C8| Saturday/Sunday, March 14 - 15, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Dancing Under the Red Star
By Karl Tobien (2006)
1
Carl Werner had no idea of the life
that lay ahead when he left Detroit with
his wife and young daughter for Gorky,
U.S.S.R., where, as one of 450 Ford
employees sent by Henry Ford to the Soviet
Union between 1930 and 1932, he was to
operate a new manufacturing facility. The life
ahead would entail being arrested by the
secret police and, shortly after, being killed
during Stalin’s purge of the late 1930s.
Millions were executed. Werner’s daughter,
Margaret, 17 at the time, saw her father’s
expression as he was taken away. In “Dancing
Under the Red Star,” a biography written by
her son: “I saw in his face the end—the end
of his innocently blind optimism and the end
of his hopes for our life in this country that
was not ours.” Margaret herself was then
arrested and sentenced to 10 years in Stalin’s
gulag, where she endured starvation, fear
and hard labor. But she also found friendship
and love there—this, particularly after Stalin’s
death in 1953. “It felt as if the master of the
house had suddenly died, and all of his
grateful servants were beginning to celebrate
their new lives.” Her story is a testament to
the power of a defiant optimism. She was
the only American woman to survive the
gulag and return home.
Journey Into the Whirlwind
By Eugenia Ginzburg (1967)
2
“I don’t want to sound pretentious,”
wrote Eugenia Ginzburg, a convinced
communist who helped establish the
Soviet regime, “but I must say in all
honesty that, had I been ordered to die for
theParty...Iwould have obeyed without
the slightest hesitation.” But then, in 1937,
Ginzburg was arrested on charges that she
was a member of a (nonexistent) Trotskyite
movement. She spent the first period of her
18-year imprisonment “in tormented conflict
between reason and the kind of foreboding
which Lermontov called ‘prophetic anguish.’”
She would be transformed by her realization
of the guilt she bore for her role in nurturing
so monstrous a creation as the Soviet regime,
and would write that “eighteen years of hell
on earth are not enough for a fault like mine.”
My Autobiography
By Evgeniia Isaakovna Iaroslavskaia-Markon
(2001)
3
Evgeniia Isaakovna Iaroslavskaia-
Markon, a philosopher and journalist,
had embraced the revolution at the
age of 13. As edited and translated
by Veronica Shapovalov in “Remembering
the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons,”
Iaroslavskaia-Markon confesses that she “fell
Monika Zgustova
The author, most recently, of ‘Dressed for a Dance in the Snow’
The Elusive
Harry
Houdini
the Boleyns has reached such intensity
that each side is angling for the death
of the other. Ever the fixer, Cromwell
maneuvers Anne to the executioner’s
block, along with her brother (and pu-
tative lover), George Boleyn, and four
other men charged with the treason-
able act of sleeping with the queen.
“He needs guilty men,” Cromwell re-
flects, “so he has found men who are
guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as
charged.” In fact, their guilt lies in con-
niving at his patron Wolsey’s downfall
and mocking him after his death.
That is the state of play as we open
“The Mirror and the Light.” It begins in
May 1536 with Anne’s corpse shoved
into a chest meant to ship arrows, her
detached head snugged in at her feet—
a fitting touch to the end of a life of
hardheaded ambition. Henry, divorced
and widowed, marries Jane Seymour
of doomy Wolf Hall, and Cromwell,
appointed Lord Privy Seal, continues
his ascent. He carries on developing the
ligaments of the modern state, institut-
ing registers of births, deaths and mar-
riages, building roads and drains, main-
taining “watercourses and sewers,
charnel houses and spoil heaps.” Most
dramatically, he pushes forward the
dissolution of the monasteries, “turning
monks into money,” transferring their
property and wealth to the king and
his allies, to himself and his friends.
Such largesse has the further effect of
advancing the cause of Protestantism,
now more clearly than ever on Crom-
ContinuedfrompageC7
well’s agenda. He knows that a return
to Rome would oblige those who prof-
ited from the seizures to restore church
property and wealth. But the great
issue of succession is as vexed as it ever
was, and the desperate hope is that
Henry’s new wife will produce a son.
