It also seems rather extraordinary that Lucian Freud’s late brother Clement, an M.P. known for his wit, should have become a cordial acquaintance of the Lewis brothers (as in C.S. Lewis) – or at any rate of Warren Lewis, through their war-time evacuee, June Clewett*, who married Clement and who remained on good terms with the Lewises after she left their household. Who’d have thought it? – the grandson of a man who represented everything they most disliked about modern culture. The Freuds were especially kind to Warren Lewis after his brother died.

God does have a sense of humour.

*p.s. She became an actress and changed her name to the, er, less non-U “Jill Flewett”. Apparently, “June” is one of those names that screams “lower middle-class” in Britain. Don’t know about “Clewett”, but it has a clunky ring.

Such events were only too common at one time in my life, between the ages of eleven and fourteen or so. It was usually girls, occasionally with boys acting as their sidekicks, who attacked me this way, so that any time I read about the non-violent tendencies of girls I laugh rather hollowly to myself. It was seldom dangerous: in those days weapons played no part in school fights in any school I attended, and it was very seldom that communal or ethnic grudges of any sort were involved, which there usually are on the rare occasions that bullying turns really violent.

Not dangerous, then, but ugly, painful, and soul-destroying, which is why, although I was not frightened either of fighting back or getting physically hurt, I was nevertheless terrorized by these people, terrorized and demoralized. They turned me into an introvert, made me a bad student (I got to be afraid of school and spent as little time and thought on it as possible), and left me distrustful of people to the point of misanthropy for many years.

I’m not writing this to lament the past or rustle up sympathy, though, but to say that I know a thing or two about bullying, its causes, its effects, and its ubiquity, and to explain why I’ve always been interested in the subject. I’ve also noticed that bullying has been much in the news lately, from the sad story of Phoebe Prince to President Obama’s warning of its dangers to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” movement directed at homosexual teenagers. Once ignored by the grownups (though they usually knew it was happening) on the grounds that their intervention would make matters worse, or  that children need to learn to defend themselves, or the related idea that being bullied builds character, it is now an object of official concern. There are anti-bullying programs, anti-bullying days (these differ from one place to another), anti-bullying pledges, anti-bullying slogans, and anti-bullying skill sets to teach to children.

All of these innovations in handling bullying are well-intentioned, and it’s possible that a handful might even work, though I have my doubts about most of them. Bullying is, well, er, a complicated social phenomenon, and it’s clear to me that many of the people talking about it have not bothered to give it much thought or to make some elementary distinctions concerning what is, and is not, bullying, nor tried to identify some basic types of bullying – important because some kinds of bullying are, as I said, physically dangerous, some are psychically damaging, and others are just part of growing up.

First – a basic definition of bullying. Dictionary.com says that a bully is a “blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people. This seems to be the substance of most definitions I’ve found, and although I might quarrel with the idea that a bully is a “blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person”, I would certainly agree with the idea that bullies choose smaller and/or weaker people as their victims. However, this element of the definition of a bully is often forgotten or neglected or left out of consideration by those who have brought bullying into the public eye. Somehow, bullying is coming to mean any sort of taunting, or any kind of physically aggressive behavior.

I, on the other hand, think it’s important to maintain the distinction between psychological bullying, physical bullying  and simple physical aggression. For example, I was a victim of bullying in the story I told above, but in a sense it was not true physical bullying. Why? Because the girl who attacked me was physically a match for me, about the same height and weight; it was not from her ability to intimidate me physically that she got her power over me. The man in this story (link thanks to Kathy Shaidle again) is not, as Kathy apparently believes, a bully, but an aggressive jerk. He and the coach whom he attacked were social and physical equals. The fact that he struck the other coach while the latter’s back was turned is the mark of a nasty, ill-tempered and perhaps cowardly nature, but not of a bully. The young man I once knew at university many years ago who was repeatedly thrown out of parties and games for brawling was not a bully: he was an aggressive young man who needed to find a better outlet for his energy than was available to him in ordinary school life. I say he wasn’t a bully because he never “picked on” anyone, never ganged up on anyone, and fought only men who were his own size or larger. Why does it matter so much to distinguish between this kind of thing and bullying? Because the proper treatment for the former is heavy exercise and the discipline of older men, not programs and counseling and psychiatric intervention.

