The Reading List again hangs its head in shame. A correction in last week’s issue contained a doozy of a mistake itself: It is not true, as we said, that in the last paragraph of Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, the hapless newspaperman Boot of the Beast gets cannibalized. In the first place, Boot of the Beast appears only in Waugh’s Scoop; the English protagonist of Black Mischief is none other than the classic Waughian reprobate, Basil Seal. And it is Basil Seal’s fiancee, Prudence, who is made into a human stew that Basil actually ingests in the last paragraph of the book.
All thanks and apologies to Michael Kelly of Washington, D. C., Terence E. Ryan of Danbury, Ct., and Jerry Brown of Potomac, Md., who caught us out in the post-modernist act of committing an error in the course of apologizing for a previous error.
In honor of this week’s editorial about Newt Gingrich and the unfair charges against him, we recommend two books by one of the Reading List’s favorite authors, Anthony Trollope, who wrote masterfully about the experience of being charged with an offense that the accused did not commit.
The Last Chronicle of Barset may be Trollope’s greatest work, the stunning and sobering portrait of the impoverished clergyman Josiah Crawley and how his pride makes it impossible for him to defend himself adequately when he is accused of theft. Though Trollope does not usually reach such heights, the grandeur of Crawley’s weakness makes him a towering literary figure.
Phineas Redux is the fifth book in Trollope’s six-novel Palliser cycle, which together surely make up the best British novel about politics and Parliament. In Phineas Redux, the idealistic young Irish member of Parliament we met in Phineas Finn finds himself accused of murder, all because he was wearing the same kind of raincoat as the true murderer and is fingered for the crime by the thick Lord Fawn. Sadder and wiser after his acquittal, Phineas is at last ready to make a wonderful marriage to Mme. Max Goesler, the Jewish widow whom Shirley Robin Letwin describes as the “ideal gentleman” in her seminal study, The Gentleman in Trollope.
