Anthony Trollope’s “The American Senator”: The Anguish of Three Couples

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Anthony Trollope’s little-known novel, The American Senator, is a blend of comedy, romance, and satire.  It’s a gorgeously- written book, and the characters are portrayed in such detail that they become our best and worst friends.  Some are ethical and good, others intelligent and charming, still others shallow and unscrupulous.

The title is inexplicable, but let’s get it over with: Mr. Gotobed, the senator, has a very small role. He is a figure of satire:  he has come to England to study the institutions of English life and always draws the wrong conclusions.  But the strangeness of the senator perhaps sheds light on the strange misinterpretations of the art of love: there is true love, love unprofessed, unrequited love, and unsavory plotting on the marriage market.

At the center are four “lovers” – no, actually there are six, because two suffer from unrequited love. Two of the main characters are cousins:   John Morton, a diplomat, is serious and just, a man of the world.  His cousin, Reginald, the fun one (everything is relative), is a solitary man, a voracious reader, and an avid walker. He is in love with Mary Masters, the charming, sweet daughter of a lawyer, but Reginald hasn’t declared himself because he thinks he is too old for her.  Mary is in love with Reginald, but her family is pushing her to marry a farmer, Mr. Twentyman, who is devastated when Mary turns him down, but she cannot marry a man she does not love.

  John Morton is proud of his fiancée. He met the beautiful Arabella when he was a diplomat in Washington, D.C. Arabella and her mother are now visiting his ancestral home. Curiously Morton sees very little of them: Arabella has never been so bored in her life, so they hide in their rooms.

Trollope can’t help being fascinated by wicked Arabella: he makes her so bad that we can’t look away.  The bored beauty has been on the  marriage market too long: she accepted Morton’s proposal because she is almost past her expiration date. She also must marry for money: Arabella and her mother are nearly penniless. They travel from house party to house party, squandering their  money on cheap glamour, and working hard to be charming. it’s their job.

Arabella’s mother thinks Arabella could do much better than marry Morton.  And then there is a ray of hope for the unscrupulous women: They are invited with Morton to a house party at Lord Rufford’s house.  If only Arabella could “catch” Lord Rufford! Without first breaking off her engagement to Morton, and indeed denying that she is engaged, Arabella flirts with wildly flirtatious Lord Rufford, and even rides “to hounds” in a fox hunt, in the hope of entrapping him by mad courage. Well, we are sure the that Lord Rufford has no intention of marrying, but as far as calculated out-of-control flirtation – we’ve seen nothing like it since Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair!

This is one of Trollope’s most entertaining novels. The Victorian critics loved The American Senator and considered it better than The Prime Minister, the fifth in Trollope’s brilliant political Pallisers series. Trollope was astonished, since he considered the PM a great novel, but perhaps the critics wanted entertainment. The American Senator is a joy to read. Why read anything but Trollope?

Out-of-Print: Chuck Miller’s Poetry

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“My poems are about the absurdity of life. It’s constantly breaking down and not making sense.” -Chuck Miller (1939-2024)

I am on a quest to find Chuck Miller’s poems. Most of his books are out-of-print, and those I find are absurdly expensive. His poetry was published by small presses, such as the long-defunct Toothpaste Press in Iowa City, and the still-thriving Coffee House Press in Minneapolis.

Chuck was often down-and-out, though he never seemed desperate, even when he was interviewed in the squalid wooden shed he’d built and lived in since the ’80s. Sometimes he worked as a migrant worker, or in a laundry, or the graveyard shift at a hospital. Sometimes he was lucky enough to get a teaching job. He marveled over it: $30,000 for a couple of classes! He was overjoyed.

I am impressed by Chuck’s wide-ranging intelligence. He had degrees in Science and Math (University of Illinois, BS), philosophy (Southern Illinois University, MA) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (University of Iowa, MFA). And yet he struggled to make a living. How is that fair?

He could be outrageous and outspoken. He seemed a likable chap at poetry readings, but perhaps he said too much. But he had a lot of friends and admirers, so perhaps he didn’t say too much.

For instance, Chuck said, “Being poor all my life, I had always hated rich people, but you have a sort of class viewpoint or a class background telling you how to feel or what to think. I was on the other side of some sort of line … I read the wrong books, I was the wrong person. What has my life been? A protest against everything. Once you see the horsesh*t they try to pretend is reasonable, you’ve got to protest.”

In the video below, he is reading a political poem. Honestly, i can’t judge a poem unless I see it on the page, but at least you’ll get the rebellious vibe. Even when he’s not trying to be contentious, he’s political.

