Hilary Mantel, 2009

When I was in grad school in the late 1990s, I once had to list my proposed areas of specialization, and I cheekily concluded my list with “21st-century literature”.  The professors, who seemed not to have understood that the primary goal of all communication is to get laughs, perplexedly replied, what?  What could this possi­bly mean?  Why, the twenty-first century hasn’t yet started!  Thus there is no twenty-first century literature to study!  So how can one specialize in it?  How?  And so, forced to treat my answer with a bit more seriousness than I’d intended, I explained that I didn’t have much interest in applying the critical apparatus I was developing to obscure tomes of centuries past, now read only by other scholars⁠—the twenty-first century was right around the corner, and I wanted to write about stuff hot off the presses!  And the thing is, I actually wasn’t bullshitting about that⁠—though I knew I’d have to start working on my dissertation before any twenty-first century literature was published, I actually did want to focus on texts that were new and popular.  As it turned out, by the time the twenty-first century rolled around I had already left academia.  But now enough time has passed that I occasionally run across lists purporting to run down the best literature of our no longer quite so young century.  And at the top of several of these lists has been Wolf Hall.

So even though none of my visitors recommended it, when I happened across it in a Little Free Library box, I put my main reading list on hold and started in on this novel, which not only won the Booker Prize but whose sequel also won the Booker Prize.  Clearly this book was serious business!  Yet, at first, it didn’t really seem like it⁠—it read like historical fiction.  Now, just taking those two words as an adjective/noun pair, they could apply to any work of imagination that takes place in an earlier era than that of its composition.  But as a set phrase, “historical fiction” is a commercial genre distinct from literary fiction.  Defining literary fiction is something I used to have to do quite a bit as part of my job teaching AP Literature, as it was crucial to the final component of the AP Literature test, Question 3.  The prompt for that question asks students to write about the way a particular story element contributes to the meaning of a work of fiction.  Students don’t get to choose the element⁠—it’s hardwired into the prompt.  For instance, one recent test asked students to write about “a character’s sense of lacking something important in life”.  Another asked students to write about indecision.  My last high school class had to write about “a literal or unconven­tional house”, examples of the latter being “hotels, hospitals, monasteries, or boats”.  What students do get to choose is the work of fiction to write about.  The prompt offers up some sug­gested works⁠—several dozen of them, these days⁠—but students aren’t restricted to this list.  From 2002 to 2019, though, the prompt did provide a restriction: if students did select a work not on the list, it had to be one “of comparable literary merit” to those on it.  Which prompts the question: what is “literary mer­it”?  Whenever my students asked that question, it seemed to me that, at least for their purposes, the safest answer was to see what the test itself implied that it meant.  One aspect seemed to be a certain level of artistry, given that Question 2 gives students a passage from a piece of prose fiction and asks them to write about the literary techniques employed therein.  And another, given that Question 3 always asked about “the meaning of the work as a whole”, was an emphasis on theme.

By contrast, consider The Tudors, a TV show I wrote about, eek, apparently a dozen years ago now.  I liked The Tudors.  But its project was to take the historical record and bring it to life.  Here’s a line in a history book⁠—can we spin it out into a long dramatic scene with modern dialogue?  Let’s put some faces to these names!  And above all, let’s turn these historical figures into characters.  Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon, Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell… what were these people like?  How did they act?  What were their traits?  Of course, this may not seem helpful in drawing a distinc­tion between the likes of The Tudors and literary fiction, given that I’ve seen it asserted (e.g., here) that the key difference between genre fiction and literature is that the former is about plot and the latter about character.  Hell, I’ve even seen myself cited (e.g., here) as an advocate of that view, as an old version of my Pattern 15 explicitly stated that science fiction tended to lack literary merit because its characters so rarely came off as fully realized human beings with unique life stories.  But the rise of fandom demonstrates that a focus on character does not in and of itself make a text literary.  Isn’t fandom about “stanning” this character or that, dividing up into affiliative “teams” when two characters are rivals, “shipping” characters into “headcanon” romances, and fleshing out minor characters in fanfic sagas?  You don’t have to believe in the old chestnut that great minds con­cern themselves with ideas, average minds with events, and small minds with people to see that none of that has much to do with artistry or thematic depth.

