Man Is Wolf to Man: Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More

In Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, the resident genius of King Henry VIII's court is the novel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel's genius is in choosing to tell the story of the English Reformation and its attendant personal and political turmoils through Cromwell's perspective. Does Mantel's view of Cromwell reflect accurately the reality of Cromwell's character? It's impossible to say with certainty, but the portrait she displays here is nonetheless convincing, and in it we see Cromwell as the central figure who takes England from its backward-looking feudal past and propels it headlong toward its future. Through Mantel's novel, we see what exactly is at stake here, and though religion is the mechanism of the social and political change at work, religion is ultimately only a part of what's going on at this historical moment. Wolf Hall presents nothing less than the story of the formation of the modern world: Cromwell is a self-made man, a prototype of the modern man, and his work is ingeniously devoted to breaking the stranglehold of authoritarian tradition. It takes a little bit of authoritarianism, of course, to do such a thing, and Cromwell is ready just for that.

What Mantel does--and what Shakespeare's Henry VIII and Richard Bolt's A Man for All Seasons do not do--is to present Cromwell as a fully realized human being. Cromwell, a prodigiously talented linguist, financier, and power broker, is a sharp and at times Machiavellian critical thinker, a pragmatist who is at times ruthless. He can both endure beatings and give them out, but he is also a man with heart--one who takes in urchins in need of a home, one who cares deeply for his family and grieves mightily but quietly at their loss, one who is sympathetic to heretics whose only crime is that they want the people to be able to read the Gospels in their native tongue. Cromwell has a heart, but it does not malign his character to say that at times he has to override his feelings to serve his duty. Mantel has based her depiction of Cromwell on historical research, but more importantly there is an idea underlying her development of his character, an idea that is illustrated in the conflict between Cromwell and Thomas More.

Many accounts of this era in British history paint Thomas More as the icon of conscience, as the moral exemplar in a time of great corruption. Mantel, however, will have nothing to do with such notions. She pits Cromwell and More against each other, but they are not so diametrically opposed here that they don't have some room to move around; though enemies, they seem to realize that the paths they tread are parallel, though moving in opposite directions. To define these antagonists more fully, Mantel plays up the background of the two figures: Cromwell the son of a notoriously violent and crude blacksmith/brewer, More the educated child of some status and privilege whose humanism stops shy of admitting the actual masses of humanity who surround him. Cromwell is of the people, More above them. In Mantel's fiction, Cromwell remembers a childhood encounter with his future nemesis, and this event sets a pattern for future interaction between the two: when young Cromwell works as a serving boy in the house where More takes his studies, the young scholar refuses to discuss with his future rival the contents of a book he is reading. It is telling as well that Cromwell remembers the incident very clearly, More not at all.

Beyond class and background, though, More is set here as a man of conscience, certainly, but the novel raises the question--in such a way that the reader will never forget it--what good is conscience if the thing that it defends is crooked, outmoded, or merely false? It's hard not to think of the certainty that propels our modern day religious extremists--Islamic terrorists, the Texas Board of Education--when thinking of how More is portrayed here. Mantel captures the sum of More's character through Cromwell's thoughts after an encounter with More early in the novel:

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 then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. (32)

Cromwell lays it all out in plain, nearly undeniable terms in a later encounter with More:

Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. (463)

Cromwell himself presents with a slippery conscience--not a weak one, but one that is accustomed to ambiguity. It's not that the ends justify the means for Cromwell, but rather that ends and means are sometimes hard to separate. All of which is to say that Cromwell inhabits a moral world that is shot through with uncertainty, with gray areas. Cromwell's moral world looks familiar to us. As such, Wolf Hall continually suggests itself as a parable of modern politics. It could replace All the King's Men in that regard.

And what of the king that Cromwell serves? (It is worth remembering that he is the same king that More served until religious matters got in the way; had Pope Clement decided otherwise on Henry's request for an annulment to his marriage, More might never have gone to the chopping block.) No doubt, Henry is true to the notions we already have of him: he is vain, self-important, lustful. But he is also tender at times and charismatic. More importantly, Cromwell the pragmatist says,

If he were oppressive, if he were to override Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and govern only for himself ... But he does not ... so I cannot concern myself with how he behaves to his women. (366)

Of course, how Henry behaves to his women becomes a matter of national and even international importance, but Cromwell seems to see beyond the personal and find the political here: Why should England answer to Rome? It's true that the break with Rome will keep funds that were in the past headed toward the Vatican at home instead, which serves Henry's greed but also serves the overall good of the state. What Cromwell understands, what we of the fully modern world do not, is that at this era in history the good of the people is indeed to some extent necessarily reliant upon the good of the king. It's no secret as well that the Catholic Church was notoriously corrupt at the time; why should the wealth of the English people go to support corruption abroad?

