At the Top of the Greasy Pole

I started my odyssey through Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of political novels in early 2011, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? I said at the outset of my review of this book that the year was to be my Trollope period, an author I had hitherto overlooked. Well, I only made it as far as Phineas Redux, the fourth in the series, which I reviewed in October, 2011, just before a trip to Egypt. I was sidetracked, as I am invariably am, setting off in the pursuit of various literary foxes, shifting from one horse to another in mid-gallop. I took time out but I was out for almost a year and a half! 

Now I’m back on course, having finished The Prime Minister, the sequel to Phineas Redux, at the weekend. Once again I immersed myself in the high Victorian political and social milieu; once again I was captivated by the intrigues and the machinations of Trollope’s most engaging character – Lady Glencora Palliser, now the Duchess of Omnium. Her husband, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, formerly the Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the Prime Minister, has at last made it to the top of the greasy pole, but, oh my, what a struggle she has trying to stop him from sliding back down! 

Her problem is simply stated: Plantagenet is the noblest Roman of them all, something of a drawback when it comes to the realities of modern political life. He heads a coalition, a compromise on men and measures, cobbled together to break a political deadlock. He becomes Prime Minister, moreover, simply because there is no one else suitable at the time, not as the fruit of his own ambition. But, alas, he is not comfortable in the role; he is far too honest, far too thin-skinned and far, far too scrupulous. The Duchess, if only it were possible, could have done it so much better;

They should have made me Prime Minister...I could have done all the dirty work. I could have given away garters and ribbons and made my bargains while giving them. I would give pensions or withheld them and make stupid men peers..... a man at a regular office has to work and that is what Plantagenet is fit for. He wants always to be doing something...............but a Prime Minister should never go beyond generalities about commerce, agriculture, peace and general philanthropy. Of course he should have the gift of the gab and that Plantagenet hasn't got....I could do a Mansion House dinner to a marvel.

Oh, Glencora, you were a hundred years too early! 

The truth is that the Duke, for all his moral rectitude, or because of his moral rectitude, is a dull dog, high-minded but uninspiring, wholly unsuited for a position which demands the kind of personal and managerial skills that he simply does not have. Does Trollope conceive of him as an admirable figure? Yes, he obviously does, though he is clearly one best suited the second rank of political life, far better as a Chancellor, where he can ponder the ins and outs of decimalisation – one of his obsessions – without having to concern himself with the kind of things that the Duchess understands are an essential part of effective leadership. A good Prime Minister has to be a consummate actor. Glencora realises this; Plantagenet does not. No, that’s not quite true: he does not want to play a part. Playing a part, to be more exact, involves compromising his Olympian ideals of probity and honour. 

Those who are interested in present day English political realities will find The Prime Minister dryly amusing at points, not least when the author touches on the nature of coalition government. England does not love coalitions, Disraeli said. That may be true, but England has to suffer coalition;

...coalitions of this kind have been generally feeble, sometimes disastrous, and on occasions, even disgraceful. When a man, perhaps through a long political life, has bound himself to a certain code of opinions, how can he change the code in a moment? And when at the same moment, together with the change, he secures power, patronage, and pay, how shall the public voice absolve him? 

The Prime Minister is certainly a political novel, but the game – unlike the novels of Disraeli himself - is played in the minor key; the politics are the personal. There are really no high ideological issues at stake, no great clash of principles. The focus, rather, is on social, sexual and domestic politics, the politics of marriage above all, particularly as this bears on property relations. 

The author is particularly good on the position of women in the Victorian world. Marriage to a virtuous gentleman, as he sees it, is that highest thing they can aim for, but he does not shy away from the penalties: the frustration of limited prospects and circumscribed lives. It’s also a novel of contrasting types. There is the practical Glencora, a foil to the high-minded Plantagenet. But the greatest contrast of all is between the Duke, a very perfect, gentle knight, and one Ferdinand Lopez, a parvenu, an interloper and - in his personal impact on the lifes of those with whom he comes into contact - something of an incubus. 

Where Lopez comes from, who and what his antecedents were, and how this outsider managed to graft himself on to the highest reaches of English society is never fully explained. Why Glencora takes him up – with unfortunate consequences for her husband – is also something of a mystery, given that he is wholly without connections or influence. Lopez, as an interloper, becomes the butt of all sorts of mid-Victorian prejudices. He is “a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew...[with] a bright eye, a hook nose and a glib tongue.” Whether or not Lopez is Jewish he certainly takes on the role of the unscrupulous financier, comparing himself at one point to Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Lopez is the kind of figure that might very well find a resonance with a modern readership, particularly as we all now live in ABC – the Aftermath of the Banking Crisis. He’s not a banker himself but he is a speculator, a man who uses the money of others wholly without any kind of scruple. Amongst other things he deals in guano, which may or may not be intended to convey the author’s own estimation of a particular kind of entrepreneurial capitalism! Lopez has nothing, no background, no wealth, no prospects; nothing beyond his wit. 

In his smooth glibness, he manages to contract a socially advantageous marriage to one Emily Wharton, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer, who also happens to be a scion of England’s old rural Tory squirearchy. 

I’ve admired a great many of Trollope’s female characters hitherto, particularly Glencora (who could not admire and love her?), Madame Max Goesler and even the colourful and slightly disreputable Lizzie Eustace. 

Emily Wharton is a contrast in every way; she is a crashing bore. Her one defining characteristic is a perverse obstinacy, coupled with dog-like notions of duty. She is obstinate in her desire to marry Lopez, though she knows nothing about him, and she is obstinate in widowhood – sorry for the spoiler – when he has conveniently been dispatched, Anna Karenina-style, though he had previously used her shamefully in an attempt to milk her father's wealth. After his death she descends into morbid mourning, even though the marriage was a disaster. In fact her widowhood becomes a badge of personal self-immolation. The man was unworthy of her; she should never have married; she rejected honest and true love; it's all her fault - mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Why poor Andrew Fletcher, part of the family’s county set, continued in his unrelenting devotions I have no idea! 

I was tempted to write that The Prime Minister is a kind of comedy of manners, except there is not really much in the way of comedy (The Duchess has a few good self-deprecating lines, though). It’s certainly a superb panorama, ranging over aspects of Victorian life, attitudes and manners at the higher reaches of society, the kind of parts that Dickens never reached or wanted to reach. Trollope, moreover, has a crisp and engaging style. 

There is also, at least it seems to me, an intriguing ambiguity in his message. He obviously disapproves of the morally reprehensible Lopez, but Lopez, or people like him, were the motors of Victorian transformation, the risk takers and the deal makers. Is he really suggesting that the only alternative is the unimpeachable Whartons and Fletchers, the epitome of rural stasis and torpor? Ah, but as Abel Wharton, Emily's father, reflects "...the world was changing around him every day. Royalty was marrying out of its degree. Peers' sons were looking only for money. And, more than that, peers' daughters were bestowing themselves on Jews and shopkeepers." The world is changing, yes, but all change is accompanied by fear, uncertainty and prejudice. 

Anyway, read it and make up your own mind. I assure you it’s well worth the effort. You may even, like me, be engaged enough to cry out in frustration when the plot takes a particular turn, or certain characters prove to be more than usually annoying. I defy anyone, moreover, not to hate Quintus Slide the newspaper proprietor, as slimy as any modern press baron.

So, yes, I’ve bagged my fifth literary Munro in the Trollope range. I spy the last, The Duke’s Children, in the distance. I promise my next review shall not be as distant. 

In Praise of Tolkien

  

Once again I’ve been back to Middle Earth.  What a delight it was to arrive in The Shire in times BLR - before Lord of the Rings; what a delight it was to see Bilbo in his youth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. 

