The American Senator

"The plot of The American Senator is about one of my favourite Trollope characters, Arabella Trefoil. Apparently, Edith Wharton based The House of Mirth ’s Lily Bart on her. Arabella Trefoil is the impecunious niece of a duke and has been on the marriage market for 12 years. She’s been struggling to find someone appropriate. She’s tied to her mother who she hates. They’re always going to stay with people and way outstaying their welcome because they have no money. It’s just dreadful. Then, at the end, when she does marry, she says, “She need never again seem to be gay in order that men might be attracted.” That made me think of that line in When Harry Met Sally when Marie—Carrie Fisher—says, “Tell me I’ll never have to be out there again.” It’s the exact same thing. Of course, contemporary resonances are not all the same. Women had more limited options, but Trollope has got incredible empathy with this woman who is clever but has to make the social rounds to try to get some guy to marry her because he’s got money and her value is dropping in the marriage market. Trollope is also very interesting on the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the industrial class. Should the poor daughter of an aristocrat marry someone who’s coming up from the working class? They’re complex heroines. I’ve seen Arabella Trefoil compared to Becky Sharp. But, in a way, Arabella’s position is a lot more precarious. Who is Trollope like? Probably he is like Thackeray, because he does have a great sense of humour. He’s really, really funny. He is wicked. He’s bitchy, that’s what Trollope is. All of his characters—or a lot of them—are always trying to get one up on each other but pretending to be polite. That was the other thing I found hard to understand about British people, as an American. They would say things like, ‘We must get together again sometime’, which is British for ‘I hope I never see you again’, but the first time someone said that to me, I pulled my diary out. It was like, ‘Oh my God, what did I just do wrong?’ Trying to understand what people are actually saying, that back and forth, Trollope helps with that. “Trollope wrote to a stopwatch and compared being a writer to being a cobbler” But one of the things that’s really great about Trollope as a writer is that he’s unexpected in his characters. So, most of the plot of The American Senator is about Arabella Trefoil deciding that she is going to try to snare Lord Rufford by pretending that he has proposed to her—because he kisses her in a carriage. Lord Rufford is only interested in smoking cigars and hunting and tries to extricate himself from this very difficult position because he doesn’t want to humiliate her but, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to marry her. But Trollope has these marvellous paragraphs where Lord Rufford goes, ‘Maybe I should marry her. She wouldn’t get in my way. I could go hunting. I could smoke my cigars.’ And, at the end, he marries someone who very firmly stops him from smoking his cigars, stops him hunting. He gets fat and is a little sorry that he didn’t marry Arabella, who would have just left him alone. I think that’s absolute genius. Trollope captures that, ‘How dare you do this to me? There’s no way I’m going to marry you! You’ve been on the market forever’ to ‘Maybe should I? Shouldn’t I? Maybe it would be a good thing to do. I’m going to have to get married. Would it be so terrible to be married to someone who would leave me alone?’ It’s cynical, but it’s funny. All his books have those unexpected moments, where a character does something that you don’t expect, and that’s my moment in The American Senator . Absolutely and—unlike Jane Austen writing about two men alone—he writes about women alone all the time. He has no problem with that. Trollope himself had the experience of someone trying to trap him into marriage. A landlady pushed her daughter in his way, hoping that she could burst in and compromise him and say, ‘Right, you’re engaged.’ Lord Rufford talks about himself as being hunted. He says, “one sometimes feels oneself like a carcass in the midst of vultures.” He kind of is. The other thing I really like about Trollope, as an American, is that these people have such a horror of commerce. And, yet, all they do is engage in commerce—except the goods they’re selling are their children. But yes, Trollope does get inside what people are saying and thinking privately. It’s like a soap opera—in the best possible way—because the characters are incredible and their situations give huge importance to smaller things. In some ways, I always think of Trollope as a very feminine writer, he’s very involved with the domestic. I should say that the top plot of The American Senator is really dreary. It’s about an American senator coming over and getting involved in some legal case, to do with hunting. I can never remember what that plot is, because it’s just so inconsequential. There’s often two or even three plots going on in Trollope—it’s like an episode of Seinfeld . Trollope does do that. His American characters are always spirits of misrule, really. They turn up at inopportune moments and recall engagements that shouldn’t have happened. They’re normally financiers. But it’s the subplot, the Arabella Trefoil plot, that’s just fantastic. She turns down a lot of people, in the assumption that there’s always someone better. The truth is, there isn’t always someone better. That’s another lesson of the book. It’s not a guarantee that if you turn down five proposals, the sixth one will be better than the previous five and, in her case, they start getting worse. The prey, the field, gets smaller. As I said, Arabella Trefoil is probably my favourite Trollope heroine. It’s Trollope’s empathy with her, even though she’s supposed to be a fortune-hunter and an adventuress."