As it turns out, Wolf Hall is about the same people as The Tu­dors.  This time the protagonist is not Henry VIII but Thomas Cromwell, the king’s right-hand man for most of the 1530s.  Hil­ary Mantel was a bit more faithful to actual events than the Tudors team, but there’s a reason that the TV show cheerfully played fast and loose with chronology: history can make for a shapeless narrative, and while the blurbs at the front of my copy of Wolf Hall promised crisp plotting, the organizing principle of the story turned out to be little more than “here’s stuff that happened to Thomas Cromwell in the order it happened”.  What’s the point of turning his life story into a novel, other than the exercise of putting some flesh on the bones of history?  One clue is that it’s not his entire life story.  spoilers for
    Meek’s Cutoff When I taught plot to my sophomores, I showed them the movie Meek’s Cutoff, in which a group of pioneers on the Oregon Trail discover that their guide has gotten them lost in the desert, leaving them in grave danger of dying of thirst.  They capture a Cayuse scout and debate about whether to kill him, as the guide wants, or whether to try to get him to lead them to water, knowing that he could just as easily lead them in­to an ambush.  The argument builds up to a showdown in which Emily Tetherow, a quiet young woman in a pink dress, wins a standoff with the guide and averts the murder of the Cayuse man, who leads them over the hill to… well, we never find out, because the film fades to black and then up come the closing credits.  The teaching point here was that leaving the fates of the pioneers unresolved demonstrates that what happened to them was not the story the filmmakers were trying to tell⁠—the story of Meek’s Cutoff is about how Emily Tetherow becomes the leader of the group, and since that story was now finished, so was the movie.  Wolf Hall ends with the execution of Thomas More.  For the vast majority of the book, More was just one of a legion of supporting characters, seemingly no more important than Thom­as Wriothesley or Stephen Gardiner.  But apparently Mantel be­lieved that with More dead, her story had been told.  And that was when it finally occured to me: wait, is this novel a response to A Man for All Seasons, then?  If so, I should probably watch that!

So this is a hagiographical treatment of the downfall of Thomas More.  I was about to delete “hagiographical” and find a word that was less hyperbolic, but it occurred to me that it probably is the most fitting word for someone who was literally canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.  This isn’t really about More the fanatical Catholic, though⁠—there’s a plot thread about More refusing to allow his daughter Meg to marry a Protestant, but we don’t see him burning heretics as we do in both Wolf Hall and The Tudors.  No, this is Thomas More as a lone man of in­tegrity in a hopelessly corrupt world.  He turns down a bribe; he declines to participate in the patronage system, turning away an ambitious young man who has come begging for a position at court; and of course he refuses to take an oath acknowledging the king’s supremacy over the pope in spiritual matters and the validity of the annulment of the king’s first marriage.  He’s also progressive, educating his daughters in the same manner as his son, and clever, finding ways to be true to his principles without running afoul of the letter of the law, forcing his enemies to stoop to perjury in order to convict him.  Chief among these enemies is Thomas Cromwell, depicted as a porcine bully.

Wolf Hall, continued:

After watching A Man for All Seasons, I had a much better sense of what Mantel might have been trying to accomplish with Wolf Hall.  It sure seemed like Mantel’s project here was to flip the script of the More hagiography, telling the same story with More as the villain and Cromwell as the unlikely hero.  Take More’s cel­ebrated education of his daughters.  Wolf Hall gives us a Crom­well who adores his daughters as well, and we see him trying to find a tutor to teach Greek to his brilliant elder daughter Anne⁠—but both Anne and little Grace are carried off by the sweating sickness, making it understandable how More’s relationships with his own girls might be a sore spot for Cromwell.  Obviously, it’s not Thomas More’s fault that his daughters survived and Cromwell’s didn’t.  But Mantel casts More’s affection for his daughter Meg in particular and his pride in her erudition, his “keen[ness] to show off his darling”, not as heartwarming but as an ongoing slight to his illiterate second wife, Alice, whom by Mantel’s account he treats as a household drudge.  Wolf Hall is generally on the side of people like Alice, and so is its Cromwell.

But what does it mean to be “like Alice” in this context?  It’s not really about privilege: Alice More was the daughter of a knight, and her first husband was a rich merchant, making her a wealthy widow when Thomas More married her.  But she isn’t More’s favorite⁠—Meg is.  On the flip side, Thomas More was not a noble­man⁠—Wolf Hall acknowledges that “More’s people are city peo­ple, no grander”⁠—but he nevertheless spent most of his life as a favorite: of the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom he served as a page; of the professors at Oxford, who admitted him at age four­teen; of learned circles across Europe, who toasted him and his friend Erasmus for their scholarship and wit.  And Mantel’s More uses the position that favor has bestowed upon him to be cruel.  “There’s something sly in More,” the novel explains, “he enjoys embarrassing people.”  For Alice, this might mean mocking her weight⁠—in Latin, so his companions laugh at her but she doesn’t even know why.  For his daughter-in-law, this might mean an object lesson in coveting material things: she longs for a pearl necklace, and More presents her a gift box that rattles enticing­ly… but turns out to be filled with dried peas.  And of course, this domestic cruelty is just a microcosm of his campaign against what he considered heresy, burning and, at least in the novel, torturing Protestants.