This is not a movie review.  All I will say is that The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s slender prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has itself been padded out into a trilogy, of which An Unexpected Journey is the first part.  Bilbo’s journey is thus considerably longer than expected.  The yarn has been spun out, unnecessarily so, some might conclude.    

No, it’s not a movie review.  I want to talk about something else altogether: I want to talk about old J. R. R. as a cultural colossus.  Germaine Greer, that 60s feminist fossil, once wrote that it was her nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the ‘most influential’ writer of the twentieth century.  What she meant, in her snooty and condescending way, was that he would turn out to be the most popular. 

Tolkien’s popularity might very well be said to be the nightmare of all the Marxist and sub-Marxist literati, forever perplexed by the obduracy of the Masses, who consistently refused to be impressed by such groundbreaking works as The Intellectual Eunuch or Revolutionary Thought for Infants.  Edmund Wilson, that political fraud and fellow traveller, once dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “balderdash” and “juvenile trash.”  By the end of the last century that selfsame “balderdash” and “juvenile trash” was crowned in a survey by English readers as “the greatest book of the twentieth century.”  I expect it was all just a massive case of false consciousness.

Now I do not want you to think I’m a Tolkien groupie, one of the army who believe that the Master is beyond all criticism; I’m most assuredly not.  I do not think that The Lord of the Rings is ‘the greatest book’ of the twentieth century; far from it.  For me it’s too much of a boy’s own world, a muscular masculine mythology created by a retiring Oxford don.  But I can understand the enthusiasm for Middle Earth, for hobbits, elves, dwarfs, wizards, trolls and orcs.  I can understand, above all, the enthusiasm for The Shire, really an idealised England, Merry England, if you like, of a mythical and pre-industrial age. 

The thing is, you see, while Tolkien may not the most influential writer of the last or any other century, he has a good claim to be the most influential conservative writer, and the emphasis really does have to be placed on conservative.  He is the most influential simply because he is the most reassuring, speaking directly to the sub-political conservatism of ordinary people.

George Orwell would have understood this.  In the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, a journey into England’s industrial north in the 1930s, he discusses the problem of socialism.  In his view socialism, as a cure for the ills of the time, was a jolly good thing.  Even so, he was objective enough to understand that, as a political philosophy, it was deeply repellent to ‘spiritually sensitive’ people.  Why?  Simply because socialism, as he puts it, is essentially an urban creed.  It’s also a creed bound up a theory of endless mechanisation, in the worship of machines.  It must lead to some form of collectivisation; it demands things that are “not compatible with a primitive way of life.”

Middle Earth is a ‘primitive way of life’; life in The Shire is harmonious and primitive, Arcadia at its most benign.  Tolkien spins a moral fable not just of good and evil, but one in which evil is represented as the antithesis of nature.  The orcs are not born; they are tortured into existence, manufactured, if you like.  They serve as the helots of industry.  Who can forget that scene in The Two Towers, the second part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, where Saruman, the evil wizard, muses on the future of Middle Earth?  As his orcs are busy destroying Fangorn Forest, the trees to be used as fuel in subterranean manufactories, he sees a new world arising, a joyless world where all are subject to the machine.

In a recent article in the political journal Standpoint (Why do precious leftists loathe Tolkien’s Shire?), David Platt drew my attention to A. N. Wilson’s Age of Elizabeth II.  This opens with a tribute to Tolkien, whom the author regarded as the “towering English literary genius of the Queen’s reign.”  For him Tolkien, in his gloomier mood, presaged the post-war destruction of English life, the dismantling of our cohesive social conventions.  The Shire is the yeoman republic, faced with the onward march of industry, urbanisation and deforestation.

Tolkien’s political message is clear enough.  Those familiar with the novels will be aware that Jackson left out an important postscript in his adaptation of The Return of the King.  The Ring of Power has been destroyed.  Their quest completed, Frodo and the other hobbits return to the Shire, hoping to recapture a home that history has passed by.  But it has not.  Saruman has come.  As Platt says in his article, a collectivist and totalitarian regime has been imposed on the Shire folk, one that is subsequently overthrown in a popular coup.  The attack on post-war socialism could not be more direct. 

Tolkien!, thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.  Just imagine what he would have made of the Shire now; just imagine what this professor of Anglo-Saxon and advocate of Beowulf would have made of our yeoman republic in its senescence.  How he would have loathed our world of political correctness, regulation and shabby acronyms, a world where political labels like Conservative, Liberal and Socialist have become practically meaningless as one movement melds into another, as England merges more and more into a ghastly Continental Mordor, watched over by the Great Eye of Brussels. 

So, yes, Tolkien speaks to the conservative in all of us, regardless of our particular politics.  He speaks to all those who reverence the past, all those who despise theory, anything contrived and artificial.  In a deeper sense he speaks to all those who have a love of England and its ancient folkways.  OK, I confess to a personal lack of realism here, nostalgia for things that perhaps never were, for an England of wolves, of fens and of myths, an England where Grendel still broods in the marsh. But I prefer that to Greer and all her howling eunuchs.  

My Expectations

A Dickens of a year draws to a close.  We’ve had a lengthy party, celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of one of our most cherished writers.  It’s been marked in all manner of ways: in commemoration, in lectures, in biography (a very good one by Claire Tomalin) and in fresh adaptations of some of his books for television and cinema. 

In fact the year has been bookended by visual adaptations of Great Expectations, a novel that might be said to have put the mellow in drama, the first a three part BBC series screened last December, and now a new cinema version directed by Mike Newell, which I saw on Friday, the day it went on general release in England. 

Who needs this?, you might ask; after all it’s been done so many times, most notably in the David Lean version of 1946, starring John Mills as Pip and Finlay Currie as Abel Magwitch, the standard against which all others tend to be judged. 

Who needs it?  I do, that’s the answer; I needed Newell’s honest and imaginative recreation, Great Expectations as Dickens would have expected but presented afresh for modern eyes, carrying overtones of the director’s previous encounter with the Harry Potter franchise, lovely little touches of Gothic humour.  It may be sacrilege to say so but the Lean version is dating, and in some ways not dating that well.  It’s just a little too stiff in parts.  Oh, I simply can’t resist the sacrilegious! 

Great Expectations, if you are not familiar with the book, is a riddle, wrapped up in an enigma, inside a mystery.  It begins with a terrifying encounter in a graveyard on bleak Kentish marshland between Pip Pirrip (Toby Irvine), the novel’s narrator, then a child, and Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict who, by his appearance, might very well have escaped from hell.  Ralph Fiennes – keep those Harry Potter parallels rolling! – was a superb growling Magwitch, hungry not just for food and drink, but hungry, too, as it turns out, for human charity, the keystone, really, of the whole book. 

David Nichols’ screenplay is excellent because – in contrast to the TV version – he gives Magwitch’s speech to the six-year-old Pip word for word;

You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart and liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A boy may lock his doors, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep his way to him and tear him open. I am keeping that young man from harming you at the present moment, but with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?’

Oh, that young man, laid on thick in only the way that Dickens can lay on thick!  It’s all rather ridiculous, terrifying enough from a child’s point of view, as George Orwell noted in his brilliant essay on Charles Dickens, but a wholly inaccurate depiction of Magwitch the man, who is not a bat out of hell at all but something of a holy innocent, quite childish, as we later discover, in his exaggerated sense of gratitude. 

