Time for a Long, Lazy Trollope Ride

By Gerald Clarke

Writers' reputations are as volatile as dollar stocks. Henry James has been up and down the literary Dow Jones so often that his pants are shiny from the ride, while Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel Prize for beating the drums of imperialism, is read these days--if he is read at all--almost exclusively by children. Sinclair Lewis, the great name of the '20s--and the first American to win the Nobel for literature--is noticed only by spiders on library shelves, and John Dos Passos, who dominated the '30s, is all but forgotten in the '70s. In good times and bad, however, there is at least one sure bet: Trollope, Trollope and Trollope again.

The literary Establishment has never considered Anthony Trollope a great novelist, like such near contemporaries as Tolstoy, Flaubert or Balzac. Noted at least partly for his prodigious output --47 novels, five travel books, and innumerable articles--he has never been ranked higher than third or fourth among his peers in Victorian England, after Dickens, George Eliot and probably Thackeray. Readers, however, have been kinder, and Trollope has always enjoyed an enthusiastic following. During World War II, for example, he ranked first in the esteem of English readers, and Londoners took him down to the Tubes to help them forget the German bombs exploding above. Trollope sales rose then in the U.S. as well, and for a time Barchester Towers and The Last Chronicle of Barset were as hot --well, almost as hot--as black-market sugar.

Now, nearly a century after his death, Trollope is more popular than ever. The Pallisers, the 22-part PBS television series based on his political novels, has received almost universal praise from the critics, and has won a devoted, sometimes even fanatical, audience. In Manhattan, liquor store dealers have been startled by a sudden demand for a liqueur called orange Curac,ao. The reason can now be told: it was the favorite drink of Trollope's crusty old Duke of Omnium. Oxford University Press, which publishes the six Palliser volumes, quickly cleaned out its stock after the TV program began in late January; it ordered a second printing and is selling that out as well. The sales have been particularly impressive considering the formidable cost of the books ($25 for a boxed set of paperbacks), their daunting length (4,624 pages), and their lack of anything that would make a Victorian schoolgirl blush.

The Harvard Coop, which has one of the biggest book departments in the East, reports a dramatic boom in Trollope, and stores in Ann Arbor, Mich., home of the University of Michigan, say that they cannot stock enough of his books to satisfy customers. In New York City, Brentano's notes a steady sale; for a heady three-week period in February and March, Trollope was even one of their best sellers. Taking careful account of the market, Berkley paperbacks has brought out a one-volume condensation of the six Palliser novels--with 250,000 copies already in print--and is now planning to issue a full edition of each.

Trollope has always had a distinguished following. Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that he would rather write like Trollope than like Hawthorne. Trollope's novels, he said, "precisely suit my taste, solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale." Tolstoy said that "Trollope kills me, kills me with his excellence." A newer fan was an American Senator by the name of John Kennedy, who was seen reading The American Senator after he won the Democratic nomination in 1960. Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan always kept a Trollope novel on his night table. He marveled at the paradox that Trollope's novels are so sound politically, while those of Disraeli, the most adroit politician of the Victorian era, are so patently false. John Kenneth Galbraith confesses to being a Trollope junkie. "For many years I didn't think I could go on vacation without a Trollope novel," says Galbraith. "He's a narcotic."

There are as many reasons to love Trollope as there are people who read him. High on the list is his magical ability to soothe: by rough and arbitrary calculation, 25 pages of Barchester Towers are equal to a 5-mg. Valium, while 15 pages of Can You Forgive Her? are worth two Miltowns. The intricate struggles for power within the Anglican Church and the Victorian crises of conscience are interesting but not unduly exciting, absorbing but not all-involving. Best of all, the stories go on seemingly forever and satisfy the modern taste for family sagas --just look at Roots and Upstairs, Downstairs. Says Galbraith: "Anybody who tells you he has read all of Trollope is a liar. No matter how old you are, you'll always find another volume you haven't read before."

Trollope approached his work with singular calm and matter-of-factness, and he delighted in comparing himself to a cobbler, an upholsterer or an undertaker. Writing, he said, was just a job like any other, and putting words on paper to make stories was no different from stitching leather to make shoes. His real career, he maintained, was in the post office, where he worked for 33 years, rising from clerk to executive. (It was Trollope who introduced the street-corner mailbox.) Indeed, his failure finally to become the second in command, the highest post he could hope to achieve, was more galling to him than the barbs of all the literary critics in London.

In person, Trollope looked and acted more like a parody of the English clubman than the Byronic titan who single-handedly filled whole shelves. Fox hunting was a passion, and his hunt scenes, to which he devoted a chapter in every novel, are the best in the language. He was bluff and comically loud, and, following tradition, he dozed over his port, emitting the kind of snore Carlyle compared to the sound of a Chaldean trumpet in the new moon. He had a clear and conventional code of manners and morals--"The object of a novel should be to instruct in morals while it amuses," he proclaimed --and his idea of a four-letter word was to say nothing more than that a man was not a gentleman. "You are no gentleman!" Sir Harry Hotspur tells his nephew in Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. (Trollope was not good at titles.) "Sir Harry," replies the nephew, "that is strong language." "Strong?" snorts Sir Harry. "Of course it is strong. I mean it to be strong."

But behind the red-faced clubman, the bearded paterfamilias (he had two sons), the inveterate moralizer, was a writer of divine obsession. Every morning Trollope would rise at exactly 5 and drink his coffee. At 5:30 he would sit down at his desk, and read until 6 what he had written the day before. At 6 he would start writing, and for the next 3 1/2 hours would turn out 250 words every 15 minutes, with a watch in front of him to keep him to the mark. At 9:30 he would get up from his desk, eat the nor mal Victorian breakfast -- meat, ham, fish, kidneys, eggs and bacon -- and leave for his job at the post office. Many people laughed at his rigidity, but Trollope knew that it was right, at least for him self. "Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed," he said. "It has the force of the water drop that hollows the stone."

Infinite Grays. The thought of being idle for even a day made him fretful, and the morning after he finished one novel Trollope would begin another, pausing only to refill the inkwell. He traveled all over the world -- including the U.S. for nine months at the start of the Civil War -- but his daily writing routine never varied. Henry James, who was a fellow passenger on one transatlantic voyage, both praised and shuddered at his industry. "The season was unpropitious," James observed, "the vessel overcrowded, the voyage detestable" -- but Trollope nonetheless wrote for his allotted time.

Perhaps Trollope worked too hard, and doubtless he should have stopped to revise. His plots can be hopeless, his style is generally plain as boiled beef, and almost every book is too long, some times far too long. For those who can slow to his pace, however, his virtues outweigh every defect. His characters are so real that they almost step from the page and ring for the servants. No one is all good or bad in Trollope's world and there are no villains or heroes -- or absolute fools. He did not see charac ters in black or white, but in an infinite number of grays. He wrote of ordinary people who sometimes did extraordinary things. "His great, his inestimable merit," said James, "was a complete appreciation of the usual."

Yet Trollope's final merit was even more than that: it was his infallible common sense. Other writers have had greater genius, but perhaps none has had a firmer, more certain knowledge of what his characters -- what real people -- should do for their own happiness and contentment. More often than not he imparted that knowledge to them and to the reader, and allowed both to en joy what is known as a happy ending.

Trollope wrote of the triumph of common sense over the irrational, of order over disorder. And that, 100 years later, is a message that still sells and still satisfies.

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