MANTEL PIECES

Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books

Hilary Mantel

Copyright

4th Estate

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Tertius Enterprises Ltd 2020

All pieces previously published in the London Review of Books

Cover design by Julian Humphries

Cover images © Shutterstock

Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008429973

Ebook Edition © October 2020 ISBN: 9780008429980

Version: 2020-09-24

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction: Hilary Mantel

Letter from Hilary Mantel to Karl Miller, 1987

American Marriage, 1988

Letter from Mary-Kay Wilmers to Hilary Mantel, 1988

Bookcase Shopping in Jeddah, 1989

Postcard from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1989

John Osborne’s Memoirs, 1991

Draft of a cover caption by Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1992

In Bed with Madonna, 1992

‘LRB’ cover, 28 May 1992

On Théroigne de Méricourt, 1992

Postcard from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1997

On Christopher Marlowe, 1992

Fax from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1994

A Mohawk Captive, 1994

Fax from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1997

The Murder of James Bulger, 1997

Postcard and fax from Hilary Mantel, 1999

On Marie-Antoinette, 1999

Email from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 2001

Britain’s Last Witch, 2001

Email from Hilary Mantel to the editors, 2003

Meeting My Stepfather, 2003

Card and email from Hilary Mantel to the editors, 2003

The Hair Shirt Sisterhood, 2004

‘LRB’ covers, 24 March 2004 and 20 April 2006

The People’s Robespierre, 2006

Email from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 2005

On Jane Boleyn, 2008

Email from Hilary Mantel to the editors, 2006

‘LRB’ cover, 9 April 2009

Marian Devotion, 2009

On Danton, 2009

‘LRB’ cover, 4 November 2010

Meeting the Devil, 2010

Email from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 2012

Royal Bodies, 2013

Emails from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 2013

On Charles Brandon, 2016

Fact-checking correspondence, 2016

The Secrets of Margaret Pole, 2017

Email from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 2019

Footnotes

About the LRB

About 4th Estate

About the Author

Also by Hilary Mantel

About the Publisher

Introduction
Hilary Mantel

WHEN my first novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, was published in 1985, I had been living abroad for some years. Its sequel came out a year later, and at that point, returning from Saudi Arabia, I needed to work out whether I could make a living as a writer. The advance for my first book had been £2000. For my second it was £4000 – a good rate of progress, but not an income. Apart from my agent and publishers, I didn’t know anyone in the media, or a single other person who was a writer. But I didn’t think I was equipped for any other trade.

The first person to throw me a lifeline was Auberon Waugh, who had reviewed my novels and who asked me to write for the Literary Review: one piece a month, £40. Alan Ross at the London Magazine employed me; he was able to pay even less. But I decided I would say ‘yes’ to anything, especially if it frightened me. Soon Charles Moore at the Spectator became my patron, and offered me their film column. A weekly column made me visible, and led to more work than I could handle.

The reviewing scene was very different in those days. There were more daily papers and they made space for books. For a time, in the autumn of 1989 and the spring of 1990, there were five Sunday broadsheets, all of them eating up copy. There were periodicals that no longer exist, like New Society and the Listener. There was even one called Books and Bookmen – the title tells you everything about the world in which I started to publish.

Writing in 1938, Cyril Connolly identified journalism as one of his Enemies of Promise. He warns young writers against reviewing, identifying the danger of ‘short articles for quick returns’ – though in his day, two thousand words was considered short. He insists that ‘any other way of making money would be better … reviewing is a whole-time job with a halftime salary.’ The author runs the risk of losing energy, ‘frittering it away on tripe and discovering that it is his flashiest efforts that receive most praise’. The only way to preserve yourself, Connolly advises, is to ‘manoeuvre’ so you never review a bad book.

It is true that reviewing eats up time. Even in the easier days in which I began, you had to become a workhorse if you wanted worthwhile returns. I was in awe of my paymasters, and at the same time I was uneasy. I recall having a batch of potential Booker winners fall out of a bag – four or five of them, and a scant two hundred words for each. I was offering opinions with no visible means of support, and with little scope for nuance. It is simple, if you have only a paragraph to spare, to swat a book like a fly. Even if you have more space, it is easier to write a bad review than a good one, or to locate the flaw in a book and become fixated on it. Young reviewers become fired with zeal against the established and the over-rated. They think they are doing justice, but it takes them longer to learn about mercy.

When I began to write for the LRB everything changed. I began my career during Karl Miller’s editorship and continued with Mary-Kay Wilmers. My pieces became more expansive, the work became more challenging, and my unease dissipated, though only gradually. I still said ‘yes’ to everything. Mary-Kay speaks so softly that when she first called me I believed she was trapped inside a sofa. It’s possible that I didn’t always know what I had agreed to review. But I learned that the paper is skilled at matching contributors to a task. I almost never got a bad book – and if I did, I could send it back. At first I had qualms about my ability to rise to the standard. What I wrote was so plain that it felt exposed. I didn’t have an arts degree, had never learned about literary criticism; in the theory wars, I was a non-combatant. But the paper had experts on tap, if they cared to call on them. If they wanted someone to stand in for the general reader, I was as general as they come. I didn’t often review fiction, so I was not in danger of projecting my own perplexities onto someone else’s work. And I welcomed the fact that all editorial changes were by negotiation. There was no danger of a sub-editor slicing off your last paragraph and changing the whole meaning of the piece. There were no particular space constraints. When I asked ‘How many words?’ the editors would say, ‘Take what you need.’

That answer is a clever one, and more demanding than it appears. To fix a book in context needs background reading. When the paper unearthed my old letters – I had no idea they kept such things – I saw that I was always asking for time, more time to learn – and it was always granted. Sometimes I was slow because I was over-committed, but sometimes because I was fascinated. The editors forgave my occasional bouts of critic’s block. They are forbearing with all their writers; sometimes it must seem unclear whether a piece is in progress or regress, or whether it will ever arrive at all. I am indebted to them for patience, and to Mary-Kay for encouraging me out of my shell. I had trained myself out of digression, but the paper was at ease with it. I was wary of jokes, but they didn’t mind those either. And when I wanted to say something more personal, they were listening.

The pieces here were written over a long period, and fall into different categories. There are those where, as I have said, I stand in for the general reader. There are pieces on the early Tudors and on the French Revolution, where I have particular knowledge. There are diary pieces, offcuts of memoir. And then there is a category of one: my piece on royal bodies, which supposedly enraged middle England – or at least, left certain newspapers spitting and foaming and doubling up in ire.

‘Royal Bodies’ began life as an LRB lecture. Afterwards it was printed, and nothing happened for a while – and I didn’t expect anything to result from a sober and harmless essay, although I did wonder if Buckingham Palace might be irked because I mocked their cocktail snacks. Ten days on, the press were on my doorstep – or somewhere near it. From my window overlooking the sea, I watched hopeless reporters range up and down, trying to work out how to catch me. They could not decide exactly where I lived, and the neighbours wouldn’t help them – in Budleigh Salterton we don’t engage with vulgarians. My husband came to tell me that the prime minister and the leader of the opposition were denouncing me. Neither, I believe, had read my lecture. Very few people had read it, but I was still Monster of the Month. If it had been bonfire season no doubt I would have been burned in effigy.

The ashes are frequently raked over, and I have to live with a traitor’s name. But the prime minister of those days, and the leader of the opposition too, are shrinking into obscurity, while the LRB expands its readership and reach year by year, never shy of disputes and never trapped into faux-apologetic mode. I am proud to work for a paper so unafraid, so original and so current. The more books I turn out, the more I wonder how one ever finds the courage to begin, and the more I respect other people who write. So many volumes, so much toil, so much hope: the least we owe our writers is dispassionate assessment and considered response.

The LRB offers more than that. A literary journal must be a political journal, as we cannot detach from larger realities. The paper is at ease with controversy rather than consensus and will allow a contributor to be contrary, even unfashionable. I have felt no pressure to line up with the editors’ views – just as I felt no need to become a Tory to write for the Spectator. Most imaginative writers are a party of one, and it is a riven and dissenting party, waging wars privately, silently. We do not like to be forced into confining self-definitions, or into consistency of response, or easy declarations of intent: or at least, we should not like it. Sometimes when I have written a piece for the LRB, I feel I understand less than when I started. What I knew, I have begun to unknow. I have not in fact finished, but begun a new engagement with a topic, an exploration that might stretch over years. There is, therefore, a temptation to write afterthoughts into these pieces, to embellish them with later and better thinking. I have not done that, but left them as they were – mantelpieces littered with to-do lists, and messages from people I used to be.

Letter from Hilary Mantel to Karl Miller, 1987

Women in Pain
American Marriage
1988

SCRIBBLE, scribble, scribble, Ms Hite: another damned, thick, square book.[1] Shere Hite is a ‘cultural historian’. She has already given us The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality and The Hite Report on Male Sexuality. Her work is an uneasy blend of prurience and pedantry; an attenuated blonde woman with curious white make-up, she has offended US feminists by making money out of sisterhood. She lives in some style, and has a young husband who, she tells us in a preface (there are many prefaces, a sort of philosophical foreplay), ‘fills my life with poetry and music, more every day’. Well, that’s all right then.

But sadly, it’s not typical. What a picture of American marriage emerges from these pages! It is certainly a ‘sad, sour, sober beverage’. (There is so much in these pages that Lord Byron said first, and better, and with merciful brevity, and without the advantages of sociological research.) The men are always off on a fishing trip, the women always masturbating in the bathroom. When he comes home, they fight; she rants, and he sits there ‘like Mussolini’. Then maybe he smashes a little crockery. They have sex by way of reconciliation, but it’s not too good: ‘I have to remind him to remove his glasses.’

This is a book about emotional suffering. There is the odd woman who says she is happy. There is even a section called ‘The Beauty of Marriage’. It occupies page 343 – but then a lot of page 343 is white space. Most of these nine hundred pages tell of disaffection, disillusion and incipient rebellion. ‘Should Women,’ asks one heading, ‘Take a Mass Vacation From Trying To Understand Men?’ Miss Hite’s respondent tells us: ‘Men’s attitudes are so bad, so impaired, and they don’t even realise how negative to women they are. They think they love women. It will take some massive reaction to make them start realising, start thinking … like a national strike, a boycott, a new Lysistrata.’ Or as Shere Hite herself puts it, less dramatically: ‘Women are suffering a lot of pain in their love relationships with men.’