More Thoughts on Homer’s “The Odyssey” & Why Not Make a film of Virgil’s “Aeneid”?

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Last weekend, during the heat wave, we went to  the much-touted movie, The Odyssey, based on Homer’s epic poem. I wrote about this in a previous post, but bear with me for a minute. The director Christopher Nolan’s offbeat special effects exploded on the screen, and the actors’ interpretations of their roles were excellent.

And now a week later I find myself reading Homer’s Odyssey, my third reading of this splendid epic poem. At my time of life, it is fitting to read epics: that’s what life is like, when you look back, an epic struggle to survive, to take charge of your fate, and to revel when you succeed. I am reading Robert Fagles’ powerful translation of The Odyssey in the Penguin edition.

Epic poetry is posh but accessible, because there is a clear narrative, a story.. The theme of Homer’s Odyssey is homecoming, which, in Odysseus’ case, takes 20 years. After a decade spent fighting the Trojan War, it takes ten more years for him to sail home. On the way back to Ithaka, he fights monsters, accidentally enrages Poseidon, and is waylaid for seven years by a besotted nymph.

At home, Odysseus will have to fight again, because the slackers and suitors of Ithaka have occupied his home, each hoping to marry his wife, faithful Penelope, who contends that her husband may still be alive..

I think we can all identify in some way with Odysseus.

But here’s a thought: why not also make a film of Virgil’s Aeneid, the great Latin epic poem? In T. S. Eliot’s essay, “What Is a Classic?” he says that the Aeneid it is the only classic in the Western canon. He argues that it was written at the height of Roman civilization, when the Latin language and literary tradition were mature and sophisticated. (N.B. Virgil wrote in the first century B.C., in what was deemed the Golden Age of Latin literature.)

And The Aeneid is a homage to Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. The first six books of the Aeneid are the equivalent of Aeneas’ Odyssey: Aeneas, a reluctant, often whiny, post-war general is fated of to lead the Trojan survivors to Italy, where they will establish a new homeland, Rome. He has no wish to do this. He tries to fob the job off on his father, but it doesn’t work out. Finally Aeneas accepts his fate, but it means leaving Dido, a queen who has fled from her country to found Carthage and fallen in love with him. They are happy together: he even does construction work in her growing city. Why can’t Aeneas stay with her? The goddesses, his mother Venus, and Juno, Dido’s patroness, won’t allow it.

The last six books are Aeneas’ Iliad: he and the other Trojans fight a civil war in Italy over a woman, Lavinia, who is fated to be Aeneas’s new wife. Another man from a different region, Turnus, contests this, and thus war breaks out.

I am considered Aeneid-crazy. “No one will ever make a movie of The Aeneid,” they say. Yes, I don’t really see it in the stars, but Aeneas has depth, because he is an ordinary man, a hero who isn’t much of a hero, though he is the the son of a goddess, a post-Trojan War hero who is burnt-out and wants to live in peace.

By the way, I recommend Robert Fagles’ translation of The Aeneid. The Latin, of course, is moving and gorgeous, but if you can’t read the Latin, Fagles is your man.

I Was a Bibliophile!  “A Spell Is Cast “and Other Classics

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I was two when I learned to “read.”  Mom claimed that as a toddler I woke her up at 5 a.m. to read alphabet books. Certainly we had plenty of books. Every time we went to the store we bought  Golden books, inexpensive editions of fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and animal stories. 

Mom, disheveled, reading to me.

No one was ever more relieved than Mom when her child learned to read and she could sleep in.

In the early mornings, I lost myself in Nancy Drew, Louisa May Alcott’s An Old-Fashioned Girl, Lord of the Rings, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Nobody’s Garden (recommended to me by the children’s librarian), Black Beauty (the saddest horse book ever), and George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind.

In fourth grade, I discovered E. Nesbit (stuffily catalogued under her married name, E. Bland, at the library). The library only had two of her books, but a local bookstore carried them, so I requested them for Christmas and birthdays. And I also loved  Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin series, and one year received The Moon by Night, a chronicle of the Austin family’s camping trip across America. Vicky gets her period!

Reading is a comfort, especially in these tough times. Below is a list of favorite comfort books for all ages.

I loved Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator, a brilliant, plot-driven novel, with many, many fox-hunting scenes, and even a lawsuit involving poisoned foxes. Perhaps there are too many fox-hunting scenes, but it is well worth reading for Trollope’s portrait of Arabella, a pathological liar who schemes to trick wealthy Lord Rufford into marriage- without first breaking up with her fiance, Mr. Morton. He is her back-up plan!  There is also a wicked Arabella in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, the coarse older woman who seduces and marries him when Jude is is a young, hopeful aspiring classicist.

