Books: Trollope's Comeback

BARCHESTER TOWERS — Anthony Trollope—Doubleday Doran ($ 10).

Is HE POPENJOY?—Anthony Trollope —Oxford University Press (2 vol.—95¢ each).

In 1882, 67-year-old Anthony Trollope. dean of British novelists, friend of Thackeray and George Eliot, suffered a fatal paralytic stroke. One year later, his many devoted readers were shocked by what they considered one of the most vulgar books they had ever read—Author Trollope's posthumously-published Autobiography.

Readers readily admitted that there was nothing about the Autobiography so shamelessly coarse as the current novels by young Thomas Hardy (whose fictional county of "Wessex" was slowly replacing Trollope's "Barsetshire"), nothing so sensual and pagan as the lyrics of up-&-coming Poet Oscar Wilde, nothing so effete as the art-for-art's-sake of Oxford's esthetic Walter Pater.

Trollope's Autobiography contained no indiscretions, no embarrassing confessions —all that Mr. Trollope would say, for instance, about his marriage, was: "It was like the marriage of other people, and of no special interest to any one except my wife and me." In fact, what so horrified the sentimental public was that by the end of the Autobiography not a shred of romance was left to clothe its burly author.

Grocer Novelist. A man writing a novel, said Mr. Trollope briskly, is comparable to a grocer weighing out tea. Mr. Trollope professed scorn for "inspiration," described how he rose at 5:30 every morning, set his watch at his elbow, and wrote without stopping until the breakfast gong brought him back to the important things of life. He always wrote, he said, at the rate of 250 words per 15 minutes.

When he had written enough to fill a three-volume novel, he tied up the loose ends of his story in as neat a bow as possible (it was sometimes very untidy), reached for a fresh sheet of paper and started another novel. In this way, he said cheerily, he had amassed nearly 170,000 in 30 years. He had spent most of it on fox hunting—in fact, he admitted, his main reason for writing romances was to make money to buy horses with.

"I look upon the result," he concluded blandly, "as comfortable, but not splendid . . . and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written."

Out of Oblivion. Perhaps it was more of an adieu than Trollope expected. Throughout the Naughty Nineties and the Edwardian and Georgian eras, Trollope's 41 novels were considered as dead as their author. As late as 1929 a student could win a master's degree in 19th Century English literature at Columbia University without being required to read a word of Trollope. Not until the 1930s did the first stirrings of reviving interest come; not until the first years of World War II did Trollope's stock begin, very perceptibly, to rise again.

Last month, with London booksellers concurring, Dr. Cyril Garbett, Archbishop of York, nominated Trollope for first place in wartime British reading popularity (Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters tied for second place, Dickens and Thackeray for third). Nostalgia for the days when English life could be portrayed as a comedy of manners was the general, if perhaps too simple, explanation.