Pip’s next big encounter is with the eccentric Miss Havisham, a bat who lives like a bat among the ruins of a long dead wedding feast.  She is a jilted bride, played here by Helena Bonham Carter, a ghostly and Gothic presence.  I could not help but recall The Corpse Bride, an animation directed by her husband Tim Burton, where she voices Emily, the title character.  It’s in Miss Havisham’s crumbling mansion that Pip is introduced to Estella (Helena Barlow), her ward, a contrast in class and manners that is destined to have a great impact on the boy’s life.  The ghost bride is a puppet master, with Pip and Estella as her leading marionettes. 

All in all the cast were first class, minor and major.  Jason Fleming was a super Joe Gargery, Pip’s blacksmith brother-in-law, mentor and legal guardian.  Sally Hawkins was amusing enough as Pip’s older sister and Joe’s shrewish wife, though she hammed up the shrewishness to the point of excess.  In the minor roles David Williams was an excellent Uncle Pumbelchook, just as I imagine him. 

The laurel wreath I award to Robbie Coltrane (Harry Potter again!) as the evasive and self serving lawyer Jaggers.  It is he who comes to the blacksmith’s forge to tell Pip, now grown up and played by Jeremy Irvine (Toby’s big brother), that he has come into money, that he is to leave his lowly life and become a gentleman in London; that he has ‘great expectations.’

Where these expectations come from and who is Pip’s mystery benefactor is the device upon which the rest of the story turns.  He believes that it’s Miss Havisham, an illusion she does nothing to disabuse, just as she does nothing to disabuse him that it is all part of a plan for him to marry Estella.  It isn’t; Estella is intended as a weapon, a heartless missile, Miss Havisham’s revenge on the whole male world. Pip’s real benefactor when he comes – yes, a he - comes as a shock, though it should be no shock to you even if you are not familiar with the story.  After all, I’ve already given it away.

So, then, Pip is magically transformed from an honest blacksmith into a ‘gentleman’ which in essence means someone who has nothing to do but waste time and waste money, a shiftless fop and a snob, evidenced in his conduct towards Joe when he comes to visit.  As a snob he moves only in the ‘best society’, and the ‘best society’ here is the Finch Club, headed by Bentley Drummel (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), a collection of unprepossessing boors and loud mouths whose idea of fun is food fights.  I simply refuse to accept that there was no Bullingdon Club reference here!  But in the end Pip comes good, losing pretence and gaining himself in acts of benevolence and charity, a counterpoint to his forced charity in the graveyard. 

As a love story Newell’s movie does not work; there is simply not enough screen time between the mature Pip and Estella, played in adulthood by Holliday Granger.  But as a tribute to Dickens it does, to all the twists and turns in which he delighted as a story-teller.  The set design and the period details are all first class, with London looking even more frightening at points than those Kentish marshes.  Yes, it has been modernised without being updated and reinterpreted, something I personally loathe.  Of this movie I had great expectations.  These expectations were not disappointed. 

So, I bid a premature farewell to 2012; a farewell to the year of Dickens.  

Last Man Standing

For the last two weekends I've almost given up my usual Friday social whirl.  Why, you ask?  Simply because I've been seduced and beguiled by the BBC's adaptation of Ford Maddox Ford's novel Parade's End.  It's brilliant television, with an excellent cast and a hugely impressive script by Tom Stoppard, all the more impressive given the complexity of the novel (actually its four novels in one).  If I describe the production as Downtown Abbey for grownups that might give you a little flavour.  It's Downton Abbey in that it covers much the same period, but Parade's End is as clever and commendable as the former is risible and second rate. 

Actually my engagements were too pressing to forgo, so thank the gods for iPlayer, knowing that it was there waiting for me to savour at my own leisure.  And how I savoured the delicious Benedict Cumberbatch as an eatable Christopher Tietjens, the book's saint-like and suffering hero.  I would have watched it simply for his beautiful English, for those wholly delicious vowel sounds, unpolluted by dirty estuary waters.  But along with that comes a performance just as immaculate as his speech.  

That would be well enough, but the second barrel of the gun is Rebecca Hall playing his wife Sylvia, just as excellent in every way, cool, detached and calculating.  While the other characters are not quite in the same league as these two, they are only a shade or two short of superb, especially Roger Allam as General Campion and Adelaide Clemens as Valentine Wannop, Tietjens’ lover who is not a lover, because circumstances have a fortunate tendency to postpone consummation!

I actually started Some Do Not... (yes, the three dots are in the title), the first of the quartet, a couple of years ago but then was sidetracked by other things.  I took it down from the shelf to see my place marker still there, some sixty pages in.  I so regret not persevering at the time, which would surely have added to my enjoyment of the television drama.  I intend to make good soon, just as I intend to order the series when it comes out on DVD.

Christopher Tietjens, as I say, is a kind of saint; Sylvia Tietjens a kind of devil.  He is Saint Anthony; she is the demon sent to taunt him.  With the action opening shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, we are introduced to Tietjens as England's last gentleman, a Tory, as he describes himself, of an exact type.  With his standards of decency and impeccable code of honour he is out of place in his time.  He would have been even more out of place in our time, set against a moral and political caricature like David Cameron, a Tory of a wholly inexact type.  

Sorry; I'm getting away from the point.  Tietjens is out of time.  His time, be believes, was the seventeenth century, "the only satisfactory age in England."  Actually he would have been just as out of place then as in his Edwardian twilight.  A victim of social malice, he would have been an even greater victim in the morally debased court of Charles II, a place where it was as well to take religious conviction and personal probity so far and no further.  I just imagine the saintly Christopher set against a notorious rake like John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, whom Sylvia would surely have taken as a lover!

And she does take a lover, less for the pleasure it gives her (she actually treats the benighted man as a bit of a joke) and more for the pain it gives her husband.  If he belongs to the past she is very much is a girl of the present, or even the future, anticipating the racier standards of conduct that were to follow the War.  Despite her adultery (he is not even sure if his son is his) Tietjens refuses to divorce her because, well, gentlemen don't do that.  She can, if she wishes, but she won't because she is a Catholic, a very flexible Catholic, I should add, mindful of the interdicts against divorce, ignoring those against adultery.  But they complement each other beautifully, just as Cumberbatch complements Hall.  

He is a masochist; she is a sadist. The more he suffers, the more she tortures, almost ruining his reputation and standing in society in the pursuit of her whims.  The paradox is that he is the only man whom she admires, the only grown up, such a contrast with her lover, the ridiculous and melodramatic Potty Perowne, well played by Tom Mison in the Beeb adaptation.  There was a really amusing scene in the most recent episode set in Rouen during the War, Christopher now being at the front.  Potty is in the same hotel.  Sylvia has denied him sex, her room locked against his urgent pleadings.  She tells him that it will be unlocked on this particular night, though he may not like what she has to offer.  He doesn’t - box in the ears from Christopher, who also happens to be there!  

This episode, the penultimate, concluded with a terrific scene between Tietjens and General Campion, a man who has acted as his frustrated protector against all the forces that would pull him down.  Now he has no choice but to send him to almost certain death at the front.  "What is a man to do when a woman is unfaithful, sir?” asks Christopher "Divorce the harlot", the general replies, "Or live with her like a man.  What sort of fellow wouldn't see that?”  Christopher falls back on his antique standards "There used to be, among families, a position...a certain...call it parade", he manages to say.  "Was there?", returns the general, "Well there are no more parades for that regiment.  It held out to the last man but you were him."

I shall be sorry to see this parade end.  I expect it will be some time before I almost stay in on Friday night again.

Lawrence and Lovers

I was asked recently for my view on the writer D. H. Lawrence, particularly in reference to his perception of women.  This is my view, uncompromising in my inimitable, no prisoners fashion.  If you admire Lawrence and his writing what follows comes with an apoplexy warning! 

