More on Thomas Cromwell

Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, resplendent conclusion to the Wolf Hall trilogy, was the perfect long, slow read during the early days of lockdown, requiring absolute concentration but never in a bad way. Turning to Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cromwell: A Life meant an even slower read which took so much longer than I'd anticipated. Unversed in reading detailed, heavily footnoted historical biographies - even though I've written the first volume of a musical one myself - I'd usually manage a few pages at bedtime before falling asleep. 

So months passed, I eventually started skim-reading the more earthbound pages dealing with parliamentary bills, and of course it all livened up again towards the end. None of the earlier tedium is MacCulloch's fault, since his style is clear and often lively, not without wit. It's just that as an historian, he has to justify the fruits of his research. And no doubt many of Cromwell's bureaucratic duties were dull. Where MacCulloch excels is in underlining his role in the Reformation, the far-reaching effects of his careful leaguing with what is called here the 'Evangelical' cause (previously a perjorative term in my books). And the surreal co-existence of sober normality with the hideous consequences of religious differences is even more marked here than in Mantel's novels. MacCulloch also throws into sharper relief the greed of Cromwell and the nobility which he eventually joined for acquiring estates, a primary factor in the Dissolution of the Monasteries - the overall complexity of which is well covered, too - and the sheer nepotism exemplified by teenage son Gregory's elevation (what was that sexual indiscretion which had to be hushed up, shortly before Cromwell's demise?)

Even if you don't feel the need to acquire this 'life' to amplify Mantel's novels of genius, the final chapter, 'Futures', is essential reading. It underlines the endless capriciousness of Henry VIII, how in a matter of months he might have pardoned his Lord Privy Seal. Certainly, despite a spate of other immediate executions, the reactionary coup which saw Cromwell's demise did not mean an end to the fantastical balancing act of evangelicals and traditionalists. Nor was the family disgraced, as Anne Boleyn's had been; Gregory became a Baron, and others in Cromwell's retinue did well - was this a result of the king's guilty conscience? Most fascinating as a tale of survival is the (eventually) twice-widowed Elizabeth Seymour, an Ughtred, then a Cromwell, and finally Paulet: a biography of how she kept her wits about her over decades would surely make a good read. I should only add that MacCulloch's biography is a joy to handle and beautifully illustrated.

Though I moved a little faster through the last one hundred pages, I felt released from captivity when I could finally turn to the proof of Elena Ferrante's latest, due to be published in its English translation in September as The Lying Life of Adults. My lips are not so far sealed that I can't declare it as much a masterpiece as its predecessors (and anyway, it's been around in Italian for some time, though my reading abilities would not have been up to that, to say the least). Then it was on to Alberto Moravia, having discovered the equally great writer to whom he was married for 20 years, Elsa Morante, through Ferrante, and The Conformist.  

What a compelling style, in Angus Davidson's English translation, ruthless in its uncovering of self-deception and the character-study of a repressed melancholic - ill, as an observant antagonist observes, with the symptom of austerity, who seems incapable of entirely getting to the truth of what he was and is. The curious mix of solid reality and almost surreal flights of plot development creates a unique type of dream-novel. Marcello, so desperate to seem conventional following a traumatic childhood encounter with a pedophile who may have detected his own sexual longings, yet psychologically unsuited to his role as Fascist functionary ('he was quite aware that, amongst the many possible standards of behaviour, he had not chosen the Christian standard which forbids man to kill, but another, entirely different one, political and of recent introduction, which had no objection to bloodshed').

You can't hate the protagonist; you're fascinated, horrified at times but spellbound, and that's part of the page-turner quality in which Moravia excels. I haven't seen the Bertolucci film, but I'm grateful for its existence, which would probably not have come into being for English-speaking readers without the long out-of-print Prion Film Ink series in which this translation was included.

Ferrante's Frantumaglia and the act of writing

If there's a wiser book on the art of the novel, I've not read it. Here the woman who calls herself 'Elena Ferrante' tells us everything we need to know, much of it more self-revealing than one would expect. The title is explained in the 70-page essay of the same name, absolutely central to the collection spanning 25 years of creativity, and in itself containing a slice of discarded writing which will satisfy those with hunger for more of the fiction, alongside fragments of autobiography. The Neapolitan dialect word was her mother's, 'for a disquiet not otherwise definable; it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain'. Ferrante further qualifies that as 'an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or acquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self'.

This debris spreads and coalesces in various ways. Ferrante describes her act of writing as made up of contrasts:

clarity of facts and low emotional reaction alterating with a sort of storm of blood, of frenzied writing. However, I try to avoid dividing lines betwen the two moments. I tend to make them slide into one another without a break.

Years later, Ferrante added that 'the act of writing is the continuous conveyance of that frantumaglia of sounds, emotions and things to the word and the sentence. Later still, she adds that she finds in her most famous creations to date, Lila and Lenù, the best capturing of herself, 'in the self-discipline of the one that continuously and brusquely shatters when it runs up against the unruly imagination of the other'. Pictured below: Gaia Girace as Lila and Margherita Mazzucco as Lenù in the TV series of My Brilliant Friend.

She also says of a special favourite, The Lost Daughter (which I wrote about in December), that she 'pushed the protagonist much farther than I thought I myself, writing, could bear'.

Why the privacy of the person? 'In art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the words...the biographical path...is only a mico-story on the side...The true reader, I think, searches...for the naked physiognomy that remains in every effective word'. Even so, it will come as no surprise to readers of her work in the round that 'Naples is my city, the city where I learned quickly, before I was 20, the best and worst of Italy and the world. I advise everyone to come and live here even just for a few weeks. It's an apprenticeship, in all the most stupefying ways'.

What's especially impressive is that many of the chapters here are e-mail interviews in which many of the same questions are asked; and yet somehow Ferrante always manages to keep her responses fresh, and she clearly responds to the other writer - she does so especially vividly to Deborah Orr.

I hope we can look forward to a second volume, perhaps of correspondence with Saverio Constanzo, the director of the latest, so-far magnificent and painstakingly detailed TV adaptation; My Brilliant Friend is out (since I don't subscribe to Sky, I bought a cheap DVD set) and The Story of a New Name is imminent. For the early stages of Frantumaglia, which might perhaps only be of interest to those who have already read the novels in question, deal with adaptation to screen. Two separate passages which I've conjoined just about nail the nature of the beast (and apply very well to opera directors too):

The real problem for a director is to find solutions, the language with which to get the truth of the film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force...I don't care for directors and screenwriters who approach the book with arrogance, as if it were a mere catalyst for their own work. I prefer those who dive into the literary work, taking inspiration from it for new ways of telling a story with images.

The other to-be-continued aspect is taking up Ferrante's lists of literary loves and exemplars. I've bought copies of three so far: Nancy Mitford's translation of Madame de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, a lethally elegant tale of a moral woman in a gossipy court; the hitherto-unknown-to-me name of Ukrainian born, Brazilian based Clarice Lispector, whose experimental style in Near to the Wild Heart, a study in existential introspection, I found hard work; and, last but for me first, Elsa Morante's Arturo's Island.

Arturo is a boy left to grow up more or less alone on the island of Procida; his mother died giving birth to him and his fatuous father comes and goes at random. We see everything through the protagonist's eyes, with an air of mythology brought about partly by Arturo's reading: the handsome parent he hero-worships, the girl only two years older than himself given up to an uncaring husband. A woman's perspective on woman as chattel is a fascinating one, and her understanding of the confusions brought on by puberty seems masterly. The translator is Ann Goldstein, Ferrante's own choice. Like her own novels, it's a bewitching, disconcerting read. I made a start on The Conformist by Morante's husband, Alberto Moravia (also next to her on the bookshelves), which is bound to be extraordinary, but interrupted it for Mantel's The Mirror & the Light, no comedown. All the same, it's demanding careful attention over time; I expected nothing less. Never was an all-absorbing slow read more needed than right now.