Half the world’s fiction is about this, but Hite wants to skewer it into a scientific fact. She is particular, though, about the definitions of science that she will admit. One thinks of the aperçu of the younger Amis: ‘I don’t know much about science, but I know what I like.’ The basis of her inquiry was a questionnaire which runs to 127 pages. She eschews multiple-choice questions (quite properly, because they put a damper on things) and goes for the ‘open-ended’, which allows her respondents to answer in essay form if they wish. She distributed 100,000 questionnaires, and got 4,500 replies – not bad going, whatever her opponents say. Miss Hite’s methodology has been attacked rather unfairly, and so often that she has buttressed her report with experts – professors all – who assure us of her probity and competence as a social scientist. Her opponents have picked up the term ‘random sample’ – a staple of saloon-bar wisdom – and have said she hasn’t got one. What matters, she says reasonably, is to have a sample that is demographically matched to the population.

What is less reasonable, and more an act of faith, is Hite’s contention that because her respondents were anonymous they must have been telling the truth. In the context of the study, the most one can hope is that they were telling the truth as interpreted by their feelings on the day that they answered. It is a characteristic of sociologists that they discount the grimly insistent nature of the human imagination. There is a chilling quality about Miss Hite’s respondents which reminds one of all those people who say: ‘I’ve got a book in me.’ Of course, everyone has: what is a pity is that exercises like The New Hite Report give it the opportunity to come out.

The buttressing professors pose problems of their own. ‘Hite,’ says one, ‘has rejected the silencing of women by recognising that a theory about women’s ways of loving must be rooted in our own experiences.’ You must do what you can with that sentence. You can read it backwards. You can try to put it out of your mind for a few days, and leave it in a room by itself, then spring back in and hope to take its meaning unawares. Probably it means that a good way to find out what people think is just to ask them. But then, you may object, their replies will be merely subjective – no use really, if you purport to be a scientist. Take back that ‘merely’. Wash your mouth out. Feminist science is something quite different; subjectivity is of the essence. Until recently, women have been objects of study, and all the theories about feminine psychology, about how women think and feel, have been constructed by men. They have been constructed, very often, in the expectation of finding pathology, or at least a rather humiliating state of things: she is smitten by penis envy, by frigidity, if she can’t have an orgasm from the Saturday Night Special she’s some deeply unnatural woman. She’s neurotic, and obsessed with one little bit of her anatomy that some civilisations delight in slicing off.

There is nothing controversial here. For controversy one must look a little further. Miss Hite belongs to the school of thought which rejects traditional, male-devised science; she says it is crampingly linear in its mode of thought, and mistakenly claims to be value-free, detached and neutral. Feminist science recognises its evaluative posture; it recognises that the observer is not neutral, for she has her position, her prejudices, her viewpoint; it values intuition. Hite takes comfort from vogues in literary criticism – text, not machine, as analyst’s model – and from Heidegger: ‘reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.’ An essay appended to the book says that white male thinkers (it is a puzzle to know how skin colour gets in) are uncomfortable with hermeneutics: ‘for them it raises the spectre of total relativity, the fear that we will never be able to know anything in an absolutely objective and certain way.’ It is possible, of course, that many scientists – physicists especially, and white and male at that – have been living with this ‘fear’ for many years; that it is now a necessary part of whatever understanding of the universe we have. But they have not entirely been frightened out of the scientific method; it has its uses, and when Shere Hite wishes to be sure that she will be taken seriously, she displays an old-fashioned masculine zeal for quantification. The questionnaire asks: ‘How happy are you, on a scale of 1-10?’ It’s a question which – if we accept Shere Hite’s views up to this point – incorporates the worst of both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ science; its only merit is that it makes us laugh.

The truth may be that The Hite Report is science, but not of the mould-breaking sort its author thinks it is; that in fact it’s just the usual kind, which offers incomprehensible explanations for what everyone knows. Sociology has never made it into the gentlemen’s club of the ‘hard’ sciences; many people have suspected that it is simply a higher form of gossip.

Considered as gossip, though, this book has a grave defect: all Miss Hite’s anonymous respondents sound alike. She insists that women of all classes were well represented, that the less educated were not deterred from writing essays on their lives; in some cases, she says, the misspellings were ‘very appealing’. But they did not find their way into the finished product, because, Miss Hite says, ‘it seemed that in print these misspellings sometimes looked demeaning to the writer, or might be seen as trivialising that respondent.’ Then, too, some of these women adore jargon: as if all their lives have been a preparation for a survey; perhaps it is because they have ‘therapists’ to contend with, as well as their families. Their range is small, their vocabulary often restricted, and there is a huge gulf between their emotion and their capacity to convey it: being a lesbian, says one, ‘is the most comforting identity I’ve had since I was a cheerleader in junior high school’. The book’s tone is homogeneous, dull, flat: all these thousands of women sound like one woman, one awful person, droning on and on. If only Miss Hite were not so contemptuous of pop sociologists, she could have given her informants fictitious names, and to each one accorded a little pen-picture, to encourage us into her narrative: ‘Mary Lou, a much tattooed redhead of 43 …’

Yet the book does have its fascination. Between the lines are the sagas, the epics, the unwritten histories, a novel condensed into a throwaway phrase. It is not that what the women have to say is very original: it is that their reports, by their weight, their mass, offer such resounding confirmation of the absurdity of life. The relationships Shere Hite surveys are so painful, and so achingly comic, that one wonders how anyone came up with the notion in the first place that men and women might live together: whoever thought it might be possible?

Language is the first problem. There are men who seemed biologically programmed to avoid it. ‘My clue that something is bothering him is when he grinds his teeth when he sleeps.’ If they do talk, it might be about the weather: one woman says acidly that after 31 years she finds the weather is no longer interesting. They say, these men: ‘What is the baseball score? Put on the basketball game!’ Women like talking – about everything. According to men, they always choose ‘soapopera topics’. While they are indulging in these, the men ‘whistle and sing and slam doors’. Sometimes they absentmindedly walk off into other rooms. If they answer, it may be completely at random. ‘I will ask,’ says one misunderstood soul, ‘two or three questions at once – example: “Do you want milk or coffee?” And he will answer: “Yes.” He feels,’ the woman explains, ‘that I should ask them one at a time.’ Another describes her marital small talk as ‘like pulling teeth’.

Ninety-eight per cent of these women say they want more ‘verbal closeness’ with men; and they want to offer emotional support when they see that life is getting to their partners. When their offer is rejected, they feel baffled and useless. (One man lost his job, his father, and the wheels off his car. His wife expressed sympathy, so he slapped her.) The men repress their feelings, and deny that women have any; one of the gay women, who has opted out of the whole thing, says that she can’t imagine falling in love with a man, because men are so alien, ‘as if they all come from the East Coast and women from the West’. For the women who decide to stay in heterosexual relationships, there is one ultimate uncertainty: ‘I wonder if he has any emotions at all?’

Almost all the married women who replied said that they believed in monogamy: but of those who had been married for five years or more, 70 per cent were having affairs. There is a lot of deception around; some of it self-deception. Eighty-two per cent of women believed that their husbands were faithful: but earlier Hite research showed that 72 per cent of men who had been married for over two years were seeing other women.

These statistics do seem to contradict one’s belief and everyday experience. But then, to judge by this sample, few extramarital adventurers ever tell, or are found out. Some are most adroit at juggling their relationships; one woman admitted to 12 lovers since her marriage, some concurrent, and affairs that had lasted between two months and 33 years. These lovers are ‘dear men’, ‘precious men’, willing to talk about their deepest feelings, and with a thorough working knowledge of female anatomy. They are generally, of course, someone else’s husband.

Single women joined in the survey too: on her lecture tours round the colleges of the United States, Shere Hite has collected examples of the chat-up lines they have to endure. Attempts to manoeuvre women into bed range from the manipulative (‘There’s a rumour round school that you are a lesbian’) to the circumlocutory (‘Ever heard the “1812 Overture” on CD?’) to the pathetic (‘My balls hurt’). The women feel pressured to marry: it seems that twenty years of the women’s movement has not changed society’s expectations in this or in many other matters. ‘Sometimes I think even if I were a new Mozart it wouldn’t be enough. All my friends and family would still be saying: “And when are you getting married? Are you seeing anybody?”’

At first glance, it seems that it is the lesbians who are most satisfied with their relationships. ‘I believe a love relationship between two women is far more serious than one between a man and a woman. Women run on a higher emotional level than men will let themselves, and they get to deeper levels with each other.’ But when you read on, the same old complaints emerge. There are people who can’t or won’t talk about their feelings, and people who go too far in the other direction and plunge a relationship into what one respondent calls ‘introspective shit’. Some partners are philanderers; others are violent. There are some over-familiar, melancholy anecdotes: ‘I was sitting there with a flashlight, inside the car, trying to read the map, and she was screaming at me, because I can’t read it properly.’ Why can’t a woman be less like a man?

The New Hite Report raises all the difficulties and dilemmas that have beset women for years. Should women fight for change, or lower their expectations? Should they fight for their rights in a man’s world, or make a world of their own, with values they find more congenial? Is there some way in which men can be educated to set greater value on loving relationships? Or should women cut their losses, and accept that heterosexual relationships, and traditional marriage especially, provide limited emotional satisfaction? The hardest thing to accept about Shere Hite’s book is that she believes there are answers to these questions; and for her of course the solutions are not within the individual’s grasp, but are, in the feminist sense, ‘political’. She is an optimist: she looks forward to an era of ‘Feminist Enlightenment’. And she has nothing to say about the current backlash against the women’s movement; nothing to say about Beverley LaHaye and the Concerned Women for America, preaching the virtues of ‘submission’, and campaigning against equal pay.

This is not a comfortable book. You may disagree with Shere Hite’s methods, and with her conclusions, but no one could believe that she has seriously misrepresented what many women feel about their lives. It is no relief, however, if you feel as the Hite respondents do, to know that your problem is multiplied by millions, that you are part of a national trend. And the more one reads, the more one loses the flavour of real life, and the more one despairs of it: the more one feels like the unlucky one of three, waylaid on the way to the wedding by the Ancient Mariner. Miss Hite’s glittering eye is not easily avoided, her skinny hand not to be shaken off. But does she know, one wonders, that the perfect relationship is not to be had? It is not a bad thing to go on looking for it, but as one woman puts it, in the bleakest terms, ‘people will always be separate. That’s how we’re born and that’s how we die, one at a time, one per body, alone.’

