I confess I have not read Hilary Mantel. I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t even know she existed until a few weeks ago. Then I saw her name among the writers who were shortlisted for the Golden Man Booker Prize: V. S. Naipaul, Penelope Lively, Michael Ondaatje, George Saunders and Hilary Mantel. I sat up and wondered why I had never picked up one of her books at the library or in a second-hand bookshop at the Colombo Book Fair. Why had she evaded me so thoroughly, so effectively, for ever so long?
I don’t know why, but I do know one day when I read her books she would become one of my favorite writers. She has already usurped a few male writers in my heart simply with the interviews she has given to the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Among all the writers I know it is safe to say Mantel is the only one who has faced the most trying obstacles on her path to becoming the only woman writer to have won the Man Booker Prize more than once.
And yet, the first novel Hilary Mantel wrote was rejected by all the publishers she sent it to – some didn’t even read the letter she sent with her eight hundred page story. Mantel says, “I wrote a letter to an agent saying would you look at my book, it’s about the French Revolution, it’s not a historical romance, and the letter came back saying, we do not take historical romances.” She adds, “They literally could not read my letter, because of the expectations surrounding the words ‘French Revolution.’
She was only twenty-three at the time and her life was beginning to fall apart. Having married her childhood sweetheart Gerald McEwen, at twenty, it took only three years for her to realize her marriage was not going to last. She was not well and in pain much of the time, and above all her book had been rejected. Of these three things, she knew there was only one that she had any real control over. She decided that if she was going to make a career as a novelist she had better try something completely different. Since her historical novel had failed she decided she would write a two-hundred-page modern novel instead, and if that also failed she would reconsider whether she was destined to be a writer.
Mantel was adamant to let no one else decide what would be her fate. Especially the doctors who treated her when she was in law school and started suffering terrible internal pains. The psychiatrist she went to see, did not take her complaints seriously. He diagnosed the source of her anguish: It was stress, he said, caused by overambition. He wondered if law school was too taxing. Mightn’t a dress shop be a better outlet for her talents?
He made the wrong diagnosis. Mantel already suspected from reading surgical textbooks, that she was suffering from a severe and undiagnosed case of endometriosis. The drugs prescribed for her psychological and physical misery led her to a mental-health clinic. There, she began to write a short story about a changeling— that is, about a woman in rural Wales whose baby is snatched and switched for another. When she outlined the story to her psychiatrist—the one who prophesied a dress-shop career—he said, “I don’t want you writing.”
This of course, was the turning point. From then on she could not stop writing. Having given up law college when she ran out of funds to pay the fees she began to work in a dress hop (the way the good doctor suggested) but soon she grew bored selling dresses. Wanting something better to do, she started taking books about the French Revolution out of the library, one after another. Then she began taking notes. After she had been doing this for some time, she asked herself, What am I doing? And the answer came: I am writing a book.
She finished ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ in 1979. The book was not about French royalty or aristocrats— she had no interest in them. To quote the New Yorker, “It was the revolutionaries she cared about. She cared about them because of their political achievement, but also because they were young, as she was, and had been driven from the provinces to the capital, as she had, by extreme ambition. Camille Desmoulins—rash, witty, louche—was the easiest character for her to imagine because he was a writer.” Somewhere in ‘A Place of Greater Safety” Mantel writes of Camille, “I wonder why I ever bothered with (love), he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”
But the book didn’t sell. So she switched to “a cunning plan.” Mantel explains she decided to write another novel. “I thought, I’ll write a contemporary novel. That was Every Day Is Mother’s Day...It was an act of defiance—I thought, I’m not going to be beaten...It was, for me, a way of getting a foot in the door.”
The New Yorker described “Every Day” as “a bleak, airless story of awful people trapped in miserable lives: a deranged mother; a mute, malignant daughter; a coarse wife; a depressed failure of a husband. She punished her characters without mercy—tortured them with hostile specters,mold, filth, boredom, angst, canned food, social workers.” Yet, the book was bought at once, and published. “Every day” was followed by the sequel “Vacant Possession”, and two others. Now that she had entered the world of published writers when she presented her historical novel again to her publishers they accepted it. Hilary Mantel was finally on the path to becoming a legend. In 2009 she won the Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. “Bring Up the Bodies”, the second in her Wolf Hall trilogy won the Booker in 2012.
Mantel says she was a ‘slip of a thing’ when she was young, and that her ill health - her struggles with severe endometriosis was what made her become a writer. Endometriosis followed by a thyroid problem had caused her body to ‘rise like a loaf left in a warm place’. In her autobiography she has written of how ‘ignorable you become when you are fat – like a piece of furniture. I’m like a comic-book version of myself. My body is intent on telling the story, so my mind had better go along with it and write the memoir.’ And yet, as these words suggest, this body that has again and again betrayed her has also empowered her as a writer. While Mantel still struggles through days and weeks when she feels too ill to work, paradoxically her
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Hilary Mantel Quotes
1. “The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”
2. “Those who are made can be unmade.”
3. “She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?’” “He thinks she’s stupid. He finds it restful.”
4. “A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers” |
illness also seems to be her hardest and therefore her most loyal task master. As she puts it now, ‘You can’t get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not… sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn’t submerge you.’
Today Mantel lives with her husband Gerald McEwen (they divorced in 1980, but in 1982 they married again, in front of a registrar, who wished them better luck this time) in a cheerful flat overlooking the sea in a little town on the Devon coast.
But when she was a child, she lived in a village in the northern part of Derbyshire—not a pretty English village but a bleak, dank, cold Northern village on the edge of the moors, its people “distrustful and life-refusing,” she wrote in her memoir, working in the cotton mills from late childhood, living in cramped houses without bathrooms or hot water, barely educated in harsh schools.
And so, even though she is now a successful writer she still finds making money as something very important. Like for most of us, to Hilary Mantel too, one of the most significant markers of success in the world is to be able to open the household bills and know that she can pay them.
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