First person singular: Ferrante and Tokarczuk

Here are two novels in which the narrators are so careful with their words that the response must be terse too - and elliptical, too, in order to avoid any spoilers.

The Lost Daughter is the last of Elena Ferrante's (relatively) early works I've read this year, since I finished the great Neapolitan quartet in hospital in early January and then moved on to the most haunting of the early three, The Days of Abandonment.

I was quick to buy a copy of Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 masterpiece Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead not after she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but because I'd read that demiTory weirdo Rory Stewart had remarked on seeing someone reading it on the tube, and, clearly knowing nothing of its reputation, objected to the odd title (so much for being well briefed).

The title comes from Blake, one of the leitmotif preoccupations of animal-loving hillside dweller Mrs. 'don't call me Janina' Dusjecsko. You're drawn into her singular way of seeing things from the very first page, and even inclined to think that many of her views must be those of the author. Until... and that's about as far as I can go here, It reads so compellingly, too, in the translation of Antonia Lloyd-Jones, who's also rendered into very lucid English Artur Domosławski's superlative biography of fellow more-than-journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, which I'm halfway through at the moment.

There's also not too much I should say about The Lost Daughter, except that it contains many of the same preoccupations as Lenù's in the tetralogy. You can't help wondering if Ferrante has kept her real identity secret because of how much she personally may have invested in her memorable tale-tellers. Here the essence is a beachscape with a mother, young daughter and doll, and how those elements trigger the narrator's memories and obsessions. How else can I describe it but as great, serious literature?

Meanwhile, the saga of Lenù and Lila continues to haunt; having reviewed the National Theatre's compromised but theatrically effective zip through the whole story for The Arts Desk, I ordered up Saverio Costanzo's TV series based on the first volume, My Brilliant Friend (the others, apparently, are to be serialised too). One episode watched so far is enough to realise that this is visual narrative right under the skin of its subject. The casting of the children, is perfect, much as I imagined them.

Linn Ullmann's Unquiet is a very different case from Ferrante's works. Ullmann calls it a novel, but it is in fact a candid, unsparing portrait of her relationship with her father, Ingmar Bergman, and to a certain extent of that with her mother, Liv. In total contrast to a dreadful, sensationalist Swedish TV documentary about the master which I gave up on halfway through - not least because the tacky music was at odds with the film clips, though chiefly because its structure was unsound, its speculations dodgy - this is a portrait told with love but also a disarming honesty, catching angles of a filial relationship in which magic plays a greater part than disenchantment. I guess the selection, the honing, is what makes it novelistic. And like all great novels, it raises more questions than it answers.

Released, with gratitude

...for all the fine nursing and good company I've enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - during my 14 days in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (this by way of a corrective to the horrors of the last two posts, accompanied by photos of the five-star-hotel view from my bed. The one above features the most original pick-me-up, Jonny Brown's two-piece vase of tulips from Duranus). Finally, after 48 hours' prevarication when my temperature stabilised, they performed the 'second intervention' on me to remove bag and tube into my left kidney - medical term 'nephrostomy' - and replaced it with a stent, which is more uncomfortable on the nether regions but gets me out of jail. Which I left at just after 6 yesterday evening, saying a rather reluctant farewell to the two other musketeers in Bay 6 of the ward. We three were wryly dedicated to reprimanding the moaners and complainers, telling them the nurses were doing their best and that there were other folk on the ward much worse off than them whom they needed to consider.

So, a hymn to those guys and to two others. My long-term neighbour, whom I'm sure I can name, Mr Patel, went through a lot of suffering and still needs his gall bladder removing, but he was a smiling and warm personage throughout it all. Among his several professions he runs an organic olive oil farm in Puglia. He'd asked his business partner to send a bottle; he delivered 16, so they went to the staff and to us three musketeers when he left about a week ago. I shall be heading up to the wondrous Neasden Hindu Temple for some vegetarian food in the next month.

I mentioned noble John, 94, pillar of the Iranian Christian community in London. He knew the people we'd heard about during our most extraordinary Christmas Day with the gated Anglican community in Isfahan, having managed a hotel there before being forced to flee during the revolution (that same which brought tragedy to the then-Bishop, his son stoned to death by an angry mob). I was very much moved by John's journey, after the latest of his many falls which fractured his skull, from seeming at death's door to being up and shaving himself, to retreat and then, it seemed, to full lively recovery, and I enjoyed conversations with two of his daughters*.

Memorable indeed was the afternoon when the Bishop of Iraq, who had been due to stay with John, came in with a group of friends, in the middle of which a celebrated Chelsea doyenne, artist and writer, another patient, wandered in sporting her afternoon glitter and feathers. Less happy was the night when John fell out of bed. Twice. Why hadn't they put the side guards up? I got a complicated explanation about how the patient can harm him- or herself more getting tangled in them. Anyway, fiercely independent John will need 24 hour care when he leaves, which he may already have done; he was moved to another ward five days ago.*

What a contrast to the two horrid old men who occupied the bed opposite him in succession. I've written about the Screamcougher, but maybe there was something psychologically amiss. Next was a fully compos mentis old moaner and attention-seeker who wanted to get back to his cat. Treated half the staff, who were infinitely patient with him and polite, very vehemently ('leave me alone!' 'What do you think you're doing?' 'Where's the fucking doctor'?). Just occasionally made us laugh ('I want to shit, dear'). Asked us all to help him. I gave him a banana - he always wanted more at breakfast, lunch and dinner - but there was a moment of pure black comedy when he asked Musketeer Two to help him get up. 'I've got terminal cancer, man, you're asking the wrong person'. I gave him a speech, addressing him as 'sir' and telling him this was not a five-star hotel and that the staff were doing their best under difficult circumstances. He stared at me open-mouthed but did shut up for the rest of the afternoon.

Musketeer Two (if I am One, in absolutely no order of priority), old hippy, has done a lot of drugs in his life, involved in the music business and just back from Jamaica. Very gentle and kindly, huge array of visitors, coming to terms with a diagnosis of cancer spread from kidney to liver and lungs. I joked that he was 'making a molehill out of a mountain'. Musketeer Three arrived the day after me. Crabby and laconic, but always surprising. In a lot of pain after treatment for a burst appendix. With a wife who had her own lung problems so couldn't visit often. Heard him waiting for her on the phone: 'where are you, you silly old cow?' But to my surprise we were all singing from the same hymn sheet on Brexit and Trump. I left before I could get to see Mary Poppins Returns in the MediCinema (another of C&W's fabulous setups); he went instead with his granddaughter. Next Thursday is The Favourite, which being on the lists I can go and see with a friend for free. Unfortunately J does not want to set foot inside the hospital again. Anyway, Musketeer Three and I chuckled quietly on a regular basis, bitching about the troublemakers.

I thank so many of the nursing staff. Some were indifferent - what a difference introductions would have made, given that the team of two serving the ward changed daily and nightly. Only three were fairly-to-downright useless. I've already mentioned the exchange with the mystery woman at the desk and the male nurse who failed to screw up the bottom of my bag after emptying so it went all over the floor, also referenced under 'Screamcougher and squalor'. Like many of the staff, he was always on Instagram and Facebook, looking at cars and sports. Jeremy found him fast asleep at the desk in the middle of the afternoon.