E. Nesbit’s The Wonderful Garden. Most of Nesbit’s books are fantasies; this one is not. In this whimsical novel, the three C’s, Caroline, Charles, and Charlotte, find a secret door in a walled garden and come upon an old book, The Language of Flowers. They consult it when they want to communicate via bouquets. Whether by magic or coincidence, the flowers and herbs alleviate distress.  In some ways, The Wonderful Garden reminds me of Nesbit’s adult classic, The Lark, the story of two young women who have lost all their money and now sell flowers from their garden.

Were you a fan of Eleanor Cameron’s Mushroom Planet series? They are in-print, but I much prefer her realistic novels, which, alas, are out-of-print.  She began her career with an adult novel,  The Unheard Music (1950), which was well-reviewed, but did not sell well. It is partly based on her experience as a librarian, but there is also at least one down-and-out musician. I had to track it down by library loan. I may have borrowed the only copy in America!

And then Cameron began to write successful children’s books. A Spell Is Cast, a kind of homecoming nostos novel, is a strange, splendid example of her ability to weave adult themes into a children’s book. The protagonist, Corey, an orphan raised by a ditzy guardian, is sent to California to live with her grandmother and uncle – yet no one picks her up at the airport, so they’re not off to a good start. No wonder she falls ill in this strange house, though she has friends out of the house. While she is ill, she has a dream reminiscent of Salvador Dali’s dream scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

If you’re fond of animal books, I recommend all-ages books like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the charming story of Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad; and Clifford D. Simak’s forgotten science fiction classic, City.  In Simak’s charming novel, the last beings on earth are talking dogs and robots. The dogs are archivists, puzzled by eight extant human tales. They wonder, Did humans ever exist? In the faux preface, a scholar of doggish literature quotes the scholar Rover.  “Rover believes that in the first tale we are dealing with is almost pure myth and that as a result no situation or statement can be accepted at face value, that the entire tale must be filled with symbolism to which the key has long been lost.”

Let me know your favorite comfort reads!

Don’t Forget Elvis Costello: “Every Day I Write the Book(er)”

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In my recent post, Should the Booker be Quirkier?, I suggested that the Booker Prize folks invite a rock star to perform a Booker-themed song,

A friend brilliantly says, “Don’t forget Elvis Costello: ‘Every Day I Write the Book(er).’ Yah, why not Elvis as kind of a Booker Muse(r). He’s a wordsmith.”

A stroke of genius! I couldn’t agree more.

And here’s the video of “Every Day I Write the Book(er.””

Chuck Miller, Poet (1939-2024): “In Celebration of Surviving”

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I discovered Chuck Miller’s poetry during a brief stint working at a hipster bookstore.

Chuck wasn’t just a local poet. His work was published in several languages.

I followed his career sporadically over the years. He was still giving interviews and poetry readings in the 2010s. Tonight I was saddened to learn that he died in 2024.

Below is a brilliant quote that defines his philosophy. And below that is his stunning poem, “In Celebration of Surviving.”

Here is a quote from an interview with Chuck.

“You see all the rottenness and corruption in the world. If you stand against that, most people sort of understand what you’re talking about, but they’ve kind of made a truce with the rottenness. Whereas, somehow I’ve never made a truce with it. So the only way I knew how to respond was to write something.” — Chuck Miller, poet (1939-2024).

And here is one of his poems.

“In Celebration of Surviving,” by Chuck Miller

when senselessness has pounded you around on the ropes
and you’re getting too old to hold out for the future
no work and running out of money,
and then you make a try after something that you know you
    won’t get
and this long shot comes through on the stretch
in a photo finish of your heart’s trepidation
then for a while
even when the chill factor of these prairie winters puts it at
    fifty below
you’re warm and have that old feeling
of being a comer, though belated
in the crazy game of life

standing in the winter night
emptying the garbage and looking at the stars
you realize that although the odds are fantastically against you
when that single January shooting star
flung its wad in the maw of night
it was yours
and though the years are edged with crime and squalor
that second wind, or twenty-third
is coming strong
and for a time
perhaps a very short time
one lives as though in a golden envelope of light

Should the Booker Prize Be Quirkier?

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The Booker Prize longlist was announced today, and I’m reserving books at the public library. By late August I’ll have circles under my eyes, and metaphorically throw a few of the books at the wall, i.e., return them to the library.

And then the shortlist will be announced.

