Within one heart so diverse mind

I'm about half way through Wolf Hall now, and one character who seems to crop up more and more is the young poet Thomas Wyatt: charmer of women, protege of Cromwell, and former lover of Anne Boleyn, who now so bewitches the King. This arrestingly modern poem, “The Lover Recounteth the Variable Fancy of his Fickle Mistress,” taketh on new significance when read in the context of Wyatt's court life. It's ostensibly about his mistress, but it might also be about the fickle favour of a capricious monarch - in this case a monarch with his beady eye on the poet's ex. It treats of lover's quarrels, but it might also reference the fierce and murderous debates over religion, which after all were knottily entwined with the ‘king's matter’: his licence to set his wife aside, and with her all Roman Catholic sway. It's a whinge from a jealous suitor, but it might also speak to a prevailing mood of certainties being unhinged. Man the paragon is really a fractured creature, subject to conscious as well as unconscious forces; all weakness, all weathercock variability, all wayward mutability are possible now in women and in men.  

Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
So cruel intent,
So hasty heat and so soon spent,
From love to hate, and thence for to relent?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
To spy it in an eye
That turns as oft as chance on die,
The truth whereof can any try?
Is it possible?

Is it possible?
For to turn so oft,
To bring that lowest which was most aloft,
And to fall highest yet to light soft:
It is possible.

All is possible
Whoso list believe.
Trust therefore first, and after preve,
As men wed ladies by licence and leave.
All is possible.

Do you read me?

Being unable to post as and when I wanted was an interesting deprivation. It made me think about the nature of a blog, or this blog, and whether it’s more like a conversation, or more like a diary, or more like a magazine.  Sometimes I feel it’s more like sending a radio signal into deep space, into an inhuman silence. 

I can look at the stats to find out how many ‘page views’ I’ve had and from how many ‘unique IPs,’ but that doesn’t really give me a sense of readership. Every now and then someone surprises me by telling me they read / have read my blog, but these are singular voices in a dispersed and sporadic population. Though having at least a putative readership is a useful discipline for a reluctant writer, it’s probably better for writer and reader if the readership remains elusive, undetermined, taciturn. This sounds at odds with the tide of interactive media and the user-based thinking that swells it, but I don't see how the influence of something incalculable, unconstant, and largely unexpressed  can be beneficial for one's writing.

I like Adam Kirsch’s comments in an NY Times article on the shifting role of the professional critic:

“If you are primarily interested in writing, then you do not need a definite or immediate sense of your audience: you write for an ideal reader, for yourself, for God, or for a combination of the three. If you want criticism to be a lever to move the world, on the other hand, you need to know exactly where you’re standing — that is, how many people are reading, and whether they’re the right people. In short, you must worry about reaching a ‘general audience,’ with all the associated worries about fragmentation, the decline of print, and the rise of the Internet and its mental groupuscules.”

Obviously he doesn’t have blogging in mind here, but you can see the freedoms of a writer who writes for the sake of writing, not for the sake of being read.  In any field, good writing is its own justification, its own reward.  

“Whether I am writing verse or prose,” says Kirsch, “I try to believe that what matters is not exercising influence or force, but writing well — that is, truthfully and beautifully; and that maybe, if you seek truth and beauty, all the rest will be added unto you.”

Last sea thing

I always have mixed feelings on Australia Day.  My love for this country was learned late, after England cured my anglophilia, but it also involves a violent distate for what usually passes here as patriotic. I love the concatenations of air, water and rock that make this continent. I love the variety and strangeness of it, utterly unique on this planet, adrift in this southern sea. I love the layers and sediments of human life here: the toughness of it, the sweetness. What I hate is the back-patting chest-slapping fair dinkum Aussie blokey bushy true blue outbackery that seems to me contrived, blinkered, and ersatz; so outdoors it’s almost camp. When on Australia Day our leaders and icons trot out the tired old cliches about mateship or the fair go (and many would be angered if they didn’t), we expose not our strengths but our greatest weakness as a nation, which is a poverty of imagination, a failure of poetry. For a nation girt by sea, we seem curiously shy of depth. We have ceased from exploration. We think we know the place.  This is only the official line, however, the line declared safe for politicians, the line marketed in t-shirts and souvenirs. Beneath it, there is poetry. There is subtlety. There is, as Bernard O’Dowd’s “Australia” hints, enduring mystery.  

Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,
Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West
In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?
Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
Are you for Light, and trimmed, with oil in place,
Or but a Will o’ Wisp on marshy quest?
A new demesne for Mammon to infest?
Or lurks millennial Eden ’neath your face?

The cenotaphs of species dead elsewhere
That in your limits leap and swim and fly,
Or trail uncanny harp-strings from your trees,
Mix omens with the auguries that dare
To plant the Cross upon your forehead sky,
A virgin helpmate Ocean at your knees.

Historical Friction

Whenever I try to read historical fiction, the little man in my hair starts screaming “Wrong! Wrong! It’s all wrong! They wouldn’t have said that! They didn’t talk like that! That wouldn’t have happened!”

My sister-in-law, a historian, gave me Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall for Christmas. Reading this novel about Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, I’m managing to keep the little man subdued while I enjoy, if not the language – which hardly tries for verisimilitude - at least the texture, the habits of thought, the smell and feel of Tudor London, which are admirably contrived. While their speech has to be read as rough translation (if only to placate the little man), you do feel as though you were bumping up against the real bodies of Cardinal Wolsey, King Henry, Anne Boleyn, their immense personalities. You feel the rich crackle and sizzle of the court, the ever-present threat of betrayal, arrest, horrible death. You also feel the certainties of church, prayer-book, rosary, relic; you feel them crumbling against the tidal push of protest coming from abroad. Sixteenth-century life and custom, rather than being simply documented, are woven dexterously into the fabric of the story. There is an immediacy about it which is more pleasing than accuracy. No doubt this is the point, pace little man, of historical fiction.

This too, too solid flesh

Nicholas Hytner’s Hamlet, with Rory Kinnear in the lead role, was a treat. They came at it with energy and attention; nothing was lost, no phrase allowed to fall to the ground unexplored or unexplained. The setting was a contemporary Eurasian dictatorship, and the actor playing Claudius bore a striking resemblance to Vladimir Putin. There was a very visible security presence tipping us off to the state of Denmark as one secretly and constantly watched, and much was made, at least in the early scenes, of the generation gap that fissures the play: Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes and Ophelia belong to a generation newly awake to ideas from outside. Ophelia listens to rock music and reads a book she hides from her father. Hamlet and Laertes strain to return to Wittenburg and France respectively, seats of learning and new ideas, in stark contrast to Denmark’s backward, martial, rotting state. Claudius (Patrick Malahide) was the smiling villian, at once urbane and full of menace, eerily echoing Putin and, behind him, Ahmadinejad. Gertrude (Clare Higgins) was a raddled, raw-boned, hard-drinking dynastic matriarch, capable, one felt, of great rage as well as raucous laughter. Polonius (David Calder) was a suspendered senior public servant, flustered and pompous, subject to senior moments in his discourses. Ophelia (Ruth Negga) was sweet and sad, as she always is.

Kinnear’s Hamlet was one of the best I’ve seen.  Thoughtful, natural, amiable, ranging ably across the mad, the merry and the melancholy. There was, however, something lacking: this Prince was not very princely. For all Hamlet’s navel-gazing, he has also something dashing about him, something dangerous and volatile and swashbuckling. One minute he’s meditating on his own delay, the next fighting a duel, slaying unseen good old men, signing the death warrants of his old school friends, leaping into a woman’s grave at her funeral declaring his boundless love.  This Hamlet - as The Times put it, ‘a Hamlet for now’ - in trainers and an anorak, looked more like an IT boffin than a prince. It was hard to picture him ‘loved of the distracted multitude.’ Hytner said it was wonderful watching Kinnear ‘think his way through the soliloquies.’ It was pleasing to see so much intellectual work in his characterisation, and his laboured thinking gave footholds to the following audience, but it was at the cost of Hamlet’s great mental agility, the lightning speed at which his brain leaps along those rocky promontories of thought.

Hamlet should be more angel than beast. He should tower over his fellows; he is larger than they, larger indeed than the play. As Romantic critic William Hazlitt wrote, “there is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage. Hamlet himself seems hardly capable of being acted.” This is because Hamlet is such a sad, strange mixture of health and sickness, strength and weakness, love and misanthropy. He is a spirit at odds with his faculties, a mind outrunning his too solid flesh. Kinnear did well; yet, like so many others, he came not to the top of Hamlet’s bent.