Until that comes to pass, there are a
number of noteworthy rivals for heir to
the throne—though disease and execu-
tion take care of a few. Still, Mary
Tudor remains a big problem; firmly
Roman Catholic, she refuses to sign the
oath acknowledging Henry as head of
the English church and conceding her
own supposed illegitimacy. Moreover,
rumor has raised the specter of her
marrying Reginald Pole, scion of the
Plantagenets, now skulking and con-
spiring somewhere on the Continent.
It takes Cromwell, master of persua-
sion with no taste for torture or killing,
to convince this wayward daughter to
sign the document despite her true
beliefs. It’s a coup for Cromwell, but
there is trouble elsewhere. Encouraged
by the Poles among others, Northern-
ers have risen in what they style the
Pilgrimage of Grace, calling for the
restoration of the old religion. Their
fury is directed chiefly against the
monster Cromwell, heretic and rapa-
cious dissolver of monasteries.
History continues to unfold for the
next 400 or 500 pages, but we must
turn to what Ms. Mantel has accom-
plished in this enormous work. The
entire trilogy is a brilliant engagement
with the exercise and metaphysics of
power in 16th-century Europe, an age
in which sovereignty was understood
to be divinely conferred, channeled
through blood. This puts the emphasis
on bodies, one of Ms. Mantel’s special-
ties. Throughout the work she has
given grisly attention to flesh and
blood, writing with macabre relish of
the horrors inflicted by various meth-ods of judicial killing: decapitation;
hanging; drawing and quartering; burn-
ing at the stake. She fills Cromwell’s
head with such ghastly scenes, among
them the aftermath of the execu-
tions of Anne’s supposed lovers, their
“corpses, promiscuous, heaped upon a
cart: their pale English limbs inter-
mingled, their heads in sodden bags.”
The body of greatest significance is,
of course, Henry’s, and Ms. Mantel
magnificently conveys his corporeality
and the understanding that the royal
person is synonymous with his king-
dom. To this end, she describes the
king with stomach-turning specificity
as his day begins:While his beard is trimmed and his
hair combed his physicians come in,
and gather in a black knot with their
basins and urine flasks. They smell
his breath, and enquire into his sleep
and dreams.
The poor labourer owns his sleep
and his stool, and can sell his piss to
the fuller, whereas the king’s piss and
stool is the property of all Eng-
land....Should he be costive, he is
ordered a potion; should his bowel be
loose, its product is taken away in a
bowl under an embroidered cloth....
Once the king leaves his inner
rooms and enters his privy chamber,
his natural body unites to his body
politic: here he is dressed and pre-
sented to the world, a bulky, new-
barbered man scented with rose oil.Put crudely, bodies bring Cromwell
down. For one thing, he has failed
Henry in his promise to produce the
perfidious schemer, Reginald Pole, or
arrange his assassination abroad.
Further, despite their having occasional
interests in common, Cromwell has
always been extravagantly resented by
the choleric Thomas Howard, Duke ofthat make the work great, as do the
characters she summons. Filtered
through Cromwell’s eyes, they are de-
scribed with fantastical brio: The baby
Elizabeth, the future queen, is “a con-
vulsing mass of linen, red flailing fists,
a maw emitting shrieks.” Reginald
Pole’s appearance “gives no idea of the
elaborate, useless nature of his mind,
with its little shelves and niches for
scruples and doubts.” And there is
Norfolk, my favorite: Cromwell “never
sees the duke with a sword at his side,
without imagining himself run through:
‘Beg pardon, Lord Cromwell, was that
your heart?’”