Equally important is the distinction between psychological bullying and simple taunting, a difference that turns on a consideration of the relationship between the alleged bully and his victim, and the victim’s status in his own and the bully’s social group. It isn’t as easy to make as the distinction between physical bullying and simple physical aggression. June Thomas said recently in Slate that Dan Savage was “bullying” Marcus Bachmann by taunting the latter about his slight lisp and somewhat effeminate (to Savage) mannerisms. A commenter stepped in and said that this was untrue, because Mr Savage is no stronger than Mr Bachmann. I believe the commenter was quite right: Dan Savage and Marcus Bachmann have very different constituencies, but they are both men in the public eye and neither shows the kind of psychological weakness that makes someone an easy target for bullies, who feed on other people’s fear and weakness. Of course, it’s probably foolish of Savage to give those people who are genuinely hostile to gays ammunition by feeding them lines they can use against the objects of their hostility, but that is a separate issue. Bachmann is fair game, and the taunts Savage aims at him are fair enough. They may be unpleasant, and indeed it’s extremely unpleasant to be on the receiving end of taunting (and taunting can sometimes be illegal, if it turns slanderous), but it should not call for outside intervention.

But some of the readers of that column in Slate appear to have gone further, and decided that even if Savage is bullying Bachmann, he is justified in doing so because a) Bachmann is a bully too, bullying patients into becoming “straight”; and b) Savage and other gay people have themselves been victims  of bullying by people like Bachmann and by straight society in general. I would counsel anyone against using that kind of justification for bullying, as there’s hardly a bully on the planet who does not act out of a well-watered sense of grievance and a chip on his shoulder. I will use the Hitler defense and say that he managed to convince himself that rich Jews were bullying good Germans and must be stopped.

Real psychological bullying can only happen when the victim is socially and psychologically less powerful than the bully, but what defines this social power, especially among the very young? It doesn’t always reside where you might think. The rich girl at an ordinary public middle school may be for various reasons less psychologically defended, more socially isolated, (and perhaps less rich) than the scrappy street-fighter who taunts her for her manners and her odd speaking voice and gradually progresses to physically hurting her. The runty boy in class may have learned to use sarcasm and his talent for making people laugh to intimidate the bigger but less articulate new boy who finally loses patience with his tormentor and hits him. Phoebe Prince was psychologically naked because she was depressed. The girl who attacked me had intimidated me psychologically, partly because I was socially isolated, partly because her hatred was a terrible thing to encounter. All of us – me and my examples, real or imaginary – shared a certain psychological quality that shows in one’s face and body language, that is hard to define but that could be summarized by the phrase “easy target”.

An easy target is quite different from someone who becomes the object of taunting for a reason – like being fat, or white in a black school, or posh in an unposh neighborhood, or being gay, or for that matter is taunted for attacking gays. Easy targets show a certain lack of ease in their own skins; they are often depressed; they don’t know the social ropes (that’s why the new-kid-in-school so often becomes the target of bullying); and when they encounter taunting, rather than shrug it off, they show that it hurts. For a certain type of bully, this is like blood in the water for sharks – an inducement to attack. In fact, even for people who are not normally bullies, the sight of someone unravelling under taunting can be an inducement that brings out the worst in them, all their own sense of grievance and fear of their peers and remembrance of being insulted or isolated by them. Easy targets have that effect on people, and I fear the only real cure for the kind of bullying they experience is to learn not to be one.  That’s why being fat or white or posh or gay is never enough, by itself, to explain why a particular person is being bullied. It takes that look.

How can situations like these be corrected by any number of teacher interventions and anti-bullying programs? Teachers can intervene to stop children or young adults from hitting each other; anti-bullying programs may help to defuse bullying between ethnic groups; young people can be taught to speak politely to each other, at least in the presence of adults. But no counseling of the children, no adult protection, can create the psychic armor essential to defeating all attempts at bullying. I’m not certain it can be taught. I’m not at all certain how I learned it myself. All I know is that one day when I was about sixteen I was standing in our enormous school parking lot, waiting for the bus. One of my tormentors from the old days, one I hadn’t seen for several years, caught my eye and approached me. But her taunts were silly and childish and had no power over me. After a minute or two she lost interest in the game, and wandered away.

