Simon Schama on ‘Wolf Hall’, taking liberties with the truth, and what historians and novelists can learn from each other
©Toby Whitebread
T
ry dropping the words Wolf Hall into a room full of historians these days and you’ll find out pretty quickly what they think of historical fiction. There will be those who make clucking sounds, roll their eyes and generally behave as though they’ve been introduced to Clio’s flighty little sister who has all of the fun and none of the responsibility. But then there are those who are happy that Hilary Mantel’s prodigious storytelling has drawn millions into the realm of the past where, once captive, they can be informed about what really happened.
Me, I’m with the relaxed crowd, though it grates a bit to accept that millions now think of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned, misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work other than the earldom of Essex — about five minutes before being marched to the scaffold as a result of Anne of Cleves turning out to be a dog rather than the pussycat of Holbein’s portrait.
I don’t pretend to be an authority on the Tudor Reformation, but when I was doing research for A History of Britain, the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture. He also unleashed small-minded bureaucratic “visitors” to humiliate, evict and dispossess thousands of monks and nuns, not all of whom had their hands up each other’s robes or were passing off pig bones as holy relics. On at least one occasion he had the fake relic and the custodial friar burnt side by side. Witty, that. The fact that Thomas More (who could use some help right now) was likewise not averse to burning people as well as books, if they strayed from sound doctrine, does not mean that Cromwell, in comparison, was a paragon of refreshing straightforwardness. Sure, he was a good family man. So was More. So was Himmler.
2015 年 2 月 13 日下午 4:23
歷史學家如何看待歷史小說
西蒙·沙瑪
作者提醒
西蒙沙瑪談《狼廳》對事實的竄改，以及歷史學家和小說家可以互相學習什麼
托比‧懷特布雷德 (Toby Whitebread) 為西蒙‧沙瑪 (Simon Schama) 的歷史小說專題所作的插圖©Toby Whitebread
電視
如果你現在在一個充滿歷史學家的房間裡說出「狼廳」這個詞，你很快就會發現他們對歷史小說有何看法。有些孩子會咯咯叫，翻白眼，表現得好像自己認識了克萊奧輕浮的妹妹，她擁有所有的樂趣，卻不用承擔任何責任。但也有人為希拉蕊·曼特爾精彩的敘事技巧吸引了數百萬人進入歷史世界而感到高興，一旦被迷住，他們就可以了解真正發生的事情。
我，我和一群輕鬆的人在一起，雖然接受這樣一個事實讓我有點難受：現在有數百萬人認為托馬斯·克倫威爾是一個飽受詬病、被誤解的實用主義者，出身貧寒，為亨利八世做骯髒的工作卻得不到什麼感謝。狗，而不是霍爾拜因肖像中的小貓。
我並不假裝自己是都鐸王朝改革的權威，但當我在為《英國歷史》做研究時，文獻大聲疾呼，托馬斯·克倫威爾實際上是一個令人憎惡的自私自利、欺凌弱小的怪物，他完善了在英國實施國家恐怖，偽造證據，並透過酷刑獲取供詞。他也派出心胸狹窄的官僚「訪客」羞辱、驅逐和剝奪了數千名僧尼的財產，而並不是所有的僧尼都伸手去抓別人的袈裟或把豬骨頭當作聖物。至少有一次，他將假遺物和保管遺物的修道士並排燒毀。真機智。事實上，托馬斯·莫爾（他現在需要一些幫助）同樣不反對焚燒偏離正確教義的人和書籍，但這並不意味著克倫威爾相比之下就是令人耳目一新的直率的典範。當然，他是個顧家的好男人。莫爾也是如此。希姆萊也是如此。
But, as I say, I’m relaxed about all this. I don’t much mind that historical novels and films take liberties with the facts, commit sins of omission or make imaginative interpolations provided they do not pretend to claim the same kind of authority in telling you how it really was as accounts based on documented fact seek to do. When I wrote my own historical novella, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations(1991), about the making and writing of history, I didn’t expect it to be held to the same standards as a work of non-fiction. Before publishing a review, the New York Times asked me whether it should treat it as fiction or non-fiction. “Fiction,” I told them. “I made up dialogue, monologue, all sorts of things.” It went into non-fiction.
