Long Live Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel writes a great deal about ghosts – not the Scooby-Doo kind – and how the dead live on in our minds, our memories and our bodies. They are not gone but merely invisible to us. I wrote in earlier post about my encounters with her and our handling of her archive. Certainly she seems now still to speak to me often. Her words, whether on the page, spoken or on the screen in our e-mail correspondences, affect me. I have just finished reading her posthumously published collection of short pieces, A Memoir of My Former Self, A Life in Writing, John Murray, 2023.
She is (I am not even going to use the past tense, she seems so present) primarily a serious, august writer of historical fiction, a multiple Booker Prize-winner, a reviewer of films and books and a profound thinker about the nature of historical fact and the nature of writing itself.
This collection chiefly comprises some of those reviews. She has the most uncanny knack, as well as of writing utterly beautifully, of making me want to read a book or see a film for the first time or again, and when that doesn’t happen I feel as I though I may not really need to, how thoroughly and succinctly has she summarised the subject. From her review, I have recently gone back to and enjoyed Robocop – not at all a stupid film, even a trenchant commentary on the nature of corporate greed amidst all the hyper-violence.
There are not many reviewers whose critiques I will read whether I am interested in the subject or not because they themselves write so well. One is local best-selling author Robert Harris. Others, television reviewers, are Hugo Rifkind and Camilla Long, who both display a truly sparkling wit. Clive James likewise. Camilla Long’s other journalism doesn’t interest me at all though, writing as she does about celebrities and fashion. Her rather incoherent obsession with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is as peculiar as it is tedious.
Many things from A Memoir of My Former Self, have rooted themselves firmly in my mind. The use, for example, of capital case for Black and White when those adjectives are applied to people, something I have not seen before or since, although I am told that it is not terribly unusual. Should we all be doing that I wonder? Is it more respectful? It is more than an affectation. Hilary doesn’t do affectation. A new word, ‘scapegrace’, an out-and-out rogue, which reminded me of ‘scofflaw’ from the superb The Outlaw Ocean, Crime and Survival in the Last Untamed Frontier, by Ian Urbina, The Bodley Head, 2019, discussed in Animal Wild. Hilary writes with real genius about Margaret Thatcher, the royal family and in particular Princess Diana.
She says that we should not have been surprised by the outpouring of national grief after Diana’s death. Her comments on the impoverished way in which we deal with death in this country today resonated with me deeply – the Victorians, she says, knew how to do it, but now “it’s a twenty-minute slot at the crematorium, a half-day off work, a funeral sparsely attended by gormless people standing around in anoraks, shuffling their feet in embarrassment and singing ‘My Way’ ”. I would add that there are always egg mayonnaise sandwiches at the wakes and that they are never very good. There is too little ceremony, too little real contemplation and one is left only with the feeling, “is that it?” No wonder, Hilary continues, “that all the omitted personal mourning translated into the transpersonal.”
In her review of Withnail and I she describes the character of Withnail as “an exhibitionist, a fantasist, destitute and unreliable, deeply embarrassing but wholly fascinating, one of those who crop up in many of our lives” and certainly they have cropped up in mine, in one case so exactly that she called him to mind as a photograph would. “Form over substance, every time” he would often say, as though that were something to be proud of. He would use what he thought were obscure words, two in particular, ‘outré’ and ‘awry’, to impress and largely baffle mostly those he described as “comely girlies”. What he didn’t realise, and I left it too late ever to correct him, was that the primary reason for the bafflement was that he pronounced both words weirdly and completely wrongly.
Hilary can also be very, very funny, and mordant. She has made me laugh out loud, whether writing about stationery or the virgin Mary. I am not a devotee of the latter but I am of the former. In her piece on stationery in this book she imagines that a cataclysm has left her bereft of furniture compelling her to start again solely by ordering from her favoured stationery suppliers’ catalogue. The only shortfall is that they don’t sell beds. “So much for office romance.” Notebooks must be perforated, and I agree for slightly different reasons. Perforation is vital. Moleskines? Just no. Those “are for posers like Chatwin and Hemingway (has the earth ever held two greater?)”
When “trusting beginners” ask how the process of novel writing is done, she tells them it is all about ring-binders.
During one of our e-mail exchanges, I was reminded of something my mother once said and quoted it to her, hoping she would not think I was being frivolous or glib. “I believe in God, but not in Henry VIII. After all, they could just have made all that up.” Gracious as ever, and I could almost hear her chuckles, she replied that not only would she quote that herself and often, but that she knew exactly what my mother meant.
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