*Just back to add that I shared no classes with the girl and did not know her name. I was vaguely aware of having seen her before in the schoolyard, but that was all. In any case, as I’d had so little contact with her, her behavior to me could not possibly have been based on personal knowledge or a grudge. She simply didn’t like the look of me.

Many thanks to readers who have continued to take an interest in our work.

We know – that is, Clio and I know – that the complaint that today’s writers have too little life experience is a common one, and that it infuriates writers, especially the more literary ones. All the same, it seems to us to have some merit. Yes, writers ought not to write only about what they know, or their work might grow dull very quickly; they ought to be free to use their imaginations; and there is nothing wrong with doing research to fill in the gaps left by personal experience or its absence. I still wonder whether people of very limited life experience write well about those matters which they investigate via research or their own imaginations. I’m not talking about the writers who write about murder investigations but have never experienced one, nor writers who never lived in the sixteenth century but set their writing in the past. Gaps in knowledge of this kind can indeed be made up for by careful research, especially of the kind that involves meeting people who work as detectives, or traveling to places where their historical novels are set. But is it likely that say, a police procedural novel written by someone who never worked in an office and experienced the dullness of routine and the stupidity (or brilliance) of bosses, could be convincing? How about adventure novels by people who have always led very regimented lives? And how could straight-A swots who have done well in school and won scholarships all their lives, who have never been fired or unemployed except by choice, who have never known a serious personal defeat (except perhaps in affairs of the heart) – write about failure?

I believe that the repetitive and formulaic quality that has crept into literary fiction, ambitious fiction, whatever one wants to call it, in the last 30 years or so is the result of the limited life experience of its writers. In order to stand any chance of success, they have to go through a series of expected steps – university, graduate school, post-graduate programs – that make taking any time off to live life rather difficult. So they’re left with two options: to write about what they know, no matter how limited their knowledge is; or to try to research their way into greater knowledge and understanding of the world and its people.

The former approach was once adopted by women and invalids, and other people whose life experience was restricted by convention or disability. Make no mistake that it can produce very great novels: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and even, up to a point, Madame Bovary, were all written by people whose life experiences were limited by either their sex or health. The trouble is that it places a tremendous burden on those writers who attempt it, who must mine their life-stories until they are mined out, or until they have infuriated all their close relations and friends. (I wonder, in passing, if these fates tend to strike women writers more often?)

The other option, that of using research to explore those aspects of life which have been closed to you, is not without its uses, as I said above, but can seldom make up for limited experience of life. Writers of this kind tend to have a rather ponderous and heavy quality to their prose, and their work, though it may make a huge impression for a time as readers excitedly grab hold of the new characters or information presented to them, tends not to endure beyond a season or two.

Astute readers of this piece will notice that I’ve avoided naming any names here. That’s because I don’t want to outrage from the start anyone who might stumble upon this piece by pointing fingers at their favourite literary novelist. I admit, though, that a few of the big-name literary writers named by B.R. Myers in his notorious piece for the Atlantic some years ago are some of the ones I have in my sights.

All the same, I haven’t given up yet, though I do think the history project as such will have to wait to come to fruition, in spite of Clio’s loud and impolite protests. (Never mess with a Muse, people. They get so difficult when crossed.) Instead, I will resume the old mix of a little artiness, a little current events, a little Pseudo-Intellectualism. By the way, is there a blog called Pseudo-Intellectual? There certainly ought to be.

As to our purpose in writing now, we were much troubled in our minds this morning – at least, I was troubled, but Clio was amused – by a round dismissal of the value of working for the government, which apparently originated with comments made by Ann Coulter and which I saw quoted in Kathy Shaidle’s Five Feet of Fury.

HAYES: My Mom works for the government. She doesn’t have a job-job?