I’m a fan of the Booker.  I’ve been looking forward to the longlist for weeks.  I’d predicted that I would have read one, two  max.  And, yes, I have read one:  Elizabeth Strout’s brilliant, dark, lyrical, political novel, The Things We Do Not Say. 

Last year the judges were eclectic: the charming Sarah Jessica Parker was one of the judges, and, the equally charming former Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle was the chair. Parker, an actress and publisher, described tearing the covers off the Booker books so she could read in public without anyone glimpsing the titles.

And Doyle was flamboyant about the many bad books being published. He delivered an outrageous, near-stand-up-comic speech at Southbank Centre, ranting about how most of the Booker submissions were terrible.

That was dramatic: it probably can’t happen twice.

But I wonder if the Booker should add more pzazz and quirks.

Here are two suggestions, which will doubtless be taken “under advisement.”

First, I would find an academic hipster who hasn’t read a new book since the mid-90s. The ’60s is her era. In fact, she has read nothing but Ken Kesey, Lynne Reid Banks, John Barth, Robert Coover, Doris Lessing, Jack Kerouac, and Charles Bukowski since she finished her dissertation. . And so she would crossly and quickly be able to winnow down the 13 new books to six, and then  go out and chat on the BBC or at Daunt Books about her outrageous views. If she starts quoting William Burroughs, hustle her offstage. They REALLY don’t want to hear her on Naked Lunch.

Here’s my other idea: recruit a pop star (why not Taylor Swift?) or rock star (Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders?) to perform a Booker-themed song.  Potential song titles:  Meta-Booker, Sexy Booker, Crazy Booker, Industrial Booker, Grateful Booker, etc. Reward them with books!

Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to invite avid reader Jenna of Jenna Reads, the hostess of the Today show book club.  Her book club choices range from pop literary to literary, and are usually excellent.

Of course the Booker PR people may have more to do than organize celeb PR!

A New Take on Homer’s Epic: “The Odyssey,” the Movie

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We went to the 10 a.m. showing of The Odyssey, eschewing the DX and IMAX theaters. We had heard that the seats rocked during the boat scenes in the DX version, and the audience was squirted with water.

A terrifying Trojan horse.

Special effects are enough, and sometimes too much. This weird film is beautiful, but the special effects are hyperbolic. I covered my eyes during a long, terrifying storm scene with flashing red lights.

The director Christopher Nolan has a spooky imagination.  The Trojan Horse is not the wooden horse on wheels of the illustrations in old textbooks. Again, like the storm, it is plus-size – it weighs more than 8,000 pounds – and rears up menacingly on two hooves. Even the interior of the Trojan horse is perilous: Odysseus and the other Greeks struggle to keep their balance, and one drowns in water at the bottom of the horse.

As for the acting, it is superb, though many of the movie stars have disappointingly small roles.  Charlize Theron is a sympathetic nymph obsessed with Odysseus, but she seems to be there mainly to look gorgeous and supportive. (That’s the problem with beauty.) On the other hand, Circe the wicked witch (Samantha Morton), is powerful, but very homely. In a memorable metamorphosis scene, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs by making them pig out.  Odysseus, rescues his men by trickery – they signal to him by oinking.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope (Odysseus’ wife) has the best female role. She is majestic and beautiful, and at first you think that’s all they’ll let her do. But the pace picks up: she must fob off creepy suitors – who now live in the great hall of the palace, eating her food and imbibing her wine. Penelope weaves all day, and undoes the weaving at night. And then Antinous (Robert Pattison), a sinister suitor, says he is on to her:  he has seen her unraveling the shroud. (She claimed she would choose a new husband when it was done.) She speaks quietly to Antinous, reasoning that that Odysseus may be alive, trying to explain why it’s not time to marry, until he backs off, for the moment.  Like Odysseus, she has the gift of gab.

Matt Damon’s take on Odysseus is is almost “meta”: he is not only a hero and the wily “man of many twists and turns,” but a complicated post-war Greek general who commands with a quiet authority. His quietness and stillness define his character:  although he fights deadly monsters, and has mercilessly tricked and killed during the Trojan War, he is gentle to his men, determined to get them home. (The goddess Athene tells him they will all die anyway, but he has to try.) He addresses the men in a quiet tone of voice, as if they are equals.  This works two ways:  they can engage him in dialogue, but they also feel they can go their own way, which is always disastrous for them. But never has there been a quieter, more sympathetic Odysseus.

