Books: Trollope's Comeback

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To realize his vision of a country gentleman's everyday life, Trollope needed money; and his best way to make money was by making fiction out of his vision. He wrote for ten years, but it was not until the appearance of his fourth novel, The Warden, in which he first sketched the world of Barsetshire, that he earned anything from his work. His next novel,

Bar Chester Towers, brought him fame as a painter of everyday portraits — and as his fame grew, Trollope saw to it that his understanding of his subject grew as well.

The higher he rose in the Post Office, the larger the districts to which he was assigned (as organizer of mail deliveries); the larger the district, the more avidly he studied it, riding its roads and lanes until he knew its people and its ways by heart.

The lanky, sullen youth turned into the beefy, bearded hunting gentleman-author who took a stubborn pleasure in denying that he was an artist.

Writing Machine. He was only too ready to give his readers what they wanted : "a little foxhunting, a little tufthunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant . . . much Church, but more love-making." Only fox-hunting could keep Trollope from his daily hours of writing.

When traveling by train on postal business, he wrote on a portable desk with a lamp (almost the whole of Bar Chester Towers was so written). En route to Egypt, to conclude a Postal Treaty with the Egyptian Government, he wrote his way across the Bay of Biscay, pausing between paragraphs to rush to the rail and vomit.

So determined was Trollope to be considered a writing machine that he gave the readers of his Autobiography little chance to note the creative passion that made the machine run. And yet, the passion was paramount. "I have wandered alone," Trollope wrote, "among the rocks and woods, crying at (my characters') grief, laughing at their absurdities, and thoroughly enjoying their joy. ... I have lived with my characters. ... a gallery of them, and of all in that gallery I may say that I know the tone of the voice, and the color of the hair, every flame of the eye, and the very clothes they wear.

Of each man I could assert whether he would have said these or the other words; of every woman, whether she would then have smiled or so have frowned." Earth Under Glass. Bar Chester Towers shows this gallery packed to the eaves with typically Trollopean peers, squires, High and Low Church clergymen, farmers, shopkeepers, each with his wife and family, all passionately involved in the everyday affairs and intrigues of an English cathedral town. It is, said Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a great admirer of Trollope, "just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its in habitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of." But readers who do not buy Doubleday's expensive edition of this famed novel will find equal satisfaction — and perhaps a more subtle Trollope — in Is He Popenjoy?, an almost-forgotten work.

Written in Trollope's prime with the utmost deftness and simplicity, and not overloaded with characters, Popenjoy displays Trollope's astonishing powers of character portrayal in concentrated form.