between an Anglican bishop and a Roman Catholic priest reflects their theological differences far less than it does the divide between tractable and intractable spirits. The fanatical priest lives humbly, the tolerant bishop in conspicuous luxury; and it is the recurrent scramble and contradiction of variable traits that seize the novelist’s relentless eye.

A trace of that scramble may be in Trollope himself: the inventor of the gaudily offensive Cohenlupe is also a furious satirist of antisemitism—there is no noisier Jew-hater than Trollope’s Mr. Longestaffe, and no more telling vindication of ethical nicety than Trollope’s Mr. Brehgert, a Jew. Melmotte, forger as well as swindler, is suspected all around of being a Jew, and is revealed in the novel’s last pages to be the son of “a noted coiner in New York—an Irishman of the name of Melmody”—i.e., an American adventurer. (A query. Did Melmotte become Melmody only after Trollope’s own exposure to the rantings of Mr. Longestaffe? Novels do frequently influence their authors.)

The Way We Live Now
ends in four sensible weddings, the traditional signal that we have been present at a comedy, and one sensible
exile. There is in Trollope a clear pull toward reasonableness; toward moderation; toward reason itself, in language precise, exuberant, substantive—in spite of which, the comic cannot suppress the grievous, and a naturalist’s brew of so many botches and blotches sends up its tragical fumes. Suicide, malice, stupidity, greed, manipulativeness, fakery, cowardice, dissoluteness, deceit, prejudice without pride, pretension, ambitiousness, even pathological self-abnegation—excess of every kind—dominate Trollope’s scrutiny of his “now.” If our now departs a little from his, it is only because we have augmented our human matériel with heightened technological debris. All the same, there is the impress of grandeur in Trollope’s account—or call it, with James, his photography. What James missed was the peculiarly elusive quality of a poetry akin to his own. Like it or not, Trollope is the poet of anti-poetry. His lens is wide, extraordinarily so: wide enough to let in, finally, a slim ghost of the prophetic.

WHAT HENRY JAMES KNEW
 

A
S MODERNISM
sinks in, or fades out—as it recedes into a kind of latterday archaism, Cubism turned antiquated, the old literary avant-garde looking convincingly moth-eaten—certain writers become easier to live with. It is not only that they seem more accessible, less impenetrable, simpler to engage with, after decades of familiarity: the quality of mystery has (mysteriously) been drained out of them. Joyce, Proust, Woolf, surely Pound and Eliot—from all of these, and from others as well, the veil draws back. One might almost say, as the twentieth century shuts down, that they are objectively less “modern” than they once were. Their techniques have been absorbed for generations. Their idiosyncrasies may not pall, but neither do they startle. Their pleasures and their stings, while far from humdrum, nevertheless open out into psychological references that are largely recognizable. What used to be revelation (Proust’s madeleine, the world that ends not with a bang but a whimper) is reduced to reflex. One reads these masters now with satisfaction—they have been ingested—but without the fury of early avarice.