We arrived in Newark from London in late afternoon on Monday, temporarily wilted from the rigors of the cattle car aspect of the Friendly Skies, but more fundamentally refreshed and renewed by a visit to Britain that included about as much variety as was feasible for a visit of less than two weeks. For starters, our trip coincided with a certain amount of British political excitement. We arrived on the very day of the Scottish referendum, and awoke next day to the news of its result. Both the Labour and Conservative party conferences took place during our brief stay. We conducted some business and indulged in much pleasure, participated in an excellent scholarly gathering, and had good visits with family and old friends, spending quality time both in the country and in the city, where we had a day binging on museums and a night at the theater.
Joan
and I met in Oxford in the late fifties, and we naturally have many fond
memories of the place, to which we have returned as frequently as
possible. In recent years we have been
rather taken with the conference entitled “Meeting Minds” sponsored each
September by the increasingly sophisticated (i. e., Americanized) Oxford
University Alumni Office. “Meeting
Minds,” which showcases many of the University’s most able scholars and
lecturers, is a kind of Elderhostel on pep pills. This year we were actually able to rent a room reasonably in
my old college, which like many others is realizing the financial potential of
its hospitality. Our
comfortable lodgings, while radically upgraded since my undergraduate days,
still had the uniquely Oxonian whiff of antiquity about them. Each of the several lectures and panels
we heard—beginning with a Dominican friar’s unusual explication of Dante’s Purgatorio—was of excellent quality, but
as it is one duty of an essayist to propose credible unifying themes, I might
suggest the indeterminacy of history.
We are in the midst of the serial centenary observation of the events of
the First World War, still often called in Britain the “Great War”. Not surprisingly, the Great War was a
recurrent subject in the “Meeting Minds” program, and one memorable lecture was
by Margaret MacMillan, a Canadian historian who is the Warden of St. Anthony’s
College, and recently the author of The
War That Ended Peace: the Road to 1914. Many of the best lecture titles are questions. Her question concerning the outbreak of
war was the soul of wit: “Choice or Accident?”
the beginning of a very bad trip
She
answered the question only as a throwaway at the end: probably an accident. If
the Archduke Ferdinand’s driver had not made a wrong turn, there probably would have been no battle of
the Somme. The Materialist View of
history struggles with the Great Man View—with so much wiggle room in history’s
interstices as to guarantee a succession of tenured slots in perpetuity.
Before
leaving Oxford for Joan’s brother’s home in Wye in Kent, we had lunch with
John and Frances Walsh, one of two surviving Oxford couples with whom we have
enjoyed the continuing friendship of half a century. Regular readers already know that in rural Kent I had to
declare electronic defeat, but there were compensations. I had a morning rambling about the
chalky hillsides above Wye, and half a day on my own in nearby Canterbury—a
treat that no Chaucerian is likely to squander in an Internet café.
A
good friend’s fine apartment in Westminster, of which we enjoyed the use, is a
short walk from the Houses of Parliament and practically no walk at all from
the Tate (Britain), where the spectacular current show features the late
paintings of Turner, overwhelming in their number and their chromatic daring. The painter largely turned away from oil
and canvas in his later years to work, with increasing daring and
experimentation, in water colors.
Among the outstanding water colors in the show is the “Blue Rigi”—the
Rigi being a mountain behind Lake Lucerne—which became famous as one of several
British masterpieces “saved for the nation” from the philistine vicissitudes of
the auction house by popular subscription through the Art Fund—a kind of Oxfam
for British Art.
The "Blue Rigi" (J. M. W. Turner, 1842)
I
thought that Turner, too, related to Professor MacMillan’s suggestions of
historical indeterminacy—that what undoubtedly happened might not have
happened, or could very well have happened differently, or does indeed “happen”
in different ways once forcefully imagined. Turner saw things in a way doubtless unique to himself,
though if one once vicariously views them through his eyes, the vision seems
inexorable and definitive. I was
surprised to realize that a large number of his paintings are at least in
theory narrative—historical, mythological, or literary. The final three paintings—and a
stunning trio they make—took as their subject matter the parting of Dido and Æneas
from the fourth book of Virgil’s Æneid.
Getting
to the Tate five minutes before it opened, thus guaranteeing that we would be
part of the day’s initial and relatively sparse
cohort of picture-peepers, was something of a coup—though not the literal coup de théatre that was to follow. My brilliant spouse, refuting naysayers
on two sides of the Atlantic, had secured a pair of tickets to the Saturday
night performance of the stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novel Bring Up the Bodies at the Aldwych. This was a feat deemed impossible by
the Common Wisdom.
Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell
As
you probably know, Mantel has completed the first two of a projected trilogy of
historical novels centered on the ambiguous career of Thomas Cromwell, the
powerful lieutenant to King Henry VIII in the third and fourth decades of the
sixteenth century. The first
two—the first being Wolf Hall—made
literary history by winning successive Man Booker (best novel) prizes in 2009
and 2012. They have been
turned into stage plays by the Royal Shakespeare Society. An artist in search of historical ambiguity, controversy, or
indeterminacy could hardly find a richer field than the interplay of hot pants
and ecclesiastical politics of the Henrician period. I have made no deep study of that time, but years ago I did
work my way through the four thick volumes of James Gairdner’s Lollardy and the Reformation in England
(1908-1913) and still have them on my shelves. My rather blunt mental creation of Cromwell drawn from
Gairdner’s copious documents is very different from that conjured up by Hilary Mantel and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and much less
interesting. But of course on my
own I would never see Turner’s colors in my reading of Virgil either. It is the peculiar gift of the
artists—painters, writers, actors--to give serious meaning to such often
vacuous phrases as in light of or from the point of view of. “The English Reformation: Choice or
Accident?”
Little
did I realize as we moved enthralled from the crowded theater to the yet more
crowded streets of the Theater District, practically seething with exuberant, youthful
life, that we were not yet quite through with the Tudors. The next morning, Sunday, we asked the
doorman to direct us to the nearest church. He sent us in the direction of St. Margaret’s, check by jowl
with Westminster Abbey. The Abbey
itself has long since become a tourist phenomenon rather than a functioning
house of worship. The truth is I
had my silent reservations about Saint Margaret’s itself. I had passed by its beautiful exterior
many times on the bus, but I knew nothing of it as a parish save that it was
the frequent venue of posh weddings among the titled and the entitled. What we found was a beautifully
conducted choral Eucharist, a sizeable and variegated congregation drawn from
many lands, and a sixteenth-century architectural gem. Among its beautiful decorations one is
prominent: the large, exquisite east window donated by King Henry and his wife
Catherine of Aragon! It's a real shame that marriage didn't last.
