U2Y1AAAAMAAJ&lpg=PR3&ots=uKuagQYv4r&dq=Anthony%20Trollope%20The%20Three%20Clerks%20illustrations&pg=PA430-IA1#v=onepage&q=&f=true
The Three Clerks (1858) was Anthony Trollope's sixth novel, and one of the most important in his career in terms of development, arguably THE most important. Trollope had launched his career in fiction nine years before with two Irish-set novels, then a historical romance with a French Revolution backdrop, then The Warden and Barchester Towers. But The Three Clerks was his first work to be focused in London and have a plot turning on the political world…seven years before the Palliser Saga would explore these topics as no novelist would before or since.
The one-two punch of the first chronicles of Barset had been the breakthrough, so in theory publishers and readers could have looked on the early novels as works of a writer searching for his niche before finding it in the dramas, loves, and comic foibles of country life. The Three Clerks proved Trollope would not be pigeon-holed, indeed, had no wish to be, for now he was writing from experience. In 1858 Trollope was past forty and well-established in the British Post Office, to the point where he would by year's end be appointed a sort of worldwide ambassador for the mail. But he had not forgotten his bachelor days beginning in London at the Civil Service, and how easy it is for young men on their own for the first time to face the temptations of women and money, whether lended or acquired dishonestly. Trollope himself, in an episode retold in every biography, once borrowed four pounds from a money-lender and had to repay 146 POUNDS in interest before the debt was cleared…while suffering the humiliation of the lender turning up in his office politely asking him to be punctual.
Around these memories, Trollope developed a series of romantic plots as naturally evolved as Eleanor and Arabin's in Barchester Towers, while also incorporating that book's sense of laugh-out loud humor, all in a three-volume narrative almost twice as long as Towers. In the Autobiography, he looked back on it as "certainly the best novel I had as yet written." Again, it is the transitional book of his oeuvre, and like most transitional books (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the most egregious example) it has significant flaws…flaws which do not allow me to rank it as high as Towers. But Trollope's admiration for the novel is NOT misplaced. The Three Clerks still makes for entertaining, fascinating reading.
The three titular characters are Harry Norman, a young civil servant for the department of Weights and Measures, his best friend/roommate/colleague Alaric Tudor, and Alaric's cousin Charley, just arrived from his father's rural parish (a covert sign of breaking with Barchester, perhaps) to take similar work for the Internal Navigation. Harry has a long-standing friendship with his father's cousin's widow, Mrs. Woodward, and ingratiates the Tudors with her respectable middle-class house in Hampton and her three daughters, Gertrude, Linda, and Katie. Three clerks. Three girls. This is a Victorian novel. 2+2 looks like a question worthy of Nobel laureate mathematicians in comparison.
I admitted early on that The Three Clerks has flaws, and probably the most glaring one is that only two of them really matter. Let's compare their plots. SPOILERS AHEAD.
ALARIC: When Sir Gregory Hardlines (Trollope has fun with the names of his supporting characters the way Dickens had fun with the names of all his characters) reforms the Civil Service to make it more of a pure meritocracy, Alaric manages to surpass Harry for a promotion. Having trumped his friend in public life, he now deals him a blow in personal life by romancing Gertrude—who had only just rejected Harry's proposal—while Alaric himself was paying a little court to Linda. Alaric marries Gertrude, then rises in the world thanks to his friendship with unscrupulous MP Undecimus Scott, who helps him acquire government commissions and helps him speculate in mines and railroads using inside information. But society brings Alaric no peace, especially after "Undy" gets him appointed trustee to his niece Clementina and persuades him to invest part of her fortune in a bridge. Alaric finally has his conscience pricked enough and is ready to sell the shares, but their value falls to nothing and he is arrested for embezzlement. Though clearly guilty, the brilliant defense lawyer Mr. Chaffanbrass gets him a light sentence, and following servitude Alaric, sadder but wiser, restarts his life in Australia with his family, for the fortitude-filled Gertrude loves him and stands by him.
Alaric's plot is suspenseful, complex, and allows for some clever philosophizing on morality and honesty, as the love-to-hate-him Undy keeps persuading Alaric to plunge in deeper with silver-tongued arguments. Alaric's indecision is well-described, as is Gertrude's towering love for him…Jane Smiley wrote that Trollope understood intimacy in a way few writers do, and his depiction of how Gertrude's love for her husband only grows as he needs someone more than ever does not feel forced but psychologically true. The realistic ending is also much in its favor.