Sons and Lovers was one of the set texts in my English Lit class at high school, really my first acquaintance with Lawrence. I didn't like it at all. More than that - I hated it. But, since it's wrong to judge a writer on the basis of one book, I persevered, reading Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as some of his shorter fiction.

Evelyn Waugh said that Lawrence could not write for toffee, which is far too mild a criticism; he could not write for anything. As far as I am concerned he is a complete literary fraud, one who managed to achieve a fashionable notoriety. His prose is cloying, indulgent and wholly inauthentic. I've likened it to wading through treacle. I particularly despise his bogus metaphysics, his soft-soap spirituality. I remember in Sons and Lovers stumbling over 'soul' in every other sentence, as if using the word ad nauseum somehow gave his writing soul. It most assuredly did not.

I'm getting away from the point, which is his perception of women. He knew absolutely nothing about women. His understanding of feminine psychology is impoverished in the extreme, rather odd in that he gave women a leading part in a number of his books. But these are not women as women; these are not people as people. They are manikins; women reflected through a particular set of male attitudes; women there, if you like, not in their own right but to affirm and reassure men. They are objects, not subjects.

Let's look specifically at Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Poor Connie; a sexually impotent husband and a brutish lover like Mellors the gamekeeper, a sort of avatar of Lawrence himself. For all its explicit sexuality it's a completely unerotic book, as lifeless as the products of modern day pornography. Women only exist as submissive chattels. If they are in any way sexually assertive, well, then, they must be lesbians. Otherwise it's lie back and think of England; no love, no passion, no intimacy, no tenderness; just pointless animalistic thrusting.

Is it really a surprise that the only intimacy Mellors is able to achieve is when he is sodomising Connie? And as far as Connie's own attitude towards sex is concerned you have the Mellors/Lawrence commandeering her point of view: "And how, in fear, she had hated it! But how she had really wanted it." There you are - the literary justification for rape. No really does mean yes.

Then there is Mellors wife, who can only get sexual satisfaction through masturbation. He, in his disgust, "took her by the neck and squeezed the life out of her." You see the only women who get satisfaction out of sex, according to Mellors and Lawrence, are black - more like animals -, but they are a turn off for white men because they "look like mud." Quite frankly there is more sexual sadism than love in Lawrence's oeuvre. He knew nothing of women and less of love. He is the last person I would trust to say anything meaningful about real women and real love.

I hope in time more and more people will understand just what a phoney he was, just how worthless most of his writing is insofar as it touches on genuine human feelings and emotions. There is a lot of soul, though.

I wrote about him here a couple of years ago, a piece I headed A Load of Balls (November 4, 2010), which really sums up my view. And here is my summing up -

The thing is I think Lawrence is a grossly overrated writer. I’ve read his main novels, beginning with Sons and Lovers, and I’ve hated them all; hated his overripe metaphysics, his bogus and insincere spirituality, his inflated and unlikable characters and his florid use of language. There is nothing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that could possibly ‘deprave and corrupt’…it’s just an overblown mess, a bad book by a second rate writer. All the naughty words, all the ‘arse’, ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’, ‘shit’ and ‘balls’ will never make up for the fact that Lady Chatterley, like the rest of this unpleasant man’s canon, is, well, a load of balls.

The prosecution rests.

Past Spirits

I wrote this article at the turn of the year, shortly after visiting the exhibition in question. I held it over until today to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of England’s greatest writers and most generous spirits.

I loved all of my grandparents, but father’s father was the biggest single influence in my life. He died when I was twenty, almost six years ago now. I still miss him, I miss the things we used talk about and the stories he used to tell, wonderful stories of his time in India both before and during the Second World War, stories of his life at school, stories of his Norfolk boyhood.

It was he who introduced me to the tingly pleasures of the ghost story. It’s the winter nights I remember best, cold outside, warm within, when he read aloud, fire blazing and lights dimmed (candle light was best), the tales of haunting long ago. It was by his fireside that I was introduced to the delights of Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James (really scary!), E. F. Benson and so many others. It was by his fireside that I first heard Charles Dickens’ tales of the supernatural, not just A Christmas Carol, the most famous ghost and morality fable ever written, but others like The Signalman and The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber.

Like me, Dickens was introduced to ghost stories early in life. It was the tales told in childhood that left him with a life-long hankering after ghosts, which just so happens to be the title of a rather charming little exhibition presently being held in the Folio Society Gallery in the British Library!

Scheduled to run until early March, A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural displays the author’s interest through a variety of printed media. I went not long before Christmas, which added to the general cosiness of the whole thing. So far as I am concerned the way it was laid out could not be bettered. It presents, if you like, a study in ambivalence: Dickens’s fascination with the subject, informed by his childhood influences, on the one hand, and the scepticism of a mid-Victorian rationalist, on the other.

It’s a kind of voyage in several stages, beginning with childhood, illustrations from The Arabian Nights along with a copy of The Terrific Register, a kind of penny dreadful that the writer read in his teens with lasting effect, not surprising, given the lurid nature of its content. He later recalled that it used to frighten the wits out of his head!

But he recovered them sufficiently to treat some of the more farcical Victorian obsessions, particularly with spiritualism, with amusing condescension. Apparitions and other manifestations of the supernatural could be reduced to natural causes, so he believed. In Well Authenticated Rappings, a satirical sketch published in 1858 in Household Words, an uncanny voice in the narrator’s head turns out to be no more than a thumping Boxing Day hangover. There is more of spirits than spirit about you, one is tempted to observe.

While he could mock the spiritualists, Dickens entertained his own fashionable notions, including a belief in spontaneous combustion (think of Krook in Bleak House) and, most particularly, in mesmerism. His own efforts here were to cause a slight rift with his wife Catherine, as an 1853 letter shows, after the author’s magnetism with one Augusta de la Rue appeared to her to be a little too animal!

In the end one is simply left with the ghost story as a story, all rational explanations aside. It’s not about the real or even the surreal world; it’s simply about imagination and the power of imagination. Here Dickens did so much to stimulate contemporary interest. His ghosts, it might be said, are comfortably bourgeois, no longer inhabiting Gothic piles but Victorian firesides; his apparitions are ever more fearful for appearing by the side of something as modern as the railway.

Now let me say a word or two in appreciation of John Leech, the man who created the splendid illustrations that make A Christmas Carol even more memorable. There is the manifestation of Marley, the magnificent Odin-like figure of The Ghost of Christmas Present and, the most chilling of all, The Last of the Spirits pointing to Scrooge’s doom. As an aside here I have to say that a lot of the film adaptations of A Christmas Carol hopelessly miss the point, seeing this encounter as the decisive moment. It’s not; it’s only the final part of Scrooge’s gradual redemption.

Andrea Lloyd, the curator of the exhibition, has written of its theme and purpose;

Dickens is already closely aligned with Victorian ghost stories in many people’s minds largely because of the success of A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens touches upon the supernatural in many of his other works, revealing his thoughts about unexplained phenomena, which in turn reflect the evolving scientific theories and beliefs that were prevalent in 19th century England. At this time people were debating the virtues of mesmerism and animal magnetism, getting caught up in the Spiritualism craze that arrived from America, and actively investigating and recording ghostly phenomena. By engaging with this vogue for the supernatural, and by tapping into the Victorian attraction to the macabre, Dickens created some of his finest works.

He did more than that. As G. K Chesterton once wrote, he did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology. I thought of Dickens; I thought of the ghosts of Christmas past, not long past, my past; I thought of my beloved grandfather, to whose memory this article is dedicated.