Letter (and kill fee) from Mary-Kay Wilmers to Hilary Mantel, 1988

Diary
Bookcase Shopping in Jeddah
1989

WHEN the Salman Rushdie affair broke, the first thing I thought of was the day we tried to buy a bookcase in Jeddah. Jeddah is Saudi Arabia’s most sophisticated, cosmopolitan city. Compared to the capital, Riyadh, it is liberal and lively. It is also of course very rich. Its shopping malls, with their icy air-conditioning, are temples of marble and glass, of lush greenery and tinkling fountains. They are something like the Muslim vision of Paradise; only the houris are missing. You can buy a fox fur, if you like, or a portrait of King Fahd, or an American-style donut; a king-size sofa with a stereo built in, if that takes your fancy. But you couldn’t, in 1983, find a bookcase anywhere. No call for them.

When I first went to Jeddah I thought I had arrived in some ultimate abomination: the Bookless City. The supermarkets had racks of newspapers and magazines in various languages, and sometimes a little stack of doctor-nurse romances. There were things called bookshops, but they sold stationery. Of course, there was the book, the Holy Quran. The shelves that contained it had an untouched air, and the big volumes in the stiff cheap-looking bindings put me in mind of the sets of children’s encyclopedias once found in the homes of the aspiring classes. The censors were active, but it was images, not words, that they seemed concerned about. The newspapers from America and Europe came with sections blacked out with broad felt-tip pens. But it was the photographs and not columns of type that were mutilated. It was Joan Collins’s bosom, Zola Budd’s legs.

Saudi Arabia is a video culture. Housewives whose mothers sat in tents spend the days in their urban apartment blocks watching Egyptian soap operas on TV. Students at the university would not buy books, their European teachers said: it was necessary for a department to buy enough copies of the standard texts, and place them in the library. My closest Muslim friend, a well-travelled and articulate woman, had a degree in English from a college in Pakistan. She mentioned one day that since her marriage, three years previously, she had read only one book.

During my four years in the Kingdom the supply of books began to improve. It was possible to buy a limited selection of paperbacks. People going out on vacation would be given a list of books to bring back – but they would have to get their purchases through the Saudi customs. Some governments publish lists of prohibited books, but if the Saudis had an Index I never saw it: it was only rumour that told you what had most recently given offence, and your fortunes might depend on how pious or touchy was the customs officer who turned out your cases. We believed that the customs men could not read English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that the customs men wouldn’t see the connection.

However, it soon became clear that the censorship was interested in words after all. The word ‘pork’, for instance. The censorship had its catering corps. It was someone’s duty to go through consignments of imported food and check out such items as dehydrated sauce mixes, in case they had recipes on the back; and then to strike out that dreadful word wherever it appeared. After a time I realised that far from being unimportant in this society, as I had thought at first, words were in fact the most important thing of all. You cannot abolish the concept of pork from the world, but if you are assiduous you can unsay the word; if your felt tips are busy enough, and numerous enough, you can take away its name and thus gradually take away its substance, leaving it a queasy, nameless concept washing around in the minds of unbelievers, a meat which will gradually lose its existence because there is no way to talk about it.

In the holy city of Qom, it is said, the Iranians have a Quran with pages two metres square, each vellum sheet illuminated by hand. The Saudis would despise such a display; they would think it a piece of showing-off, the kind of thing that Shi’ites go in for. They favour contests at which the Quran is recited, with much public fanfare and the award of large cash prizes. I learned that the Holy Quran had little to do with the book on the shelves of the stationery stores. It was a living book, and its very language was sacred. Its verses were charged with power; they could heal the sick. Each word was a little fighter in a daily war.

Okaz, Jeddah’s Arabic daily, carried in March 1986 a doomladen, prescient column about the power of words. ‘The war of words,’ the writer said, ‘is more harmful than World War Two. Words are forcing the world to World War Three. Words – written in newspapers, magazines, books, uttered on radio and television – are tools to massacre the souls of people.’

The world conspiracy against Islam of which Tehran now speaks is not the fantasy of one elderly paranoiac: in the Kingdom it was a fantasy purveyed as fact to the whole nation. Talented young Arabs, the newspapers alleged, went to Europe to study, and by their abilities excited the envy of their hosts, who would quickly set about ruining them by addicting them to drugs and introducing them to prostitutes. In Marks & Spencer’s London stores, specially trained agents of Zionism lurk, ready to pounce on Arab shoppers, accuse them of shoplifting, throw them into jail and publicise their disgrace worldwide through Reuters and UP.

In November 1986 the Saudi Gazette reported a pronouncement by ‘the General Presidency of the Departments of Religious Researchers, Ruling, Call and Guidance’, warning against certain Italian floor tiles that had been imported into the Kingdom. These tiles were aimed at ‘purposefully offending the sentiments of Muslims’. Hidden away in their swirl of pattern – not obvious at a casual glance, but evident on close inspection – were the words ‘Allah’ and ‘Mohammed’. Or so the authorities said. The eye of faith is formidably sharp. If a floor tile can offend Islam, what chance has a novel?

The Saudi response to The Satanic Verses has been lowkey; the ayatollah, who refers contemptuously to their faith as ‘American Islam’, has stolen their thunder. But it is not difficult to imagine the depth of outrage. The first popular reaction in the West to the death threat was, I think, amazement, tinged by what came near to a disbelieving hilarity: ‘But it’s only a novel.’ We could not believe that people would riot about a story.

Novelists have various tricks for concealing what they are about. If they want to use a real person as a character they can, if competent, cover their tracks well enough to avoid being sued for libel. If critics call their work ‘brutal’ or ‘offensive’ they can smirk and say that they were spinning a metaphor, forging a conceit, creating an allegory. They can, like Salman Rushdie, allow their characters to dream. Writers no longer talk about their muse, but they are willing to talk about how their characters take over, about how the author himself is a minor part of the process, carried along on some irresistible creative tide. It is all part of the mystique; authors enjoy it. In the West, it does not matter whether they slide away from the implications of their work in this way.

Elsewhere, of course – in the Eastern Bloc or in South Africa – a novel is taken perfectly seriously as a vehicle for ideas. Its writer is forced to stand behind the points he makes, and is given no particular privilege. The censor will peel the novel’s defences away and say, so this is what you really meant; and penalise and punish the author accordingly. But elsewhere the censor may not bother to strip away the conventions; he may not even recognise that they exist. Art for art’s sake will mean nothing to him. The Satanic Verses may be a great work of art, the pattern on the floor tiles may have been aesthetically pleasing: but both are political acts. The defences of merit and of good intention that we are accustomed to erect around a persecuted work of art cannot help Rushdie’s book, in countries where they are not recognised as defences. In Tehran, malice is understood. It is taken for granted. There is a worldwide conspiracy against Islam, and Rushdie is its ‘mercenary’.

If his defence cannot be made in artistic terms, it must be made in political terms, but it is hard to feel pleased with the politicians. When the British government says that it understands that Muslims are offended by the book, it means it understands that offence has been taken. It is not near to understanding the nature of the offence. The prime minister says that great religions should be strong enough to withstand criticism, and her remark is alarming because it is so wide of the point. Unlike modern Christianity, Islam does not make a virtue of tolerance. In theory it accommodates the faith of Christians and Jews, the ‘people of the book’, but the Kingdom, at least, does not permit any form of worship other than the Islamic; projecting their own intolerance on the outside world, the faithful in Jeddah found it hard to imagine that in Britain their co-religionists could go freely to a mosque, and they only half-believed it. If you are in Britain, Islam appears an inward-looking and self-protective faith, but when you are in the East it appears vital, active and proselytising. Not long ago, the same could be said of Christianity. Unless we are prepared to think about our own history, enter into it a little, we cannot know what the Muslim writer is talking about when he speaks of ‘spiritual torment and torture’. The silly and the secular do not understand the God-driven. Fundamentalists look at our cheerful modern notion of live-and-let-live, and find it immoral and incomprehensible.

In the first few days after Iran issued the death threat, the support for Salman Rushdie was heartening and unanimous. But we are so used to intellectual consensus and compromise that when we meet an intransigent opponent, with whom no meeting of minds seems possible, we immediately doubt our own case and our own values: politeness may be the ruin of the West. The backtracking has been an unpleasant spectacle. It was unpleasant to hear a young Tory MP say recently that ‘two or three’ of his friends had told him that the book was ‘very second-rate’, and announce that since Rushdie had made so much money he should pay for his own police guard: we do not expect our legislators to be able to read, but we do expect them to be able to distinguish between a private man’s private difficulty and a matter of vital public interest. And just as unpleasant is the defection of those who now cast doubt on Rushdie’s integrity, or urge the withdrawal of the book. Perhaps it is understandable that the authors of children’s books and light social comedies should decline to defend The Satanic Verses. Their freedom of expression is not at issue.

Back in Jeddah, the same woman who had read only one book since her marriage explained one day with great eloquence the consolations of living among believers, in a solidly Muslim society – the feeling of security for the faithful, the freedom from the constant bombardment by alien values. Muslims in Britain live under such bombardment, and they have to accept it and survive as best they can. But their faith still has its consolations, and some good would come of this sorry business if the spokesmen of the Muslim community, and the enlightened and educated Muslims who must be offended by Iran’s decrees, could explain to a sceptical and ignorant Britain what these consolations are.

Postcard from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1989

Looking Back in Anger
John Osborne’s Memoirs
1991

ONE OF THE more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loincloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston. Houston was blond and wholesome, and had a long career, much of it in B-movies; it’s interesting to think that John Osborne might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden … Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby fan, as Dr Watson … He would, you feel, have snarled a hole in the screen.

A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of a lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing’.

Osborne’s father worked in an advertising agency. He was a semi-invalid for most of his son’s youth; his mother was a barmaid – or, as she put it, ‘a victualler’s assistant, if you please’. They moved often, from one rented suburban house or flat to another. Until he was sent away to a third-rate boarding school, the boy had virtually no education; his mother preferred to keep him at home to go window-shopping with her, or to the cinema. These were the days of the double-feature, and he saw, he estimates, two hundred films a year. He had a crowd of relatives who were, in his view, spiteful, greedy, stupid and pathetic. They manifested ‘a timid melancholy or dislike of joy, effort or courage … Disappointment was oxygen to them.’

It is an atmosphere in which effort is despised, and anyone who has the temerity to try to advance in life must bear the complacent smirking of those who predict that it will all end badly. His mother, Nellie Beatrice (so he calls her – the family called her Dolly), dominates his life and shapes the picture of himself which he gives to the reader. The whole book bears witness to the grown man’s failure to separate himself emotionally from a woman he despises – from Nellie Beatrice with her flaking face powder and her Black Looks. The consequences of this failure are played out in the second volume: they are a disabling misogyny, a series of failed and painful relationships, a grim determination to spit in the world’s eye.[1] He is not loveable, he knows; very well, he’ll be hateful then.

