Leaves look pale

It’s hard to close a book like Bring Up the Bodies and leave the lustre and terror of that Tudor world behind. It’s hard, too, not to want to read ahead. I know what happens afterwards – Henry marries three more wives; his three surviving children each take a turn on the throne; it’s Boleyn’s daughter that gives her name to the next age. But I want Hilary Mantel to tell it to me again. I want the rich, breathless pulse of her voice, the turn of the seasons in her hands. Alas there’s only one more book to come: her story ends when Cromwell’s does, so Henry and his heirs are left to their own devices.

I almost wish some copycat would take up the story, giving us Elizabeth’s court in the same fashion. The one thing I felt wanting in Mantel’s world was what happened sixty years later: the great flourishing of English letters at the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. What’s missing in Cromwell’s ambit is the intoxication of lyric, longing, complex verse. Wyatt and Surrey are well enough in their way, but they are to Sidney and Shakespeare what betamax is to the ipad. The Elizabethans, given in Mantel’s manner, would be a treat. 

Yet nothing in my experience leads me to expect success from attempts to fictionalise poetry. To wit: Shakespeare in Love. Or worse: Anonymous. I’d better content myself with poetry unfiltered by fiction. So here’s a wintry sonnet from Shakespeare, number 97, which fits the season outside my window, and might as well stand for the desolation of leaving a lover as for finishing a good book.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

Tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings

I once took a class in watercolour painting. About the only thing I remember is that we learned the colour of shadows. The shadow of a green apple, for example, is not grey but blue; the shadow of an orange is violet, and so on. This strikes me as an apt image for the genius of Hilary Mantel: she can paint not only the things themselves but the colour of their shadows.

Her rendering of Tudor England, (anything but a still life), is deep and dense; not because she’s at pains to render every detail, but because she isn’t. Such is the vivacity of her recreation that when she writes “window” you picture lead-latticed casements without being told to. Glances through such windows are enough to suggest a totally different relationship to gardens, weather, herbs and crops. The materials of the Tudor world are very present: cold stone, embroidered silk, scented wood, air that’s damp, or clean, or plague-ridden. But the immaterial is equally present. Minds, spirits, consciences all straddling the break with Rome, the new gospel, the frailty of a divinely appointed king; it’s frightening how easily one acquiesces in the casual misogyny and debauchery of the court. Mantel’s characters, though necessarily fictive, bestride their world authentically. It’s the opposite of that strange quality that makes CGI animation never feel quite right, no matter how lifelike - figures look solid but seem weightless. Her figures, particularly her Cromwell, move in three dimensions, every movement fully weighted, every shadow faithfully coloured.

This, I think, is what sets her apart from the generality of historical fiction writers. Authenticity, far more than accuracy, is the real pull of successful historical fiction. It's fiction loosed in history, but not unmoored from truth. Fiction that kicks away the struts of accuracy without falling into error. This is what Shakespeare knew, when he shoved an actor onto the stage at the beginning of Henry V to deliver this prologue. It sounds like an apology for lack, but it's really a defense of the kind of imagination Mantel brings to her little kingdom.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i'the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

He's made the things that bring him near

Some while back I mentioned poet Christian Wiman. I like his work, and his story even more. In the space of a few years in his early thirties, he found God, fell in love and married, and was diagnosed with incurable blood cancer. He writes, as you’d imagine, with attention and poignancy, and, as you might not expect from a contemporary poet, with a good deal of investment in things like rhythm and structure. As a way into this poem, here’s a line or two from a biographical essay he wrote called “Love bade me welcome” (a quote from George Herbert): “I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought.” This poem, with its echo of Hopkins and its Herbertesque conceit, is called “Every riven thing”, a title which on its own tells multitudes about a view of the world.  

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made 
sing his being simply by being 
the thing it is: 
stone and tree and sky, 
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.

I that knew what harbour'd in that head

Yesterday I bought Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel's sequel to her 2009 smash hit Wolf Hall - and so far it's just as unputdownable as the original. She continues the story of Thomas Cromwell's ascendancy in the court of Henry VIII, with the same wild energy and gorgeous embodiments. See James Wood's review of both novels for a much better overview than I can give here. This is more by way of an introduction to this weekend's poem.