The Year of Dickens

David Lodge, writing in the December issue of Prospect magazine (Our Mutual Friend), has reminded me that this coming February marks an important event in the literary calendar – the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

A whole series of events are planned to mark the occasion, a torrent of Dickens, in publications, conferences, exhibitions, as well as new film and television adaptations of his work. A statue is also scheduled to be unveiled in Portsmouth in August, the town where he was born.

I’ve written before just how much I love his work (Adoring Dickens, May 27, 2010), so I expect to go, to see, to attend and to read as the mood takes me. The Museum of London is putting on a special exhibition about the writer’s links with the city. In so many ways he’s the chronicler of nineteenth century London, in good times and in bad. His is another human comedy. When asked why he was my favourite author I replied it was because I loved his Dante-like journeys through Victorian London, a great panorama, peopled with the most wonderful eccentrics; with the bad who are very bad and the good who are very good, archetypes one and all.

The BBC, who have produced some excellent adaptations of his novels in the past, are apparently planning several new screenings, including two of Great Expectations – a serial and a movie – and one of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I shall be particularly interested in the latter because the mystery was never solved, the novel a permanent enigma, unfinished at the time of the author’s death. Presumably some kind of resolution will be offered.

I have a number of previous adaptations on DVD, including two TV serials of Bleak House, a 1985 version starring Denholm Elliot as John Jarndyce and the 2005 version, which I watched at the time, broadcast twice weekly in a half hour, soap opera-style, format, as opposed to the usual hour long classic series format. The latter was particularly noted for the performance of X-Files Gillian Anderson in the role of Lady Deadlock.

Dickens' place in the imagination is now unshakeable, second only to Shakespeare. Even people who have never read him will almost certainly know of some of his characters, Ebenezer Scrooge most of all, as much a part of Christmas as Santa Claus. Indeed in A Christmas Carol Dickens might have been said to have invented the modern form of the seasonal holiday. In past time, before the seventeenth century Civil Wars, it was in part a religious holiday and in part an excuse for a drunken ruckus, represented by the slightly disreputable figure of Father Christmas (not at all like Santa!) and the Lord of Misrule. A Christmas Carol recreated it in the image of Victorian bourgeois respectability and homeliness, a time of feasting, family togetherness and fun, all of the most wholesome kind! God bless us, every one.

After his death in 1870 Dickens work went gradually out of fashion, at least among the high priests of literary taste. The process accelerated, as Lodge argues in his essay, after the First World War, a time of a revaluation of all Victorian values by a generation that left cosy sentimentality in the mud of Flanders. In Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust the protagonist is held captive by the mad and illiterate Mr Todd, who forces him to read the work of Dickens aloud until the day he dies. This particular fate was among the worst that Waugh could imagine, as his father, a past president of the Dickens Society, insisted on reading aloud to him and his brother.

In a brave new literary world, given to introspection, psychology and floating along on a stream of consciousness, there was no room for someone as playfully unconcerned with deeper motives and states of mind as the great Victorian bard. F. R Leavis in The Great Tradition, a seminal work of literary criticism, excludes Dickens altogether from the pantheon of English literature, on the snooty grounds that “…his genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests.”

But Dickens has endured. He has found a new and ever growing audience. Why? Simply because he is beyond all fashion; because he is so human, a true craftsman in words, a great shaper of the human spirit, a writer of boundless humanity and simple generosity. I’ve read most of his novels more than once, David Copperfield three times in all, finding fresh delights each time, hating Mr Murdstone just as much as I did on first acquaintance! Doubtless I shall read it and the others again. I may even, in future times, read them aloud to my own children. :-)

The Perils of Finn

Here I am at the top of another mountain, having climbed Phineas Redux, the forth in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series. It’s really the sequel to Phineas Finn, the second in the set, though it follows on from The Eustace Diamonds, its immediate predecessor.

It was suggested that I read the Phineas novels back to back. But, closely related as they are, I preferred to follow the author’s own footsteps. I’m glad that I did because there is a reasonably important overlap with The Eustace Diamonds, one arising from the disreputable love life of Lizzie Eustace, which has a fairly significant impact on the fate of Finn!

The further I travel the more I warm to Trollope. I’ve come quite a way now from Can You Forgive Her?, the first in the set, where the author came across to me as something of an obsessive eccentric, particularly concerning the question of electoral reform. The ballot, oh the ballot, how tired I was of the ballot! With each step he seems to me to have become progressively more relaxed, less intrusive, more inclined to allow his characters to work out their own destiny in their own way, characters that have become ever more fully rounded.

And what characters they are. What a wonderful schemer Glencora Palliser is, generous to her friends but cat-like in the defence of her own interests, in the interests of her family and the inheritance rights of her son. Yes, Phineas Redux is a political novel, far more so than its predecessor, but it’s increasingly obvious to me that the politics of power and the politics of property, essentially the main theme of The Eustace Diamonds, are intimately related in Trollope’s mind, as they were intimately related in the mind of the Victorian upper classes. Wealth, political power, love, marriage, property and ambition are all dimensions of a complicated game of social advancement.

So, act two: enter Phineas, stage left. That is to say he has returned from Ireland, where his inconvenient wife has conveniently died. Sorry, that sounds a little more cynical than I had intended. ‘Our hero’, as the author refers somewhat irritatingly to his character, though not as much as the first time around, is suitably sobered, and matured, by the experience. The young man in a hurry is no longer in quite such a hurry.

Altogether he is more sober, more reflective, than he was in Phineas Finn, though to begin with no less ambitious. In the course of the novel he is destined to become more reflective still, being caught up in a personal crisis that bring a significant shift in his perceptions of political advancement.

I’m being cryptic but I think the point of a review is to whet the appetite of a potential reader rather than précis the plot! Let me just say that ‘our hero’ finds a way back into political life at a time when politics was money. Finn has no money but he has charm, he has good looks, he has intelligence and, most important of all, he has connections, particularly with the most politically influential people in the novel – the women! Most important of all there is Lady Glencora, now the Duchess of Omnium, and her circle, which includes the talented and enigmatic Madame Max Goesler.

In climbing the greasy pole one can scarcely avoid attracting enemies along the way, those who wish to climb faster. Finn’s enemy, and his potential nemesis, is Mister Bonteen, notwithstanding the fact that they both belong to the Liberal Party. Actually I think that it’s a general truism in politics: one’s opponents are on the other side; one’s enemies are on the same side. Rivalry, after all, rather than principle, makes for a deadlier hatred. Finn’s rivalry with Bonteen has the effect of frustrating his desire for office, undermined by a whispering campaign over his ‘soundness’. It was to be potentially even more deadly when Bonteen is found murdered and Finn finds himself in the dock of the Old Bailey on trial for his life.

It is not just ‘our hero’ who is brought back in Phineas Redux; all of the characters familiar from Phineas Finn are there. Apart from Glencora and Madame Max there is the Lord Chiltern, now married to Violet Effingham, once the subject of Finn’s own amorous interest; Lady Laura Kennedy, living apart from Robert, her morbidly religious husband, an archetype dour Scot, who descends steadily into madness and death as the novel proceeds; and Quintus Slide, the slimy editor of The People’s Banner, who attempts to destroy Finn with a series of insinuations about his relationship with Lady Laura.

The bond between Laura and Phineas, strong and stronger, on the one side, weak and weakening on the other, is one of the central tensions of the novel. He once loved her; he once proposed to her, a proposal that was rejected, though she loved him, in favour of wealth, wealth that was to be accompanied by misery. But just as Finn has outgrown her she has not outgrown him, descending into morbid forms of attraction, a contrast in every way with the practical Madame Max, who performs an invaluable service for him in his hour of greatest need.

