Back to the Classics #1

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Very Long Classic. You would think that the door-stop novels The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He Was Right were Trollope’s longest but in fact the novel discussed here, at 1300 manuscript pages and about 420,000 words, was his longest. Critics have said it would have better had about 100 pages ended up on the cutting room floor, but I found it a page-turner because winter is the season to settle into a long novel and Trollope tries hard to be easily understood, despite occasional balled-up sentences (he wrote too fast and didn’t revise for later editions).

The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope

It is 1873. Augustus Melmotte moves to London from the badlands of Middle Europe with the odor of financial impropriety wafting about him. He buys a large house on Grosvenor Square and ensconces his wife and grown daughter there. Building the reputation as great financial wizard and big spender, he throws daughter Marie a grand ball.

Probably based on the real-life bunco artist James Fisk (shot dead in 1872 by a business partner), a San Franciscan wheeler-dealer named Hamilton K. Fisker and his naïve English partner Paul Montague bring Melmotte into the puffing of a Ponzi Scheme called the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway. Rich jackasses and titled muttonheads are induced to speculate and sit on the board, whose meetings last about 15 minutes every Friday. Trollope satirizes what he called in his autobiography "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places… so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable."

Melmotte makes lavish gifts to charity and becomes so glamorous that HM government requests that he host – and pay for - a dinner for the Celestial Emperor of China. So drawn by his money, the Conservative Party recruits him to run for a seat in in Parliament. Rumor runs rampant however that Melmotte’s financial future is stormy, thus spooking would-be guests. Still, Melmotte manages to win the seat. But his future is not rosy.

This is a Trollope novel so there must be romantic trouble. Marie is pursued by two worthless guys for her money. Paul Montague’s previous affair with an American woman, Winifred Hurtle, complicates his subsequent romance with Henrietta Carbury. Georgiana Longestaffe, in her late twenties, is feeling behind in the matrimonial race and contemplates marriages with a Jewish banker, to the unreasoning anguish of her snobbish family who are quite okay with falsehood and chiseling but not okay with Jewish people. For a little comic relief, the romance of John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles (country names for country people) has rough going. There’s even a middle-aged romance between a newspaper editor and Henrietta’s mother, a writer who needs him to insure good reviews for her terrible books. A problem is that the triangle of Paul-Hetta-Roger fails to hold interest because Hetta isn’t interesting, Roger is a bit of a prig, and we Trollope veterans already know who is going to marry whom in the end.

Apparently, this is not a popular novel with readers that gush over the likes of Bertie Stanhope perhaps because the realistic observation of business and personal corruption is raw, especially for generally genial Tony, and the satire may seem strained in places. It’s hard for any writer to sustain humor and satire over the length of a novel, much less one about 700 pages long. Even more to the point, satire in 1873 seems mild to us in 2019. We have read Brave New World and Catch-22. Also, nowadays when we read Melmotte is a "horrid, big, rich scoundrel… a bloated swindler… a vile city ruffian,” how can we not  be reminded of somebody and conclude that given our nutty reality, satirists are hard put to ruffle us.

Readers may also be dismayed that with only few exceptions characters don't deal with each other with the least scintilla of honesty. Girls like the Longestaffe sisters scheme incessantly to land unwary rich guys as husbands. Parents like Lady Carbury and the elder Longestaffe disfavor their daughters as burdens while they cosset their sons who are genuine financial burdens. People even lie to themselves, persuading themselves to accept the most absurd things.  For example Father Barham convinces himself, despite evidence a child would judge rightly, that Melmotte is God's instrument and vows to help deliver the Roman Catholic vote to the crooked financier.

We have seen the weak male often portrayed in Trollope: Charlie Tudor, Harry Clavering, and Johnny Ames. But the dude-bros of the Beargarden Club are weak in ways different from the awkward hobbledehoy. Though idle and indolent, they are addicted to the excitement of gambling at cards, gorging and guzzling, and, Trollope implies, the vice of seduction and whoring. Their goal is to marry an heiress and get their paws on her money. Sir Felix Carbury is one of the most malignant, heartless characters I've read in a Trollope novel. I do believe Tony, along with us readers, smiles when Felix winces under the authorial taser.

Another point that may rattle readers that think they are used to Trollope is the author’s examination of domestic violence. Country girl Ruby Ruggles is doubly victimized. She is dragged about the house by her hair by her drunken grandfather. She is sexually assaulted in a London alley by the entitled shit Felix. We rather expect, our prejudices kicking in, victims vulnerable to assault to be young, female, rural, and poor, but Trollope does not turn a blind eye from the sensitive point that middle and upper class men coerce consent and obedience from women with violence. Lady Carbury was “at last driven out of her house by the violence of [her husband's] ill-usage.” The American Mrs. Hurtle has had to defend herself from a drunken husband and has shot a would-be rapist dead. And when Marie refuses to sign papers for her father:

That cutting her up into pieces was commenced after a most savage fashion. Marie crouching down hardly uttered a sound. But Madam Melmotte frightened beyond endurance screamed at the top of her voice, ‘Ah, Melmotte tu la tueras!’ And then she tried to drag him from his prey … Croll, frightened by the screams, burst into the room. It was perhaps not the first time that he had interfered to save Melmotte from the effects of his own wrath … Melmotte was out of  breath … Marie gradually recovered herself, and crouched,  cowering, in the corner of a sofa, by no means vanquished in spirit, but with a feeling that the very life had been crushed out of her body. …  [She] lay on the sofa, all in a heap, with her hair disheveled and her dress disordered, breathing hard, but uttering no sobs and shedding no tears.

Indeed, we are long way from Lily Dale eating her heart our over Crosbie in the sewing room.

Clearly, this story has strong passages and thus not to everybody’s taste. Some will cringe at the seeming anti-Americanism and anti-semitism. But I think Trollope’s view of Americans and Jewish people is nuanced. It seems to me that he is sympathetic to Winifred Hurtle and Ezekiel Brehgert, perhaps because they were outsiders like Trollope himself. If nothing else Mrs. Hurtle compels our attention because she’s the tough American woman who’s seen too much of life and says things like,

Yes; come. You shall come. And now you know the welcome you shall find. I will buy the whip while this is reaching you, and you shall find that I know how to choose such a weapon. I call upon you so come. But should you be afraid and break your promise, I will come to you. I will make London too hot to hold you; — and if I do not find you I will go with my story to every friend you have.

Whoa, daddy. Though a sad single girl threatened to stab another sad single girl in  scene played for laughs in He Knew He Was Right, I can't think of any other incident in Trollope where a woman threatened to horsewhip some dude.

I was badly burned by the latest one of his I read, The Belton Estate, so I was nervous this novel letting me down. I was concerned about the usual Trollope issues like his facetiousness, his less lucid grammar, and his tendency to mishandle surprises (I think unlike Austen he didn’t like pulling surprises on readers). I also fretted that it would have a slow, oh so deliberate, start like Dr. Thorne. Mercifully, the set-up was brisk and incidents started right away. This was first published as a serial so at the ¾ mark, the recapitulation of Marie’s story and Roger’s struggles of conscience makes the pace temporarily sluggish.

This book was so compelling that long as it is I read it in only about two weeks. I highly recommend it to Trollope fans and to readers who balefully wonder if the Chronicles of Barsetshire were the height of Trollope’s powers. I’d say this was as enjoyable as The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He Was Right.