CHARLEY: Charley has a good heart but falls prey to all the city's vices, working with an unimpressive aptitude, becoming indebted to the money-lender M'Ruen, and half-promising to marry a barmaid. Alaric and Harry try to improve him, but Charley only finds salvation in his friendship with the imaginative, talkative Katie…a friendship which turns to unspoken love after he saves her life in a boating accident. However, after escorting Katie to her first ball, Charley is arrested for debts to a tailor and spends a night in prison. Mrs. Woodward privately asks him not to see Katie any more. Katie falls desperately ill while Charley little by little extricates himself from his difficulties and becomes a man worthy of respect. Thinking she is near death in the deepest part of the family's despair over Alaric, Katie, now as calm and sensible as a woman, has Charley summoned to Hampton. They admit their love for each other, Katie takes a turn for the better, and marries Charlie…who eventually becomes a successful novelist.
This story is far more formulaic and conventional, but it is the most charming of the romantic plots. True, Charley's problems are partly resolved by himself, partly by Trollope arranging a convenient exit for the barmaid and laying the money-lender aside, but the character's progressions to maturity are handled with care and sentiment. Katie begins as a recognizable-even-today teenage girl: whiny, opinionated, and frivolous. She becomes a woman with an appreciation for life's hard realities and limitations, but an indomitable spirit. Charley wavers back and forth between industry and indolence, but Harry's friendship and Katie's continual urgings to "be steady" win out when he realizes how much his life could have sunken. Charley has the most integrity and self-honesty from the get-go, most notably when he rejects Alaric and Undy's plan that he propose to Clementina and share her fortune…as soon as he has the motivation to put those traits to use for the better, he triumphs. The similarities, coincidental I am sure, to Trollope's actual life also make it fascinating reading with knowing grins on the reader's face.
Charley and Katie are also responsible for the two best chapters in the novel. Chapter XXII, a long digression but an immensely entertaining one, is a reading of Charlie's debut as a fiction writer: a dreadful melodramatic romance full of every hallmark of lousy Victorianism which Trollope must have had the time of his life writing, and also allows him to jibe at his profession in an appropriate manner. Chapter XLII, meanwhile, is based around the scene where Katie and Charley tell each other of their love, and Katie serenely decides she is ready to die while Charley vows to be steady forever. Believe it or not, reader, this scene is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of Chapter XXII. There are no histrionics or false notes: the characters have walked along their paths in such straight lines that this climax of their arc is suffused more with quiet acceptance of the facts than Romance-in-CAPS. Dickens would have milked it. Eliot or James would have bogged it down in overanalysis. Trollope gets it exactly right…it may have been here when he broke through as a mature novelist to be reckoned with. He himself could not read Chapter XLII without tearing up, and no less than Elizabeth Barrett Browning lavished it with praise.
HARRY: Harry is a good, hard-working man who possesses a stubbornness at his core, a tendency to lecture people, and a desire to be acknowledged in life. His friendship with Alaric is tested first by his inner jealousy over the promotion, then his shock over Alaric's financial dealings. It breaks completely when, still heartbroken over Gertrude's rejection, he finds she has accepted Alaric. Taking it as a personal insult, Harry refuses to see or forgive them while still trying to reform Charley. Eventually, Harry falls for and marries the gentle Linda, whom he is more compatible with as an adoring girl who could use an authoritative husband. Harry's shiftless older brother dies and he inherits the family property. He and Linda build a good life together. There is no evidence his faults have been corrected.
Trollope knew this was the weak link of the saga. Out of 47 chapters, only 5 (5!) focus on Harry's story. His marriage to Linda takes the most rear of all back seats as Alaric and Charley's adventures are going on. And he undergoes no arc, has no growth. The most important thing he does in the novel is be related to Mrs. Woodward and so link up the Woodwards and the Tudors. This is key to the whole book, but if you're going to call a novel The Three Clerks and give two of them truly well-done stories, why pay such little mind to the third? Why not push Harry out of the picture? In his last conversation with Gertrude before Alaric heads for Australia, he shows he has not learned anything, and thus comes across as nothing but unnecessary deadweight attached to two tales of real drama.