I enjoyed this novel tremendously; I enjoyed the political and personal nuances and the interplay between them both. Trollope is a master of words, of character, of simple descriptive power, which shows in all sorts of ways, even so far as his treatment of the hunting themes, in which he excels. Come to think of it that’s another way of reading this book, as kind of fox hunt, with Phineas Finn at one point as the bigger quarry. He makes it safely to the covert - I don’t think I’m giving too much away in saying that - safe in the arms, and the wealth, of Madame Max.

So, yes, another literary Munro bagged; two more to go – The Prime Minister and The Duke’s Children. Beyond that range I can detect The Chronicles of Barsetshire in the distance, another dimension of Trollope’s oeuvre and another dimension of Victorian politics.

But I’m going to take time out. I have a trip to Egypt coming up, so all of my extra mural reading is shifting in that direction. From a serial by Anthony Trollope I’m now beginning a serial by Naguib Mahfouz, taking me from nineteenth century England to twentieth century Egypt in one swift step. The road goes ever on. :-)

Heil, Bertie!

Open any anthology on fascism and there is bound to be an introduction telling you that fascism is difficult if not impossible to define. At my own risk I’ll hazard a definition: fascists, generally speaking, are wholly devoid of a sense of humour.

Let me give you a practical example. Take the great humorist P. G. Wodehouse, the satirist of the English upper classes, the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, possibly the greatest craftsman in words that our language and literature ever produced. Jeeves and Bertie are his best known creations, but there is also Roderick Spode.

Those who love Wodehouse will know all there is to know about Roderick Spode, the seventh earl of Sidcup, the founder of the Black Shorts, because when he got round to fascist politics there were no more shirts!

Now just imagine any Italian or German author writing about Mussolini or Hitler in the way that Wodehouse wrote about Spode, an obvious parody of Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists. You know and I know what would have happened to such foolhardy souls. You know and I know what would have happened to anyone who could have written this;

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

There are few writers more brilliant than Wodehouse and few less political. Caught up in the German invasion of France in 1940, he was subsequently interned as an enemy alien (“If this is Upper Silesia one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like.”) Released on the grounds of age, he went on to make a series of broadcasts in the summer of 1941 from Berlin at the behest of the Propaganda Ministry, light-hearted banter on life in Europe in typical Wodehouse style, intended for an American audience, for a people not yet at war.

Light-hearted or not, apolitical or not, they were enough for some in England to condemn him as a traitor. In hysterical over-reaction some libraries banned his books, clearly not conscious of the political irony here. He was even accused with total absurdity of being a Quisling, after the notorious Norwegian collaborator. As late as December 1944 in Parliament it was urged that he should be indicted on a charge of treason. Most absurd of all were those who combed through his books looking for ‘fascist tendencies’. What, fascist tendencies, in Bertie Wooster?! Oh, well, maybe in Jeeves.

Wodehouse was later to describe the decision to give these broadcasts as naïve, not treasonable or malicious. He was certainly not treacherous in the way that, say, Ezra Pound was treacherous, broadcasting in a distinctly political manner from Rome. But the criticism, hurtful and vicious on the part of some, caused him to move permanently to America after the war, where he became a citizen in 1955. It was an outcome anticipated by George Orwell in any essay published ten years earlier;

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings…I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.

Sad to say the accusations have not entirely gone away, fresh fuel being added by a recently declassified Ministry of Intelligence (MI5) memo, part of a file on Werner Plack, an official of the German Foreign Office who acted as Wodehouse’s minder. Reported recently in the Times, it mentions an interview with H. W. Flannery, an American journalist, in which the author is alleged to have said that he was at liberty in Berlin but had to report occasionally to a “Mr. Slack or Black or something”, whom he claimed to have met while in the internment camp.

The memo says “This clearly referred to Werner Plack and was clearly intended to suggest that Wodehouse had so little acquaintance with the German foreign office official that he was uncertain as to his name.” But MI5 already knew that Wodehouse was acquainted with Plack, the two having met in Hollywood prior to the war, where the German was acting as a film extra and a spy. The memo concludes “This incident suggests that Wodehouse is not always quite as frank and ingenious [sic] as he pretends.”

Oh, my, what a heavy burden of guilt, a Plack by any other name would smell as sour! Poor old P. G; poor old Bertie, the one moment in his life when he really needed Jeeves the dashed fellow had taken a spot of French leave!

Although Wodehouse was later to admit that he had, in his own words, made a ‘ghastly mistake’ in broadcasting from Berlin, he categorically denied Flannery’s statement that he had been misleadingly vague about his contacts with Plack.

It would seem obvious that Flannery, a rabid anti-Nazi who believed – wrongly – that Wodehouse had done a deal with the Germans to get out of the internment camp, is far from being a reliable source. But no matter; if this is the weight of the evidence then it is ludicrously light.

I would excuse Wodehouse anything, a return for all the delight he gave me when I was at school, trying to suppress my laughter, reading undercover by torchlight after lights out. We, as a nation, treated him shabbily when he should have been treasured. Our loss was America’s gain.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

A Vixen’s Tale

I’ve now completed The Eustace Diamonds, the third in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of political novels; another milestone passed; another three to go! I enjoyed Can you Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn, the Irish Member though not nearly as much as the story of Lizzie Eustace and a legacy which brings more trouble than pleasure. It seems to me that the author is much more assured here in his treatment of themes, of plotting and of character, his style much more relaxed, perceptive and gently ironic.

The Eustace Diamonds is said to be the least political of the six. The Pallisers hardly feature at all – though Plantagenet’s obsession with decimalisation makes yet another appearance! -, apart from Lady Glencora's brief lobbying on behalf of Lizzie, taken in as is almost everyone else by this duplicitous woman, such a contrast to the earnest and po-faced Alice Vavasor of Can you Forgive Her?

Yes, Lizzie Eustace is an anti-hero. She reminds me in some ways of Becky Sharp from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (was this the author’s intention?), though she doesn’t have the same kind of wit or native cunning. Becky makes things happen; things tend to happen to Lizzie, though she is not averse to scheming and lying to try and turn them her way.

It may not be a political novel as such – though the politics of property features highly – but it offers the most marvellous insight into Victorian mores, into contemporary attitudes to property, to wealth, to social relationships and to marriage. Like Vanity Fair, it’s essentially a comedy of manners or a social satire, though not quite as sweeping and as richly textured.

Lizzie Greystock, the daughter of an impecunious Admiral, is a social climber who has climbed quite effectively, making an advantageous marriage to a baronet, Sir Florian Eustace, who conveniently dies, leaving her - as Lady Eustace - with an income, a castle in Scotland and fabulously rich set of diamonds. However, that is not the end of her problems; it’s the beginning.

My, those diamonds; what a burden they are, and not just for the footman who is obliged to carry them from place to place in a strongbox! The problem is that the lawyer acting for the estate insists that the diamonds are not hers at all but an heirloom which should be held in trust, in the face of Lizzie’s insistence that they were a personal gift from her late husband.

I think a Victorian audience would have been more sympathetic to the legal nuances arising here, which now seems all so refined and perhaps rather pointless, especially as the jewels will eventually pass to Lizzie’s younger son, the heir of the Eustace estate. I confess I did not quite understand the motives of Camperdown, the family lawyer, in his relentless pursuit of Lizzie, yea, even so far as the Court of Chancery (Dickens’ Bleak House should be sufficient warning to those who want to take matters there!), especially as John Eustace, her brother-in-law and the nominal head of the family, does not show the same determination. Of course the more legal time the greater the costs, sufficient motive in itself, I suppose.