It might, the reader thinks, have turned out quite differently. Throughout both books Osborne reproduces letters sent to him by his mother and relatives. Uncle Jack writes to him: ‘There is nothing to report, only I have lost the sight of one eye.’ If the Osborne family had lived, say, in Lancashire instead of London, such a letter would have made Jack a local celebrity; a turn of phrase like that would be a family treasure. But Osborne’s humour is aggressive, not black, not self-deprecating, not tolerant; it makes the world a harder place. The letters make the memoirs easier for the reader, however: one looks forward to them. In the days of heady fame – of Broadway and the Royal Court, of pursuit by the press, of ‘love-nests’ and ‘hideaways’ and CND celebrity rallies – the letters still wing their way. ‘Sid is upstairs in Bed. He had all his bottom teeth out on Wednesday.’

How did our hero escape Nellie Beatrice, Sid and the rest? He had a footling journalist career on Gas World – and, briefly, on Nursery World. Primed by his success at the Gaycroft School of Music, Dancing, Speech, Elocution and Drama, he tried the theatre. Talent seems to have been less important than the ability to live on almost nothing and endure insults from management and patrons. Jobs in rep were advertised in terms like these: ‘No fancy salaries, no queer folk.’ Queer folk appear on almost every page of both volumes of memoirs, and Osborne is at pains to point out – many, many times – that he has no homosexual proclivities. He’d rather a dosshouse than a warm sofa where his timid virtue might be imperilled; and indeed many of his theatrical lodgings didn’t rise much above the dosshouse level.

He toured the provinces in melodramas about ‘middle-class girls compromised in their cami-knickers’ and in ‘northern comedies’ where he failed to see the joke. Between jobs, he learned to subsist on evaporated milk and boiled nettles. His Hamlet was a ‘leering milk rounds man’; he featured in a production of Aladdin so bad that the child amateurs who formed the chorus were abducted from the theatre by their furious parents, so that the ‘Big Spectacular’ had to be cancelled. His first play got its world première in Huddersfield, and lasted for a week.

The first volume left Osborne in 1956, at the point where – in 17 days – he had completed Look Back in Anger. George Devine, the first artistic director of the English Stage Company, arrives in his life (in a rowing boat) and makes him ‘preposterously famous’. Osborne vehemently denies claims that the play was first entitled ‘On the Pier at Morecambe’, but a photographed page of his notebook shows that several titles were contemplated. They include ‘Angry Man’, ‘Man in a Rage’ and ‘Close the Cage Door behind You’. Only one strikes you as false to its begetter: ‘Farewell to Anger’.

For in this second volume, it’s hello to some more. Fame makes Osborne savager than ever. What is wonderful is how the years have deepened the ire, how memory has mauled his wounds so that they open again before the reader’s eyes. When he was a boy, a hospital messed up an appendix operation, leaving him with a hole in his side; they gave him a special pencil with which he could cauterise the wound and help it to heal. If you could wish the playwright one thing, it would be a styptic pencil for his psyche. Self-mutilation is, however, a riveting spectacle.

On the cover of Almost a Gentleman Osborne wears a miscellanea of camp togs, and an expression at once quizzical, combative and prissy. As with the first volume, frail jokes and bad puns decorate the text. We know the writer is on form by page 20, when we read of ‘Binkie Beaumont, most powerful of the unacceptable faeces of theatrical capitalism’. There is some repetition: the comedian Max Miller is once again ‘a god … a saloon-bar Priapus’, and various people are ‘a sphinx’, or, in the case of his second wife, Mary Ure, ‘not a sphinx’. The spite, though, comes up new and fresh.

When Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court, the warmest reaction was Philip Hope-Wallace’s ‘spinsterly condescension’ – Osborne has always at his command the exact, skewering phrase – but then the Sunday papers came out. Ken Tynan called it a ‘minor miracle’ and praised it in these peculiar terms: ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.’ Some critics said: ‘It calls out for the knife.’ All these years on, Osborne will not take the point. ‘Hamlet is too long,’ he says grandly.

Thereafter the hostility of his audiences fuelled his talent; so did rows with the Lord Chamberlain. The list of cuts required to The Entertainer has a strange poetry of its own: ‘Page 30, alter “shagged” … page 43, omit “rogered” (twice) … Act III, page 21, omit “balls”.’

If the balls were omitted, this book would be nothing. It is essentially a book of vitriolic gossip. It does not pretend to be a history of the Royal Court – which is just as well, or we’d never hear the end of the disputes about who said what to whom. (Did Lindsay Anderson really try to ban critics from the Royal Court? Lindsay Anderson doesn’t think so.) It tells very little about how Osborne and his contemporaries went about freeing themselves from the constraints of the theatre as they found it; Brecht’s influence barely merits a nod.

Indeed, the book tells us less about Osborne’s work than about other people’s reactions to it, and less about applause than condemnation. After the opening of his musical satire The World of Paul Slickey, the New Statesman said with restraint: ‘It has almost every fault.’ Playgoers, less circumspect, chased him up Charing Cross Road.

His attitude to his audience is always uncompromising: ‘Their pleasure inflames my prejudice, their indifference stirs my rage.’ In hindsight, Osborne takes a gloating pleasure in trashing his best efforts. Yes, there was a theatrical revolution – the barricades manned by lecherous petty-minded egotists. Yes, the Angry Young Men were political radicals. But this radicalism, he tells us now, was a gigantic self-deceit. They were duped by traitorous fanatics. When, the reader wonders, did Osborne become so discerning? When did he become able to see the true nature of things? It is only the development of some cooler qualities that gives a point to retrospection: since he is as angry as ever, is he any more likely to be right now than he was then? There is no particular reason, of course, why people who write their lives should be fair to themselves or other people. It is more diverting if they aren’t. But when revenge seems the major motive for writing, diversion soon becomes mixed with disgust.

His portraits of colleagues and contemporaries are bilious. Tony Richardson’s ‘duplicity was so sinewy and downright that he was able to deceive friends and adversaries effortlessly’. Freddie Ayer had an ‘organ-grinder’s monkey’s brain’. Olivier gets off comparatively lightly: he is chronically adulterous and manipulative, but so is everyone else Osborne knows. At one point Olivier sings, to the tune of ‘John Peel’, a merry song about buggery.

Women come off worse: Vanessa Redgrave, for example, ‘Big Van’ with her incontinent Yorkshire terrier. ‘Loyal’ is often the best adjective he can find for a woman; it is a trait more often valued in dogs. He may despise the women who cross his path, but doesn’t refuse them. George Devine, who was such an influence on his career, would ‘pull on his pipe lingeringly at the sight of a pretty girl’; Osborne was also a pipe-man. Back in his Gaycroft School days he had run away from a fiancée who worked in a building society – run away from the £12 Bravingtons engagement ring, and the Saturday promenade to look at furniture in the High Street. He married Pamela Lane, who he met in rep in Bridgwater, but their work took them to different parts of the country, and the relationship expired from lack of interest.

His next wife was Mary Ure, who played Alison in Look Back in Anger; even in his description of the wedding ceremony, Osborne is sneering at the bride. She is accused of having a large family, and of having bought a going-away outfit which would ‘photograph pretty disastrously in the departure lounge’. When once again it is time to ‘pump out the blocked drain of matrimony’ he moves on, via mistresses, to Penelope Gilliatt. ‘Why do you keep marrying these women?’ the agent Peggy Ramsay asked him. ‘I’m sure they can’t possibly want to marry you.’

It is not long before moaning and sneering again dominate the text. Gilliatt is accused of nothing much worse than ‘dumb pedantry’, self-importance, spending too little time on her husband and too much on her Observer film column – and of not knowing how a writer works because she is not a proper writer herself. The actress Jill Bennett arrives on the scene. Osborne doesn’t like her much – but why should that impede his career as what he likes to call a ‘cocksman’?

Here the reader’s mind may go back to A Better Class of Person. Early in his acting career Osborne worked with Lynne Reid Banks, who went on to write The L-Shaped Room. Pronouncing her ‘unspeakable’, he saved up his hatred until ‘some time later at an improbably posh party in London I offered her a sandwich. I had taken some trouble to insert among the smoked salmon and cream cheese … a used French letter. The unbelieving repulsion on her face … was fixed for ever for me.’ An unbelieving repulsion steals over the reader too, who begins to wonder whether Osborne is – and one must phrase this delicately – faintly deranged. Through this new book, the question is constantly posed, and for some people it will answer itself when Osborne in a ‘fast forward’ takes us to 7 October 1990, the day after Jill Bennett’s death. Falling upon her newspaper obituaries, shredding them line by line, he denounces ‘this whole rotting body of lies and invention which was her crabbed little life’. He tells us that she ‘was a woman so demoniacally possessed by Avarice that she died of it’, and quotes Tony Richardson’s judgment that she was ‘the worst actress in England’.

At this point, the pious reader may wish to pray, the queasy reader vomit, the prudent reviewer consult the libel laws. Adjectives stored up – ‘fascinating’ perhaps, or ‘scurrilous’ – don’t seem worth using. It no longer seems possible to make a literary judgment on this second instalment of Osborne’s life; the author forces from his reader the moral judgment which he has worked so hard to elicit.

Harold Hobson, writing about him in the Sunday Times at the peak of his fame, said: ‘Self-loathing appears to be the driving force of his art. He should control it; he is not as bad as he thinks he is.’ I don’t know about that.

Draft caption by Mary-Kay Wilmers for a (rejected) cover for the 23 April 1992 issue of the ‘LRB’.

Plain Girl’s Revenge Made Flesh
In Bed with Madonna
1992

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN’S book begins, as it should, with the prodigal, the violent, the gross.[1] But what do you expect? Madonna’s wedding was different from other people’s. The plans were made in secrecy, and backed by armed force. ‘Even the caterer … was kept in the dark until the last minute.’ You also, you may protest, have been to weddings where the caterer has seemed to be taken by surprise. But we are not talking here about a cock-up with the vol-au-vents. We are talking about something on the lines of Belshazzar’s feast: but more lavish, and more portentous.