Ms. Mantel has wonderfully con-
jured the mentality, materiality and
channels of power in a vanished age,
and, in the case of Cromwell, the ob-
jectives, machinations and emotions
of an intricate mind. Her description of
the relationship between Henry and
Cromwell, ever precarious and delicate,
is the trilogy’s focal point and always
arouses a frisson of anxiety in the
reader. Cromwell, so clear in his view
of things, must manage the intractable
potentate, “a man of great endow-
ments, lacking only consistency, rea-
son, and sense,” and must skate over
the thin ice of his spoiled, super-
stitious, volatile nature. For all its mag-
nificence and scope, however, this final
volume is really too long, with too
many wearisome pages spent fossick-
ing through Cromwell’s proliferating
memories. It is as if Ms. Mantel were
loath to get to the fatal day, July 28,
1540, when the executioner’s ax will
separate this bustling head from the
“graceless slab of muscle and bone”
that was its body.Ms. Powers is a recipient of the
National Book Critics Circle’s
Nona Balakian Citation for
Excellence in Reviewing.The End
Of Thomas
Cromwell
to be either the best at something or to present
himself as such. Mr. Posnanski admits that
“Houdini had a big ego, a rough nature, and he
ruthlessly went about destroying imposters and
critics and people he perceived as competitors.”
Why, then, did he become such a phenomenon
in his own lifetime, and why has the name
outlived the man for nearly a century? In part it
was because his acts became ever more danger-
ous: jumping manacled from bridges, finding
increasingly claustrophobia-inducing containers
in which to be bound, freeing himself from a
straitjacket while suspended by his ankles a
hundred feet in the air. In 1916, 100,000 people
gathered in the District of Columbia to watch one
of his suspended escapes. To the mystery of how
he did it was added, Mr. Begley suggests, the
dark thrill that he just might not get out this
time. That is the fictional fate he met in a 1953
biopic starring Tony Curtis, drowning in his
water-torture tank. In reality, he died more
prosaically, in 1926, of a burst appendix, having
declined medical attention until it was too late.
He was 52 years old.
Shortly after Houdini’s death, a rival magician,
Howard Thurston,
offered this assessment:
“He was an indefatiga-
ble worker of insatiable
ambition, an aggressive
enemy and a loyal
friend. As a showman,
he was in a class with
Barnum. In force of
character, he resembled
Roosevelt.”
Both biographers
are comfortable leav-
ing the mystery of
Houdini’s ongoing
appeal unresolved,
or deferring to the
conclusions of others. Mr. Begley writes that
Houdini never offered a reason for his feats,
never tried to extract a larger meaning from
them. But others did:His self-liberation has most often been
interpreted as a parable about breaking
free—free from constraints either external
(capitalism, bigotry) or internal (repression,
self-doubt). The fact that Houdini stretched
out his wrists for the handcuffs and walked
willingly into the jail cell does nothing
to diminish the power of the parable.
Like Buster Keaton, like Charlie Chaplin,
like Mickey Mouse, Harry Houdini was
a beloved little guy defying authority,
beating the odds, standing up to the
bully, making it on his own.Nothing could be more fitting than a conclu-
sion that Houdini was impossible to pin down,
but the idea of a defiant Houdini “slipping all
those chains” captures both the truth and the
romance of his life.Mr. Wilson is the editor of the American Scholar
and the author, most recently, of “Barnum:
An American Life.”ContinuedfrompageC7His trade was
surprise and
risk. To the
mystery of
how he did it
he added the
dark thrill that
he just might
die this time.in love—completely and with impassioned
sincerity—with the idea of revolution.” She
found Alexander, the man of her life, when
she was 20, and in the same year suffered an
accident that made it necessary to amputate
both her feet. To which event her response is,
“What is the loss of one’s feet compared to
such a great love as ours?” When Alexander
was arrested after a tour of Western
European universities, Iaroslavskaia-Markon’s
protest against the Soviet state’s arbitrariness
was immediate, notwithstanding her devotion
to the cause of revolution. If the state was
criminal, she would be too. She surrounded
herself with “petty criminals”: pickpockets,
shoplifters, robbers and punks whose
activities she shared until she was caught,
taken to jail, sent to a labor camp and
sentenced to death. Ever determined to
puncture official lies, she wrote in her
autobiography, before she was executed in
1931, at the age of 29: “No state in the world
can remain revolutionary, by the very
definition of a state.”Between Shades of Gray
By Ruta Sepetys (2011)4
“They took me in my nightgown.”
