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.