Cromwell eventually comes to serve not only as the king's political advisor but as his conscience as well: "If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong," he says to the king, who responds: "It seems I prefer to hear it from you" (419). After Henry divorces Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn, Cromwell considers the child of Henry and Anne's union "the guarantee of no more civil war ... the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country" (367). That child--though not the boy Henry and Anne hoped for, but a girl, the Princess Elizabeth--would eventually be the monarch that brings England together for good. As Mantel has it, Henry and Anne conceive the child, Cromwell the nation. The Reformation--in England as elsewhere--was a bloody, remorseless process, but the solution was perhaps inevitable from the start: the formation of the secular state--the world we live in now.

More and Cromwell lived in a time that was caught between past and future. As Cromwell says in the novel: "It's England against Rome ... The living against the dead" (521). Mantel's approach to this material is riveting. You can't help but admire Cromwell after reading this novel, even if the compromises he makes threaten to tear him apart--literally as well as figuratively, given the punishments of the day--punisments that Cromwell evetually succumbs to himself. Knowingly, we wait for the moral and personal tragedy that is to be Cromwell's downfall and demise, but it doesn't come--not yet, not in Mantel's pages, which end with King Henry's second marriage in decline but not at the bottom. As Joan Acocella wrote in her review of Wolf Hall in the New Yorker, "Mantel should be congratulated for creating suspense about matters whose outcome we’ve known since high school. What’s going to happen to Anne Boleyn? we think." To anyone who has ever endured sighingly an episode of The Tudors or winced at the pat moral satisfaction of A Man for All Seasons, Wolf Hall is a revelation.

The Puritans in America

There are two basic ways of looking at the British expatriates whose New England adventures form the core of what is remembered of America's pre-revolutionary founding.

One perspective, that of the Pilgrims as the steeple-crowned progenitors of our national founding myth, Thanksgiving, has lost a lot of ground in our culture, and for good cause: there's little that is historically or culturally accurate about this popular perception of these so-called "freedom men" (as the perennially twinkle-eyed Ronald Reagan once referred to the Puritan John Winthrop) who knew they really had it made once they got their hungry mitts on what (according to Benjamin Franklin) should have been our national bird. This myth was begun innocently enough, in a way, by Abraham Lincoln as a way of boosting the nation's spirits in the midst of the Civil War, but the story seems to have taken on a life of its own, as myths are so often wont to do.

The second perspective, established, oddly enough, a few decades before the Civil War, has a more solid grounding in historical fact and is borne out, more or less, by the voluminous written legacy the Puritans left behind in the form or their sermons, journals, captivity narratives, letters, and histories. This is the notion of our pre-founding fathers as dour, grim-visaged killjoys who (counter to the Thanksgiving myth's claim that they came here seeking "religious freedom") were so narrowly and single-mindedly devoted to their retro-Old Testament God that any aberration in the theory or method of worship could be grounds for banishment. These are the Puritans (e.g., Cotton Mather) who referred to the burning of witches at the stake as "miracles," the Puritans (Mather again) who expressed delight when an earthquake struck Jamaica and killed lots of people there, those people being, from the Puritan perspective, iniquitous and therefore fully deserving of their own tragic demise. These people also branded Hester Prynne with a red-hot letter A on the front of her otherwise dun-colored smock for committing an offense that would, in a more sensible era, the narrator points out, be merely the subject of derision, not of legal action.

Or so the story goes. If Lincoln was the founder of the Thanksgiving myth, Nathaniel Hawthorne is the one who has done the most to popularize the opposite perspective. And though the 19th century Dark Romantic view of the Puritans can withstand a lot of scrutiny, it too needs to be qualified. A little bit, at least.