When Madonna married the misanthropic actor Sean Penn, ‘reporters were stopped at the kerb by a guard armed with a .357 magnum handgun … an army of journalists descended on 6970 Wildlife Road, the palatial $6.5 million cliff-top home of property developer and Penn family friend Dan Unger. Armed security guards scanned the horizon with infrared binoculars.’ Overhead, press helicopters competed with the ocean’s roar. Inside the steel gates, sushi and champagne were served – sometimes by journalists impersonating waiters. No writing appeared on the wall. Instead, Penn ran down to the beach, and scrawled his message to the world in twenty-foot letters in the sand: FUCK OFF. Madonna wore a ten-foot train and a bowler hat. They exchanged vows on the brink of a cliff: ‘Prophetically,’ says the author. He is not a man to let a symbol give him the slip.

The unblushing bride was born in 1958. Her mother, also called Madonna, was a French-Canadian X-ray technician; her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was an engineer. The family was large but affluent, and Madonna grew up in pleasant suburbs: the blue-collar upbringing she claims for herself is one of her inventions, it seems. Andersen makes Madonna’s early years sound like those of St Thérèse of Lisieux. Surely Catholic childhood in 1960s America was not quite so stifling and bizarre? We can be sure it featured crucifixes and rosary beads, all the jolly props which Madonna would later find so useful, but when the author quotes Madonna on her formative influences, he doesn’t try to discriminate between what she thought then and what she says now. ‘Crucifixes are sexy; there’s a naked man on them.’ If Madonna went to a postmortem, would she find the corpse sexy too?

Is there any point in trying to write about Madonna’s life in the conventional way? One thing everybody knows about the woman is that she has invented herself: it is a commonplace. When constant revisionism and reinvention is under way, what does it profit a biographer to drag the weary ‘facts’ before us? Something sterner is required: whole blank pages, paragraphs of exclamation marks. Andersen’s mode is conventional, his style good enough for his subject matter and appropriate to it. His technique, though, is sneakier than at first appears. You may grow infuriated by what seems an uncritical, gormless narrative: but if you stop reading for five minutes and rehearse what you have learned, you realise that anything you now know about Madonna is entirely to her discredit. Yet this is as it should be. Didn’t the girl herself, in high school, ask her friends to call her ‘Mudd’?

Still, let’s truffle with Andersen on his dogged path. When Madonna was five years old, her mother died of cancer, and her father married again. Cue self-examination on the superstar’s part: ‘Like all young girls I was in love with my father, and I didn’t want to lose him. I lost my mother but then I was the mother; my father was mine.’ Andersen refers us – as he often must – to the film In Bed with Madonna, in which his subject explains how she would often crawl into bed with her father. ‘I fell right to sleep after he fucked me.’ Inane giggle. ‘Just kidding.’ The pause is fractional, not long enough for a reaction from the viewer. The girl knows when she’s gone too far. At the age of six or so she would say to Papa: ‘If you ever die, I’m going to get buried in the casket with you.’ This Donne-ish sentiment Tony Ciccone found ‘really disgusting’. Poor man! His disgust threshold will have to rise. When he reaches 59 his daughter will drag him onto a stage to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, her navel exposed and a pattern of laces, like evil stitching, covering her private parts.

The pages concerning Madonna’s childhood are far more interesting than those which follow: but is this not often the case with biography? The relation of mature achievement, in any contemporary life, becomes a dreary procession of dates and places and figures; even the potential excitements of a life like Madonna’s seem to melt away under scrutiny – another day, another million dollars. Madonna Unauthorised is full of names of people who were forgotten by the time they reached the page, or which belong to people who were never more than a footnote in the subject’s great narrative. And most people are a footnote to Madonna, who is no nurturer of other people’s reputations. A great many people who have passed through her life have been famous for 15 seconds; or less, if she could manage it.

It would be good to feel human while you read her life; it would be good to feel pity where pity’s due. But you are prevented. Here is Madonna on her mother’s death and its implications:

It was then that I said, okay, I don’t need anybody. No one’s going to break my heart again. I’m not going to need anybody. I can stand on my own and be my own person and not belong to anyone.

Each line of this sounds like a trawl for a song title: sounds like some awful, thumping, monotonous chart-topper.

Until she was 12, Andersen tells us, Madonna wanted to be a nun; and he tells us in a way that makes it clear that he expects us to throw up our hands and say ‘Lawdie me!’ In fact, most intelligent Catholic girls go through a phase in which they would rather be like Mother than like mother: but then their eyes are opened to wider possibilities. (Besides that, Madonna naturally feels that ‘nuns are very sexy.’) One feels that Madonna’s onstage antics with Romish paraphernalia have never brought her quite the odium she craves. Perhaps we all recognise that the faith lends itself readily to vaudeville productions. Catholic vaudeville is divisible: Waugh and Greene purveyed the intellectual version, and Madonna has done it for simple souls.

In her early teens, by Andersen’s account, Madonna gives up on Thérèse of Lisieux and turns into a Tyson. When she chases a boy, it’s no figure of speech. ‘At one point she ripped off her blazer and blouse and began pursuing a boy named Tommy around the playground.’ Still, sex and religion are very much confused, as she tries to fathom the still unfathomable riddle of her gender. ‘You know how religion is … Guys get to do everything. They get to be altar boys … They get to pee standing up.’ Determined to do something about this Vatican-sponsored inequity, Madonna ‘experimented with ways to urinate without sitting down’. Andersen does not go into much detail, or tell us what success she had. But he describes with diligence her early sexual relationships with boys and girls: in one case, a beau ‘asked her if she wanted to take a walk through Samuel A. Howlett Municipal Park’. And she did, it seems; she did not deem it too exciting. One of her swains reports: ‘I realised I’d actually kissed a girl, though in my case it happened to be Madonna.’ However, when party-going, ‘she guarded her virginity by sometimes wearing a purple turtleneck leotard.’ There is a point where the reader loses interest in Madonna, and becomes ambitious only to meet the man who can paint such a word-picture.

There is nothing else in Andersen’s book that comes near to the pleasure he gives the reader in these early pages. The account of Madonna’s defloration is an anti-climax in every way. Notoriously, she has described the loss of her virginity as a ‘career move’, which one took to mean that she had preserved her hymen until she met someone prepared to pay to shred it. But if Andersen is to be believed – and why not? – the fateful evening began at Knapp’s Dairy Bar, and Madonna yielded to the caresses of a 17-year-old schoolboy who had trouble with her bra strap; a veil is drawn over what he made of the rest of her. He is quoted as saying: ‘I had this great urge to laugh, but Madonna was pretty methodical about it.’

Madonna was now missing Sunday Mass in favour of trysts at Dunkin’ Donuts. Soon, too, she would meet the gaiety, in the shape of a dance teacher, who took her to museums, concerts, art galleries, and also to places where ‘she felt strangely at home as the only female among hundreds of writhing men.’ Andersen may mean they were dancing, but perhaps it depends at what point in the evening she arrived. Madonna has a prurient fascination with male homosexual activity. The film In Bed with Madonna (the film, if you need to know, of her ‘Blonde Ambition’ tour) shows how she likes to encourage it amongst her friends and co-workers. One of her other biographers, Douglas Thompson, quotes her as saying that she thinks of homosexual men as her ‘alter ego’. This is interesting, but Andersen does not pursue it. He is more concerned at this stage to describe her intellectual development. She had decided to grow the hair on her legs, he tells us, believing that this indicated a bohemian cast of mind. She won a dance scholarship to the University of Michigan: ‘Keeping herself to herself, Madonna devoured the dark poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.’

An axe-murderer couldn’t carve up the girl more efficiently. But is it a case of diminished responsibility? One would like to think Andersen is of sound mind, that he writes with premeditation and intends the consequences – but then again, who wants to brand a family man a killer? The blurb tells us that the author ‘lives in Connecticut with his wife and two daughters’. He has previously written ‘highly praised’ works on Katharine Hepburn and Jane Fonda. This does not seem adequate preparation. Perhaps life’s ambiguity has passed him by, or he has come by praise too cheaply?

So: Madonna went to New York. Her dance teacher persuaded her she needed the larger stage, and so she took herself off in search of fame, living in slums and foraging in dustbins for her food. Andersen brings tears to the eyes with his account of her early struggles, but does not feel for her so much that he suppresses the verdicts of her various teachers and colleagues. No one seems to have liked Madonna, or seen anything in her, or thought she had much talent. But – unaccountably – she was taken up by two French music producers, who spirited her off to Paris in the hope of turning her into a disco queen. But Madonna wanted to be a punk: so when they gave her a car, a maid, a secretary and a voice coach, she sulked and sulked until she found herself back in New York.

And then … but come now, if we go at this pace we’ll be here all day. When Madonna got back to New York she joined a band. There was a female vocalist who performed in her underwear. Madonna got her sacked, and took her place. From there she made the progress of which we are all aware. The received wisdom is that even if you have talent, you still need luck; even if you’re lucky, without talent you’ll be found out. Madonna shows that energy can be a substitute for talent; and she has made her own luck. She is thorough: ‘she asked me,’ says one of her friends, ‘to teach her how to spit.’ And spit and spit she did, over and over, till she spat like a veteran. Someone else taught her how to smoke. From Michael Jackson she learned how to grab her crotch. Are these not accomplishments, hard-won for a girl from a nice family? So often Andersen seems to miss the point. He will, persistently, describe Madonna as a transcendent beauty, when, as everyone can see, she’s the plain girl’s revenge made flesh. Madonna has cultivated ardently – apparently without humour or irony – her identification with Monroe: he mentions that she is said to have purchased an adjacent crypt, so that their dust may mingle, but he does not insist on this as fact.

If he recognises pastiche, he never says so. If he identifies id-in-boots, he doesn’t let on. His book has photographs, but he is almost perversely unable to set down, in words, what Madonna is like. And the truth is that three hundred pages, however well composed, could not convey what three minutes of In Bed with Madonna make explicit. Our heroine is charmless, foul-mouthed, will admit the camera and the sound-recordist everywhere, except into a business meeting. We know that in this film we are seeing the real Madonna – for we know from her other films that she cannot act. And also, that she sees no need to: for she has tapped, somehow, into a rich deep vein of fantasy and cash, and all she needs to do is mine it. A proper inquiry might be instituted into what Madonna means: perhaps a joint inquiry, to look into the question of Michael Jackson too, for they seem of a kind. Their appeal is to children ten or twelve years old, too young to know who or what they are, aware of sex as a waiting, empty arena, desperate perhaps to burrow back into a childhood of fantasy and irresponsibility. Madonna has always wanted to be black, if we are to believe Andersen, and she looks like a female impersonator. Michael has transformed himself from a black man into a white-ish female child. They have dined together (‘vegetarians are paler,’ Madonna says) and appeared together at award ceremonies. But it seems they are locked in competition, about who has the more formidable publicity machine.

