I’m away from home for the moment, so my newsletter schedule will be prone to some disruption for the coming week.
Why did I get this book?
Pure regret at having not read Hilary Mantel’s work before, which I resolved to correct after news of her death.
Is it what I thought it was?
It’s as great as many admirers of Mantel have said.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
If I ever teach my course on adaptations of history in creative work again, I’d love to teach this book, though I think it would so outshine most of what I would assign that it would be almost distorting to the rest of the course.
Quotes
I’d have to transcribe the whole book here to give a full account of the passages which caught my eye or delighted me. You never fully realize how astonishing great writing can be until you are thoroughly in the grasp of a great writer. I found myself quietly laughing with simple delight at the prose a good deal of the time. So I’ll limit myself to a few from the first third or so of the book.
“He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.”
“With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory.’ Show me where it says ‘relics, monks, nuns.’ Show me where it says ‘Pope’.”
“‘Right, Thomas Cromwell,’ she said. ‘Make a note of this. No strange Dutch drinks. No women. No banned preachers in cellars. I know what you do.’ ‘I don’t know if I can stay out of cellars.’ ‘Here’s a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don’t take him to a brothel.’”
“You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.”
“‘I will send some people,’ he says, ‘to sort out the kitchens. They will be Italian. It will be violent at first, but then after three weeks it will work.’”
“Too large a royal nursery can be encumbering to a king.”
“That was the way of the world: a knife in the dark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warnings which have worked themselves into flesh.”
“The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man’s daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it.”
“The king makes his way to his wife’s apartments. He moves in a perfumed cloud made of the essence of roses: as if he owns all the roses, owns all the summer nights.”
“The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.”
“There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree…or enter into the service of ancient families. Don’t try to go it alone, or they’ll think you’re pirates.”
“‘Not really my business,’ Cromwell says, ‘heretics’ books. Heretics abroad are dealt with abroad. The church being universal.’”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I’d don’t have a great deal to say about the book other than my profession of great pleasure in the reading of it. It did make me feel once again that though I know modern English history moderately well—it comes with the territory of studying societies that were subjected to British imperial rule—I always feel I should know earlier periods better than I do.
The course I mentioned above was one of the two I was teaching at the start of the pandemic, the semester where most colleges and universities left for spring break and then only came back together on Zoom. I think that made it a pretty mixed experience for the students and for me, so I don’t know how to think about teaching it again. But one of the major things we were thinking about was how to conduct research to support creative work that draws on history, and I kept thinking about that a lot while reading Wolf Hall—about how beautifully Mantel splits the difference between understanding Tudor England’s historical specificity and its accessible universality. One of the many decisions she makes that manages that balance so adroitly is the present-tense narration of Thomas Cromwell’s thoughts combined with a distinctive kind of free indirect speech that retreats for long stretches of dialogue—it takes you in and out of a historical frame where at times we are restricted to the way the world looks to these past individuals and at times wander quite happily outside of it—though never into the present omniscience of the historian, interpreting and assessing from the other side of time’s deep well. But in any event, you can see Mantel’s research praxis shining clearly all through the book—not just research into Cromwell’s life but into all the ways that his life has been previously written and imagined.
There may be comparable works but I was also taken at how well Wolf Hall creates an experiential sense of the Reformation and how it came into English life. Despite the fact that it centers on Thomas Cromwell, it doesn’t give us this history as some deed of a driven or masterful man, but instead as a kind of creeping flood tide moving up channels and riverways.
It always feels strange to be coming in so late on something that so many people have so long appreciated in such full and thoughtful ways—you end up having so many thoughts which are new to you but which you find on examination are simply the echoes of long-said sentiments. I suppose if you wait long enough—I think in this case it would take a generation or two—you can come new to something on the edge of being forgotten and feel pleasure in your own cleverness. In this case it’s more “and what was it that I was doing in 2009 or so such that the news of this book made no dent on my consciousness?”
I often feel a sort of envy, half-justifiable, half-irrational, at the ability of present writers to use the richness of European archives to illuminate individual lives in such fully human ways as far back as the 1400s. It always sets me to thinking about historical fiction that someone could write, perhaps on a sketchier archival basis, set in sub-Saharan Africa with some degree of comparable antiquity. There are some marvelous examples—Maryse Conde’s Segu, for example, which is a book I need to teach again soon. (Its length is an impediment for using it in many classes.) This last week, I lectured a bit about Sonni Ali and Askia Muhammed, the two major founding figures in the history of the Songhai Empire in the Middle Niger and I just kept thinking that it was a historical novel waiting to be written. (There are reasons why I think a writer from Mali, Niger or other West African nations might hesitate in the context of contemporary politics, since one of the major thematic dimensions in their history involves tensions over the role of Islamic clerisy and trans-Saharan traders in the rule of the cities and communities of the middle Niger, a history which is still very raw and relevant to the present.)
Of course, I envy you the chance to read it fresh. It’s hard to recreate how the book made me feel that first read, but you come close here. Maybe add in: Ok, that’s a different take on Thomas More. Or: Why am I not hating Cromwell? I have always detested Cromwell. This woman is some kind of genius to make me like Cromwell. And then I read the next book, which might be even better.