"The night is for the dead"

Hilary Mantel on why she became a historical novelist (this is A Place of Greater Safety, her novel of Robespierre, which I remember reading at the recommendation of my brilliant teacher Simon Schama circa 1993):

I wasn’t after quick results. I was prepared to look at all the material I could find, even though I knew it would take years, but what I wasn’t prepared for were the gaps, the erasures, the silences where there should have been evidence.

These erasures and silences made me into a novelist, but at first I found them simply disconcerting. I didn’t like making things up, which put me at a disadvantage. In the end I scrambled through to an interim position that satisfied me. I would make up a man’s inner torments, but not, for instance, the colour of his drawing room wallpaper.

Because his thoughts can only be conjectured. Even if he was a diarist or a confessional writer, he might be self-censoring. But the wallpaper – someone, somewhere, might know the pattern and colour, and if I kept on pursuing it I might find out. Then – when my character comes home weary from a 24-hour debate in the National Convention and hurls his dispatch case into a corner, I would be able to look around at the room, through his eyes. When my book eventually came out, after many years, one snide critic – who was putting me in my place, as a woman writing about men doing serious politics – complained there was a lot in it about wallpaper. Believe me, I thought, hand on heart, that there was not nearly enough.

"Documents, ink, methods of drying"

I loved this Paris Review interview with Hilary Mantel. I have been reading her for a long time, ever since my college professor and literary inspiration Simon Schama recommended A Place of Greater Safety to me c. 1993 (and then I read all the backlist):

When I began work on the French Revolution, it seemed to me the most interesting thing that had ever happened in the history of the world, and it still does in many ways. I had no idea how little the British public knew or cared or wished to know about the French Revolution. And that’s still the case. They want to know about Henry VIII.

Mantel postscript

Sara O'Leary sends an amazing and much fuller interview with Mantel, a must-read if you are at all interested in the process of theatrical adaptation:

“There have been extraordinary times late in rehearsals where Ben” – Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell, the production’s riveting focal point – “would say, ‘I don’t think that line’s right. Give me a new one, Hilary’ – and there’s your line. There’s something very bracing about that atmosphere.”

Bracing – and perhaps just a little bit eerie. For it becomes apparent during the course of our conversation that it is not just Mike Poulton she’s been working with. In Ben Miles she has, it seems, a living, breathing personification of her complex and chilling protagonist, dead these past five centuries or so. Miles, who is almost never offstage for the plays’ six-hour running time, has created his Cromwell not only from the scripts but also from a total immersion in the books that are their source. He is, Mantel remarks to me at one point, “the only one who really understands the structure of Wolf Hall”; perhaps in part because he made himself a timeline of the novel, and of Cromwell’s life, which he kept pinned up on the walls of an office he had in the rehearsal rooms of the RSC. “It was like that scene in A Beautiful Mind,” he tells me, “when Russell Crowe’s office is discovered and there are just these scribblings everywhere.”

Straining your ears for the response

Tim Adams interviews Hilary Mantel for the Observer Review:

I always write in terms of scenes, and for a big scene in one of the Cromwell novels I will prepare for several days by going through all my notes and all my sources before diving into the writing. At that moment where I commit to the writing it is exactly like walking on stage. All your senses are alive and it is as if you are straining your ears for the sound of a response.

Another bit caught my attention too, in response to a question about the huge success of these books: "I never expected it but it gives me great pleasure though, because I saw it as a continuation of what I had been doing. Right from the first page, the first paragraph, it was like: "Ah! Now you see everything you have done was aiming at this!" I think this project is the thing I could have done that nobody else could have done, if that doesn't sound boastful." I am overdue a post about writing, only I am (a) waiting till frenzy of school year is over and (b) full of trepidation about airing thoughts and plans, as there does tend to be a dynamic in which one speaks about a future project and then loses interest in actually executing it! Definitely some thoughts on writing soon, though - I have been writing very little this year (other than tens of thousands of words of these reports for the tenure review advisory committee!), and it has actually been very helpful in terms of letting the desire and the ideas well up in me and want to burst out in a sustained stint of effort over the summer.

Tudors!