©Giles Keyte
Damian Lewis as Henry VIII in the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s ‘Wolf Hall’
Even though Leo Tolstoy refused to callWar and Peace a novel, fiction should candidly rejoice in its inventions. It is when a polemical point gets made through shifting the evidence around to suit some preconceived opinion that it gets morally murky. The film Selma, which I have yet to see, has been criticised for its representation of Lyndon Johnson as a wily procrastinator rather than the president who urged Martin Luther King to confront the worst outrages against civil and voting rights so that the country would be shocked into supporting legislation. Ava DuVernay, the film’s director, expressed surprise that so much was made of this emphasis but she must have known the stakes were high. For the film’s critics, an uninformed audience might confuse a movie interpretation with the documented truth: a rare instance of mutually interested partnership between presidential politics and the civil rights movement is in danger of being replaced by a model of conflict and deception.
但正如我所說，我對這一切感到很放鬆。我並不介意歷史小說和電影隨意篡改事實、疏忽大意或進行想像性的插入，只要它們不假裝聲稱擁有與基於記錄事實的敘述相同的權威來告訴你事情的真相尋求去做。當我寫自己的歷史中篇小說《死去的確定性：毫無根據的推測》（1991）來講述歷史的創造和書寫時，我沒想到它會被拿來與非小說作品達到同樣的標準。在發表評論之前，《紐約時報》問我是否應該將其視為小說還是非小說。我告訴他們：“這是小說。” “我編造了對話、獨白，各種各樣的東西。”它已經進入非小說類領域了。
戴米安路易斯在 BBC 改編的希拉蕊曼特爾小說《狼廳》中飾演亨利八世©Giles Keyte
戴米恩路易斯在 BBC 改編自希拉蕊曼特爾的《狼廳》中飾演亨利八世
儘管列夫·托爾斯泰拒絕將《戰爭與和平》稱為一部小說，但小說應該坦誠地為其發明而歡欣鼓舞。當我們透過改變證據來迎合某些先入為主的觀點時，爭論的焦點就會變得道德模糊。我還沒有看過電影《塞爾瑪》，這部電影因將林登·約翰遜描繪成一個狡猾的拖延者而受到批評，而不是一位敦促馬丁·路德·金直面最嚴重的侵犯公民權利和投票權暴行、令全國震驚的總統。本片導演阿娃杜威內 (Ava DuVernay) 對電影如此強調這一點感到驚訝，但她肯定知道風險很高。對於該片的批評者來說，不了解情況的觀眾可能會將電影解讀與記錄的事實混淆：總統政治與民權運動之間罕見的互利夥伴關係，有可能被衝突和欺騙的模式所取代。
Invention may compromise authority but then we don’t go to great historical fiction or feature films for hard documentary truth. What they deliver, instead, is an imaginative impression but when that impression emerges from rich research it is often capable of delivering a much more vivid sense of the past than an arrangement of unimpeachable data. No military history of the battles of Austerlitz or Borodino is ever going to transport the reader into the ferocious and chaotic reality experienced by both officers and ordinary soldiers better than War and Peace.
The mindset of historians and historical novelists is not all that divergent. Both strive for what Oxford philosopher RG Collingwood exhorted as the imaginative “re-enactment”; the getting inside an event. Without a grip on evidence, the historical novel is empty fable; without imaginative empathy, history is all bones and no flesh and blood. For some historians, who see their work essentially as the political science of the past, this may sound like a dangerous flirtation with romance. But then there are some who don’t mind admitting we were drawn to the subject in the first place precisely because of that romance.