One night nurse who was busy on Facebook at her desk said, when I pointed to my three-quarters-full bag on my way out from the toilet, 'I'll come when I've finished this'. 40 minutes later she appeared in the ward and said, 'I haven't forgotten', before walking out again. When it reached full to bursting I went to the toilet and emptied it myself. She looked disapproving when I told her I had to do it (as I had been, before they decided they wanted to measure and/or analyse the contents). 'An hour has passed', I said, knowing it was between 50 minutes and an hour or more. 'Not an hour,' she said, walking away again. One other nurse was rude (when  I asked politely about making up the bed, usually done around 10am but this time unmade way past noon, 'let us do our job') but clearly good at his work, and we got on better after that. I could have done without the ineptitude of a too-tight dressing which was apparently the real reason for blistering on my right forearm and cellulitis above it. That retreated swiftish, but the extra hospital contributions to my suffering were unnecessary and unwelcome.

I repeat - that stuff was very much in the minority. I thank the majority, dealing well in situations of serious understaffing, from the bottom of my heart. One thing I shall be on the warpath about: the hygiene.

Cleaning the few toilets and showers shared by the ward only three times a day - twice, in this instance, it seems (photographed at 21.30 that night; on the next morning, the third entry was filled in, possibly fraudulently) - with the last cleaning usually at 2.30pm. Contracting out to an inadequate company is false, short-term economy; stamp out the chance of MRSA etc and in the long term the NHS saves money.

While nights proved a trial - I can't get over the silence back home - days were never boring. My reading tailed off a bit after finishing the Ferrante quartet; an earlier novel, The Days of Abandonment, is of the highest literary quality, a Kafkaesque narrative of how a woman loses her sense of self and falls into absurd, irrational behaviour after her husband abruptly leaves her for a younger model, but not a pageturner. My most recent visitor apart from J, the wonderful Frances Stonor Saunders, brought me Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill, an astonishingly rich essay for its 24 pages.

Frances also offered invaluable advice based on experience: when you leave, ask for a full printout of your treatment rather than just the usual signing-off summary. Papers go missing; when you return for any connected appointments, bring it all with you just in case.

I finished one fine TV series and got through a shorter, more recent one. Earlier this year, I was drawn in immediately to Eve Myles' utterly mesmerising, infinitely various characterisation, the core of the Welsh thriller Keeping Faith.

How bereft I'd felt when it went off the BBC iPlayer in September as soon as I'd got to the end of episode 4 (of 8). Fortunately I found the rest this time by entering 'Keeping Faith watch online' into Google, happy to put up wih the odd interjection of an advert in each instalment. The slow burn, always plausible drama maintained its high standards to the end, with all the other roles superbly taken (plenty of stillness, a rare quality in TV acting. Pictured below, Myles with Hanna Daniel as Faith's sassy fellow lawyer Cerys Jones). Roll on Series Two.

After that I turned to The ABC Murders, well aware that Agatha Christie adapter Sarah Phelps always serves up thoughtful rewriting (and replotting in some cases) since I reviewed And Then There Were None for The Arts Desk. Malkovich as Poirot? Ungenial, perhaps not Christie's detective, but a magnificent and compelling creation, so watchful.

All acting fine, cinematography beautiful or grim to look at (though they seem to have taken a bit of a train going through a landscape from last year's Scotland-set Witness for the Prosecution; no routes to the south coast from London look remotely like that). The original is one of the few I never read, so the twist came as a genuine surprise; I don't expect anyone would anticipate it.

Got to the end just before they wheeled me down for the second intervention, less painful than the first though I wished I didn't have to hear every word of the surgeon and assistants; I was trying to focus on the closing scene of Strauss's Daphne in my head. Now I just have to wait in line for the stonebreaking, which of course was done in a day two and a half years ago along with the rest in the Acibadem Private Hospital, Bodrum, Turkey. I'm afraid that because of NHS waiting times, worse than ever for cancer patients as The Guardian states today, I'm going to take up the very reasonably priced private healthcare plan J has just discovered.

*I bumped into one of them, Caroline, in the lift on my return visit this Tuesday to give a sample and blood, and though we were delighted to see each other, I was sorry to hear that John, now in a ward one floor below, has been up and down (and still there, though we had talked about options for temporary care home - my 90 year old friend Thomas, now bereft of Beulah who went there with him, is in the permanent part of what sounds like a very good one in Wimbledon).