Think of all of the millions of American high school students (past and present) who have read The Scarlet Letter. Think of the millions more who were supposed to have read it and who, thanks to Cliff's Notes or SparkNotes, scraped by (just barely) on the unit test over the novel. The Scarlet Letter is, of course, greatly admired by students for its intricate prose style, which boasts such gems as this one, from the first chapter of the narrative proper: "Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand." This is, for Hawthorne, a short sentence, but it still manages to get its point across: even on a good day, these are clearly the most anal-retentive people in history. Hawthorne's narrator in The Scarlet Letter (who also happens to be named Nathaniel Hawthorne) takes every opportunity he can to point out how narrow-minded and somber these people are. Even the Puritan children are stiff and joyless, their insults hurled at Hester's daughter, Pearl, being marked by the stilted formality of children who aren't really children at all, having had anything that might resemble child-like joy sapped out of them by the dry stern-ness of their parental units. This Hawthornian perspective was in the 20th century the beneficiary of a supplemental booster thanks to Arthur Miller's The Crucible, read or supposedly read by a few million more students. The result is that there are more people who have read 19th and 20th century perspectives on the Puritans than there are people who have actually read the Puritan literature itself.

Clearly, the Hawthornian view does have much to go on: the banishments of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the Englishmen's land grab and the near-genocide of the Pequot Indians, the witch trials, and pretty much every sour word Cotton Mather ever committed to paper. Of particular bearing to Hawthorne was the role that his own great-ancestor played in the witch trials -- and Hawthorne's own subsequnt feelings of inherited guilt. These things have to be balanced out, though, with a broader sense of historical context. Back in Europe, Protestants and Catholics were still killing each other at every convenient opportunity, and the violence there makes Williams' and Hutchinson's banishments seem progressive by comparison. As far as the witch trials, we can compare the dozens of witch executions in 17th century America with hundreds or even thousands in Europe. The land grab was brutal, but it was no different from what Europeans were doing in every other corner of the globe, so is it fair to single the Puritans out for the common crime of the era? Should we expect them to be any different from their contemporaries elsewhere? Perhaps we should, because they claimed to be creating a "city upon a hill" here--a model Christian community for all the world to follow, populated by practitioners of mercy and goodness. We would have to be pretty historically naive, though, to assume that they ought to have succeeded without spilling blood.

All of which is to say that the English who gradually came to dominate New England in the 17th century were pretty typical Europeans of their day. They were not Americans; the concept of an American identity did not exist yet and wouldn't really for another hundred years.

What good can we say of these people? Despite the fact that they were religious zealots, they were also rationalists. They were thinking people, and they were highly literate, and they brought the art of self-reflection to a new level. That's why we remember them (and not those Virginians to the south) as the founders of American culture: the Puritans wrote obsessively both of the otherworldliness of divine truth and of the minutiae of the everyday. Sometimes the two worlds intersected when Divine Providence saw fit to suffer a sign bespeaking the nature of His will. For a people who believed in predestination but had no other way of assessing what God had in store for them, these omens became the currency of their spiritual lives. Max Weber understood as much when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Many Puritan women, even, were educated, such as the most charming and sly Puritan writer of them all, Ann Bradstreet, America's founding poetess. As an exercise in comparison, consider Ann Bradstreet's "Contemplations" and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature side-by-side. Doctrines aside, both documents make the same point about nature as evidence of God's greatness (Bradstreet) or of the greatness of the "Universal Being" (Emerson). For evidence of Bradstreet's aforementioned slyness and charm, see "The Prologue" or Bradstreet's poem dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.

The Puritans were also proto-democratic in their own way, although they would certainly not have identified themselves as such. They were sticklers for the rule of law, as all Englishmen not wearing a crown have tended to be. They were robust mercantilists. All that was necessary to add to the mix at that point was a healthy dash of Enlightenment-era belief in the inherent freedom of humankind, a tonic (or antidote, perhaps) to assuage the presumed guilt of original sin, and you could really go somewhere with that formula. As soon as the pendulum swings a little to the godless proto-scientific rationalist side, you have the necessary preconditions for the kind of ideas endorsed by the founding fathers of our political heritage. Much of American Enlightenment thought is reactionary to Puritan and Great Awakening theology, but there is also much in the American Enlightenment that draws on foundations established by the Puritans.

Though in many ways the bearers of a typically European worldview, the Puritans did have a couple of things that distinguished them, especially their willingness to risk life and fortune for the right to pursue their own collective (and narrowly defined) religious beliefs. And though they were not directly the founders of our nation politically, we are right to look to them as originators of so many qualities, good and bad, that still define America today.

Books I Read in 2009

Othello, William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
"Master Harold" ... and the boys, Athol Fugard
Netherland, Joseph O'Neill
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allen Poe
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petersen
The Street, Ann Petry
Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare
Native Son, Richard Wright
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John Le Carre
No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
Dispatches, Michael Herr
Going After Cacciato, Tim O' Brien
Atonement, Ian McEwan
Saturday, Ian McEwan

Of these 34 books, I had already read 18 of them at least once.

