The Writing Life

“YOU WERE AN answer,” Hilary Mantel’s husband said to her when she came in one evening. “I glowed,” Mantel writes. “Who would not want to be an answer?”

Dame Hilary Mantel was certainly an answer to every writer’s prayers for illumination on how to delve deep into the motivations of their characters. Her pithy advice to writers is worth quoting from her previous memoir: “Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don’t think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage [banter]!”

 The author of 17 books, Mantel made bold choices in her writing life, and made history come alive by daring to delve into the personalities and the causal trajectories of famous historical characters. Published posthumously (Mantel died in 2022 at the age of 70), and with an introduction by her longtime editor Nicholas Pearson, A Memoir of my Former Self: A Life in Writing is precisely what its title says. The five sections include her reviews on other authors like VS Naipaul, Jane Austen (in her memorial service it was revealed that she was working on a ‘mash-up’ of the Austen novels) and Elizabeth Howard (her mentor), memoir (her struggles with lifelong illnesses, a sojourn in Saudi Arabia), film reviews (as the film critic for The Spectator from 1987-91), and the 2017 Reith Lectures, her superb reflections on the way art can bring history back to life.

 ‘On the One Hand’ is the title of a lovely rumination on Martin Amis’ view that for a novelist, writing journalism and criticism is writing left handed, “where the connection isn’t to the part of me that novels come from.” It makes Mantel grab a pen and write with her left hand and then say that in her career as a columnist  (as film critic and later an opinion writer) her pieces came very definitely from her right hand. She tells us she successfully concealed the fact that “I had no opinions,” and if she were granted a coat of arms, her motto would be “It’s not that simple.”

From there the essay moves on to her view that novelists ought to be the very last people to comment on the news of the day. Why? Because fiction deals in ideas as well as fact, and also in metaphors, symbols and myths, and that’s what Martin Amis recognised when he said novels and commentary come from different places within the writer.  “Fiction multiplies ambiguity. It is about the particular, which suggests the general; about inner meaning seen with the inner eye … scuffled on to the page furtively…by night and with the wrong hand.”

In ‘Where Do Stories Come From?’ her reply is quirky. From the personal columns, from the small ads in the newspapers, which she devours every day—in fact, subscribing to other news sheets along with The Guardian, which doesn’t have these adverts. We learn that her family and friends thought she got her ideas from eavesdropping on conversations in restaurants and pubs; only recently she had the courage to say she is, in fact, hard of hearing.

In ‘Persons from Porlock’, she answers the question: Why does a writer pray for interruptions? It could be because you’ve promised a novel before it has been written. Or you need to write a different book that bridges the gap between where you are now and the self who is ready to keep her initial promise. Or you dread setting off down any one narrative path because you know your choice will make most of the others impossible. And then in her inimitable fashion, delivers the killer landing line: “Unfortunately for writers, there is no intellectual equivalent of a sexual climax; they don’t always know when they’ve finished.”

In ‘Night Visions’, we get a glimpse into what it means to be Hilary Mantel the Writer. It means dreaming in verse. It means writing a short story (‘Nadine at Forty’) in that dream state and finding no evidence of it on the computer the next day despite saving it (thankfully, she’d printed it). It means not daring to go out in case she “sees something that starts off a chain of those damned sentences.” It means being at the mercy of compulsions, and knowing in her heart that she, a writer, is one of those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, “towed towards hedges and ditches by an untrained subhuman energy.” Mantel tells us that writing imposes a strange requirement to live in different realities—one part is doing the day to day stuff, and the other “in sessions of thought as dark as night” into the subterranean passages between the lines where you hope to find not words, but images, hobgoblins, chimeras and Medusa heads. “To write ferociously, you have to keep shocking your psyche,” she says, or nothing happens. “By the end of the summer I’ll have finished the book, or the book will have finished me.” And that’s what it means to be Mantel the Writer.

Her personal life, which she has addressed at length in her memoir Giving Up the Ghost, is the topic of ‘Remembering my Stepfather’. “I was seven or eight, the eldest child of three, and I already had a mother and a father, a family that seemed to need no supplementation, but my mother thought differently,” is how Jack Mantel, the stepfather moved into their house. He occupied her mother’s bed and the back of their house while her father, a meek clerk, lived in the front part, listened to jazz records and read library books. At the age of eleven, they moved out and left the father behind, and changed their name to Mantel. “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me,” she says in the memoir.

In ‘Last Morning in Al Hamra’ (1987), we get a glimpse into her four years in Jeddah where her husband was posted. I’ve always wondered how her sequestered and isolated life among other subjugated women in Saudi Arabia influenced the female characters in her book, most notably Ann Boleyn. And in one of the essays entitled ‘Ann Boleyn: Witch, Bitch, Temptress, Feminist’, we find out.  Mantel’s acerbic insights in ‘Last Morning’ arrow to the essence. For instance, she likens the professional expatriate existence to frail and moribund children who live inside plastic bubbles. Though she has a Saudi neighbour whom she teaches Dryden’s poetry, she points out that their values were very different. And sums up her Saudi experience with: “When you come across an alien culture you must not automatically respect it. You must sometimes pay it the
compliment of hating it.”

Part III, ‘Turn the Page’, carries in-depth essays about the oeuvre of a few famous writers. Here, I will focus on how Mantel illuminates their writing styles and what it says about their craft and achievements. Annie Proulx is a ruthless poet hounding for every nuance, each word whipped into line in paragraphs that build an astonishingly stormy power. Naipaul, she says, has a sharp eye for the intellectually fraudulent, a puritan in matters of style with a contempt for “fine writing”. He cultivates plainness; “what lingers is their authoritative rhythm, an impression of discrimination and scruple, of wit and restraint.” From the writing style she moves on to Naipaul’s life. “He is the person most haunted by what he has rejected…by the private fear he has made into a universal condition. Wherever he goes, he is sailing the inland sea.”

Her perspicacity comes from her fascination with the human condition. In ‘Real Books in Imaginary Houses’, we learn that books are not there to allow one to escape, but to give one information about the human condition, which is a thing one cannot escape. “Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.” This, by far, is the best summation of what a novel is, a fitting retort to those who claim reading novels is escapist. From reading, it is but a step to becoming a writer.

Writerly advice is peppered through the book, especially in Part IV— ‘The Reith Lectures’. There Mantel offers us a window into her novelist-world, particularly the writing of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. A novelist spends a lifetime in the business of presenting what’s lifelike, but not like life, she says. “And that’s a sobering thought—that life won’t actually do.” A Memoir of My Former Self presents a lifetime’s hard-won epiphanies in a lifelike way, revealing the essence of what makes her Hilary Mantel.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes