A Fine and Terrible Mystery

There is a book I want to read but it hasn’t been written.  It’s a book which solves an important mystery, or at least provides the likely solution to the mystery embodied in the known life, deeds and works of a man who lived in the 15^th century.

Call him Thomas.  He was born in 1416, approximately, near the year of Henry V’s great victory at Agincourt, in Stretton-under-Fosse in Warwickshire.  A minor noble, he was knighted sometime before 1441 (commonly at the age of 21) and in that year served as an Elector in Northamptonshire.   When he was 27 he and one Eustace Barnaby were accused of stealing  £40 from one Hugh Smyth.  (At that time £40 purchased £29,440 worth of goods at 2015 prices, but corresponded to £230,600 in the relative value of labor.)  It wouldn’t have been a minor theft yet it wasn’t prosecuted.

Thomas married Elizabeth Walsh in the same year and together they had a son, Robert and possibly 1-2 other children later.  In 1443 he was elected to Parliament as one of two “Knights of the Shire” for Warwickshire and was appointed to the Royal Commission for the distribution of funds to impoverished Warwickshire towns.  That trust could suggest the earlier accusation was frivolous and without merit.  In 1449, at the age of 33, he was elected Member of Parliament for the Duke of Buckingham’s safe seat of Great Bedwyn.

In 1451, when Thomas was about 35 years old, his life changed.  He was accused, along with 26 others, of trying to murder the Duke of Buckingham, one of the most powerful Lancastrian magnates in the land.  Thomas probably owed allegiance to the Earl of Warwick, a powerful Yorkist supporter.  The accusation was never proved.  Later in the same year he was accused of extortion twice then of breaking into the home of Hugh Smyth of Monkskirby, stealing £40 and raping Smyth’s wife and attacking her in Coventry 8 weeks later.  (Rape at that time could mean abduction or consensual sex with a married woman.)  His arrest was ordered but nothing was done.  In the following months Thomas was accused of over 100 serious crimes, mostly violent robberies.

He was finally brought to trial in August of that year in Nuneaton, the heartland of Buckingham’s power and imprisoned in infamous Marshalsea Prison in Southwark in spite of pleas to be tried by a new jury from Warwickshire.  Over the next several years he escaped was imprisoned again, escaped, was imprisoned until he was released on £200 bail (worth £147,000 of goods at 2015 prices) gathered by Warwickshire magnates.

From 1460 until 1470 he was imprisoned at Newgate for further alleged crimes, including joining with the Earl of Warwick in a plot to assassinate the Yorkist King, Edward IV.  He was explicitly excluded from two of Edward IV’s general pardons afterwards but was finally released during the short period when the Earl of Warwick returned Henry VI to the throne.  He died in 1471, about the age of 55.

While Thomas was in Newgate he had access to the library of the Greyfriars Monastery adjacent to the prison, one of the finest libraries in western Europe at the time.  And he wrote a book, arguably the greatest achievement of prose literature in the 15^th century, “Le Morte d’Arthur.”

Here is just one quote from Sir Thomas Malory’s book,  (there are many others that would have served just as well),

“Wherefore, as me seemeth, all gentlemen that beareth old arms ought of right to honour Sir Tristam for the goodly terms that gentlemen have and use, and shall do unto the day of doom, that thereby in a manner all men of worship may dissever a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villain.  For he that gentle is will draw him to gentle thatches (virtues) and to follow the noble customs of gentlemen.”

There are several obvious mysteries.  First, what happened in 1451 that caused a young knight with family, income and good prospects to turn into an apparently notorious outlaw?  If he was such an outlaw, why did the magnates of Warwickshire pay such a great sum for his bail?  Finally, most importantly, why is it that someone who was accused of such crimes wrote a book so intimately concerned with the issue of knightly morality?  Was he a redeemed sinner, a hypocrite, a Robin Hood, a rare honest man caught in an age in which everything, including the justice system was freely and cruelly manipulated by partisan politics (as the Paston letters indicate)?

I expect reasonable cases can be made for most, if not all, of the above.  As of late the study of Sir Thomas Malory’s life has become a bit of back water in spite of his importance to English letters.

Ian Mortimer has written a unique, thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening historical work:  “1415:  Henry V’s Year of Glory.”  The book chronicles everything that occurred on every day in 1415 in the world as far as Henry could have known it.  What makes the book so extraordinary is how a nuanced, complex and deep characterization of Henry Vth emerges from meticulous examination of that detail.

It seems to me that the life of Sir Thomas Malory, so important to understanding one of the seminal works of English literature and the English literary imagination might yield to a similar approach, particularly a close  examination of 1451 and the actions of the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of York, the Earl of Warwick and Queen Margaret as well as those more immediate to Malory himself. It's easily worthy of Sherlock Holmes, don't you think?

Episode 2 is here.

Firebird

Watson:  Why are you being so stubborn, Holmes?...It's the final performance of the Imperial Russian Ballet -- the house has been sold out for months –

Holmes:  I suspect it's some sort of plot.

Watson:  You mean somebody wants to lure us into a trap...?

Holmes:   Somebody wants to kill me.

Watson:  Kill you?

Holmes:  That's right. It's a plot to bore me to death. I detest ballet.

                (“The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” by Billy Wilder)

I more than empathize with Wilder’s Sherlock.  Fencing has enabled me to appreciate ballet on an athletic level and there have been a small number of occasions when it has affected me with the raw and startling ferocity that can characterize real art.  (Ironically, one of those few occasions was during a Mathematics Conference in upstate New York when a bunch of us, like so many confused, blinking badgers in eye glasses,  were bused to a performance at Saratoga of the New York City Ballet then under the directorship of George Balanchine.)  But such occasions have been rare.