Poor Players

The production of Macbeth that I saw performed recently at the University of Kansas was noteworthy for a couple of things: the over-the-top Disney witch quality of the Lady Macbeth performance and the curious absence of anything resembling even a modestly gory spectacle. And what is Macbeth -- perhaps the first horror story of the modern era -- without a little spectacle? The Lady Macbeth bit might have worked with a little more blood, more brains and guts and "gory locks."

There was one moment, though, that made the audience gasp -- the moment in Act 5 when Macbeth responds to the news of Lady Macbeth's death: "She should have died hereafter." So sharp and callous was the tone of delivery that everyone present -- mostly high school students, some of them my own -- could feel the sting of it.

Though there was a certain power to it, this delivery is not consistent with the way I read Macbeth. The Folger edition of the play glosses the line so: "she would inevitably have died sometime; or, perhaps, she ought to have died later." It's impossible to know exactly what Shakespeare intended; the context could lead to either interpretation. I have always preferred the latter reading, though, in part because it corresponds with my understanding of Macbeth's character (and of his relationship with Lady Macbeth) and partly because of the dramatic heft that this reading adds to the play's finale. Seen the latter way, this moment carries with it a crushing irony that finally and completely devastates Macbeth's spirit shortly before his own demise.

Immediately preceding the announcement of this tragic bit of news, Macbeth muses to himself: "I have almost forgot the taste of fears. ... Direness ... Cannot once start me." The lines that follow, then, can serve one of two purposes: to reinforce the notion that Macbeth is utterly dead at heart, that nothing can provoke him -- and thus he responds with coldness to his wife's death; or to set the stage for an ironic reversal: Macbeth has enough humanity buried within him to feel this last and ultimate blow. Hemmed in by enemy forces, harried by the knowledge that he has no heir, deprived of any rest or comfort, Macbeth can only keenly be aware of the fact that all that he has done -- what he knows will result in the eternal forfeiture of his soul -- he has done for his childless wife. He has bloodied his hands at her bidding. Either he sees her here for the masterful manipulator that she is and thus repudiates her or the love that he bears for her -- a doomed, even tormented love -- achieves its apex and terminus here: the last scrap of meaning that the world could have for Macbeth is now gone forever.

We have already by this point seen Malcolm and Donalbain's grief (truncated by the necessity of circumstance) at their father's murder, and we have seen Macduff's near-paralyzing grief at the announcement of the murder of his wife and children. In the Shakespearean mode of extensive parallelism in language, event, and theme, it is fitting then that the architect of these griefs would himself be the recipient of such bad news of his own. If Macbeth does convey a sense of near-overwhelming grief here, the emotive dynamic of the play's final act is thus enhanced through this irony: the reaver's own bereavement. Thus this moment becomes the core structural-thematic antithesis of the play.

There can be no definitive reading of Macbeth's "tomorrow and tomorrow" speech and the two lines that lead to it, but we can say a few things with certainty. First, this speech -- Macbeth's most famous -- is certainly provoked by Lady Macbeth's death. That fact is momentous in itself; whether he is immune even to the horror of his wife's death or whether he is nearly blown down by it, whether she should have died later or would have died anyway, Macbeth is at this moment confronted with a visitation of mortality that affects him more than any other in the play (barring his own pending death). Thus, second, the announcement directly provokes the most profoundly nihilistic speech in Shakespeare -- indeed, it is hard to find its equal for nihilistic vision in the history of our language. Third, from this moment on Macbeth truly has no further capacity for emotion: it's all been spent on this speech. Shortly after this moment, he compares himself to the bear at the stake: the only thing driving him at this point is the base animal instinct to survive. He has no personal motive to prick him on by this point: his kingdom is certainly lost, his queen dead, his throne never to be graced by heir of his own.

Our alternatives, then, are to read a flat trajectory into Act 5 or to convey a sense of the complex dynamics of character and event. One thing we can say about Shakespeare is that he rarely gives us a simple, unambiguous character, good or bad. Macbeth is a tragic figure, and to feel the tragedy of his undoing we need to see what makes him human. His love for Lady Macbeth is precisely that mark of the human that we need to see in him.

The Bottom of Things

Bottom is a key figure in Shakespeare because the generosity of Shakespeare's humanism is what is at stake in the reading of his character.