Hilary Mantel on the respectable face of soap opera.

Martin/Mantel

An outtake from the wretched review that I'm still wrestling with (when they don't come out right the first time round, they often take horrible amounts of subsequent wrangling!):

I have been recommending Wolf Hall to readers impatient for the next volume of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Throne series. They share a good deal of the same source material from Tudor history, but while Martin is a good writer in many respects, especially if one disregards the language at the level of the sentence and concentrates instead on his ability to render complex human and political relationships with clarity and vividness, Mantel is a great one. She demonstrated decades ago, in A Place of Greater Safety (her 1992 novel about the French Revolution), an ability to tell large world-historical stories with the kind of imaginative precision about politics more often associated with works like Robert Caro’s biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, or indeed with the great nineteenth-century narrative historians Carlyle and Michelet.

Sent!

I've been quiet here this week, and the week's included rather less exercise than I'd hoped - but that was for the very good reason that I've been working fiendishly on the style book. It's not really finished finished, I will have one more pass through it in June before submitting the final version, but I have just emailed my editor a provisional final draft (with a few missing references and some patches of rougher prose than I'd usually be willing to share); he'll give me notes when I see him in New York at the end of the month.

It will sound immodest, but I think this book really is amazing, it is the book I was born to write! I have a very hard time publicizing my novels - it's not that I don't think you would enjoy them if you are a novel-reader, I am happy saying something like "If you want a novel to while away an hour or two, this one will be pretty well suited to that need, and I hope it will make you feel and know things a bit differently than you did before you read it" - but really I am much more comfortable passionately recommending someone else's novel than my own! This style book (the final title is Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, and it will be published by Columbia University Press) really does do something that is interesting and useful and not quite like any other book about reading and writing. I am excited to shepherd it into the world - I imagine it will be on the fall 2014 list, though I'm not certain.

Flying tomorrow late afternoon from Cayman to the UK for my cousin's wedding. I won't take any work with me, I think, given that I've finished up everything I can do on the manuscript without library access. The extent of obligations to see family and friends will really make it fairly tight even getting in a minimum of exercise, though I'm hoping for a couple civilized runs and at least one visit to the Central YMCA to swim and spin. Back home in New York as of the evening of Memorial Day, and looking forward to what I hope will be a highly satisfactory first block of training for IMWI. Intend to minimize internet time in London, so posting here will probably continue to be very light through to the end of the month.

Miscellaneous linkage:

What Gary Panter doesn't know. (This one really is fantastic.)

What Hilary Mantel's been reading.

Just say no!

Light reading around the edges:

Installments two and three of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed trilogy, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil.

Two crime novels by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Daybreak and House of Evidence.

Daniel Friedman's funny geriatric noir Don't Ever Get Old.

"So now get up"

At the Guardian, Hilary Mantel on how she came to write Wolf Hall.

Closing tabs

Steve Burt's life as a girl.

I was distressed yesterday to realize I was coming down with a cold, but I think I've dodged the worst - still somewhat stuffed up, but it has receded somewhat overnight rather than descending to the lungs.  Session #2 on The Golden Bowl this afternoon, and I am about to rewrite my old lecture, as I was visited with inspiration while rereading last night as to a better way to try and bring the book alive in class.

Miscellaneous other links: one year I really am going to go to this; working in Antarctica; Larissa MacFarquhar on Hilary Mantel.

Closing tabs

Trying to stay off the computer so that my back (some sort of minor muscle strain, an inconvenience rather than a true pain) can get better!  Currently have laptop propped on a plastic file box, and think I will keep it that way for a week or two: it minimizes internet time-wasting if I have to stand up whenever I want to use the computer....

Delicious things: a super-enjoyable dinner hosted by my new publisher at Public on Tuesday night; a surprise arrival in the mail from Becky in England.

Adorable things: synchronized kittens (via Jane); some pig!

Literary things: Zadie Smith on the Willesden library blues; Lev Grossman on why people in Narnia don't read books.

Uncategorizable things: first-person crop circles.

