Fiction: Fanny: A Fiction by Edmund Whie is camp, funny, slightly outrageous and very different, is an engagingly offbeat performance closer to other White novels such as Caracole (1985), with shades of Peter Carey, writes, Eileen Battersby
Fanny Trollope (1779-1863), mother of the famous Victorian writer, and campaigning novelist/travel writer in her own right, certainly had her adventures, not least of which was marriage to a man with a flair for making a mess of everything. Failed lawyer, failed farmer, he eventually set off to the young US with Fanny and their children to establish a business. This venture also failed and back he went to England.
All of this is well-known to anyone with an interest in Anthony Trollope, whose early life seemed to have been almost as chaotic as that of Charles Dickens. But Fanny's career is less widely documented, aside from a few biographies, one of which was written by her daughter-in-law. She was something of a character, and much of her energy was spent in the struggle to keep her children alive. Her literary career began when she was 53 and reeling from the horror of experiencing America.
Far from being the expected women's fiction of the time, her début took a controversial look at the US. Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) took a harsh look a country viewed at that time as an idealistic paradise. For Fanny, it was a savage place populated by filthy eccentrics. Her attack made her famous; the British loved it and from then on her thoughts and opinions were in high demand. She also became the family breadwinner, wrote more than 100 books and lived to the age of 84.
It was quite a life and makes for quite a story, if an unlikely subject to attract the attention of Edmund White, author of superb novels such as A Boy's Own Story (1982), his magnificent lament, The Farewell Symphony (1997), and The Married Man (2000). One of the most consistently interesting of contemporary US writers, White is a natural stylist. Having resided for a long time in Paris, he is now settled in New York, and during the course of his career has developed an outsider-insider voice closer to Paul Theroux than the more obvious comparison of Gore Vidal.
White's semi-autobiographical work has concentrated on chronicling the emotional turmoil of the gay experience. Aside from the grace of his prose, which is elegant and effortless, it was he who proved that gay fiction belonged in mainstream literature. Fanny: A Fiction, camp, funny, slightly outrageous and very different, is an engagingly offbeat performance closer to other White novels such as Caracole (1985), with shades of Peter Carey.
At the centre of the story is Trollope's whirlwind relationship with Frances Wright, "Fanny", the pioneering Scots feminist who stormed into the Trollope household and paraded a new rhetoric. It was the age of revolution and in addition to the politics of state was the politics of gender. Fanny Wright was a feminist in need of disciples and she found one, albeit it only for a while, in the form of Fanny Trollope.
This novel is presented in the form of a gossipy, unpolished manuscript, found by Trollope's publishers after her death, and published with an eye more to profit than to the enduring reputation of a dead writer. It is the first of many jokes perpetrated by White, who appears to have had immense fun writing this romp.
Old Mrs Trollope opens her account in a sufficiently formal and respectful tone:
Now that her life is over I have decided to write it. To be sure I knew her only for a few intense years, but our relationship was central to both of us, if only to indicate the direction each of us did not choose to take. We spent time together on the high seas and in the United States (which she admired and I despised). We seldom agreed on anything and her followers, if there be any left, will doubtless question my right to be her Boswell.
Initially presented as a biography, it quickly degenerates into a comic attempt at score-settling, written by an old woman who briskly insists she is too busy to spend much time on research. White makes obvious the level of friction that is to fuel the work, which is written in a racy conservational style that, according to Trollope, who appears not to have harboured many delusions about her literary gifts, is her natural voice at work.
Modest she may be, yet she is aware of her power to amuse, and it is this quality that confers lightness and energy to her ramblings. A mother of six, married to an infuriating husband, she is also clear-eyed about her appeal as a woman, and in one of the most poignant passages in the book describes looking up from a table of animated conversation to discover a ravaged old woman peering at her:
I suddenly saw a funny little snaggle-toothed old woman with ratty hair peering out at me from the shadows and I wondered who could it be, had they let the peasants in to gawk? Until I realized with a start it was me . . . I had been so absorbed in the brilliant company . . . that I had entirely forgotten the sad reality of me.
Fanny Wright's life of, as Trollope presents it, free love and mistakes, is a tale of Utopia adrift. Dogged feminist though she is, her actions are repeatedly determined by her man of the moment. And according to Trollope, Wright had her share of famous men, from Lafayette onwards. Once in the US, Wright turns her attentions, or ambitions, to the social circle of George Washington. And so it goes, heroine or wanton, who or what exactly is Fanny Wright? None of it really matters. Indeed, in a seance, Wright denies everything from the grave. However haphazard a biographer Trollope in her dotage proves to be, a vivid sense of the shared life and times of two headstrong women emerges. Particularly colourful is the account of their crazed trip to the US: "My husband opposed the voyage to the last and finally, broken on the wheel of my wheedling, gave in only five days before our departure."
Even at his most explicitly candid, White has always retained a captivating elegance and allows his chatty narrator many instances of this elegance, "a ship voyage is a long tedium stretched out between two panics - departure and arrival". For all her focus on Wright, who does emerge as a humourless, dour obsessive of much, albeit wayward, moral force, Trollope is in fact telling her own story, which is a tale of domestic hardship, real poverty, ailing and dead children and suppressed regret.
White evokes a sense of the time. Famous personages from 19th-century history and literature wander through Trollop's memories and the chaos of New Harmony. It is a book of snapshots and a great deal of talk. White attempts to balance the old world against the new, the conventional with the radical, dreams with failure.
This is not the novel one might have expected of Edmund White, but it is playful and barbed. Few period pieces are as capable of shaking off accusations of pastiche or self-seriousness. This year's ultimate summer read, Fanny: A Fiction is like a giant ice-cream to be consumed at speed and enjoyed long after the final page. As old Mrs Trollope assures us, although never a beauty, she was always good company - and she is.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Fanny: A Fiction. By Edmund White, Chatto & Windus, 323p, £16.99