Hilary Mantel on love and politics
No stranger to controversy, Hilary Mantel not only writes about history, she makes it. Natasha Lunn finds out what makes her tick
Natasha Lunn meets the Wolf Hall author breathing life into history
Hilary Mantel is pointing out of the window of her home in Devon, showing me the beach she fell in love with, aged 16. The sky’s light is so bright I squint, but her eyes remain wide as she recalls seeing it for the first time. “I stood on the cliffs up there, alone. I was up to my knees in wild flowers and this beach shone like a box of sugared almonds. I thought, I need to get here.” It took her 42 years to move to the town of Budleigh Salterton where she now lives with her husband Gerald, but on that summer day she “buried the intention”.
This is one example of the “stealthy underground planning” that shapes Mantel’s life. Another is her desire to write about Thomas Cromwell: she began at 22, but, yet again, buried the intention, digging it up 37 years later to write novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The
Bodies (2012). She is currently working on the third in the trilogy, The Mirror And The Light.
Perhaps it makes sense that aspects of Mantel’s past crop up in her future. After all, the 65-year-old, who published her first novel at 33, has spent a great deal of time looking back and breathing life into the dead, winning the Man Booker prize twice in the process. (She made history by being the first woman and first British writer to do so.)
Today Mantel is talking about The Reith Lectures, a series of five talks, titled Resurrection: The Art And
Craft, that she’s recorded for the BBC. The underlying theme is evidence and “the need for constant process of evaluation before you believe anything”.
Past lecturers have included Grayson Perry and Stephen Hawking, and now is a ripe moment for Mantel to step onto the podium. As BBC Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams says, “What better time to explore the crossover between fact and fiction from the past as we try to make sense of the modern world and our own elusive truth?”
AS A CHAMPION OF ACCURACY, WHAT DOES MANTEL THINK OF TODAY’S POST-TRUTH WORLD?
“It’s alarming,” she says. “All the more need to study history in a critical way, because the first thing you ask is: who is telling me this, and why would they want me to believe it?” She wishes people would approach the news with this sceptical attitude and understand
“politics is in the air we breathe”.
Would she write about a living politician? “People ask, ‘Why don’t you write about Blair?’ I’m deeply interested in contemporary politicians, but as a novelist, I want to be able to stand back and see a pattern years later, rather than reacting to events. You can’t see the pattern when you’re close to it. I think that’s true of our lives and of history.”
Mantel grew up in northern Derbyshire, where
“women were perceived as the people who held everything together”. Being the eldest sister to two brothers also put her in a position of power: “I grew up thinking men were there to be led rather than men were there to lead women.”
To read about Mantel is to understand she has no desire to live according to anyone else’s template. Her ideas are
“I grew up thinking men were there to be LED rather than men were there to lead WOMEN”
often controversial, from her short story about the assassination of Margaret Thatcher (causing Thatcher’s allies to call for a police investigation) to the speech that sparked a media frenzy (after she described Kate Middleton as a “shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own”). After the latter, Mantel’s comments were ripped out of context. Did the furore put her off speaking out? “It did teach me how doggedly certain papers will pursue their agenda, but it didn’t put me off,” she assures me. “In fact, it made me feel competitive.” This thick skin was a trait she developed while living in an unconventional family set-up with her mother, father and her mother’s lover, who moved in when she was six. Her father eventually moved out when she was 11; she never saw him again. As villagers gossiped, Mantel “had to go to school and be plied with questions. I was aware there was a predatory movement towards me.” She pauses. “It made me not indifferent, but resistant to public opinion. I’ve always looked at people, whether an individual or the Daily Mail, and asked: if I don’t value your opinion, why should
I let it knock me off course?”
MANTEL IS, IN LIFE AND IN HER NOVELS, A PLOTTER.
But she admits “there are a lot of things you can’t control – misfortunes within you.” One such misfortune is her ongoing battle with endometriosis, an illness that led to the removal of her womb, ovaries and part of her bowel. In her memoir, Giving Up The
Ghost, Mantel imagines Catriona, the daughter she never had, and once said her infertility was “the first time in my life I had come up against an absolute ‘No’ from fate”.
Another effect of Mantel’s illness was weight gain, which, combined with pain, means she doesn’t feel at home in her body. But in person she strikes me as beautiful, with blue eyes that glint like marbles offset by porcelain skin. She fields questions with subtle grace and obvious generosity, as if she’s just about to break into a smile.
As the daughter of a “very beautiful mother” devoted to her appearance, Mantel admits her self-esteem centred on her looks when she was young. As an adult, though, she finds joy in clothes and make-up. “I don’t think self-esteem resides in divorcing yourself from personal appearance, because to do that is to divorce yourself from sexuality. And without that drive in your life you are a poor, weedy sort of thing.” She chuckles. “I don’t think women should discard their bodies, they just have to know there are lots of ways of being beautiful, just as there are lots of ways of being loved. For example, no matter how many times people tell me black is slimming – come on, I could dress like a funeral parlour and I wouldn’t look slim! – I indulge my love of colour. I might not be able to find clothes in the colour I want, but I can get a scarf, do my make-up. It’s about finding a way to preserve your identity. My body has been a source of grief to me, but I have had to hang on to the idea that it can be a source of pleasure, too.”
Mantel appears to have found much happiness in her life, through both work and her marriage to Gerald, a former geologist. “He lets life come to him, whereas I’m always trying to make things happen.” Gerald is “a gatekeeper of sorts” who often says no when Mantel, a “mad enthusiast”, takes on too much. “If somebody comes to me with a project, I suddenly find it’s the most interesting thing in the world. I ask Gerald not to pour cold water on my enthusiasm, but he also reminds me there are only seven days in the week.” When we speak about love, she points out it comes in different guises. “Married love is different from romantic love. Someone like me who doesn’t have children, it doesn’t mean I don’t feel maternal love. Because one of my greatest joys is to see young artists flourish. If you can help them… that’s a form of being a parent.”
The ultimate pleasure for Mantel, though, is work. No matter what life throws at her, “writing is like the string, it holds everything together. You put the beads of incidents on that thread and, whether they’re beautiful or ugly, there is something to hang them on”. She finds the process physically tiring, though: “It’s almost as if you are reliving everything you’re writing.” In that case, Mantel has lived through hundreds of years. “Yes, I’ve been at the point of death many times!” On paper, this might come across as a quip, but in person I sense she means it. She talks about writing as if it’s a spiritual process, which makes her feel “genderless” and “bodiless” as she settles in the bodies of her characters.
Before meeting Mantel I’d wondered what someone who spends their life dwelling on the past might be like. Nostalgic? Regretful? Not at all. Mantel is a dreamer, a schemer, a kind genius with so much life to give – to the fictional world and the real one. For now, though, she’s already buried her next intention: to adapt her story about Thatcher’s assassination for the stage. And the rest, I’m sure, will be history. Mantel’s Reith Lectures, Resurrection: The Art And Craft, conclude 11th July. Download them at Bbc.co.uk/reithlectures