Trollope: Interviews and Recollections ed. by R.C. Terry (review)

HUMANITIES 113 Shelleyan lyrical vein, and writes of 'A Summer Evening Churchyard' that 'the wishful calm of these lines suggests the very fine balance Shelley was able to achieve between desire for a transcendent meaning and the fragile status of an interpretation which neither affirms nor denies' (44), while his treatment of 'The Cenci' shows a perceptive appreciation of the human insights in the play. The writing is u'sually lucid, and at times eloquent; and it is the more to be regretted that it so often falls into stale but still fashionable jargon, as for example when 'signifiers' appears when nothing more is meant than 'words.' (GEOFFREY DURRANT) R.c. Terry, editor. Trollope: Interviews and Recollections. Macmillan. xxxiv, 257. $53.00 This book, like the others in its series, consists of recollections and comments about its subject, drawn primarily from those who knew him, arranged chronologically from items about family and childhood to those concerned with his last years. For the most past, Terry has excluded any substantial critical estimates of Trollope's work. Each entry is preceded by a full explanatory headnote giving sources in detail and is succeeded by very helpful footnotes, themselves a pleasure to read. A short chronology of Trollope's life is provided at the beginning; there are eight pages of plates, and the text closes with 'Suggestions for Further Reading' and a full index. Although the selections are carefully chosen, the literature has been efficiently and thoroughly mined, and the results will provide Trollopians with much help in their work, it is in his introduction that Terry makes a significant and interesting contribution of his own. He rightly sees his principal problem as biographical. He says that, 'even though what follows is not a biography,' the book is 'close kin to biography,' and he claims thatTrollope might concede this kind ofrecord to be 'the truest sort of biography.' Here Terry raises the question of the Autobiography, a 'mixed blessing to scholarly posterity.' He quotes Trollope's own recognition of its limitations. Terry understands, and has previously written about, its relation to fiction, but more pertinently to his task here, he notes how much the publication of the Autobiography has influenced later recollections of those who have written about their experiences of Trollope. Moreover, he is properly suspicious of biases -especially of those who objected to Trollope's bluff and hearty manner, regarding it as . coarse and ungentlemanly or worse, as did the Rev A.K.H. Boyd: 'Indeed he was the orily man I had heard swear in decent society for uncounted years.' Through the introduction, we are guided to evaluate the material in the 114 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 text in such a way as to put to rest a common and rather unsophisticated notion of a man permanently wounded by childhood experiences, divided against himself and carefully concealing that division and that pain. We are shown, instead, that 'although [Trollope] ... was thoroughly of, and at one with, his time, he was, as a man, more playfully ironical and, as a writer, more subversive than his own age generally realized.' Our age has now thoroughly assimilated that view thrO\fgh increasingly careful readings of his work, but Terry has shown us that that view, that 'truest sort of biography,' can be realized through the words of his contemporaries. Despite the disclaimer in the introduction, it has been impossible for Terry to avoid analysis of the work; nevertheless he has been faithful to his intentions and produces it only when it reinforces the biographical matter or when to omit it would do violence to his texts. It is churlish to complain of omissions in a book of this kind, but readers might wish to have had some further commentary concerning Trollope's pronouncements on such public issues of his day as the controversy over the introduction of competitive examinations for the civil service (he was against them). So much that is here is good, making itimpossible to selectanything for extensive quotation. Terry has given us a book that is useful and a pleasure to read. Better still, through the comments of others he has allowed us to detect in Trollope a character that...