Deep Dive into Mary, Queen of Scots

 I go on tears. Ex-pat Kenya. Ex-pat Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda. Hemingway. Martha Gellhorn. My tears veer between the literary and the historical. I was a history major at Berkeley, and there isn't a whole lot about 16th-century England that I don't have a fair grasp of. The latest deep dive is into the guilt of Mary, Queen of Scots. You can't really be interested in Elizabeth I's reign without treading on the well-worn toes of Mary Stuart. Her status first as Dauphine then Queen of France (briefly) and then her return to Scotland colored Elizabethan foreign policy until the day she was beheaded. Not that voodoo dolls were part of William Cecil's effects, but if it were possible, he'd have had one and would stick that doll every single night. Many times.

Anyway, the big question is, of course, did she know that her husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was going to be murdered? Naturally, the tome of all tomes when mentioning Mary Stuart is Lady Antonia Fraser's biography, which even among her critics (who feel that Mary was as guilty as hell!) acknowledge that it is the most thoroughly researched treatment as a whole. Lady Antonia comes down on the side of, gee, she might have had an inkling, but surely not. Bollocks, I say.

I base this not on the actual events (bizarre as they are), but on the aftermath of the murder at Kirk O'Field. Mary couldn't even feign any sort of pretense, not even play-acting that she was mourning his death. This is a woman who was still wearing her white veil of mourning two years after her first husband's death! Yet she couldn't be arsed to curtain any of her activities upon Darnley's death, despite numerous missives from abroad castigating her for her lack of political acumen (notwithstanding her complete lack of grief). Not that I think that Darnley shouldn't have been dealt with. His death unleashed far more of a political nightmare than incarcerating him in a dingy cell would have done. And Mary's fears that throwing him in jail would compromise her son's legitimacy really doesn't hold much water. After all, less than a hundred miles away, a woman, whose legitimacy was an even bigger question, was managing her country just fine. Darnley was conspiring with foreign powers to dethrone her and place himself on the throne. He actually had a decent claim to it, and it seems a case of who murdered who first. Anyway, he's murdered, and she acts like it's just another day in Scotland. No forty days of mourning for her this go around. There were weddings and parties to attend!

But her lack of any (even if false) sympathy isn't what ultimately swayed me to land firmly in the, oh yeah, she knew camp. It was when she was once incarcerated in England and her never-ceasing conspiracies with foreign powers to bump Elizabeth I from her throne. It wasn't even a case of her "looking through her fingers" as she did with her husband's murder. It was outright, "I'm the rightful heir. That bastard is on my throne and if you invade and she just happens to be killed, London is worth it!" It was that blatant.

This was a bloodthirsty age. Elizabeth agonized over finally charging Mary with treason (after several uncovered plots), and based on Mary's letters to various conspirators, she wouldn't lose one moment of sleep if her "dear sister" had been dethroned and killed. I'm not basing this opinion on the Casket Letters. I really don't care about them, because the endless arguments are, in my opinion, pointless. And it was certainly in Mary's brother James's interest to blacken Mary to the point where Elizabeth couldn't possibly release her. The perpetrators of Darnley's murder (and what a worthless sod HE was) all had tragic ends. Darnley was strangled to death. Bothwell died insane in a Danish prison. Mary was beheaded. James Stuart, Mary's half brother, was assassinated. Darnley's father, the Earl of Lennox, was also assassinated. What's the saying? Men make plans, and God laughs. Elizabeth and Cecil died in their beds. 

Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages

This is a pretty interesting book if rather predictable because I've read this story a million times before--allow me the hyperbole--only the names are different. The author, Carmela Ciuraru, delves into a brief biographical recap of five literary giants, and then how their wives suffered under the weight of all that "genius." All of these writers are basically monsters who can write. I mean that sincerely. These are assholes with a capital "A." They are cruel, arrogant, vicious, and petty, people I would avoid at parties no matter how scintillating the conversation.

Having spent several years doing a deep dive into the Hemingway/Pfeiffer marriage with more than a layperson's grasp of his marriages to Hadley, Martha, Gellhorn, and Mary, I found myself just nodding in weariness at the shenanigans and utter ridiculousness of these relationships. I asked myself over and over again, why are you staying with this man? And even though I find Martha Gellhorn to be made in much the same mold as Hemingway (a narcissistic bully), I also was applauding her from the sidelines for her just saying, buster, I'm done, and dusting her hands off on her trousers as she exited that toxic relationship (as all his relationship with EVERYONE became toxic after a certain point). All of these vignettes felt very familiar and, frankly, tired.

The five marriages analyzed are as follows: Una Troubridge and Raddclyffe Hall, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Elaine Dundy and Kenneth Tynan, Elizabeth Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis, and Patricia Neal and Roald Dahl. I don't think it's surprising that the male authors in this house of literary horrors are English. The post-war years in Britain ushered in a type of unruly, arrogant, angry type of writer that glorified repudiating the values of pre-WWII Britain, and glorified the brutality of that rejection. Did they need rejecting/ Sure, but because women are often the scapegoats of any social or political movement, misogynistic is far too mild a word to describe these men. They are vile and angry for the sake of being vile and angry. This is what sold in post-WWII Britain. Even though they needed women to bed and run the mundane aspects of their lives because they couldn't be arsed to hire people, they also loathed them, exactly like Hemingway.

Tynan, Amis, and Dahl used their wives, who let themselves be used because either one walked or one cooked and cleaned and kept one's mouth shut. In between all that washing up, if you managed to create your own art, well, you'd better not get more accolades than your husband. These weren't partnerships. It wasn't, oh, Patricia, my darling, you won an academy award, and just received a whopping big paycheck, now we can spend six months in France. It wasn't like that. Nope. Tantrums, pouts, and general all-around nastiness followed because how dare you be AS talented as me. And that's the kicker to these stories. You couldn't even be equal. You were always a lesser light. You couldn't be even a candle to a spotlight, You could be the flame a match. Some days.  Between the three of them, Tynan, Amis, and Dahl, it's almost impossible to choose a more horrible husband. They were all lauded, all lionized, and all of them were absolute bastards to their wives and mistresses.

The relationships of Troubridge and Hall and Morante and Moravia are less fraught with these competitive dynamics. Troubridge, allegedly gifted in her own right as an artist, just gave it all up for John Raddclyffe Hall, and was perfectly satisfied in being bathed secondhand glory. The case of Morante and Moravia wasn't so much about two authors competing against each other as it was that Morante was an absolutely impossible person, and their relationship seemed more cerebral than anything else. They respected each other's writing.

The question that kept arising when I was writing my historical fiction on the Hemingway/Pfeiffer marriage was as a reader, do you accept the genius along with the cruelty? I was never much of a Hemingway fan (although at sixteen there were passages in For Whom the Bell Tolls that had me weeping) precisely because he only writes about men and how fucked it all is and how there is no honor anymore and how we should all put a gun to our heads because if you can't die with honor, what's the point? That said, I cannot deny his genius. I just don't have to read it. Same here with these authors. I don't want to read them. They might be amazing writers, but I cannot separate the man from the page. I think about the woman banging out meals and making beds, and tiptoeing out of bed at two in the morning to write a page or two or read a script. That is the person who has my admiration (but also my scorn because why did you put up with that nonsense for so many years?) That might be a character flaw, but so be it.