The most interesting moment of In Bed with Madonna shows the star before a mirror, her make-up lady hovering at her shoulder. Face white, blank, hairpiece cosied on her skull like the top of a cottage loaf, she waits for experience to be layered over the impersonation of innocence; she could, you think, become anything at all. Madonna says: ‘I will be a symbol of something … Like Marilyn Monroe stands for something. It’s not always something you can put a name on, but she became an adjective.’ For anyone who wishes to become an adjective, Madonna is an inspiration. On stage, her little muscly body twists itself in a parody of sensuality: her mini-soutane rides hip-high, her voice wavers on and off-key; up and down she dips, over the supine body of a spreadeagled semi-man. It all happens too fast for words, and it repels or excites at too deep a level for any writer who has offered his services so far. Madonna is not a subject for easy writing. She is a commentary on something, but God knows on what. Andersen doesn’t, that’s for sure.

‘LRB’ cover, 28 May 1992

Rescued by Marat
On Théroigne de Méricourt
1992

IN 1817, at the asylum of La Salpêtrière in Paris, a longterm inhabitant died of pneumonia. Her malnourished, oedematous body was taken away for autopsy. For some years before her death she had been intractably and violently psychotic. She had crawled on the floor like an animal, eaten straw. She stripped off her clothes in freezing weather, and did not mind (her keepers noted) if men saw her naked. She threw icy water on her bedding and her person, and on the floor of her cell.

Her madness was not without eloquence. Until the last years of dementia, she talked all the time. She denounced her keepers as royalists, and spoke of decrees and government measures, addressing her words to the Committee of Public Safety. But the great committee was long since disbanded, its members guillotined or in exile. For Théroigne time had stopped sometime in 1793. Trapped in the rat-infested cell that was her last home, she spoke always of liberty.

The woman whom the press called Théroigne de Méricourt was born Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, in the village of Marcourt, not far from Liège. She was therefore not a Frenchwoman, but a subject of the emperor of Austria. Her family were of peasant stock, but comfortably-off. The train of disasters in her life began when she was five years old, with her mother’s death. She and her two younger brothers were parcelled out to relatives. (About the same time, in Arras, four motherless children called Robespierre were being bundled from one household to another.) Théroigne was taken in by an aunt, who appears to have treated her as a servant. She returned to her father, and got short shrift from his new wife; through her adolescence she trooped from one family to the next, often with her younger brothers in tow, always hopeful of being wanted, and doomed to disappointment.

The family drifted into money troubles, and its most vulnerable member slid sharply down the social scale, spending a year as a cowherd. After this, she secured a post as a governess, Elisabeth Roudinesco claims – though she goes on to tell us that at this stage Théroigne had not learned to write.[1] More likely, as her 1911 biographer Frank Hamel says, she earned her living as a seamstress. But then in 1778, when she was about 16, her luck changed. She met a Mme Colbert, who engaged her as a companion, arranged music lessons for her, and took her around Europe.

Théroigne had considerable musical talent. She was a pretty young woman, petite, with blue eyes and chestnut hair, and a sharp intelligence to make up for her lack of formal education. She had, in fact, all the qualifications for a romantic heroine, or romantic victim. Accordingly, four years after her stroke of luck, there came along a fateful Englishman. Something between an elopement and an abduction occurred. The cad took her to his estate, procrastinated about the marriage he had promised; then they flitted back to Paris, where between them they ran through his money. ‘Yet she knew neither carnal passion nor genuine affection,’ Roudinesco sighs. After that she seems to have taken up with a number of men, including an elderly marquis who gave her an annuity. Roudinesco describes her as ‘uneasily suspended between literary bohemianism, polite society and moral degradation’.

Elisabeth Roudinesco (a pupil of Lacan and a historian of psychoanalysis) is concerned not just with Théroigne’s life history but with revolutionary feminism; with Théroigne’s madness and what it means, and with how historians have treated this baffling and intriguing woman. Her book is intelligent, original and deeply felt, but it is written, or perhaps translated, in a strained and artificial idiom which makes Théroigne’s story sound even more bizarre than it really is. Throughout the book, errors and inconsistencies pass without editorial intervention; the index is waste paper. But however badly you tell Théroigne’s story, you cannot take away its fascination. The cowherd became an opera singer. The opera singer became a rabble-rouser. The rabble-rouser became a madwoman. It is inevitable that the poor, starved body on the postmortem table should have become a battleground for theorists. No doubt it is useless to complain that the subject’s humanity has slipped away. Even her contemporaries were quick to turn Théroigne into a symbol.

Théroigne had a daughter; we do not know her date of birth or the name of her father, but we know that she died in 1788. Théroigne also contracted syphilis. In the light of her later illness one would like to hear more about this, but perhaps it is as well that we don’t hear more from this author; it is impossible, for several reasons, that a surgeon should have told Théroigne that ‘the virus had entered her bone marrow.’ Medical matters are not Roudinesco’s strong point; it is only in legend that the murdered Marat was still bleeding on the day of his funeral.

Théroigne was restless and ambitious; she wanted to make a professional career as a musician, so she left her old marquis and went in pursuit of success. She crops up in London, Naples, Genoa, Rome; we can follow her, just about, by a paper trail of pawn tickets and letters and legal agreements. In the spring of 1789 she took lodgings in Versailles, and attended every day the debates of the newly convened Assembly.

On the eve of the revolution, women did not regard themselves as an interest group. Throughout the century poor women had taken to the streets in times of shortages and high prices. But few people in 1789 thought that women should be allowed to vote – or indeed, that all men should be allowed to vote. Suffrage was dependent on economic status, and few women had enough of that. Besides, as Roudinesco shows, few Enlightenment thinkers could conceive of any role for women beyond the domestic. There were exceptions, like the Marquis de Condorcet, who believed that either no human beings had natural rights, or all had the same rights. But the biology-is-destiny school of thought had the upper hand: women were weak, irrational, subject to cyclical indisposition, unfitted by providence for any part in the political process. The Declaration of the Rights of Man did not extend to women; it was enough if their fathers and brothers and husbands had rights. Théroigne called this attitude ‘supremely unjust’.

At some stage Théroigne acquired not only the language of political discourse, but also the famous riding habit – white, black or blood red – in which she sweeps through the imagination of her contemporaries and of romantic historians; at some stage, this neglected, abused little girl puts on her plumed hat and picks up her pistols. What was she then – a feminist pioneer, a street-fighting woman? Any close account of her life is a process of debunking. Though she haunted the Palais-Royal in Paris, she was perhaps not present on 12 July, when the crowd turned into a mob; she was not present two days later, when the Bastille fell. She did not lead the women of Paris on their October march to Versailles, to bring back the royal family, ‘the baker, the baker’s wife, and the baker’s little apprentice’. What she did do was to make herself pleasant to various up-and-coming deputies and journalists, to attend little discussion groups; to be seen, once or twice, on the streets when notable events were occurring. Her greatest moment came when she delivered a speech to the men of the Cordeliers Club, and was enthusiastically applauded. But would the left-wing club make her a member? Ah, well: that was another matter.

Elisabeth Roudinesco has a number of interesting things to say about the nascent political power of women, but she tends to make simple ideas sound very complicated; Olwen Hufton, in her study of women and citizenship, is a model of clarity.[2] Hufton has produced a vigorous, well-argued, level-headed book, written with a nicely sardonic wit. She handles theoretical issues with ease, makes them concrete; Roudinesco makes them vaporous. Théroigne is peripheral to Hufton’s narrative; her interest is in more ordinary women, women who (by and large) have neither faces nor names, but who, as the revolution progressed, arrogated to themselves an increasing share of informal power. But did the revolution advance women’s rights, or retard them? Both these authors show how feminism and progressive politics came adrift from each other. Urban women rioters did not want the vote, but price controls on bread, candles, soap. Their interests and those of peasant women did not coincide. And rural women, as their men complained, clung to their priests: to their madonnas and village virgins, to the hope of a better life after this.

As Théroigne became better known, she became the target of a ruthless campaign in the royalist press. She had tried to keep herself to herself – Roudinesco, who presumes to go to bed with her subject, assures us that ‘it was not hard for Anne-Josèphe to renounce the pleasures of the flesh, for she had never known them.’ But inevitably, stories about her background leaked out. A certain deputy had the unfortunate surname of Populus. The satirical right-wing news-sheets nominated him as Théroigne’s lover, thus implying that she was mistress to the people, a very busy prostitute. She was depicted as having given birth in the chamber of the Assembly – her labour brought on by excitement at one of Robespierre’s speeches.

In the imagination of the era – and of later eras, too – a public man is one thing; a public woman quite another. A woman who leaves hearth and home for the wider world is a streetwalker. She is a locus of disease; she victimises men, infects them. A number of historians have described the revolution as a spreading infection, a disease running out of control. Roudinesco shows us the painful metaphorical weight the woman revolutionary had to bear. She tends, however, to write as if Théroigne had a harder time than her female contemporaries. In fact, sexual slur and innuendo was the established, pre-revolutionary weapon of anonymous but aristocratic pamphleteers, who portrayed Marie-Antoinette as a predatory lesbian. During the revolution, the journalist Hébert would portray the ferociously respectable Manon Roland as a slut, and Antoinette as a seducer of her own pre-adolescent son. Any woman who put her nose above the parapet received the same treatment. Right-wing journalists like Suleau, one of Théroigne’s persecutors, employed language offensive to a 20th-century ear. Did people in fact believe what was written in the press? Were they blind to satire and exaggeration and sheer silliness? Roudinesco writes as if the left-wing press of 1790 was quite different from the royalist press – as if it was sober and responsible, and employed legions of fact-checkers. But abuse was in the air. The press was free for the first time. The fine art of vituperation was flourishing, on every side. There was no divide between the personal and the political. Théroigne’s friend Camille Desmoulins once wrote a theatre review so ruinous to business that the leading man called him out.

The men who traded insults had means of settling their disputes: rapiers and writs. Théroigne had no platform from which to reply. Towards the end of 1790, heartsick and in debt, she left Paris. She wanted to see her family – she was always loyal to them, despite their treatment of her. Unfortunately, her reputation as a political activist followed her. Three émigré officers kidnapped her from a rural inn. One of them attempted to rape her. She was handed over to the Austrians, and imprisoned in the Tyrol, in the formidable fortress of Kufstein.

