Harry T. Cook 5/15/09

The need to vacate a church office I had occupied for nearly 22 years was cause for much book sorting and moving. My working library — books and other publications pertinent to my area of research — had been about evenly divided between church and home. Largely at the latter over the years, my voluminous collection of the classics, 20th Century fiction, poetry history and biography had also to be sorted and moved to new quarters in a spare bedroom now a study.

While I hope I never again will be required to undertake that onerous task, it turns out to have been a helpful and revealing thing to do. Because it necessitated the giving away of several volumes, which had to be pried from my hands by the love of my life, I learned or re-learned what books have been important to me from college days on.

The pretty much up-to-date collection of books and journal articles treating of the Second Temple and New Testament periods, which constitute my focused area of continuing research, are important for obvious reasons: I’ve had to keep up with others’ scholarship so as to inform my own. Since I plan to pursue that research, I shall be acquiring yet more books, and on that account may have to apply to our rabbi for marriage counseling.

It is the other portion of my library that tells a lot about who I have been all these years along. A person with dual degrees in library science and psychology (maybe abnormal) could write my biography not only from skimming the authors and titles of the books on my shelves but by marking which books bear more the print of moist hands upon their spines and by deciphering the many annotations and underscorings in their margins.

I am partial to the written word written well, i.e., how language is used in memorable yet not overbearing fashion. I have tried in my own writing to be observant of the Samuel Clemens dictum about the difference between “lightning” and “lightning bug” and to locate in others’ writing the choice of the right word in the right place.

The novels of Anthony Trollope display that gift throughout. His delicately playful use of English is everywhere seen in his prose. An added bonus for me is that Trollope spent a lot of ink in withering satire of the church and its foibles.

Among the characters he created were the Foghorn Leghorn of the mid-19th Century Church of England, Archdeacon Theophilus Grantly; the humbly pious Warden, Septimus Harding and the formidable Mrs. Proudie, autocratic helpmeet of the hapless Bishop of Barchester.

Trollope built around them telling descriptive prose:

Of a particular preacher he wrote: “The sound of his own voice had brought with it the accustomed charm, and he ran on from platitude to truism and from truism back to platitude, with an eloquence that was charming to himself.”

Of a puffed up and loquacious barrister Trollope wrote: “He never had time to talk, he was so taken up with speaking.”

Of a cautious houseman in service to a reclusive pundit, Trollope wrote: “He never knew that his master was at home, though he often knew that he was not.”

Of the aforesaid bishop trying to screw up the courage to confront his despotic wife, Trollope wrote: “There was a look about the lady’s eye which did not admit of my lord’s disapproving at that moment. He felt that if he intended to disapprove, it must be now or never, but he also felt that it could not be now.”

And of the wife, Trollope wrote that, upon being dismissed by her husband who had summoned what slight trace of courage he had to do so, “She did not forget to close the door behind her.”

To replace my tattered ones, I have attempted in vain to find copies of Trollope’s Barchester Towers and The Warden in the major bookstores in my part of suburban Detroit. Neither could I find a bookseller who knew who knew the name Trollope. I had a sneaking suspicion that one of them thought I was looking for a good time. At least he knew that word.

To my disappointment and surprise, I have learned that neither the Trollope oeuvre nor John P. Marquand’s novels are taught any longer in undergraduate literature curricula.

That is a pity, for Marquand’s mid-20th Century prose resembles that of Trollope’s in piquancy and understatement. In a nation of people who can’t write, you’d think even slight exposure to either of them would be helpful.

Marquand wrote of one character, a successful bank president, that he possessed “cool and placid features, set in assured, easy lines etched by a career in which everything had always worked out right.”

Of an aging spinster, Marquand wrote: “She looked cool as though it were not a hot day. She looked so old that no weather could disturb her. Her brown dress of still silk rustled like autumn leaves . . . Her lips were set in an amused, determined line . . . Her eyes looked old and faded. There was a tremor in her thin, blue-veined hands that made the beaded reticule she was holding shake, but she still had a deliberate, airy way of walking. Her voice, too, had a quaver in it, but it retained a plaintive, musical note like an echo of a younger voice.”

Of idle talk in the New England town he created for one of his novels, Marquand wrote: “Gossip always became in time a sort of mythology and lay before every inhabitant of _______ like a long shadow on a summer afternoon. A word here, a word there, an embarrassed silence, a snatch of overheard conversation, an overelaborate explanation — all those things finally could not help but make a picture.”

Yes, I read the books from the New York Times’ bestseller list which I need to read to keep current with history and history in the making — especially biographies that often convey history, Plutarch-like, from the personal perspective, making it the more compelling. I think here of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time of several years back and of Jon Meacham’s recent Pulitzer winner American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.

Yet I find myself returning again and again to Trollope and Marquand, because they both understood the potency of the English language written well, much in the same way Winston Churchill understood it: as rapier-like, piercing a thing to its core and as incandescent, revealing the truth of the matter.

© Copyright 2009, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.