I looked at some of the discussion surrounding Wolf Hall, and quite a bit of it interpreted the novel as a strike on behalf of Team Protestant in a battle still raging after five hundred years.  Hilary Mantel rejected the Catholicism in which she was raised, some contended, and now she’s written a novel whose primary villain is a Catholic saint, portraying him as England’s Torque­mada while sympathizing with his chief adversary, Henry VIII’s hatchet man, Thomas Cromwell.  And this seems like the point at which I should note that I actually rewatched the episodes of The Tudors that cover the same period as this novel, and in those episodes Cromwell is portrayed as a fervent Protestant.  But in Wolf Hall Cromwell’s beliefs are a lot more nebulous.  And I think that brings me to what I ultimately took away from the novel.  Remember, in A Man for All Seasons, More is defined primarily as a man of integrity.  “Integrity” means strict adherence to a personal code of ethics; it comes from the same root as “integer”, a root that means “whole” or “complete”, and carries the sense that you are fully yourself, with no corrupting admixtures.  To behave with integrity thus requires a strong sense of self⁠—to know, in a phrase I first heard from the Mormons but which ap­parently made its way into Michelle Obama speeches, “who you are and what you stand for”.  The Thomas More of A Man for All Seasons fits that bill.  One of the movie’s best-known quotes is firmly focused on the self: More is asked why he’s willing to lose everything for the sake of his belief in papal supremacy, and he replies, “What matters is that I believe it, or rather, no, not that I believe it but that I believe it.”  That is, what is important to him is that he not contravene the beliefs that make up his self-defini­tion.  When I went looking for reviews of A Man for All Seasons, many of the hits were for those text summary sites that my stu­dents were so fond of back in my days teaching high school, and since those sites all seem to copy each other, they were unani­mous that Thomas More is “a man whose sense of self is set in stone”.  That is precisely what Mantel’s Cromwell finds so off-putting about More:

He never sees More […] without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you?  Or what’s wrong with me?  Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before?  Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more.

More’s vaunted integrity, to Cromwell’s mind, makes him rigid: if to deviate from your sense of self is to lose your integrity, and to change your mind is to deviate from your sense of self, then you can never admit that you were wrong on any point.  More thinks that the word ἀγάπη should be rendered in English as “charity”; William Tyndale, in his translation of the Bible, instead uses the word “love”; More relentlessly persecutes those who side with Tyndale, for they are Wrong, and that cannot be borne.  “He would chain you up, for a mistranslation,” Cromwell muses. “He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.”  And the integrity that drives More to the taking of lives doesn’t even really exist, to Cromwell’s mind, for More sets it aside when dealing with Protestants: “More says it does not matter if you lie to heretics,” Cromwell grumbles. “It is legitimate, and indeed More goes fur­ther; it is blessed.” Even when not behaving as an inquisitor, More is, in Cromwell’s eyes, a hypocrite at his core.  “Thomas More here will tell you, I would have been a simple monk, but my father put me to the law. I would spend my life in church, if I had the choice. I am, as you know, indifferent to wealth. I am devoted to things of the spirit. The world’s esteem is nothing to me,” Cromwell says, before asking, “So how did he become Lord Chan­cellor? Was it an accident?” 

Cromwell, in Wolf Hall, serves as More’s opposite number less because of the battle between Protestants and Catholics, or be­cause when they first met More was an archbishop’s page and Cromwell was a street urchin, than because More’s sense of self is set in stone while Cromwell’s is made of shadows.  He’s Mister Nobody from Nowhere, and he chuckles at the frustration other courtiers express when they “can’t fit my life together”.  Mantel does fill in his past for us⁠—regularly thrashed by his father, a mercenary in foreign armies, rescued from the streets of Flor­ence and taught the banking trade⁠—but this is all speculative, as the historical record is patchy when it comes to Cromwell’s early life.  Even when he is an established figure among the highest circles, he remains a shapeshifter, “at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard”.  He served as the closest advisor to the cardinal who for years acted as the power behind the throne, and then after the power in the throne sent that car­dinal to his downfall, Cromwell somehow managed to become the closest advisor to that king.  “You were born to understand me, perhaps,” Mantel’s Henry tells him.  Yet the understanding doesn’t go both ways.  Cromwell remains “unknowable, incon­struable” to all, Cromwell himself not excepted.  The only one who thinks he has Cromwell figured out is, of course, Thomas More.  But “I shall not indulge More,” Cromwell thinks, “or his family, in any illusion that they understand me. How could that be, when my inner workings are hidden from myself?”