In a way, The Odyssey reminds me of old 1950s Biblical spectacles like The Robe and The Ten Commandments, movies that played over and over on TV at Easter. But this is a different kind of spectacle, majestic but hip and edgy, a portrait of a terrible, terrifying world that is, alas, not unlike our own.

Book Martyrdom:  How Many Books Is Too Many? 

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The movers sweated as they lugged boxes of books up three flights of stairs to our new apartment.

1950s Smiling Woman Teacher Librarian
. (Photo by Debrocke/ClassicStock/Getty Images)

The sweaty movers were good-natured, and joked around: “Which of you is the professor?” (Neither: we are amateur eggheads.)  But there was one grumpy exception: a man in a Frank Zappa t-shirt growled as he wiped the sweat off his forehead with one of my dish towels, which he had pilfered from the box labeled TOWELS.  “It’s like moving boxes of bricks. Are these yours, lady?”

I looked around wildly.  Should I deny it?  But no.  I was not going to prevaricate, though book martyrdom loomed.

“Yes.” I sounded wobbly, not dignified,. Then I picked up a box and headed upstairs with it.

A nice man intervened and gently took the box from me.  “If I may… Karl’s just a whiner, aren’t you, Karl?”

Indeed, Karl admitted he was a whiner.

But then they had to lug up actual boxes of bricks, for brick-and-board bookshelves, and Karl almost lost it.

You see, Karl was not a bookish person.  He was not a bricks-and-boards person, either. He didn’t understand the life-style. Sure, we had lots of books, but we not only read them, we needed to have them.  Because one day we would want to read Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family, and we wouldn’t want to go through Interlibrary loan, which is ghastly, because the paper in the books is often yellow and the pages are uncut. And it could take years to find the Charlotte M. Yonge at a used bookstore.

Fortunately, Karl didn’t have the power to evict me. But in New York, an avid reader was recently evicted from his apartment for having, oh, say, 100,000 books, or maybe 200,000.  The landlord said he feared the heavy books might crash through the floor.  Is that even possible? Well, that is a lot of books.

During my college days, a Dickensian graduate student, whom I shall call “the lodger,” because that’s what I called him, lived in a book-filled studio apartment below our apartment. It was arranged like the stacks at the public library.  There were narrow aisles between thousand of books crammed into metal bookcases of the kind the library uses. I can only suppose he found a special public library furniture store. 

At a book sale at his apartment, I learned that our landlord had refused to rent our apartment to him because he was convinced the bookcases would fall through the floor and damage the house.

I was very emmpathetic, but in the back of my mind, I thought, Someday I’ll have thousands of books, too!  Well, perhaps we have 1,000, 1,200 tops. Not in the lodger’s range!

The odd thing is that even fanatical readers disapprove of having “too many books.” Oh, they might have a cute t-shirt, saying Too Many Books, Too Little Time, but they don’t mean it.  They would rather pay $4,000 for soccer tickets, or $5,000 for rock concerts, than buy books they can “get at the public library.” The thing is, you can’t get them at the public library. The library discards many newish books, and the backlist is even more ephemeral.

We buy books instead of soccer tickets, or that trip to Hawaii we’ve never wanted to take.

And the important thing is: We refuse to be book martyrs!

Women’s Roles in “The Odyssey”:  Who Wants to Be Helen?

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There has been a ruckus about the role of Helen in The Odyssey, the hit movie of the summer. A Black actress, Lupita Nyong’o, plays Helen, and online gossips are shocked out of their minds.

Lupita Nyong’o as Helen

There has been a storm on X, with many posters expressing indignation about a Black Helen.  One went so far as to say that no one will believe she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Mind you, I’ve always pictured Helen as tall and blonde, though there is no evidence for this, and artists often paint her with red-gold or auburn hair. (Of course it’s black on the vase paintings.)

Helen is not described at all in Homer’s  Odyssey, so all this is fantasy.

Here’s the real reason to be indignant: Helen has a minimal role, unless the screenwriters have changed this. Why not cast the Black actress in one of the main roles? Why not Circe, the witty, brilliant witch with the power to turn men into pigs?  Or Calypso, the nymph who kept Odysseus for seven years?  (His poor wife, Penelope!) Even Princess Nausicaa has a bigger role than Helen.

And no one would have batted an eye if Nyong’o had stolen the show in one of these important parts.  No, it’s this absurd idea of beauty that triggers the prejudice. 

I haven’t seen the movie – I still haven’t seen Gladiator, so I’m way behind – but I’m amazed by how upset people are because of their personal version of Helen.

Anyway, would this have been an issue without the internet? Probably not.

By the way, tell me if the movie is good. I did like the trailer!