FOREMAN: That’s not a…

ANN COULTER: No. She is a drain on society.

(Applause)

Well, really, I knew that. Government workers are a drain on society. Some of them certainly are, at any rate. Here I must confess that I’ve never worked at anything but government jobs, unless you count university lecturing posts, which I don’t, as in a sense they have become merely the propaganda wing of the government, unfortunately. (That is not entirely true or fair, but there is more truth in it than I like.) So I’m not exactly disinterested. Yet though I’m willing to confess freely that I don’t imagine any of my government work to have provided any kind of essential service to anyone, there are many government positions that do exactly that. What would we do without the – well, let’s see – the soldiers (and all the many different trades among them), the pavers, garbage collectors, custodians, street-sweepers, water-pipe layers and maintainers, sewage-system engineers, traffic-light and street-light monitors, policemen, and not least of all, the administrators who organize and manage them? Libertarians like to imagine that some or all of these services except soldiering might be provided by the private sector, but they’re wrong. Aside from the fact that the private sector is not likely to take an interest in providing many of these not especially profitable services, their failure to do so in the least profitable sectors can make life very unpleasant, not just for the handful of people intimately concerned, but for everyone who lives in the same city.

When airlines refuse to make particular runs because there’s no profit in it for them, it could be argued (barely) that the only people affected by this decision are those who live in the cities to which they will not fly. But surely if we ever reached a stage in which, let’s say, sewage companies refused to provide their services to Quarter X because its inhabitants could not afford them, would the whole city not soon acquire a rather stinky reputation? Clio and I have both lived in cities in which public services of this kind were not provided from public funds, but only by private contractors and only selectively. The results were not pretty and could not be avoided unless one simply did not leave the confines of one’s own garden – and even there, the smells of the untamed and unserved city could penetrate when the prevailing wind was in the right direction.

The fact that too much public money is wasted on services that no one wants, or that are poorly provided, or over-priced, or – in some cases – non-existent, should not blind us to the fact that many essential services are still provided by public servants of one kind or another, and that their place could not readily be taken by private contractors.

Meanwhile, I have long accepted with melancholy certainty that I am myself not an especially Useful Person. I might feel more melancholy than I do about this, were it not for the fact that I do not believe that being Useful is or ought to be the principal goal of human life. Let me quote the great Reepicheep now, from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

“But what manner of use would it be ploughing through that darkness?” asked Drinian.

“Use, Captain? Use? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, why then, I confess that it will be of no use at all. But so far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful, but to seek honour and adventure, and to refuse this adventure would be no small impeachment of our honours.”

(I admit  that the above is quoted from memory and may be slightly off.) I don’t for a moment suggest, of course, that I expect anyone to pay me to sail around the world having adventures. Or even to pay me a civil servant’s salary, necessarily – a goal that still remains elusive for me, alas. I only mean that I don’t like a) the suggestion that public servants are, in general, useless, and b) that being useful ought to be our ideal.

Is there anyone else out there willing to say a word or two in favour of government workers and their works? By “anyone” I mean people who aren’t essentially left-wing in their outlook, but who are aware of the services that public servants provide and that it would probably be difficult to find some equally satisfactory means of providing them, for all the liabilities of the present system.

Anyway, here is a comment recently posted by Musette, going under her mortal initials (or some of them) at the Taki website. Takimaghas a rather vulgar tone and many of its writers express views that are antithetical to ours, but it appears to allow its writers to write whatever they think, to judge by the broad spectrum of political attitudes they espouse. (No, not all of its writers are “right wing”, if you follow them closely.) Here is the comment:

The next book we’re hoping to review also concerns early modern history – a book about Catherine de Medici and her efforts to build some kind of religious consensus in 16th-century France. She failed spectacularly, of course, but not necessarily through malice or evil intentions towards French protestants (n.b. we spell “protestant” with a lower-case “‘p” in defiance of convention because it is not the name of a specific religion, but the designation of a certain cast of mind. As the Catholic church is not allowed by convention to be “catholic”, this seems fair, though we wonder if anyone will get the tease.) In any case, this kind of effort by rulers to create a modus vivendi between hostile peoples is going to be one of the major themes of this blog for a while. We – Clio and I – hope that at least a few readers will be interested, and patient enough to keep coming back to check for new pieces while we struggle to overcome our natural inertia.