虛構或許會損害權威，但我們不會從偉大的歷史小說或長片中尋找確鑿的紀實真相。相反，它們傳遞的是一種富有想像力的印象，但是當這種印象來自豐富的研究時，它往往能夠比一堆無可辯駁的數據更生動地傳達出對過去的感覺。沒有任何一部關於奧斯特里茨戰役或博羅季諾戰役的軍事史能夠比《戰爭與和平》更好地將讀者帶入軍官和普通士兵所經歷的殘酷和混亂的現實。
歷史學家和歷史小說家的思考方式並沒有太大的差異。兩者都力求實現牛津大學哲學家 RG Collingwood 所倡導的富有想像力的「重演」；進入事件內部。如果沒有證據的把握，歷史小說就只是空洞的寓言；沒有富有想像的同理心，歷史就只是骨頭，沒有血肉。對一些歷史學家來說，他們將自己的工作本質上視為過去的政治科學，聽起來像是危險的浪漫調情。但有些人並不介意承認，我們最初被這個話題吸引正是因為那種浪漫。
。 。 。
我出生於 1945 年，當時的英國飽受戰爭摧殘。我的個人歷史，無論是猶太人還是英國人，都遭受了打擊，但不知何故卻堅持了下來。禮物就像我渴望得到的大麥糖捲一樣，是嚴格定量配給的（實際上我從 Woolworths 偷過一兩次）；未來是原子級的，讓人既興奮又害怕，但過去卻是一段無窮無盡輝煌的浪漫史，我盡可能地在那裡度過時光。我八歲時創作的第一本「書」是一部關於皇家海軍的歷史，主要由戰艦的香菸卡片圖片組成，從「金鹿號」到「皇家方舟號」。當我和父親一起穿過倫敦塔時，我彷彿聽到了河邊微風中理查三世的一個討厭的侄子的嗚咽聲。我是我認識的唯一一個比《金銀島》更喜歡羅伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森的《巴倫特雷大師》的男孩；阿瑟柯南道爾的《白衣公司》而不是《福爾摩斯》。我對華特司各特的作品百看不厭（重讀時令我驚嘆）：不僅是《艾芬豪》，還有《威弗利》，這部小說於1814 年出版後成為第一本國際暢銷書，並開創了歷史小說的大眾市場。
我記得《韋弗利》中的一個場景給我留下了深刻的印象。這位與小說同名且略顯滑稽的男主角追隨自己夢幻般的愛情故事，於 1745 年（詹姆斯黨叛亂的那一年）進入蘇格蘭高地，他也順理成章地加入了這場叛亂。他被帶到了一場家庭宴會，其中的主菜是「一隻一歲的羔羊」。。。整個烤。它被放在腿上，嘴裡含著一束歐芹。。。這隻可憐的動物的側面遭到了族人猛烈的攻擊，有的人用匕首，有的人用刀，而刀通常和匕首放在同一個刀鞘裡，所以它很快就變成了一幅殘缺不全、令人悲痛的景象。
. . .
I was born in 1945, into a Britain scarred and charred by the war. My personal histories, Jewish and British, had taken a beating but had somehow endured. The present was austerely rationed like the barley sugar twists I craved (and actually nicked once or twice from Woolworths); the future was atomic in a way that both excited and terrified but the past was a romance of inexhaustible splendour and I spent as much time there as I possibly could. My first “book”, created when I was eight, was a history of the Royal Navy consisting mostly of cigarette card pictures of battleships: Golden Hind to Ark Royal. Walked through the Tower of London by my dad, I thought I caught on the riverside breeze the whimpering cry of one of Richard III’s inconvenient nephews. I was the only boy I knew who liked Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae better than Treasure Island; Arthur Conan Doyle’s The White Company rather than Sherlock. I couldn’t get enough of Walter Scott (something that on rereading amazes me): not just Ivanhoe, but the lumberingWaverley, the novel that on publication in 1814 became the first international bestseller and inaugurated a mass market for historical fiction.
I remember being vividly struck by one scene in Waverley. The eponymous and somewhat drippy hero follows his own dreamy romance into the Highlands in 1745, the year of the Jacobite rebellion, which he duly joins. He is brought to a clan feast in which the main course is “a yearling lamb . . . roasted whole. It was set upon its legs, with a bunch of parsley in its mouth . . . The sides of this poor animal were fiercely attacked by the clansmen, some with dirks, others with knives which were usually in the same sheath with the dagger so that it was soon rendered a mangled and rueful spectacle.”
These were the table manners I hoped to imitate at home but I also remember Scott’s learned footnote explaining Scottish aversion (“till of late years”) to pork. These clansmen were apparently kosher; och oy! But it was the scene’s close-up physical detail that made me feel I was there with clan MacIvor.