It’s Lizzie’s misfortune to alienate just about everyone around her, including Lord Fawn, her fiancé, a rather tepid individual and ineffectual member of the Liberal government (her final letter rejecting his already withdrawn marriage proposal had me in stitches!), though her cousin Frank Greystock, whom she deceives without scruple, remains loyal almost to the end.

Abandoned by most decent society, she cultivates her own déclassé and ever so slightly disreputable set, including one Lord George de Bruce Caruthers (one can just picture the twirling moustaches!), a potential suitor and a ‘Corsair’ (Lizzie is an admirer of the poetry of Byron), the grasping Mrs Carbuncle and Lucinda, her self-centred niece, and Sir Griffin Tewett, a man with little in the way of grace or finesse, recalling for me Sir Percival Glyde, the villain of Willkie Collins' The Woman in White. There is also the oleaginous Mister Emilius, the clergyman, who is playing his own disreputable game. All are destined to dance an amusing and wholly mercenary quadrille!

As always some of Trollope’s descriptive passages are quite brilliant, particularly the hunting scenes in which he excels, something I discovered from the two previous novels. The pursuit of the fox is fascinating but not nearly as fascinating as the pursuit of Lizzie the vixen, the most elusive quarry of all.

There are a few things that puzzled me. I’m thinking specifically of Frank Greystock’s treatment of Lucy Morris, the penniless governess he falls in love with and promises to marry, only to neglect her, leaving his conduct, particularly with regard to Lizzie, who has her own designs on him, open to speculation.

It all comes good in the end, though the action here seems to take place ‘off stage,’ so to speak. Was it simply Frank’s insistence that made Lucy acceptable to his family? Was he having second thoughts? He couldn’t visit her while she was a guest of Lady Linlithgow because of her disapproval, but why did he not write?

Sorry; this is Trollope’s novel, not mine, and even with such lacunae it’s a jolly good read, an everyday story of upper class, and shady, Victorian folk. I was completely beguiled, no sooner finished than moving into the foothills of Phineas Redux, my next stage in the journey.

Up and down the greasy pole

Now I’ve finished Finn! Sorry for the awful pun. I’ve finished reading Phineas Finn, the Irish Member, the second volume of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of six politically-themed novels. It’s long, in excess of seven hundred pages, but on the whole entertaining and diverting.

The book touches on politics at a whole number of levels. There is the obvious parliamentary dimension, with a thorough-going exploration of the great question of the day, that of electoral reform (it was written against the background of the Second Reform Act of the late 1860s). There is also an entertaining exploration of sexual politics. I find Trollope’s female characters highly admirable, intelligent and well-informed, generally more so than the men. Add to this the politics of personal choice, of integrity, of the conflict between public duty and personal conscience then the mixture is beguiling to a splendid degree.

I have my own personal dilemma. How does one review a classic like this? Is there anything new to be said? I note that many of the reviews on Goodreads simply rehash the plot, which, quite frankly, does not seem terribly imaginative. I’m only going to go as far as saying that the novel is shaped as a kind of rake’s progress, except that Finn isn’t really a rake! In the end he makes the right choice, which – apparently - destroys the political prospects that he has managed to build up, as an outsider, as an Irishman, as a parvenu in a very exclusive English political club. So my review is more of a personal exploration, a series of impressions on the central themes.

To begin with I have to say that it took me a long time to warm to the character of Finn, whom the author continually refers to in a rather irritating fashion as ‘our hero.’ For all his charm there seemed to be no real substance to the man, nothing to explain his rapid ascent through the ranks of the Liberal Party, even so far as becoming an undersecretary of state in the government. He is a man of principle and a man of passion, yes, but both seemed to me to be in inverse proportion to his talents and to his ambitions. Above all, he has a rather irritating and ingratiating style. In essence my assessment of the man is precisely the same as that of Violet Effingham, one of the four women he has a dalliance with;

Mr Finn, when I come to measure him in my mind, was not small, but he was never quite tall enough. One feels oneself to be a sort of recruiting sergeant, going about with a standard of inches. Mr Finn was just half an inch too short. He lacks something in individuality. He is little too much a friend to everyone.

In the introduction to my Penguin edition John Sutherland says that the character comes near to being a kind of political gigolo, which I think was probably the author’s intention, though he doubtless would not have expressed it in such terms. Finn is saved from the fate of a gigolo – just - by the greater power of moral conscience, which, at the end, offers him a measure of redemption.

Finn’s Dilemma, a possible alternative title, is that he has never really established himself in life before he begins his political ascent. A penniless barrister who has never practiced his profession, he decides to enter Parliament at a time when the only payment was for members of the treasury bench. Politics at this time was a rich man’s game, and I really do mean man. Trollope’s women, outsiders by sex, no matter how wealthy, have their own political ambitions - to host salons and live a public life vicariously through marriage, because there was no other way at a time when they could neither vote nor enter Parliament.

As I have said, Finn, initially dependent on his father, an Irish country doctor, for financial support, eventually makes his way into office as an undersecretary to the colonies, which comes with a decent if uncertain salary. Elections and defeat in elections are always just round the corner! This solves one problem only to add another – his office, and his salary, depend on loyalty to the ministry, robbing him of the freedom to speak out on certain issues, particularly that of Irish tenants’ rights.

He also has a way out like the women in the novel – he can make an advantageous marriage; in other words he can link his star to an heiress! His search for a partner is one of the central platforms of the evolving story. His feelings seem genuine enough; his feelings, first, for Lady Laura Standish and subsequently for Violet Effingham and then, tentatively, for Madame Max Goesler, are authentic enough – he is no naked fortune hunter –, but his desire for money to support his political career seem just as authentic. The ease with which he transferred his feelings from Laura to Violet suggests that his love, or his infatuation, is never that deeply rooted.

Was this Trollope’s intention, to suggest something ‘insubstantial’ in Finn’s character? Even his duel with Lord Chiltern, his friend turned rival in the pursuit of Violet, seems almost be based of on a kind of affectation, something not quite real about it all. Love here seems all about profit and calculation. It’s as well to remember, too, that Finn’s pursuit of one heiress after another is all against a background of an ‘understanding’ he has with one Mary Flood Jones, his childhood sweetheart back in Ireland, charming, beautiful, intelligent and – wait for it – penniless!

In many ways Finn’s dilemma interested me less than the dilemma of the female characters; the dilemma of Laura, who finds herself locked in a loveless marriage to Robert Kennedy, a dour Calvinist Scot, who, though a prominent member of the Liberal Party and a cabinet minister, frustrates his wife of her vicarious political ambitions; frustrates her in every other sense as well in a wholly sterile union. Then there is Violet, rich but not free, unable as a single woman to set up an independent household without offending the mores of the age, who in the end seems the accept the relentless pursuit of the temperamentally unstable Chiltern merely to escape from Lady Baldock, the old dragon aunt who guards her lair!

Trollope writes with such verve. The hunting scenes with Finn and Chiltern will delight all sportspeople with their descriptive energy, the very thing that I picked up from the passages dealing with the same subject in Can You Forgive Her?, the predecessor to Phineas Finn. Overall there is much to delight here, an excellent exploration of high Victorian attitudes to politics, to morality and to money. On the downside Trollope has a tendency to intrude his own political obsessions overmuch, particularly over the question of the secret ballot, a measure which he opposed. And, my goodness, how much he lets this King Charles’ Head float into the narrative!

Ever onwards I go, now looking towards The Eustace Diamonds.

Trollope Ho!

I very recently entered what I'm calling my Anthony Trollope period. I have them all lined up in the shelf next to my bed, the six Palliser novels ands the six Chronicles of Barsetshire, tome-like in their mute appearance, a formidable wall of books containing an ocean of words!

