Trollope is one of my very favourite authors, yet I've never, ever been able to get to grips with the final instalment of the Barchester series, The Last Chronicle of Barset. Over the last few days I've been trying again, and even allowing for the fact that I'm slightly under par at the moment, I still found my eyelids drooping after 60 pages. Did the clergyman steal the cheque, or didn't he? I just didn't care. Yet when I once interviewed the Trollope biographer, Jack Hall - a droll New Yorker - he told me he thought the Last Chronicle was the pick of the whole, prodigious bunch. One of the things that distinguishes Trollopians from Dickens lovers, Jack added, is that the former's admirers tend to have sharp disagreements about their favourite titles, whereas Dickensians tend to cluster around the same three or four. (I do like Dickens, BTW. I just think Trollope is the better psychologist.) Just to illustrate that point, we discovered that while I raved over the fairly obcure Is He Popenjoy?, Jack thought it was deadly dull. Ah well.
I'm also trying to continue my treatment for my Tolstoy phobia, a deeply shameful condition, I admit. (Does ayone else out there suffer from the same problem?) As I've mentioned, my friend Martha Bayles recommended Hadji Murad, but I hated it as much as the first time I read it a decade and a half ago. I'm now testing my theory, based on not much in particular, that the great Russian reads better in French. I definitely preferred Ivan Ilych in translation, although I still found it repetitive (and it's barely a novella). Today I'm finally sending off for the first volume of, um, Guerre et Paix, which should keep me going until the summer. I've never managed more than 250 pages in English.
At least I'm not entirely alone. I just came across this passage in H.E. Bates's autobiography. He's discussing Stephen Crane's Civil War tale, The Red Badge of Courage:
It is interesting to note that War and Peace, Tolstoy's "endless panorama", annoyed Crane. "He could have done the whole business in one-third of the time, and made it just as wonderful. It goes on and on like Texas." Exactly. Not for the first time, nor the last I fear, had sheer length and size seduced readers into the mesmerized belief that they were in the sacred presence of greatness.
So it's me, H.E. Bates and Stephen Crane. I feel slightly less embarrassed now.
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