My summer reading: Trollope authorial intrusionist

This hot, hot summer, being back in New Jersey, the soil of my birth and early breeding, evokes memories of how I loved to read in this season, away from the pressures of other school subjects. I wish I could peel off a long list of books, like in the old days. But I’m only halfway through one book, Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope. I’m a slow food eater and a slow reader. If I love a passage, I reread it over and over. I sometimes put the book down and stare into space as I digest the scene I just read.  Trollope is a chatty author by our contemporary standards. The book—tome would not be an exaggeration—is 651 pages (plus another hundred or so of notes and an introduction I will read when I’m done with the novel). “Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” wrote W.H. Auden. I think Auden should have read Manon Lescaut by Antoine Francois Prévost, one of my long, hot summer reads and re-reads. Although, I might agree with Auden that, “Compared with Trollope even Balzac is a romantic.” I’ll withhold judgment until I’m done with Phineas, a young Irish lad too pure for the politics of British parliament with which he has become entangled. To be sure, there is romance, unrequited love, star-crossed love . . . intrigue of that sort, as well as lots about money and its meanness and imagined power. I love that in the 1860s, politics was a nasty then as today—oh, I’m sure if they had texting, sexual shenanigans would have grabbed media headlines. There is even an opportunistic, manipulative journalist, Quintus Slide in the book.

I must say, I’m catapulted out of the story with some of Trollope’s authorial intrusions, for example, Chapter 29 opens thus: “And now will the muses assist me while I sing an altogether new song . . . The poor fictionist very frequently finds himself to have been wrong in general, and is told so roughly by the critics, and tenderly by the friends of his bosom.”

How many of us novelists would love to intrude in our own works with such caveat emptors, even knowing full well our editors’ red ink will spill with a vengeance and she will box our ears?  FYI, Trollope uses expressions like “down at the mouth” and the word tweet as a verb – but I have not yet found what the proper synonym would be today.