When I was reading Wolf Hall, you might remember, I posted a poem by Thomas Wyatt, a minor character but (at the time) a major poet. The other major poet from the early sixteenth-century was Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who died in 1547 at the venerable age of 30. Wyatt and Surrey were both published in Tottel's Miscellany, an anthology important in collecting and shaping the poetic experience of the early English Renaissance. They were precursors to Sidney and Spenser, who in turn precursed Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. This poem is Surrey's sonnet on the death of Wyatt - a touching tribute, and a fitting way to mark the lives of both. Fans of Midsummer Nights Dream should enjoy the reference to Pyramus and Thisbe in the final line.  

Divers thy death do diversely bemoan:
Some, that in presence of thy livelihed
Lurked, whose breasts envy with hate had swoln,
Yield Cæsar's tears upon Pompeius' head. 
Some, that watched with the murd'rer's knife,
With eager thirst to drink thy guiltless blood, 
Whose practice brake by happy end of life, 
With envious tears to hear thy fame so good.
But I, that knew what harbour'd in that head ;
What virtues rare were tempered in that breast ;
Honour the place that such a jewel bred, 
And kiss the ground whereas the corpse doth rest ; 
     With vapour'd eyes : from whence such streams availe,
     As Pyramus did on Thisbe's breast bewail. 

Wind, willows and water

Among my favourite novels are two animal tales: Wind in the Willows (1908) and Watership Down (1972). Both involve animals whose lives unfold in the English countryside; animals with powers of speech and reason and even wit. Both are charming books, but only in one does the charm arise from watching animals be animals. In Watership Down, the rabbits are rabbits. In Wind in the Willows the animals are arguably humans.

Rat and Mole, Badger and Toad certainly have animal qualities like heightened sense of smell and the homing instinct, but they are essentially Edwardian gentlefolk living fairly gracious riparian lives. They all wear clothes and walk upright (Toad seems to have hair); they inhabit a carefully stratified social world, and affect the diction of characters from Wodehouse and Waugh. They buy their food from shops; they eat (at tables or in wicker chairs) sumptuous breakfasts washed down with ale and coffee; delicious al fresco luncheons; and suppers accompanied by cheeses and wines. There’s one scene that’s always troubled me: Rat and Mole sit at ease by the fire in Rat’s bijou sitting room; they are apparently alone in the house when ‘dinner is served.’ By whom? This is not the only passage that suggests servants are one of the several luxuries these mild-mannered beasts enjoy. In a wonderful 2009 article Rosemary Hill regards the book as a sigh of nostalgia for the lost world of Edwardian suburbia, when boating and picnicking filled the long days of the leisured classes. The story, too, turns on behaviour more proper to adult humans than rats and toads: dangerous addictions and excesses, fraud, theft, imprisonment, escape, and in the end, violent overthrow of interlopers. Charmed though I always am by this book (Kenneth Grahame’s prose is radiant) it’s certainly not because it offers any real insight into animal life.

The rabbits of Watership, on the other hand, are wild animals whose lives are governed by weather, terrain, predation, and instinct. They speak, but they speak a language called Lapine. They have social structures, but these resemble the structures that abide in real warrens, according to Richard Adams’ careful research. The human world, and even other animals, are utterly strange to them. They are a band of brothers who come to value each other deeply, but they never transcend their animal desire to fight each other in mating season, or their animal pragmatism about defacating and breeding. (One can’t imagine the genteel Rat even excusing himself to use the lavatory, and certainly not courting a lady-rat; he and his friends are indubitably bachelors.) Inhabiting the rabbits’ world, far from evoking nostalgia, makes you feel how alien and menacing humans and ‘man things’ are to wild creatures.

Yet, without disowning this animality, Watership Down is an intensely political novel as well. It’s about freedom; about the treacherous compromise between safety and liberty. In their travels, Hazel and Fiver and their companions come across two other warrens: one is the Brave New World of rabbitry, where the rabbits are sleek sophisticates who engage in a conspiracy of glazed silence about their mortal danger. The other is 1984. A highly militarised warren run by a lapine tyrant, Efrafa is full of pitiful creatures, brutally oppressed in the name of safety. Hazel’s band comes to embody the perils and the promise of true freedom.

The Willows are a world away from such political concerns. The animals’ highest goods and deepest joys come from eating, drinking, communing, and resting. Their freedom is simply the fresh air in which they pursue their simple pleasures. Looked at one way, that makes them just the parasitic aristos for whom they stand in. Looked at another, it makes them creatures in the best, blessed sense.