You would suppose that the condition of becoming a working historian is to leave this kind of thing behind as fable: a genre not just distinct from a history but the antithesis of it. The distinction could not be clearer, some historians argue. On the one side stand the interpreters and analysts of documented evidence; on the other, the fabulists, free to come and go from the realm of truth as their literary fancy dictates.
Yet in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, the young Thomas Babington Macaulay thought that, while true historians must never invent, there was something they could learn from novelists. He knew that Scott was greedy for archival research into anything that might help him reconstruct a lost world: ballads and vernacular poems; games and diet, costume, furniture, weapons and architecture. It was the fabric of everyday life that “high” historians disdained as unconsidered trifles — their noses deep in state papers and the correspondence of the mighty — that Macaulay thought should be snapped up by any writer wanting to make his reader live richly in a different time and place.
Both Scott and Macaulay were beneficiaries of a wave of writing that began in the later 18th century by the likes of the costume historian Joseph Strutt and the eccentric vegetarian radical Joseph Ritson, a great anthologist of folk ballads and resurrector of Robin Hood. But they also felt instinctively that they were embarked on a common endeavour of storytelling from which historical truth could emerge. For Macaulay, it was the unfolding of the epic of British liberty. Walter Scott, the product of Enlightenment Edinburgh, also believed this to be the great motor driving British history, though the sunlight of progress was darkened by a sense of what was being lost: cue the plaid, the pipes and the standing lamb with parsley.
There was another bond connecting the novelist and the historian: their shared belief in the power of literary narrative and their healthy respect for its complexity. The instruction was not all one way. When he published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, Charles Dickens openly professed how much he owed to the narrative genius of, as well as the learning behind, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837), a work that charges along like a bolting horse in the historical present. “See Camille Desmoulins, from the Café du Foy, rushing on, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him; not they alive, not him alive. This time he speaks without stammering: Friends, shall we die like hunted hares, like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy where is no mercy but only a whetted knife? The hour is come.”
Before scholars brushed off historical novelists as dubious entertainers, there were many such fruitful collaborations. Victor Hugo could not have written his phenomenal (and absurdly unread) 1793 (1874) without the help of the histories of Jules Michelet, head of the Archives Nationales, and a virtuoso of storytelling. The greatest of all the historical novelists, Tolstoy, was himself a compulsive trawler through the archive. An unexpected treasure trove of Masonic papers led him to make Pierre Bezukhov flirt for a while with the mysteries of the Craft. His own experience of a military raid on a Chechen village bloodied the young Tolstoy in the cruelties of war. This did not stop him immersing himself in every conceivable historical source, in many languages, on Napoleon and the history of Russia 1805-1812.
. . .
To be sure, there are significant differences in working methods. Because historical novels use conversational dialogue, their inventors have to think very carefully about voice: the tonal music of their writing. There are many ways to get this disastrously wrong. If characters are made to speak in a modified version of the diction of the past, they risk pastiche. “Brook your ire!” one character says to another in Mike Leigh’s film Mr Turner. On the other hand, it was probably preferable to Turner telling him to “chill”. For if historical figures speak pretty much as we now do, only kitted out in breeches and farthingales, the alien strangeness of the past, wherein much of its magic lies, goes out of the window. In an essay on this problem, Marguerite Yourcenar, author of one of the most compelling historical novels ever written, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), explains that the challenge of catching a reliable tone for Roman conversation from elusively scattered fragments of prose made her decide to make her book monovocal. After pondering the choices of voice for Hadrian, she plumped for a version of oratio togata, toga-speech: elastic and personal in ways in which a voice drawn exclusively from Cicero’s rhetoric could not have been. The result is a distinctive kind of address: poetic and ruminative; by turns brutal and sensual; a million miles from the studied disingenuousness and naked self-vindication that usually pass for non-fiction memoirs.