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: (1) in the matter of concluding installments of trilogies, Holly Black's Black Heart and Mira Grant's Blackout; (2) a book I seized upon at the Ottawa airport and read hungrily as I traveled home (it seems not to have been published in the US?), Mark Billingham's Good as Dead; (3) in a free electronic publicity copy that hasn't been well formatted for Kindle, Martyn Waites's Born Under Punches (I enjoyed this quite a bit, but am not sure it really has aged well: it was first published almost ten years ago, and so many others have now been mining this vein of anti-Thatcher noir that some of the techniques here seem a little clumsy or crude - I'm keen to read Alan Warner's new novel, which also doesn't seem to be published any time soon in the US but which sounds excellent and which can of course be obtained from the US Amazon site in some more or less illicit fashion). 

Dug in deep now on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall sequel: I still think her gifts lie in the way of intellectual things and the depiction of characters rather than in the language as such, but it is an extremely engrossing book, there is no doubt.

The prithee-perchance problem

Hilary Mantel on the art of making the dead speak.  I think she may go slightly too far in the direction of flattening the language and making it undistinctive: I loved Wolf Hall and am very eager to read the sequel, but language is the least interesting part of the fictional world she creates.

Sent off the piece I had due today about twenty minutes ago; have a couple of school things I really should do this afternoon, but they are going to have to wait till tomorrow!  Struck with a slight cold or sinus infection of some sort, alas; it is the inevitable consequence, I fear, of a spell of working too hard and the struggle to get out of town without leaving too many loose threads.

Proust would just have stayed in bed

At More Intelligent Life, Hilary Mantel on winning, losing and the consolation of guinea pigs.

Alcathoe's bat

Catch-up miscellany (I have been traveling, it throws me off!):

Thumbprint-sized bat discovered in England.

Ancient Roman ingots to provide lead shielding for neutrino detector (thanks to Wendy for the link!).

An edited transcript of my interview of Jonathan Safran Foer for the Literature and Terror series at Columbia.

At the LRB, Jenny Diski on delusionary parasitosis (something I hope I will never experience).

A recent conversation with a friend of my mother's who didn't much like Wolf Hall (which I liked very much indeed) led me to obtain and consume (I will not say devour, they are not quite so delightful to my tastes as that) four crime novels by C. J. Sansom, who seems to be better known in Britain than in the U.S.: Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign and Revelation.

They are not at all bad, they are highly readable, but they caused me to think with considerable grumpiness about how much I dislike the genre of the historical mystery (as opposed to the straight historical novel), especially when it is set in medieval times.

It might just be after-the-fact rationalization of a more visceral dislike, I cannot really say, but the thing that irks me is that though of course crimes must always have been investigated (and Oedipus Rex would be a good example of an early literary work that develops an innovative form to foreground a narrative of investigation and discovery), the narrative protocols of crime fiction are very much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so that it makes a sort of nonsense of the whole business (at the very best a parlor game, at worst a deeply misguided effort in false sensibility) to write about fifteenth-century monks as though they could just be plugged into a P. D. James novel and function.

The first volume in particular gave me a desperate yearning to read some modern stabs at 'real' faux-medieval crime narratives - you would mine Boccaccio and Chaucer and whatever else you wanted for some ideas and then write some really genuinely formally peculiar things that would be (ideally) moving and intellectually gripping but that would look absolutely nothing like the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Medievalists out there? Any ideas? What would the reading list be for a fiction-writer researching such a project (I am not contemplating it myself, I am just curious), and what might the genre of medieval crime tale look like? Are there ones that are readable (in verse or prose), and what are their narrative as opposed to investigative protocols? What about law cases/trials and other forms of narrative of investigation? Adaptations of the story of Cane and Abel or other Biblical crimes? Hmmm, I realize I do not actually have a very clear idea about this, I must investigate - perhaps there is an abstruse but magically interesting academic book at the library that would satisfy my curiosity on these points...

The mirror and the light

Anna Murphy interviews Hilary Mantel at the Telegraph (I am hoping, of course, that she will 'fall into the pit' of a 10-year Civil War novel - that is exactly what I would love to read!):

A self-proclaimed slip of a thing when she was young, her struggles with severe endometriosis – the pain of which has often debilitated her – followed by a thyroid problem, led to her body 'rising like a loaf left in a warm place’. In the past 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.

