Books: Obsession

THOMAS MORE by Richard Marius Knopf; 562 pages; $22.95

There is a drawing of Thomas More dating from 1527, just eight years before Henry VIII had him beheaded for refusing to recognize the King's right to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. Hans Holbein's sketch shows a prosperous Londoner in a fur-trimmed robe, surrounded by his family and his possessions—silver dishes in the cupboard, and a shelf or two of those rare luxuries, books. Mounted on the wall, dangling above More's head like a sword, hangs a clock.

Holbein could not have chanced upon a more fitting symbol, if a reader follows the gracefully conceived, somewhat revisionist argument of Richard Marius, one of the editors of The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More and now an English professor at Harvard. It is Marius' persuasive thesis that, far from being the serene humanist made popular by Robert Bolt in his play A Man for All Seasons, More was a soul tormented by the little death knells of ticktocking time, and haunted even more by the silences of eternity.

A workaholic who signed his letters "In greatest haste," More ran hard to get ahead in the fluid society of Tudor England. After studying law, he positioned himself at court as personal secretary to Henry, as much through nattering verse and charm at the dinner table as by administrative competence. As he moved up in office—royal councillor, Undertreasurer of the Exchequer, speaker for the House of Commons and finally Lord Chancellor—he seemed docile and circumspect.

In private life as in public life, Marius suspects, More was a bit of an actor. Having succeeded at the main chance, he worked equally hard at humility. He played the family man to the hilt. His daughter Margaret was the love of his life. But he constantly harangued his first wife Jane, who bore him four children in seven years. His second wife Alice, whom he married within a month after Jane died at 23, was a testy widow he may have selected precisely because she did not attract him. Sex, Marius suggests, was the "ruling drama of his life," the profound guilt that fired More's medieval obsession with death and damnation just when the humanism of the Renaissance was lifting the darkness for his contemporaries.

More's writing expressed the agonized self-contradiction of an up-to-date careerist pursued by ancient demons. Marius rates him as "the greatest English storyteller between Chaucer and Shakespeare." The wit and irony that would soon mark the best Elizabethan playwrights already distinguished More. Like his friend Erasmus, More revered classical Greece. His masterpiece, Utopia (1516), a fantasy of the ideal commonwealth, imagined human beings so perfectly ruled by logic that they were happy to own no property and to labor modestly and endlessly for the common good.