Her captors had swallowed her legend. They did not ill-treat her physically, but they put her under a great deal of mental pressure. They believed that she was on intimate terms with the men who were now shaping events in Paris. They had amassed a formidable amount of documentation about her – some of which has misled Elisabeth Roudinesco. But it soon became clear that while Théroigne was a singular and eloquent woman, a great enthusiast for revolution, her actual influence had been very limited; she had no particular knowledge of the inner workings of the Jacobin Club or of the private opinions of revolutionary leaders.

Théroigne coughed blood. A doctor said her mental state showed cause for concern. Her interrogators took her to Vienna, where she was taken to an interview with the emperor, who ordered her release. Escorted halfway across Europe by her captors, she resurfaced in Paris. Most people had assumed she was dead; besides, the world had changed.

In republican France, Théroigne would grow into her popular persona, go halfway to meet her violent legend. Did she, on the day the monarchy was overthrown, kill the journalist Suleau? Certainly, she was at the centre of a mob which did so. Roudinesco does not concern herself too much with sifting through the available accounts, and this seems a loss. So many of the revolution’s leaders remained aloof from the violence. It seems important that Théroigne did not.

At least there was no longer a royalist press to spread rumours about her private life. But she was further away than ever from real power. Manon Roland – who was disdainful of women’s role in public life – exercised covert power when her husband was minister of the interior. Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe – mysterious, marginal women – seized the initiative in the political societies. By 1793, the women sansculottes were on the streets, calling for price controls. Théroigne did not fit in anywhere. Whatever she was, she was not a woman of the people: her superior if patchy education, her cosmopolitan experience, marked her out. She attached herself to the Brissotin faction in the Convention, to the people who were later called Girondins; she backed their pro-war policy, and campaigned for the right of women to bear arms.

It was not an astute move. Théroigne and other women campaigners invoked the image of the Amazon. Myths were well understood, in those days. As Roudinesco reminds us, the Amazons killed half their male children at birth, and kept the rest as emasculated slaves. It is hard to think of an image more calculated to strike panic into the male psyche. Théroigne campaigned among the women in Saint-Antoine, claiming that her views had the backing of prominent revolutionaries like Robespierre. But Robespierre had never met her, and said so. He was unlikely to favour her notion of women’s battalions, since he did not favour any battalions at all – he was opposed to the war. He had his own constituency among the women of Paris, who came to sit in the public gallery at the Jacobin Club and worship him. As Hufton says, a pattern had been established: on their day off, men went drinking and women went to church. The women of Paris may have had little time for the priests the old regime had foisted on them, but they preserved the image of a male saviour who was gentle, celibate and ready to die. They cherished at the same time, Roudinesco says, the image of Marat, but for a different reason. He was everything the political woman was said to be. He was ugly. He was irrational. He was a political embarrassment.

Théroigne’s opponents in the press were now on the left, not the right. They depicted her as wearing a false moustache, which tended to drop off at moments of crisis. Predictable male grumbles were beginning to surface. When a man got home from a hard day’s patriotism, he wanted his dinner on the table; he didn’t want to find that his wife was three streets away, attending a political rally. In the summer of 1793 the power of the women’s clubs would be broken. A series of personal and peculiar contingencies – which Hufton describes very clearly – identified them with the enragés, the anarchistic looters of grocer’s shops, the populists whose views, in time of war, became a luxury the republic could not afford.

Théroigne was not a clubbist, though, or an enragé’s mistress, or anything much any more, just a woman washed up on the revolution’s inhospitable shore; her vision of women’s role was becoming utopian, at a time when only the bleakest pragmatism could take one safely from day to day. In May 1793 she turned up at the door of the Convention to take her usual place in the galleries reserved for Girondin supporters. A crowd of women ambushed her, stripped off her clothes and whipped her. The incident was very violent; it was not a token humiliation. She was rescued by Marat, who called off the women, put an arm around her and took her to safety. It is one of the doctor’s few recorded good deeds.

The following spring, one of her brothers asked the authorities to take her into protective custody, and declare her insane. This may, Roudinesco thinks, have been an attempt to pre-empt her arrest. She was said to be suffering from delusions of persecution – but, during the Terror, who was persecuted, and who was deluded? She wrote a letter to Saint-Just: ‘I have neither paper nor light, I have nothing … I must be free so that I can write.’

The letter seems more desperate than mad, but it was used against her. She was transferred from one asylum to the next, ending up at the terrible Salpêtrière. Roudinesco shows how proposals for the reform of the place had come to nothing – other considerations had elbowed out the issue of how the mad were treated. It is clear that, if she was sane when she was shut up, Théroigne could not have remained sane for long, under the stress of mistreatment. She was not forgotten after the revolution – far from it. She became a well-known curiosity. The doctors who treated her did not trouble to inform themselves of the facts of her life. They embraced the legend. She was the killer, the emasculating Amazon. It was considered that the revolution had driven her mad. What was the revolution, after all, but an outbreak of mass psychosis? The monarchy restored, this view seemed persuasive.

After Théroigne was dead, a cast of her head was taken. The tiny face is avian, chilling. She had withered away, Roudinesco says, ‘through a slow extinction of the organs, arising from the depth of melancholia’. If we are to be Freudian, melancholia is induced by mourning for the ‘lost object’. Théroigne’s lost object was the revolution. The language of her madness is simpler than Roudinesco will concede. Enemies said she was filthy, hot, demanding. For twenty years she washed herself in ice.

Olwen Hufton writes very cogently of the decline of the female militant, and of the counter-revolutionary woman. Roudinesco devotes her later chapters to historiography: her subject seen by Michelet, by Lamartine, by the Goncourts. Théroigne becomes thinner, more shadowy: an ideological nullity, a ghost. Yet she was real, wasn’t she? In her postscript Roudinesco describes her journey to Marcourt, the village where Théroigne was born. She finds ‘nothing, no shadow or shade’; almost nothing to demonstrate that the woman or her family ever existed. There is only a baptismal certificate, preserved under glass. The author is overtaken by that haunted malaise common in those who try to make sense of the revolution: ‘I feel that I have invented everything.’

Postcard from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1997

Blame it on the Belgians
On Christopher Marlowe
1992

‘YOU DON’T WANT to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe.[1] ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’

Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit. He looked at his buttery bills too, and noted when the shoemaker’s son had money to spend; noted when (unless he was starving himself) he was absent from college. His conclusion? There was no tavern. There was no brawl. It is an old lie that Nicholl has set out to nail, but he is unable, he admits, to substitute a new truth. All he can hope for is a ‘faint preserved outline where the truth once lay’. In Elizabeth’s England, men lied to their reflection; and Marlowe belonged to a shadow world of espionage, where every straight action is mirrored by treachery, where the agent provocateur is king.

Charles Nicholl has previously written on alchemy in the Elizabethan age. ‘As above, so below’: this was the maxim of alchemists. It works in the real world too. The factious giants of Elizabeth’s court are supported by a vast root system of con-men, of prison informers, of spies, ‘projectors’ and ‘ambodexters’. Marlowe was part of this underground world: this is not in contention. But his reputation is surrounded by rumour, misinformation, disinformation. Shady and unpleasant he may have been, Nicholl says, but we owe him something – not simply because he was a great dramatist and poet, but because his death was murder, and the crime is unsolved. Nicholl is an investigator with a compelling sense of duty to the past and the people who inhabit it. To accept an untruth, to assent to a lazy version of history, is not just negligent but immoral.

Charles Nicholl writes vividly, without the academic’s compulsion to cover his back; but where he is speculating he says so clearly. Part of the success of his book comes from the fact that he has focused sharply on his central incident. He begins with an account of Marlowe’s death; he leads us away from it, into the thickets of European politics and the literary and political underworld; then he leads us back, by ways digressive but sure, to the Widow Bull’s victualling house in Deptford, where in spring 1593 four young men spent a day drinking wine in the garden.

Mrs Bull’s house was not a tavern, nor was she a sort of Mistress Quickly, half-expecting a fight to break out as the sun declined. She was a bailiff’s widow, with some court connections; her house was a respectable one. Nicholl evokes the Deptford evening: the scent of apple orchards mingling with the reek of fish and sewage. At about six o’clock, the young gentlemen came in for their bespoke supper. A short while later, Ingram Frizer put the point of his dagger into Christopher Marlowe’s right eye socket. He inserted it to a depth of two inches. Marlowe died quickly, with no great fuss.

The inquest produced a tidy, emollient version, which the coroner accepted. It had been self-defence, said the two witnesses, whose names were Skeres and Poley. Marlowe and Frizer had quarrelled over the bill, or reckoning. Marlowe had picked up Frizer’s dagger and slashed at him, Frizer had wrested it away (presumably while the witnesses stood as if turned to stone) and had inflicted the fatal wound. No other version was available to the court; these were the only witnesses, and their account could not be contradicted. Four weeks after Marlowe’s death, Frizer was pardoned. One of the rumours that went about town was that there had been a quarrel over a boyfriend. Nicholl is quite certain that whether or not Marlowe was a homosexual, it had no bearing on his death, and we cannot know what bearing it had on his life: ‘We do not know what it meant to be gay in Elizabethan England.’ As for the row about the bill, it is plausible enough, as an explanation, until you know there was a greater account to be settled. At the time of his death, Marlowe was under investigation by the Privy Council, suspected of being part of a plot to incite the citizens of London against the immigrant Dutch merchants. His friend Kyd had already been arrested and tortured, and the fact that Marlowe was not in jail suggested that some powerful interest was protecting him. It was not the first time he had been in trouble with the authorities. In Cambridge in 1587, his college had taken fright at a report that Marlowe was planning to skip the country and join the ranks of the would-be Catholic martyrs, the seminarians at the English College in Rheims. The Privy Council had taken the unusual step of intervening on his behalf: young Marlowe was a good boy, he should be given his degree. Then in the late January of 1592, he had got into a more spectacular kind of trouble: he was deported from the Dutch town of Flushing, accused of coining. In London he was interviewed by Burghley, the lord treasurer; though coining was a capital offence, he cannot have served more than a short term of imprisonment: in May that year he was on the streets again, brawling in Shoreditch and attracting the attention of the constabulary.

Leave aside for a moment all speculation and suggestion. Just these two (well-documented) incidents seem to show that we are dealing in a business of spectacular complexity. They went back a long way, Marlowe and Frizer and Skeres and Poley, much further back than the ‘feast’ at Mrs Bull’s. In As You Like It Shakespeare made a reference to Marlowe’s death, cryptic but pointed: he called it ‘a great reckoning in a little room’.