Is the synesthesia in the passage commonly referred to as "Bottom's Dream" simply the mark of an idiot? Or is it an imperfect but endearing expression of the vision of one whose senses have been overwhelmed--positively--by the richness of his experience, the experience that life has to offer even the meanest of us?

Shakespeare rarely extends his humanist vision to the lowly among his creations, and there's nothing in the text of the play that directly suggests that Bottom's dream should be an ennobling one--Bottom becomes an ass even in fancy. But I have seen actors perform the speech with an utterly convincing sense of wonder and self-expression befitting much better words than the jumble that falls out of the character's mouth, and each time I have been touched by the vision presented. Which is the true, the genuine reading?

Shakespeare won't tell, and I'm sure that he would have been incredulous could he have known that people would be talking this over nearly four hundred years after his death.

"By Divers Meanes Men Come Unto a Like End"

"Surely, man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers, and wavering subject: it is very hard to ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement upon him."

--Montaigne

No Country for Old Men

One thing is apparent from the start of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men: the pace of the book is rapid-fire, and it won't take long to burn through it. There is certainly an entertainment value to No Country for Old Men that is undeniable, even if the novel is not without its flaws.

McCarthy is our nation's foremost living chronicler of the violence and depravity of the American West. Set in 1980, No Country for Old Men draws on the themes from McCarthy's Old West novels but animates them with a more contemporary crime-drama aesthetic. The disregard for human life that accompanied the westward expansion has become in this novel the disregard for human life that accompanies the drug trade from Mexico, and the action of the novel recounts Llewelynn Moss's tragic attempt to get away with a briefcase full of somebody else's money. (Who exactly the money, orphaned after a drug deal gone awry, belongs to is a question that cannot be answered in any simple terms.) As Moss's unstoppable pursuer, Anton Chigurh is another embodiment of McCarthy's The Judge, from 1985's Blood Meridian, still McCarthy's best (and most disturbing) novel. Chigurh is perhaps more human than the quasi-mystical Judge, but both characters relentlessly pursue an ethic of violence that McCarthy uses to convey an Old Testament message that is central to his work: that violence is one of the mechanisms that animates the world, that no matter how civilized we may become the specter of it will always pursue us.

Ultimately, what is most appealing about the novel is the off-center dynamic between the characters. Moss may be at the center of the action here, but what really gives the novel shape is the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who stands at the periphery of events throughout the novel, but who is rattled by them as surely as the reader is. In this way, McCarthy uses Bell as a stand-in for the reader. Just as we bear witness to this story of harrowing bloodshed, so does Bell, whose faith in simple goodness is sorely abused by what he sees. McCarthy might be suggesting that we are as powerless to stop the violence of the world as Bell is to stop the violence that takes place in his Texas border county. There is a certain conservatism, perhaps apolitical in nature, that pervades McCarthy's work. In McCarthy's view of the universe, nothing ever really changes. We're still taking scalps; we just don't put them on display anymore.

Most poignantly, Bell, a representative of law, order, and civilization, comes to realize that the only reason he makes it out of this situation alive is that he is utterly ineffectual to stop any of this violence. He doesn't register even as a blip on the bad guys' radar screen. The life and death drama might as well take place out of the law's jurisdiction; the citizens Bell is elected and paid to protect die on his watch. McCarthy presents Bell to us as the pinnacle of what we might call "decency" -- honesty, simplicity, earnestness, fortitude -- but he is ineffectual in the wake of this evil. Thus the title phrase, lifted from Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium," takes on new meaning in the context of Bell's internal crisis. Is there any country anywhere that can serve as a fit and proper home for a man who hopes to cling to a vision of decency that he suddenly realizes is obsolete? Obsolete perhaps because it was only an illusion to begin with.

There's much to admire in this novel, but there are also some moments that are cringe-worthy. The prose in the third-person narrative segments is strong: the images are leaner than those of other McCarthy novels, the action more streamlined, the dialogue more fluent much of the time, but as the novel progresses some of the dialogue becomes too heavily freighted with the kind of pseudo-philosophical rambling that bogged down No Country's predecessors, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. The third-person chapters in the novel are punctuated by shorter italicized first-person segments, told from Bell's perspective. Some of Bell's passages devolve into a kind of aw-shucks cornpone that clashes jarringly with the rest of the narrative. Many of these segments could have been excised, the result being a stronger novel.

As is, No Country for Old Men is a good novel, but cutting a few dozen pages would have made it great.