The question that infuriates so many in both Wolf Hall and A Man for All Seasons is why More, who claims to want no part of martyrdom, does not follow the same path he puts his family on and take the oath that will save him from execution.  Conversa­tions in both works suggest that, as much as he fears the pain of torture, he fears the eternal pain of damnation more, and genu­inely believes that if he retains his integrity, paradise awaits at the stroke of the headman’s blade.  It’s so hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that a genius could genuinely believe that on top of the sky is a place where you go if you’ve done nothing wrong, and down in the ground is a place where you go if you’ve been a bad boy.  Heaven and hell aren’t real.  Wolf Hall suggests that More actually dies in order to preserve his sense of self⁠—and that what Cromwell understands, and More doesn’t, is that the self isn’t real either.  And, hey, you know what?  That sounds an awful lot like thematic depth to me!

(As for artistry⁠—I hope the quotes above, and below, give you a sense of the prose style, which is indeed marked by no small amount of said virtue.  However, Mantel has a bizarre stylistic quirk of referring to Cromwell as “he” even when she hasn’t used his name in ages.  Other men also get called “he” when it would be awkward not to do so, and thus there are times when Mantel wishes to use “he” to refer to Cromwell but realizes that it would be confusing to do so.  At which point she writes not “Cromwell” but “he, Cromwell”.  An example: “Suffolk, his blond beard brist­ling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick. Norfolk looks apprehensive, and as he turns over the cardinal’s possessions, it is clear that he ex­pects to find wax figures, perhaps of himself, perhaps with long pins stuck through them. The cardinal has done his feats by a compact with the devil; that is his fixed opinion. He, Cromwell, sends them away.”  It threw me out of the narrative every time.)

A postscript: Wolf Hall says of Cromwell that he “can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury”.  Does this not sound like the ἅνδρα πολύ­τροπον, the man of many twists and turns, of whom Homer asks his muse to tell the tale⁠—a man who at one point presents him­self as another Mister Nobody?  One of the foundational units of my literature classes was on ideology, and the primary text I used to introduce it was the Odyssey.  Specifically, I had my stu­dents read book nine, with the Cyclopes, an episode that demon­strates that Odysseus is, as Henry describes Cromwell, “as cun­ning as a bag of serpents”.  To the Greeks, little could be more admirable.  But the Romans fuckin’ hated that guy.  Cruel Ulixes!  Deceitful Ulixes!  Had he no honor?  No integrity?  Perhaps, in this light, A Man for All Seasons is a tribute to Roman virtues, and Wolf Hall a tribute to Greek ones.

As noted, for all that the conflict between Cromwell and More sheds light on Mantel’s project in Wolf Hall, it’s also just one thread in a sprawling, shaggy tapestry.  Mantel spends a fair bit more ink on Henry VIII’s effort to escape his marriage to Cath­erine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.  I mentioned earlier that Wolf Hall’s sympathies tend to lie with characters who are not the favorite.  Among Henry’s children, that means Mary, to whom Cromwell, while carrying out the king’s orders, is gentle enough that his son is astonished.  And among the children of Thomas Bo­leyn, the English ambassador to France, that means another Mary⁠—Anne’s older sister, the “kind little blonde, who is said to have been passed all around the French court before coming home to this one, scattering goodwill, her frowning little sister trotting always at her heels”.  This portrayal of Mary Boleyn is more or less in keeping with that in The Tudors, in which King Francis I points her out to Henry and calls her “my English mare, because I ride her so often”.  Her father instructs her to win the king’s favor, and in short order Henry is in his bedroom asking her, “What French graces have you learned?”, to which she re­plies thusly:  MATURE AUDIENCES  .  But Henry is soon on to his next mistress, and Anne learns that if she wishes to be the queen rather than a night’s diversion, she’ll have to to play hard to get.  Meanwhile, Mary disappears.  In Wolf Hall, she doesn’t.  She hangs around as part of Anne’s household, a young widow (her cuckolded husband having died of the sweating sickness) with two of the king’s unrecognized children to raise, reduced to the family doormat, doing her sister’s laundry and whatnot.  The only kindness she receives is from Cromwell, shocking enough to her that she floats the idea of marriage.  She may have earned a reputation in the French court as “every man’s hackney”, but perhaps an ugly commoner would like a pretty bride who will make him the king’s brother-in-law?  Cromwell demurs, seeing red flags waving wild­ly, but over time he becomes sufficiently attached to the Boleyn household as a whole that he acts as a go-between for Anne and the king.  But when Cromwell visits, Mary remains the one who steps outside with him and gives him the real scoop.  And so we see that when Anne is pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth I, Henry “is afraid to touch Anne” but “does not wish to resume his celibate life”, and so, Mary reports, Thomas Boleyn “finds he needs me again. God forbid the king should ride a mare from any other stable.”  Cromwell promises to try to get Henry to at least give her a pension for the services she is rendering the king every night.  “Does a dirty dishcloth get a pension?” Mary asks.