What sort of man was Marlowe? Nicholl is not primarily writing a work of literary criticism, but he presents us with a picture of an author who is congruent with what he writes. Marlowe is flamboyant, sceptical, a vivid schemer, with plenty of ‘stomach’ – that is, he is ambitious, impulsive, noisy, prone to violence. Not the best sort of recruit for the secret services, by modern standards – but patient undercover work was not his forte. Nashe wrote:

His pen was sharp-pointed like a poignard. No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning-glass to set on fire all his readers … He was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and his invention were foreborn: what they thought they would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed.

At some level, however, he must have been in the service of princes; everyone was. Poetry wasn’t a living. So, in 1587, Nicholl tells us, he was acting as a recruiter for the Catholic seminary at Rheims, working on the young men within his university, and reporting back to some important Protestant about what success he had. Some recruits were from crypto-Catholic families; some were just romantic boys with a relish for danger and for being on the wrong side of the establishment. Christopher Marlowe was – no doubt – not intrinsically evil or depraved; probably he was not particularly anti-papist, and perhaps indeed he had flirted with Rome himself. His own beliefs are unknowable, but at an early age, it seems, he found work he could do, the kind of work that keeps you in doublets you can wear to have your portrait painted. He was the kind of man whose rashness, in speech and action, might provoke an answering rashness in others. He was articulate, where others fumbled for words. He was ingenious, where others struggled to find the mechanism of a plot. The weak, the wavering, the disaffected would be drawn to a man like Marlowe.

In the Europe of the late 16th century, Nicholl shows, ‘intelligence’ was a massive industry. Of course it was different from the modern idea of intelligence, because ink and paper and the spoken word were the only means of communication, and news could travel only as fast as a courier. Every government department needed its sources of information, and so did every great man; networks of couriers and foreign correspondents were maintained. And when it came to understanding what your opponents were up to, you could not tap their telephones or monitor their radio communications: your only course was to insert some man of yours among their men. Thus, the two-faced man flourished – and at state expense, since Francis Walsingham had set up in England the world’s first professional secret service.

Subversion was an industry. You can feel, reading Nicholl, that every second seminarian at Rheims must have been a spy; indeed, that seems quite possible. The history of Elizabeth’s reign has a thin, friable top surface: the Protestant virgin of England, standing alone against Catholic France and Spain; the Queen of Scots nourishing her assassination schemes, knotting them to a vast papist conspiracy that creeps throughout Europe. Yet if you look at these conspiracies – at the Throckmorton plot, the Babington plot – they melt away. Deluded, muddled, inefficient young gents have their plans firmed up for them by whatever brisk agent provocateur Walsingham has put in place. ‘Farewell, sweet Robyn,’ writes Anthony Babington to Robert Poley, who was one of the men who stood by as Marlowe was stabbed. ‘Farewell, sweet Robyn, if as I take thee true to me.’ Poley was anything but true: and Babington, briefly strung up but fully conscious, was shortly afterwards castrated and disembowelled by Elizabeth’s executioner.

Nicholl is adept at tracing the cross-connections, the processes by which sedition was manufactured; and he has plenty of persuasive case histories, of agents turned double agents turned triple agents. He leaves us in no doubt that Marlowe was on the edge of the secret world, then later at its heart. Why did the secret services bother with the young literati? Because they were clever, and good at understanding plots; because they always needed money; because they were footloose and willing to travel; because they had the entrée to great households, and could be induced to spy on their patrons. Marlowe’s patron was Thomas Walsingham, the great spymaster’s nephew. Beyond this, he had the friendship of powerful men.

One was Lord Strange, who became earl of Derby. He belonged to the Stanley family, whose power base was in Lancashire, a part of England famous for clinging to Catholicism. His cousin Sir William Stanley was a notorious traitor, who after years of stalwart military service to Elizabeth had handed the Dutch town of Deventer over to the Spanish and formed a regiment in the king of Spain’s service. Lord Strange was a problem for the government. As a Lancashire official he did his job of naming and fining recusants. Ostensibly, he was loyal. Yet he was high in the line of succession, and Catholic exiles saw him as a likely figurehead in the event of a coup. The Earl of Northumberland, too, was very near the throne. He was an occultist and scholar, and collected the works of Giordano Bruno. Northumberland’s friend was Walter Ralegh; their coterie was sceptical, intellectual. They had the kind of inquiring minds a precarious regime detests.

One of Nicholl’s most interesting lines of investigation follows the work of Frances Yates, and concerns Giordano Bruno’s visit to England in 1583. Bruno was protected by Henri III of France; while in England, he may have proffered a distinctive Valois solution to Europe’s problems. On the one hand was an intransigent, narrow-minded Protestantism; on the other, the Jesuitical, proselytising Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. Might there be a third way – another way of looking at God? Bruno’s dream was of something more spiritually and intellectually attractive than the aggressive dogmas which dominate the age. There is no space, in his tightly constructed book, for Nicholl to explore Bruno’s mysticism, or the shifting frontier between mysticism and science; nor can he do more than advert to John Bossy’s theory that Bruno was spying for Walsingham. If he was, Nicholl argues, it did not help his notions gain currency; Walsingham was interested in the man and his links with the French embassy, not in Bruno’s wider message. Nicholl suggests that it was in the Northumberland-Ralegh circle that Bruno’s ideas lingered on, after his extravagant presence was withdrawn. They may have lingered on, too, in the mind of a playwright looking for a model for Dr Faustus.

One cannot say that the government was simply too hardheaded for Bruno’s ideas to take hold. They were alchemists, too, when it suited them. Edward Kelley, a famous spirit-medium and an assistant of John Dee, the occultist, geographer and mathematician, was one of Lord Burghley’s agents in Prague, where there was a set of expatriate, feebly plotting Catholics. Burghley applied to him hopefully for some of his ‘tincture’, for it would have been very useful for the war-weary economy if the lord treasurer had a starter potion for turning base metal into gold. ‘Our gold is not the common gold,’ the alchemists used to say. But Burghley had missed the spiritual dimension of the science. Common gold was what he was after. He also asked Kelley for a cure for his gout.

To men of this mentality, religion was the servant of the state. It kept the masses quiet – such men acknowledged, in that respect, the atheist’s objection to faith – and it also provided a touchstone of allegiance. It was said that Ralegh, for instance, belonged to no religion. Kit Marlowe, informers said, had ‘read him the atheist lecture’. And Marlowe was a well-known scoffer, who would say (in his cups, perhaps) that Jesus and Saint John were lovers, that ‘the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe.’ Where church and state are in alliance, atheism is treason.

It was not a private matter, whether a man believed in God. A man of no religion might soon be a man of any religion: that is, he might become a papist, a subversive, if talked to in the right tone or approached with a big enough bribe. Again, to the conventional mind, atheism was incomprehensible: if you did not believe in God, might you perhaps believe in the devil, and might you not, if you were a slippery occultist like one of the Northumberland set, have the means of communication with him? The devil had, notoriously, more spies than any lord treasurer, or Mr Secretary Walsingham; more battalions than the Earl of Essex, the old queen’s toy-boy. Atheism would be a neat charge to stick on that contentious man Ralegh, if you were ill-disposed to him. It was vague, too vague, perhaps: but suppose you could associate him with the popular discontent against ‘the beastly brutes the Belgians’, the French and Flemish refugees, the rich Dutch merchants – against whom, it seemed, his man Marlowe had made placards? Would that not (at least) tend to get Ralegh into more trouble than he was in already?

Once you have praised The Reckoning for its sharp focus, it seems ungracious to carp at it for not taking an overview. To get the best from the book you need to understand about the succession problem, about Elizabeth’s constant equivocation, about the efforts of her ministers to stampede and panic her into action; you need to know why the secret service was necessary. Could Nicholl not have provided a swift, synoptic background? Of course, specialists would have quarrelled with it, but it would have supplied the one lack in his fascinating book. He doesn’t usually make the mistake of assuming the reader knows everything he knows, but there are areas of obscurity. He refers, in a phrase, to the Lopez affair. Has he explained it somewhere? The book is, necessarily, one-paced and choked with detail; you might blink and miss something. But ‘Lopez’ is not in the index: so perhaps he hasn’t explained.

Lopez was a Portuguese Jew, one of Elizabeth’s court physicians. He plotted in a pale and extensive way, took money from here and there, from so many masters that any intelligence he ever supplied was cancelled out by counterintelligence. But it is unlikely he plotted, as the Earl of Essex alleged, ‘a desperate and dangerous treason’ to poison the queen. Even Elizabeth did not believe it, but – because Essex sulked, and manufactured evidence – the old man was hanged, drawn and quartered, just the same. His real crime, possibly, was to have laughed at Essex with two Portuguese drinking cronies, and to have insinuated that he had cured him of a certain discreditable disease. The point is that both Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil believed Lopez innocent. That was no reason to assert themselves on his behalf. They were dispensable, these little, paid-for consciences, these bought bodies.

Nicholl explains that after Walsingham’s death the secret service divided. Some agents were bought by the Earl of Essex, and some by Robert Cecil. This split may have been fatal for Marlowe. Essex and Ralegh were old enemies, implacable opponents; they fought a naval campaign together, but they also fought for the favours of the old woman who was the fount of all power. Nicholl sees Marlowe’s end as part of a conspiracy to bring down Ralegh; he makes persuasive connections. But finally, he cannot explain what Marlowe was doing in the ‘little room’: with Poley, who was Robert Cecil’s man, with Skeres, who was Essex’s man, and with Frizer, who was anybody’s man, perhaps, if the sum were agreed beforehand. What pretext was given to Marlowe for this strange meeting; what proposition was put to him, in those long hours in the garden; why did he not sense the drift of events, and get out of that little room in time? Nicholl does not claim he can supply the answers, but rather puts us into a frame of mind where we see that there can be none. What stays with the reader – when he has forgotten the smaller details of the intelligence network so minutely described – is a sense of frustration and futility. If it were otherwise, the author would not be true to his subject. The secret services of that time, and maybe of more recent times, existed largely for their own ‘inward’ reasons, and were governed and kept in business by their own distorted logic. They were the great school and refuge of opportunists, cynics – and of poor poets, no doubt – and operated not so much to serve the state as to serve themselves. Despite his scholarship, Nicholl’s aim is humble enough. ‘I am not trying to argue that Marlowe’s death has to have a meaning. My reading only extends to a more complex kind of meaninglessness than that of a tavern brawl.’

Is the book pointless, then? Not at all. It tells us, if we needed telling, that poetry and cynicism may co-exist, flourishing in one heart, that great writers may be the dupes and servants of small regimes – and that writers will do most things for the promise of hard cash.

Fax from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1994.

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