Plums
Dear Hugo,
We've come to the end of the Long Halloween. It seems that when October 31 falls on a Monday, costumery starts the Friday before and goes straight through til the Tuesday morning sugar hangover. Plus we went to the PA Renaissance Faire, another fancy-dress occasion, the weekend before that. You've been a Knight, a Dead Knight (expressed via a spooky demeanor), and a Skeleton. Or was the skeleton just the final form of the knight, stripped bare of armor?
Similarly, I was first a living queen and then a dead one, thanks to a cheap velvet gown from Shein-via-Poshmark and some fake blood (I stole one of the capsules Robin gave you for your birthday. Sorry!). It's a fun dress but suitable only for costume wear, I think, since it's a scratchy and hot synthetic material that may or may not be full of lead, the sort of fast fashion garment that is about the same quality as a Spirit Halloween ensemble anyway.
Having procured this dress for Ren Faire purposes, it seemed most efficient to use it for Halloween too, and Dead Queens of England are topical. First there was the long-awaited passing of Elizabeth II. And then just two weeks after, Dame Hilary Mantel died - famous for her novels chronicling the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, and one of my favorite pieces of writing on Kate Middleton and the obsession with royal clothing.
Velvet dress + pearl necklace with a golden "B" charm + a little blood = Instant Anne Boleyn costume!
(Not that anyone guessed it on sight, presumable due to a lack of Wolf Hall fans at the parties I attended.)
I have been thinking about Mantel a lot lately, and specifically what she was trying to do with her historical fiction. As much as I love the immersive quality of the Cromwell trilogy, and the way her language pivots from finely-wrought to brutal and blunt, by the third book I started to wonder about the portrait of Lord Thomas as the ultimate meritocrat. Mantel's Cromwell is a thousand times smarter than everyone else, a ruffian who bootstrapped himself to the highest position a commoner could ever reach, and he's driven by a secret, pure Protestantism that took hold after he witnessed a woman burned at the stake for her beliefs when he was a boy. It's an interesting artistic project, to be sure -- the rehabilitation of an historical figure generally pictured as a pitiless villain. I want to be Cromwell when I read those books. I want to be the class-transcending figure who can see all sides of the plot in a way that no one else can, I want to be smarter than everyone, I want to work harder than everyone, I want to amaze everyone.
And, of course, I don't want to be felled by the emotional whims of a hereditary monarch. You can read the Wolf Hall books as an argument against the monarchy and aristocracy, but then you have to ask what sort of governance they are arguing for. The aspects of Cromwell that Mantel writes as heroic suggest it's people like him who should be in charge - self-motivated, self-educated strivers, middle class merchants with business acumen and an internal moral code. But though she takes pains to impress upon the reader the misery of Thomas's childhood (getting the shit beat out of him by his drunken father), Mantel can't cast him as issuing from as lowly a position as befits a true rags-to-riches tale. His father was a cloth merchant, owner of a brewery/inn/blacksmith shop, and a local constable - the very picture of an emerging urban middle class. The various Earls and Dukes still treat Cromwell like he's some kind of peasant urchin. They don't realize he is the future: a world ruled by commerce and trade rather than enfeebled bloodlines.
Perhaps it's too strong to say Mantel is advocating for this view, rather than seeking to represent what would, in fact, go on to happen. I've sat in on a few British history classes lately (best employee perk after interlibrary loan privileges) and am trying to understand more about how history works as an academic discipline. Some part of it seems to involve identifying all the ways that events were not inevitable, and instead contingent on hundreds of other tiny things from idiosyncratic personalities to a certain day's unexpected weather. But narrative logic prefers the momentum of inevitability, of consequences. The freak accidents and unpunished villains of real life will leave most readers unsatisfied. Writers who can harness that sucking stochastic void into an enjoyable book are few and far between.
I would have liked to read Mantel's thoughts on King Charles and Meghan Markle. But it seems fitting that her life matched the reign of Elizabeth II so exactly - both lasting from 1952 to 2022. A couple of years ago, Mantel even joked (I think??) about having revised her political positions to support absolute monarchy, but only until the Queen died.
As you know, I love a good passage about color. So in honor of Dame Mantel, here is perhaps my favorite paragraph from The Mirror & The Light:
He used to think that the plums in this country weren't good enough, and so he has reformed them, grafting scion to rootstock. Now his houses have plums ripening from July to late October, fruits the size of a walnut or a baby's heart, plums mottled and streaked, stippled and flecked, marbled and rayed, their skins lemon to mustard, russet to scarlet, azure to black, some smooth and some furred like little animals with lilac or white or ash; round amber fruits dotted with the grey of his livery, thin-skinned fruits like crimson eggs in a silver net, their flesh firm or melting, honeyed or vinous; his favorite kind the perdrigon, the palest having a yellow skin dotted white, sprinkled red where the sun touches it, its perfumed flesh ripe in late August; then the perdrigon violet and its black sister, favouring east-facing walls, yielding September fruits solid in the hand, their flesh yellow-green and rich, separating easily from the stone. You can preserve them whole to last all winter, eat them as dessert, or just sit looking at them in an idle moment: globes of gold in a pewter bowl, black fruit like shadows, spheres of cardinal red.
CARDINAL red. Get it?? You have to read the books, I guess.
Next year, I'll try to nudge our Halloween costumes toward something less Anglocentric. In the meantime, however, I am going to binge watch Season 5 of The Crown.
Love,
M.