I’m now reading Can You Forgive Her?, the first in the Palliser series of political novels. The author has an interesting style, much more controlled than Charles Dickens, his contemporary, and much less exuberant, though with subtle comic overtones. Like Dickens he offers a fascinating insight into the habits, attitudes and mores of Victorian England, though clearly the social milieu he prefers to look at is quite different.

He also offers himself, at least a part of himself. In Can You Forgive Her? he makes an appearance as Mr Pollock ‘the heavyweight sporting literary gentleman.’ I was delighted to discover that Trollope was indeed a keen huntsman. It shows particularly strongly in Chapter XVII of the novel, the one headed Edgehill, which describes a hunt meet and all the vagaries that arise from a hunt meet. The chapter begins so beautifully;

Of all the sights in the world there is, I think none more beautiful than that of a pack of fox-hounds seated, on a winter morning, round the huntsman, if the place of the meeting has been chosen with anything of artistic skill. It should be in a grassy field, and the field should be small. It should not be absolutely away from all buildings, and the hedgerows should not have been clipped and pared, and made straight with reference to modern agricultural economy. There should be trees near, and the ground should be a little uneven, so as to mark some certain small space as the exact spot where the dogs and servants of the hunt meet.

The whole chapter in some ways reminds me of Tolstoy’s description of a wolf hunt, one of the highlights of War and Peace, though at a far more intimate, a far more English level. I’m not sure if this makes sense, but I’m thinking of the difference between epic grandeur, the sort of thing that becomes the wide-open spaces of Russia, and the more circumscribed social and physical geography of nineteenth century rural England.

Edgehill is a chapter that could only ever have been written by a rider and a hunter. Trollope captures perfectly the highs and the lows, the anticipation and disappointment that so often accompany a hunt. He knows his way and he knows his people.

They are still there, the amateurs who want to be up with the hounds, who jump every hedge and fence, who want to be in at the end, only to find that their horses are blown far too early. And then there are the experienced hunters, people who know the lie of the land and the capability of their horses; who know when to jump and when to look for ways through, who know the ditches and obstacles to be avoided. There are people who in general do not, at the close of the day, end up walking for miles, leading exhausted mounts! These are also the people who know how to keep on the good side of the hunt master, who rules the proceedings a little like Captain Bligh ruled the Bounty. Good reading; good hunting!

The word of man

I mentioned last November that this year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Authorised or King James Bible, one of the great landmarks of English literature. I’ve since discovered one or two additional interesting facts about the history of a book that was never, in fact, ‘authorised’ by James or anyone else.

As Derek Wilson writes in the January issue of History Today, James may have set the translation in motion but he neither paid anything towards its publication nor did he promote its use. Although the new translation got a royal nod of approval, it was only ‘appointed’ to be read in churches, not commanded. Other versions continued to be favoured according to taste, including the puritan Geneva Bible, translated by exiles during the reign of Mary Tudor.

The original publication, moreover, was beset with all sorts of problems, largely to do with inadequate proof reading. In one of the verses in Matthew’s Gospel ‘Judas’ was substituted for ‘Jesus’. In the account of the crucifixion given in Luke Jesus is said to have been executed with two ‘other’ malefactors. Fundamental errors and poor production meant that the new Bible was slow to catch on. Robert Barker, the book’s first publisher, was unable to recoup his outlays, with the result that he finally ended his life in a debtor’s prison.

Even twenty years after the original publication there were still proof reading and printing problems. A 1631 edition was so bad that it came to be known as the Wicked Bible, omitting the word ‘not’ from the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ In another place God’s ‘greatness’ was misprinted as God’s ‘great asse.’ No, I’m not joking!

The Authorised Version only really started its steady advance after William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I, banned the Geneva Bible, far too puritan for his High Anglican taste. Even then, mirroring the politics of the day, there was a kind of civil war between the holy books, with the Authorised Version only gradually winning out over its Calvinist rival. Its final triumph came with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

The paradox here is that by this time the language used in the 1611 translation was already antiquated in the way that Shakespeare was antiquated. But this only added to its charm and authority, giving it a central role in the rediscovery of a more authentic religion and a more authentic England, uncorrupted by the traumas of the Civil Wars and all that followed.

It was now that the translation, always intended for recitation in church, became a central part of public worship, helped along by the fact that there was no alternative. It was, if you like, the only word of God. But it also took its place alongside the poems and plays of Shakespeare as the word in English, whose beauty and lustre is increased by the passage of time.

The Man who was Chesterton

One is invariably being pursued by one’s own prejudices; it takes speed and dexterity to avoid being caught! Unfortunately Paul Johnson, journalist and historian, is not quick enough. In a recent review of The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, a compilation of quotations by Bevis Hiller, he suggests that prejudice (“the BBC establishment has always hated him”) was responsible for a failure to televise the author’s Father Brown stories, though they are, in Johnson’s words, ‘a natural.’

A quick spot of research shows that this is not true. Some of the stories were televised, though not by the BBC. In 1974 ITV, the commercial television station, broadcast a series of thirteen episodes, staring the late Kenneth More in the title role. The series is still available on Amazon.

Johnson goes on to suggest reasons for this alleged hostility by the ‘establishment’, mentioning and dismissing Chesterton’s alleged anti-Semitism in passing, before alighting on the real cause as he sees it - the author’s Catholicism. Knowing Johnson, knowing something of his own background, I really have to say he would, wouldn’t he!

The more likely explanation, the explanation I see, is that Chesterton was one of those uneven writers who just stopped being fashionable. He stands in this regard in the same pantheon as Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, somewhere on the outer reaches of imagination and taste; of their times, not ours.

This does not mean to say that he is a bad writer; far from it. I admit that my experience of his work is fairly limited, confined mostly to The Man who was Thursday, a novel published just over a hundred years ago, and some shorter pieces. I haven’t read the Father Brown stories and probably never shall because I consider the detective genre to be a lower class of fiction. There you are: a prejudice just caught up with me!

Still, sifting through The Wit and Wisdom has opened up possibilities, opened up some of the intellectual depths of this Oscar Wilde of the conservative right. I use this comparison deliberately simply because Chesterton made, in brilliant aphoristic style, one of the most telling observations about the fate of Wilde that I have ever read;

We feted and flattered Wilde because he preached such an attitude [a new immorality], then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.

Chesterton adopted something of the method, if not the immorality, to carry out his own counter-attack on those aspects of modernity that disturbed him most. Some of his observations are trenchant and witty; others just ill-placed and bad tempered, hence the uneven quality. I’ve compared him to Oscar Wilde though Hiller draws an altogether more apt parallel with Dr Samuel Johnson, whom he resembled not just in literary grumpiness but in corpulence!

I suppose Paul Johnson is right in part in suggesting that Chesterton’s faith accounts for some of the prejudice to which he alludes. But it seems to me it was less because he was a Catholic - by conversion, incidentally - than because he was more orthodox than the orthodox, often a symptom of any kind of conversion. His Catholicism seems to have been of a particularly obscurantist, neo-medieval kind, allowing him to dismiss the Enlightenment in one sweeping announcement: “I know of no question that Voltaire asked which St Thomas Aquinas did not ask before him – only St Thomas not only asked, but answered the questions.” This is a mind not so much closed but bolted shut!

There is grumpiness here; there is prejudice, attitudes that do not quite harmonise with the modern age, an observation I feel sure that would have delighted the reactionary old fogey, who wanted to return to a feudal economy where every man – no mention of women – would be allocated “two acres and a cow.” Yes, grumpiness and dottiness but also charm, good prose and intelligence; wit, occasionally, of quite brilliant intensity. What more could one ask for?