Back to the Classics #21

I read this book for my second round of the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2020.

 19^th Century Classic. “One wants some sort of excuse for reading Trollope - a long convalescence, or an ocean trip.  Without it, it is hard not to suspect the motive for immersing oneself in this reassuring ambience of decency, money, and ease,” wrote critic Clara Claiborne Park in 1962. What a glorious era, that time from the end of WWII to the assassination of President Kennedy. When it was unimaginable that the tidal waves of pandemic, bungled federal response, economic devastation, closed schools, and social unrest would simultaneously break on our shores. And provide the motive for immersing myself in the reassuring ambience of Can You Forgive Her?, Phineas Finn, The Eustace Diamonds, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister consecutively since April. So, suspect my motive. I dare ya.

 The Prime Minister – Anthony Trollope

This 1876 novel, the fifth of the Palliser series of six, focuses on two characters. Ferdinand Lopez, though the son of a Portuguese immigrant, talks, walks, and dresses like an English gentleman. His tidy appearance helps him in his business practices, i.e., incessant unstable rounds of buying, selling, speculating, using puffery and other people’s money to nail down the big deal that will put him on Easy Street.

His fatal flaw is that he literally does not know the difference between right and wrong. Ethical, schmethical – he’s clueless. This ignorance disables his discernment, i.e., the wise judgement that would enable him to overpower his love of money and his overweening ambition. This ambition turns men into ravening beasts, complains Mrs. Parker, the working class wife of his put-upon accomplice, Sextus Parker. Out of her own bitter experience, she observes:

But them men, when they get on at money-making,—or money-losing, which makes 'em worse,—are like tigers clawing one another. They don't care how many they kills, so that they has the least bit for themselves. There ain't no fear of God in it, nor yet no mercy, nor ere a morsel of heart. It ain't what I call manly,—not that longing after other folks' money.

If Ferdinand Lopez is badly in need of wisdom, so is the other main character, Plantagenet Palliser, the Prime Minister and Duke of Omnium. Trollope identifies the ingredients of unhappiness for a politician as zeal, a thin skin, unjustifiable expectations, biting despair, contempt of others, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement.

Planty Pal, as our not chirpy hero is ironically called, is wonderfully free of the above qualities but for two. His conscience is over-scrupulous because he fears he will be a loafer of a PM, merely presiding over a do-nothing coalition government. He is a genuine Trollopian hero in that he is ridden with self-doubt; see Mr. Harding in The Warden and Josiah Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

But a more fearsome enemy to his state of mind nags him. His skin is so thin that he frets about the scurrilous attacks of the gutter press. Such is his anxiety that his wife Glencora Palliser remonstrates, “I wish I could make you thick-skinned for your own [sake]. It's the only way to be decently comfortable in such a coarse, rough-and-tumble world as this is.”

The Duchess of Omnium – a.k.a. Lady Glen – freely admits that she is made of coarser stuff than her husband. In her role as wife of the PM, she is the happy worldling planning ostentatious parties, balls, and fetes. Her goal is to provide networking venues for her husband’s liberal friends to feel they are mixing with the right people, to coax unpleasant Tory adversaries into collegiality, and thereby extend the tenure of her husband in office.

Plantagenet needs all the assistance he can get on the social side since he is not genial and clueless as to fundamental people skills. Socializing drains him of energy he’d rather use doing useful work and fending off brazen seekers of office and favor.

“Two gentlemen have been here this morning,” he said one day to the Duke of St. Bungay, “one on the heels of the other, each assuring me not only that the whole stability of the enterprise depends on my giving a certain office to him,—but actually telling me to my face that I had promised it to him!” The old statesman laughed. “To be told within the same half-hour by two men that I had made promises to each of them inconsistent with each other!”

The Duchess capriciously takes people in hand, however, and this whimsical tendency to play favorites precipitates a political crisis. Their marriage, one of incompatibles from day one, is complicated since their feelings for each other are too complex to be subsumed under the catch-all term “love.” As they discuss moving on to the next stage of their lives, she wonders how he will occupy himself:

“I am thinking of you rather than myself. I can make myself generally disagreeable, and get excitement in that way. But what will you do? It's all very well to talk of me and the children, but you can't bring in a Bill for reforming us. You can't make us go by decimals. You can't increase our consumption by lowering our taxation. I wish you had gone back to some Board.” This she said looking up into his face with an anxiety which was half real and half burlesque.

Suffice to say, the long-time married among us hardcore readers will connect with the Pallisers' intricate relationship because we too express to our spouses“anxiety which was half real and half burlesque.” Trollope’s indirect  suggestions for a serene marriage are sensible:  don’t ever lie, respect each other, do no harm, and make each other comfortable, and, if possible, happy. Moderation in all things, thus echoing the ingredients of happiness for a politician: have reasonable expectations and timelines; don’t be zealous or over-scrupulous or too conscientious; develop a thick skin and you’ll get along just fine.

The loyal reader is spared the usual fox-hunting interlude and romcom subplot. Still, Trollope will use tried and true expedients. For example, though I can readily believe muggings were all too common in the dark parks of Victorian London, the outcome of a mugging is once again largely positive as when Phineas saved Robert Kennedy from being garroted. And a single female eats her heart out over her unworthiness a la Lily Dale, which made me groan and stamp my foot getting through the barefaced padding of the last 100 pages or so.

Overall, these two stories provide entertaining reading. To my mind, the best part of the politics of this book are the short digressions on the importance of resilience and other soft social skills politicians and their minions must have. Technocrat readers that toil in large bureaucratic organizations may get useful HR lessons out of this installment of the Palliser series. Also, because I’m a brute, I enjoyed Trollope’s parodies of the monstrously unfair editorials of the “energetic yet not thoughtful” Quintus Slide, the editor of the scandal sheet, People’s Banner.