Yet, this post is about a ballet, and a particular production, that I’ve only seen on DVD.

All of us are imaginary creatures.  Art can operate on our imaginations in three ways.  It can confine the imagination, force it to work in a precise and limited context, or it can inspire the imagination to amend, invent and improvise on the source, or it can provide essential but insufficient substance and demand  the imagination work to derive meaning or allusion.  Ballet necessarily involves all three.

The ballet in question is Stravinsky’s “Firebird” as performed by the Mariinsky Ballet with the orchestra under the direction of Valery Gergiev.  The choreography is Mikhail Fokine’s original.  With this particular ballet and production we’re in Angela Carter territory.  This is myth and fairy tale ripe with dark allusion and layered with sometimes conflicting meaning.

The Firebird’s first and only long solo insists we’re in a fantasy that requires us to work and will reward us if we do so.  Yekaterina Kondaurokova’s creature continually transfigures before us:  from dancing woman, to supernatural but physical animal and back again.  And as she dances, she is at once female, ethereal, earthy, subtly sexual.  And witty:  when she pauses with the stem of a golden apple in her mouth and stares at the audience is she pure wild animal or is she mocking our own conception? She is essentially mysterious, essentially unique, but undoubtedly symbolic of passion.

Then Ivan Tsarevich, who happens to be out hunting, climbs over the garden wall, (I told you we were in Angela Carter territory) and pursues her in a pas-de-deux with a resolution that poses an important question that’s easily missed.  Quite simply, after hunting her, why does he release her in exchange for a feather?  Has she captured him or revealed something in him that neither he nor we knew was there?  Pursuit rarely climaxes with empathy.

The garden, the tree of golden apples and the 12 imprisoned princesses, one of whom Ivan falls in love with, of course, are in the supernatural power of the necromancer Koschei the Deathless who cleverly has hidden his heart in a golden egg hidden in turn in a casket behind the tree.  Koschei’s imminent triumph over Ivan, aided by his company of demons, is forestalled when Ivan retrieves the feather, calling the Firebird.  She compels the demons, even old skeletal Koschei himself, to dance themselves to exhaustion.  She then reveals the casket containing the egg with Koschei’s evil heart.  Ivan shatters the egg breaking Koschei’s enchantment and destroys him.

The procession to Stranvinsky’s majestic music that concludes the ballet for all its grandeur is cleverly subtle.  The other princesses are ritually introduced and matched to dashing male counterparts, previously enchanted and bound within one of the garden walls.  The Tsarevich and future Tsarina stride haughtily on stage, perform the same deep, ritualistic bow and triple kiss, alternating cheeks, the company passes through the gates to climb stairs leading to the russet glow of a great Russian city.

Yet this apparently, conventional happy ending is dark and deeply original as a result of context and absence.  Coming so soon after the enforced franctic dance of the demons caused by the Firebird’s magic, it’s impossible not to compare the two, to see that the procession is a kind of enforced dance, too.  It’s natural to wonder, is everything then a dance?  Then there is the Firebird herself, conspicuous in her absence.   Have the Tsar, Tsarina and their court achieved a life without passion or is it now, invisible, within them?

1895

When I was in graduate school I developed a method for solving particularly difficult mathematical problems of the kind that sometimes took days. The strategy was to keep the problem “lightly” in mind all the time. By lightly I mean, focusing continually on the problem and the pertinent details and related deductions while avoiding obsessing about any particular strategy for solving it. The longer I’d go, the more difficult it would become to preserve the state of willed obsession and yet the solution would finally come, often emerging spontaneously, proving that sometimes the deepest reasoning the mind does is subconscious.

January felt like that. I’ve been thinking about how to restructure my fencing training and competition in order to become a better fencer. As part of another project I’ve been reading some archaeological research, in particular Stein et al’s “Revisiting Downtown Chaco” and George Pepper’s 1905 paper “Ceremonial Objects and Ornaments from Pueblo Bonito.” As an adolescent I imagined that science and knowledge developed linearly. Later, I learned that even in something as rigorous as mathematics, the development of knowledge is much more like the development of a theme in musical composition. Important knowledge is reasoned, or discovered, then lost and rediscovered sometimes simultaneously. In the light of Lekson’s revolutionary history of the ancient southwest it might be a good time to review Pepper’s work chronicling the finds of the Hyde/Putnam excavations. If Lynn were reading this over my shoulder she’d no doubt bring up “The Glass Bead Game,” and rightly, too.

In January I also had a bout with the flu as has she. The flu sucks. In “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” T.E. Lawrence describes how he developed his famous strategy for the Arab insurgency while suffering a severe illness. Unfortunately, I have to report that my own recent illness led to no such astonishing insights, at least that I’d recognize as such.

There was a compensation, however. We’ve just seen the BBC production “Sherlock Series 2,” the second installment of the modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. The first series of three feature length films was a perfect delight. And yet, the second series surpasses it. It was by far the best drama I’ve seen in the last year and notably puts to shame every American film we’ve seen since “Michael Clayton.” They are literate, witty and filled with original dramatic riffs built from modern technological culture.

They are also allusive. Dr. Watson’s blog happens to latch at 1895, which was also was the original Holmes’ annus mirabulis, the year of some of his greatest mysteries. I’m inclined to think that 2011, was Moffat and Gatiss’s 1895.