Thus begins Ruta Sepetys’s story
of her mother, Lina, age 15 in 1941,
when the Soviet secret police barged
into her home in Lithuania and arrested her
along with her younger brother and her
mother. The account follows a familiar
pattern: prison, a long journey to Siberia,
hard labor, starvation, extreme cold. The
family is then taken to the north, to chop
wood. The sign they see upon their arrival
reads “Trofimovsk.” They are at the top of
the Arctic Circle. When Lina’s mother asks for
a stove for thejurta—the common barracksthe prisoners built out of mud—the guard
replies: “You’d like a stove? What else? A hot
bath? A glass of cognac? Shut up and get to
work.” Lina’s salvation was artwork. “After
everyone was asleep, I drew by moonlight.”
The worst thing was the darkness. “In the
polar region, the sun falls below the horizon
for 180 days. Darkness for nearly half a year.”
The prisoners were convinced that if they
endured the first long winter without the sun,
they’d survive. On a morning six months after
they arrived, Lina left the jurta to chop wood.
“I began my walk through the snow,” she
recalls. “That’s when I saw it. A tiny sliver
of gold appeared between the shades of gray
on the horizon. I stared at the amber band
of sunlight, smiling. The sun had returned.”Unedited Life
By Valentina Grigorievna Ievleva-Pavlenko
(2001)5
Arrested after the end of World War II
on charges of spying for the West,
Valentina Grigorievna Ievleva-
Pavlenko was sentenced to a six-year
term in the gulag. She would go on to labor
in Russia’s far north and in Eastern Siberia.
A woman who regularly told herself she was
not a slave and would not accept being one,
she escaped one night to look for her lover,
Boris, also a prisoner. Her account, also
included in the anthology “Remembering the
Darkness,” attests to the joy she took from
this exercise of her will, though in the end
she was caught and dragged to the guards’
barracks. There, “the whole platoon began
to beat me.” Through the hellishness of the
gulag she was sustained, her story suggests,
largely by love affairs with men she met
there, prisoners like herself, and also by her
close friendships with women prisoners.APIC/GETTY IMAGES
LONG WINTERA supply train arriving at a Siberian gulag in the 1930s.Norfolk, who is contemptuous of his
base birth and outraged by his pre-
sumption. There is even a rumor that
Cromwell too, this upstart from Putney,
means to marry Mary Tudor. And now
he incenses Norfolk disastrously with an
egregious affront to his family’s honor:
closing Thetford Priory, where the
duke’s ancestors are buried.
Most damning of all is the unfor-
tunate matter of Anne of Cleves, whosemarriage to Henry was brokered by
Cromwell. The union has much to rec-
ommend it as a political alliance
against Catholic France and the Holy
Roman Empire, but, alas, Henry is re-
pulsed by the woman he once referred
to as “a great Flanders Mare.” Despite
the king’s eagerness to produce an-
other male heir to supplement the
baby Edward born of the now deceased
Jane, he is so put off by the woman
that he cannot perform the needful.
Finally and fatally, Cromwell’s own
body fails him and he is incapacitated
by a bout of malaria at just the wrong
time, leaving the field open for his
many enemies, rivals and turncoat
friends to destroy him. His promotion
of Protestant doctrine and usage—his
heresy, as it was deemed—is now
brought to bear against him along with
trumped-up charges of treason.
All this we can find in histories and
biographies, but it is Ms. Mantel’s
depiction of Cromwell’s inner work-
ings, so credibly and vividly imagined,Mantel’s trilogy is a
brilliant engagement
with the exercise and
metaphysics of power
in 16th-century Europe.BOOKS
‘May I never experience all that it is possible to get used to.’—EUGENIA GINZBURG
FIVE BESTON WOMEN OF THE GULAG