One last word regarding Wolf Hall: we are anxious to see what Ms Mantel does next with her hero, and how she manages to explain the way that Cromwell’s nearly supernatural prescience and skilful manoeuvering in Book I failed him by the time of Book II.

This piece was originally written last year for a journal whose editors accepted it and then, having paid for it, decided not to print it. Mantel’s book is now hardly new any longer; nor is it a classic, not yet at any rate. But I think it is still topical, because the idea of the State as God appears to be growing more popular every year.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a fictionalized account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, one of the architects of Henry VIII’s reformation of the English Church. It was published in April 2009 and has won the Man Booker prize and more recently, the National Book Critics’ Circle award. It has attracted unreserved praise from a great number of reviewers in the most prestigious papers. The novel’s overwhelming success is surprising for a very long work about what is, after all, the best-known period of English history. The fact that it is highly readable is certainly one reason for this success, but there may be another. Most works of history or historical fiction (excluding bodice-rippers) that reach a broad audience do so because they address current fears or longings, and this is very true of Mantel’s novel. It is about Cromwell, yes, but it is also about religious fanaticism, social dislocation, and how best to govern an unruly people, all matters of pressing concern to contemporary Britons. For Wolf Hall is a Whig history: it offers us a Cromwell much like ourselves as our eye into the past, while we are the novel’s heroes.

Mantel’s account of Cromwell’s life begins with a scene in which his violent father has knocked the youth to the ground. Skimming lightly over his youthful adventures on the Continent, it goes on to recount the story of his friendship with his patron, Cardinal Wolsey, the genial papal legate, who tries and fails to secure a divorce for Henry VIII. Cromwell recovers from Wolsey’s downfall and commits himself to the service of the king, where he goes from one success to the next. His intelligence, his gift for languages, his understanding of money and trade, his administrative ability, and his political shrewdness all contribute to making him a very useful man, and ultimately a very powerful one.  It is not until the second half of the novel that Cromwell gradually becomes embroiled in the affair that made his career, the Boleyn family’s attempt to negotiate a marriage between Anne and the lovesick Henry. Although instrumental in arranging her marriage, Cromwell betrays Anne in the end: he is a new kind of servant who places loyalty to the state above personal ties.

Once this intrigue is concluded, Mantel gives short shrift to some of the other important events in Cromwell’s life: his involvement in the dissolution of the monasteries, for example, (although she seldom fails to point out how their inhabitants were parasites); or his persecution of heretics, redefined as enemies of the state after Henry’s break with Rome. The novel ends with the separation of Sir Thomas More’s head from his body, and Cromwell (or the narrator, it’s not quite clear) telling himself, “Today, More was escorted to the scaffold by Humphrey Monmouth . . .  Monmouth is too good a man to rejoice in the reversal of fortune. But perhaps we can rejoice for him?”

Mantel’s use of Cromwell as the only set of eyes through whom we view the action of the novel, her sympathetic portrayal of scenes from Cromwell’s childhood and domestic life, some of which are certainly her own invention, and her skilful elisions of most of the minister’s less appealing or justifiable actions, allows her to turn Cromwell into a new man for all seasons, a rebuke to the figure of Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play by that name. In fact, Mantel’s Cromwell is something of a “Mary Sue,” a wish-fulfilment figure, and one who is rather too good to be true. His actions as depicted by Mantel are always justifiable; he never fails in any enterprise except through the failures of others; he is seldom shown to be wrong about anything; and he appears to be gifted with nearly superhuman foresight, although of course all this must falter in the second book Mantel is to write, as Cromwell in turn becomes the victim of his sovereign’s paranoia.