So with Mary Boleyn as a supporting character just as important in her own way as Thomas More, I figured that since I’d watched More’s movie, I’d check out Mary’s as well.  The Other Boleyn Girl covers the entire Boleyn saga, from the girls’ first time meet­ing the king to Anne’s beheading, in under two hours, so it moves at a breakneck pace, no pun intended.  As the title suggests, the angle here is to tell the story from Mary Boleyn’s perspective.  Much has been changed: Anne and Mary’s ages have been swapped, and this Mary has not only mastered no French graces but is as innocent as a lamb on her wedding night.  In fact, she is portrayed as rather slow and sheeplike throughout the film, which is otherwise stocked with cartoon villains.  In this version of the story, the grim, callous Duke of Norfolk sends his niece Anne to win the favors of the king, but her sassy approach back­fires and Henry takes a liking to simple Mary, who serves as his nursemaid after a hunting accident.  He calls Mary to court to serve as his mistress, and as he is the king, she cannot refuse.  He gets her pregnant, and cruel, ambitious Anne takes the opportu­nity to elbow Mary aside and become not just Henry’s mistress but his queen.  Unfortunately for Anne, the Henry of this movie is a rapacious monster, and the fact that she does not immediately provide him a male heir, but instead has a daughter and then a miscarriage, lands her a date with an executioner.  But she has one comfort: when Henry had caught wind that Anne had once briefly been married, he doubted Anne’s (false) protests that the marriage had never been consummated, and would only trust guileless Mary, who, despite Anne’s cruelty, came to her sister’s rescue and lied.  This led to a reconciliation between the two sis­ters, so Mary is by her sister’s side for the rest of the story: the court hearings on the annulment of the marriage of Henry and Catherine, the coronation of Anne, the birth of Elizabeth, the panic after the miscarriage… and ultimately, Mary is there in the crowd, serving as the face of love when Anne has her head struck off.  This would come as quite a surprise to the real Mary Boleyn, who had been banished from court after marrying William Staf­ford, a soldier of no great birth, and never saw Anne again.  Per­haps the real Mary is “the other Boleyn girl”, as she has different vital statistics, a different personality, and a different life story from this one.

My major required (and still requires!) a course in Shakespeare, and the one I took plowed through a couple dozen plays over the course of fifteen weeks.  One of the few we didn’t read was this one, Henry VIII.  So after reading Wolf Hall and watching many hours of Henry VIII-related media, I thought I’d finally see what Shakespeare had to say about this fuckin’ guy.  I wanted to see it on stage rather than just read it, but that took some doing, as almost no one performs it anymore; eventually I found a video of a 2010 performance at Shakespeare’s Globe, rebuilt after it burned down in 1613 due to cannon fire at a performance of, you guessed it, Henry VIII.  And it turns out that modern fire safety regulations aren’t the only reason that this is one of the most rarely staged plays of Shakespeare’s⁠—to the extent that it even is one of his, as he apparently wrote less than half of it.  Up above, I talked about stories driven by theme vs. stories driven by charac­ter; so far as I could tell from one viewing, this is neither.  It’s es­sentially an illustrated encyclopedia article ticking off a handful of notable episodes in Henry VIII’s rein: the execution of the Duke of Buckingham for treason (ascribed here to Wolsey’s male­faction); the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey (with a ham-handed speech penned by Fletcher: “Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition! By that sin fell the angels; how can man, then, the im­age of his maker, hope to win by it?”); the divorce from Catherine of Aragon that leaves Henry clear to marry the woman named here as “Anne Bullen”.  This in turn leads to the birth of Eliza­beth, at whose christening Thomas Cranmer gives a long pane­gyric about how awesome her reign is going to be, which is quite a thing given that it took the consecutive deaths of three other successors for Elizabeth to end up on the throne.  And there you go!  Happy ending!  And what happened to Henry and Anne after that, you ask?  Never you mind!

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