Thus I would advise the reader of The Three Clerks to skim through Harry's passages and concentrate on the rest…and Trollope's evolving literary style. Advancing from his first steps in finding his own voice in The Warden, Trollope strides like a marathon runner through these 567 pages. He is the most personable of narrators, always knowing what his characters are thinking and constantly addressing his audience directly. The fourth-wall breaking would be toned down in the years ahead, but right now barely a chapter goes by where Trollope fails to pull off an apostrophe, sometimes earnestly sympathetic, sometimes raging, usually laden with well-deserved irony and satire. He even works in extended speeches about Sir Robert Peel, Dickens's Bill Sikes, and the state of our sense of right and wrong. And he has a great sense of prolepsis and playing with diegetic time, slipping over incidents which would have been enticing to describe without killing our interest and telling things about the future plot which make us want to read more.
The characters themselves are fully-realized human beings with flaws and virtues. Trollope wrote in the last chapter he did not consider the people in his books heroes or heroines, that such figures are rarely found in real life (an accurate statement of his narrative philosophy)…and so the ones we like still possess drawbacks and undesirable attributes which must be overcome (or not), while those on the blacker side of life still have intellectually understandable motivations and some positive traits…he even admires the despicable Undy for his consistency of outlook on life.
The plot may have its holes and weaknesses, but the drama is played to reasonable highs and the tone is gentle and very funny. Trollope is able to laugh at all his characters, especially the eccentric fringe figures like the profane Captain Cuttwater and the Neverbend siblings, who mouth the current vogues for transcendentalism and socialism without ever understanding what they're saying, and his sense of satire stays strong throughout. He is not as crushing as Dickens, but society, the media, and the government all take still-potent hits from his pen.
There is also a theme about facts and honesty which is interesting and subtly worked into all the different strands of plot. The characters are dealing in facts and hard information, mostly involving money and the government, but their problems come from how to apply these truths to themselves. Harry will not admit his human weaknesses, Charley rationalizes his troubles away, and Alaric, worst of all, ignores his conscience in the face of Undy's false logic. (There is a great structural device here where Alaric is shown to be the most loquacious and charming of men, is himself charmed by Undy, and ultimately witnesses Undy undone by the greatest verbal magician in Trollope's universe, a character so vivid he would return in two more novels and defend Phineas Finn in his murder trial, the roaring Mr. Chaffanbrass.) Meanwhile, the political world is shaken up by an increasing reliance in factual information and merit over questionable patronage, and Alaric is mixed up in a stock market where information is king but can change by the day. Alaric and Charley only have happy (or reasonably happy) endings when they admit the truth about themselves. This is why Harry's story is so weak…his payoff comes without self-revelation.
Finally, there is that looking ahead to the Palliser Saga where, as Penguin rightfully said, he reached the height of his powers. Already there is the sharp, judgmental, laughing and weeping eye for London in all its walks of life, the lower classes on the rise and their bars and cheap neighborhoods and economies, the upper classes and their clubs and balls and country houses and occasional ridiculousness. There is the insiders' view of politics as the most demanding of games, where people jockey for power and privilege and make decisions large and small which shake theirs and others foundations. The major difference is that Palliser and his fellow members of the House of Commons and the Ministry, for all their scheming and gamesmanship, always had an ideal at heart. Those novels celebrated the spirit of democracy and principle. Here, dealing with the Civil Service he knew so well, Trollope takes a more cynical view of a series of useless bureaucracies (the Internal Navigation is phased out in the end) which do nothing but allow otherwise aimless men to draw a government salary and ambitious men to carve out fiefdoms and chances to test their philosophies of life in the name of "public service." Sir Gregory Hardlines, Mr. Oldschole, and Mr. Snape (140 years before Rowling described his possible descendant) are as uninspiring as Plantaganet Palliser and Mr. Monk are noble. Yet in retrospect, it is debatable which is the more honest point of view.
The Three Clerks is vital reading for any fan of Anthony Trollope…or Victorian Literature in general. The maddening portions are worth trudging through to witness the emergence of the Trollope persona, and the story of Crinoline and Macassar will have all those with English degrees or giant libraries rolling in the aisles.
All honor to the true and brave!
No comments:
Post a Comment