Mantel’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, who might be said to be the villain of the novel, is too wicked to be convincing, even for those disinclined to hagiography. Mantel sets up More as a foil to Cromwell. While More is a sadistic masochist who teases his wife ferociously, wears hair-shirts, and tortures heretics, Cromwell, who was historically responsible for torturing rather more people than More, is shown to be kind to wives, servants, children, and dogs. While  More is a slippery, self-aggrandizing courtier with a penchant for dramatic gestures, Cromwell is a plain-spoken, pragmatic administrator often insulted for his low birth. Above all, while More is a fanatical Christian (though of course also a man on the make), Cromwell is a rational man for whom the pursuit of God is not the first goal of human life.

There is no doubt that Mantel’s Cromwell is more appealing than Mantel’s More. The question is, does she create an accurate portrait of either man? It is difficult for one who is not a specialist in Tudor history to answer that question. Other questions present themselves to the detached reader. Was Cromwell really so good a father? Was More really so terrible a husband? The contemporary records are mixed, and Mantel does not indicate her sources. Those reviewers who proclaim her book to be astonishingly well-researched are surely saying more than they can know from what Mantel has provided for us in her work. Verisimilitude and plausibility are admirable qualities in an historical novel, but they are not the same as historical accuracy. Finally, while Cromwell may have been, as many English historians have concluded, the architect of the modern English state, that does not mean that the real Cromwell would have appealed to modern tastes any better than More, either as a personality or a political actor. Neither man recognised the individual conscience as the supreme authority in determining matters of right and wrong. Neither man hesitated to execute those people who rebelled against established authority. They were not like us, and for Ms Mantel to make Cromwell more like us to make his policies more sympathetic is a kind of cheating.

Mantel’s book supports neither the Protestants nor the Catholics in the English Reformation. For example, she writes admiringly of the obviously Romish Cardinal Wolsey, a man who stood for everything that Protestant reformers hated about Catholic priests and the papacy. She is critical of the Reformer William Tyndale, whose zeal and adherence to principle she finds distasteful. She turns her sights neither on Catholicism nor the Reformation, but on religious fanaticism, or, as we say today, “fundamentalism.” She paints More in an unflattering light because the deaths for which he was responsible were carried out in the service of religion. Worse, More, like Tyndale, was willing to die for a point of principle. Yet she accepts or excuses the executions for which Cromwell was responsible because they were carried out in service of the state.

Leaving aside the question of whether Mantel’s portraits of Cromwell or More are historically accurate, readers ought to ask themselves whether the fanaticism she deplores was really as pernicious as she thinks, or whether it might even have been a necessary ingredient in bringing about the kind of polity that good liberals admire. Without the fanatic Luther to declare, “here I stand; I can do no other,” would the nations of Europe really have been able to throw off the yoke of Rome, as Mantel would no doubt describe it? Without the fanatics who translated the Bible into modern tongues would literacy have spread the way it did in Protestant nations, and then, as the Catholic Church fought back, in Catholic nations as well? Could we have achieved our present liberty of conscience, fragile as it may be, without the fanatics who were willing to die (and sometimes kill) not for the claims of the subjective conscience, but for that which they thought was indisputably right? It is courage and not political expediency that sets an example to be remembered down the ages and leads people to question received truths.

However, Musette has long since married her B(est)B(eloved). She is less preoccupied and has more time for free-range thinking. As for the risks of blogging, with Clio’s support, I’ve decided that the time for such cowardice has passed. I don’t know whether I’m prepared to blog under my real name (probably not), but I’m certainly prepared to state a few opinions in public without worrying overmuch that the thought police will be knocking on my doors any time soon. And if they do, I’m prepared to fight.

But enough melodrama.

I don’t intend to allow the blog to be as personal as it once was: I’ve lost interest in that kind of writing, for the moment. What I intend to do, instead, is use this blog for its original purpose: to write about history. (That’s why I called it “alias clio”, after all.) And because the prospect of writing and researching essays about different historical events, personalities, and so forth every day or even once a week is a bit daunting, I think what I will do is review history books, one a week perhaps, with the rest of the week devoted to discussing the issues raised by the review and the book, with whoever happens to show up and wants to take part. If I have to, I’ll discuss the book and related issues without any contribution from readers, but I hope that won’t be necessary.

New and improved.

Stay tuned.