It’s Possible to Learn

from Flawed People

Margaret Renkl

In 1980, my senior year of high school, I sat in

an auditorium watching “A Man for All
Seasons.” The film, based on Robert Bolt’s play
of the same title, won the 1967 Academy Award
for best picture, as well as five other Oscars. It
was also one of the for mative artistic
experiences of my life.

“When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his

own self in his hands, like water,” Sir Thomas
More tells his daughter in the film. “And if he
opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find
himself again.” In a dark room in Alabama,
4,000 miles and half a millennium distant from
Tudor England, those words burned into me. In
a few months, I would be leaving home for the
first time. Already I wondered who I would be
after I did.

In my dorm room that fall, I kept a postcard

replica of a portrait of More by Hans Holbein
the Younger. I love that painting still. Of all the

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glorious art that New York City spreads out like
an endless banquet of beauty and provocation,
it’s always the one I visit first. Holbein’s
portrait tugs at something in me so deeply
a t t a c h e d i t f e e l s i n t e g r a l . A s i n g u l a r,
irreplaceable organ. A self.

Nearly 500 years after he painted his haunting

portrait of More, Holbein is having a moment. A
retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum
has inspired rapturous reviews. “A
flabbergasting talent,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in
The New Yorker. “A mastery of optics and color
theory and classical history,” Jason Farago
noted in a review for The Times. “Daring on an
intimate scale,” Jenny Uglow wrote in The New
York Review of Books.

The centerpiece of the show is the portrait of

More, on loan from the Frick Collection. The
painting has always encouraged rhapsodies,
and the shadowed velvet sleeve in the
foreground deserves every ardent word it has
generated. “The sleeve was ecstasy, the sleeve
should be illegal, the sleeve was Utopia,” wrote
the novelist Jonathan Lethem in an essay for
the Frick last year.
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But for me the portrait is moving less because
of the artist’s genius than because of what its
subject had come to represent. “A Man for All
Seasons” primed me to see in More’s painted
eyes the intelligence and integrity and resolute
determination of a man who knows who he is
and who cannot be tempted to forsake himself.
Not even to save his own life.

A committed Catholic, Thomas More was a

brilliant writer and scholar. He was also a
lawyer, a statesman and a counselor to King
Henry VIII, and he eventually became Henry’s
lord chancellor — “the king’s good servant,” as
More put it in his final words, “but God’s first.”
After Henry separated his country from papal
authority, More refused to swear an oath
recognizing the king as supreme head of the
Church of England. In 1535 he was executed
for treason. Four hundred years later, he was
canonized as a Catholic saint.

As the novelist Hilary Mantel depicts him in her

celebrated trilogy that begins with “Wolf Hall,”
More was a man less for all seasons than of his
own bloody age, but her fictional portrait is no
closer to the full reality of this complex man
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than Catholic hagiography is. But Ms. Mantel
is right that Thomas More is a troubling figure
in history, even in church history, and “A Man
for All Seasons” does not address the other
ways in which his conflation of God with
Catholicism played out, including the
persecution of Protestants.

The question of how much one person’s

absolute moral conviction should govern the
behavior of other people is not a question we
left behind with Tudor England. It underlies
nearly every political debate we have today.
Many of the “moral” convictions being foisted
upon American citizens by way of their leaders
are as problematic now as they were during the
political convulsions of Henry’s day.

But when I look at Holbein’s portrait of More, I

don’t think about the historical role More
played in attempting to suppress the Protestant
Reformation. I don’t even think about his
fictional counterparts in Mr. Bolt’s play or Ms.
Mantel’s novels.

What I think about is an idea that first came to

me as I sat in a high school auditorium
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contemplating a man who could more easily
give up his life than his own understanding of
himself. As I sat in the dark, I suddenly
recognized that the world I was entering would
profoundly test my understanding of myself,
too. I needed to figure out where I could bend,
where I could grow and where I must stand
firm on trembling ground.

We don’t give robber barons like Henry Clay

Frick a pass because they used their wealth to
create important collections that live on beyond
them, any more than we give Thomas More a
pass for persecuting Protestants. But part of
living comfortably in a complicated world
means recognizing the complexity of human
beings — their inscrutability, their ever -
changing priorities, above all their capacity for
self-contradiction. Much as we might prefer it
to be otherwise, it is possible for a person to do
unforgivable things and also things that are
remarkably beautiful and good. We do human
wisdom a great disservice when we expect it to
be perfectly embodied in a flawed human
being.

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Perhaps even more important, we profoundly
misunderstand the very nature of art when we
think we know in advance what readers — or
audience members or gallery visitors — will
derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to
tell them what they should derive from it.

Whether it’s a painting or a film or a play or a

dance or a poem or a novel or a sculpture or a
symphony or any other artifact of creativity
made by a restless, curious, questing human
mind, a great work of art finds its completion in
the restless, curious, questing mind of the
person who encounters it. And there is no
predicting how that act of transformation, that
experience of utter intimacy, might unfold.

Great art of every kind allows people to place

themselves, safely, into the larger world. It is
transformative precisely because it is one way
we come to understand our own part in the
expansive, miraculous human story. A great
work of art reminds us that our own lives,
which too often feel small and insignificant, are
part of a story that can be full of cruelty and
suffering, yes, but that can also be astonishing.
Very often it is magnificent.
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When someone tells me that a book should no
longer be read — or a film should no longer be
screened or a painting hung or a play
performed — because of some problematic
history attached to the work or its creator, I
think of the girl I was in 1980, discovering a
truth I desperately needed to find, in just that
moment, from a story that might or might not
be true about a human being who might or
might not be good. A human being who, I know
now, was almost certainly both.

New York Times (18 March 2022)