Lately there have been interesting voice inventions. Martin Amis’s tone for the SS inThe Zone of Interest — the heartiness of nonentities; (“but this is fucking ridiculous”) man-to-man pub talk translated to Auschwitz — is somehow more credibly horrible than lunatic ravings or the Hannibal Lecter-speak of evil geniuses. For the characters in his forthcoming The Buried Giant, set in post-Roman, half-Saxon Britain, the author Kazuo Ishiguro has chosen a mysteriously formal speech, full of stiffly exchanged courtesies, whether spoken by monks, knights or peasants, entirely stripped of the poesy of epic or legend. “Excuse us Master Wistan while I walk them to the longhouse. Then if we may sir I’d like to resume our discussion of just now.” But, as seems apt for the book, it undoubtedly casts a spell.
. . .
This is not the historian’s problem. We must content ourselves with the voices given to us by diaries, letters and speeches, which are audible enough without our having to put words into the mouths of the unprotesting dead. But there is one calculation we have to make that, from the first sentences, will set the tone: the manner of our own narrative voice. Most historians just go with the flow of what comes naturally; slightly popularised editions of their academic voices. Others make a great performance of their own presence, though none as operatically booming as Carlyle: “O beloved brother blockheads” — that’s us, his readers. Others still disappear into the action; just opening a door into the past and crooking a beckoning finger to the reader to follow.
Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England
Those who start in the thick of it, I like best of all. The writer who made me want to be an historian was Columbia University professor Garrett Mattingly. In 1959, he published The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, which has the imaginative grip of a novel but is grounded on the bedrock of the archives. It begins with a name the significance of which we, as yet, have absolutely no idea; with an exactly visualised place. Through the repetition of a single word “Nobody,” we hear the tolling of a bell ringing the doom of someone or other.
“Mr Beale had not brought the warrant until Sunday evening but by Wednesday morning, before dawn outlines its high windows, the great hall of Fotheringhay was ready. Though the Earl of Shrewsbury had returned only the day before nobody wanted any more delay. Nobody knew what messenger might be riding on the London road. Nobody knew which of the others might not weaken if they wanted another.”
What is this? Who is this? Where are we? You want to read on, don’t you? So you do so with the intense excitement of knowing every word is true.
Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor
Illustration by Toby Whitebread
Photograph: Giles Keyte
This, of course, is fiction not fact. But the challenge to the status quo from men like Cromwell was real enough. In his book, theWealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes argues that the challenge to the Vatican from the new religion was a major influence. It was the dawning of a more secular age.
“The Protestant Reformation changed the rules. It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”
Northern and southern Europe started to go their own ways in the 16th century. They had different beliefs, different ways of doing things, different cultures. Half a millennium later this gulf has yet to be bridged: witness the strong sense of protestantism that informs Germany’s attitude towards Greece.
Landes says there were two special characteristics of Protestantism that support the claim that it was crucial in the rise of capitalism. One was the emphasis on the need to read, for girls as well as boys. He says that while good protestants were expected to know how to read the holy scriptures for themselves, catholics were explicitly discouraged from reading the bible.
But these were not the only changes happening. The voyages of discovery by Columbus and Magellan meant the known world was expanding. It was an era of globalisation, with new products available for import and fresh markets opening up.
Cromwell is part of this world. He has travelled widely in Europe. He has contacts in Antwerp, then a more important port than London. He is a man of the world with cosmopolitan views. He speaks foreign languages and is keen to add Polish to the list. He would not be a Ukip supporter.
The problems of the wool trader Wykys in Wolf Hall look suspiciously like a metaphor for the weaknesses of the UK economy in 2015. Presiding over a failing business, Wykys has got the wrong products, the wrong people working for him and is selling his goods in the wrong markets. “Latterly, Wykys had grown tired, let the business slide. He was still sending broadcloth to the north German market, when – in his opinion, with wool so long in the fleece these days, and good broadcloth hard to weave – he ought to be getting into kerseys, lighter cloth like that, exporting through Antwerp to Italy.”
In good company doctor fashion, Cromwell decides he can turn the business around. He takes a look at the stock, casts his eyes over the account, then fires the chief clerk and trains up a junior to take his place. “People are always the key, and if you look them in the face you can be pretty sure if they’re honest and up to the job.” Today we would say that he understood the importance of human capital.
Once he had made Henry supreme over the Church of England and disposed of Anne Boleyn, he set to work on the Dissolution of the Monasteries.