Indeed, she credits her ill health with getting her to write in the first place. She studied law at university but by her early twenties, 'My options were closing off, because the things I felt I might do, I clearly wasn’t going to be able to do. I was still without diagnosis, but I knew something was wrong with me. I felt really marginalised, and that what I needed was a project under my control.’ As she once wrote, 'Illness forces you to the wall, so the stance of the writer is forced on you.’

And so, while Mantel still struggles through days and weeks when she feels too ill to work, paradoxically her 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.’

Jeddah

Hilary Mantel remembers the feeling of the happiest day of her life.

Miscellany

What have I been reading? Hmmm...

Galen Beckett, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent (very enjoyable, but not as good as Ellen Kushner - and the Austen pastiche works better than the Bronte pastiche).

Michael Crichton, Next (verging on satire rather than suspense, but quite readable - not his best, but then again Crichton could write a halfway decent novel in his sleep).

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. I liked it very much indeed, though I was struggling in the back of my mind as I read to articulate why it is that I do not in the end find Mantel to be in the very top rank of novelists. In a way she's too much of a thinker rather than a writer - it makes her novels attractive to me, but the prose itself does not stand out on the grounds of style, it's more a question of striking ideas.

(I read A Place of Greater Safety in 1993, on the recommendation of Simon Schama, and it certainly prompted me to read all of her other books, though many of them are depressing enough that they can't be called favorites - I do think that I would rate Beyond Black slightly above Wolf Hall, but then Wolf Hall is by far the more enjoyable read due to its subject matter.)

I love historical novels, I grew up reading Robert Graves and Mary Renault and Gore Vidal - and I also read Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time at an impressionable age. In other words, when I was ten or eleven Tudor history was on my short list of particular obsessions - I had a poster of that famous portrait of Richard III on the wall of my bedroom, and pored over biographies of Thomas More and so forth. I really, really like what Mantel's done here - the language is fresh (I was skeptical about the choice to write in the present tense, but it works, and she's got an unorthodox but appealing way of using the pronoun "he" as a way of centering the book almost completely inside Thomas Cromwell's head). The characters and the history are immensely appealingly dealt with, and the sheer scope of Mantel's novelistic imagination is perhaps the most impressive thing of all.

My one criticism is that when one turns to sentences and paragraphs, they are much less striking than the overall picture or the intellectual or psychological insights - the book is studded with paragraphs that have a sort of "meta-" or philosophical status, Cromwell is a person of insights, but they are too banal in their phrasing to be worth quoting on stylistic grounds. Which I think is a shortcoming - but it is certainly one of the best novels I've read for quite some time. She has developed a system of notation that is original and highly effective, but it is very much a creation of artifice - as opposed to Peter Temple, say, whose sentences make me feel as though he has actually discovered an almost completely foreign and yet strangely inevitable system for the transcription of reality that truly rocks me off my foundations...

"Drives superb"

At the Guardian, Hilary Mantel on where ideas come from.

"Their heads were full of Durkheim"

At the LRB, Hilary Mantel has a merciless piece on her time as a social work trainee in the early 1970s:

I was getting a crash course in what age can do to the body and brain. Through writing them down repeatedly, I became familiar with some of the worst phrases in the English language: you can’t beat ‘terminal’, but a close second is ‘immobile, disorientated and doubly incontinent’.

And this:

Who’d be a social worker, anyway? The problem was the same then as now. Communal expectation was riven by contradiction. You were a busybody and a do-gooder, interfering in private life; or you were a useless, gormless, uncaring drain on the public purse. Whichever role you were cast in you had to get on with the job. My next stop was the community worker: Ruby’s estate was such a trouble spot that it needed its own staff. He was a jaunty young man, and he balled his fists in his pockets as he told me he knew the stepfather: ‘Nah, he’s all right.’ Shrugging, he made it clear that he intended to do precisely nothing. And there was nothing more I could do. I’d liaised with the ‘appropriate agencies’. I’d told my seniors. Ruby’s allegations were not so particular that I could go to the police, and she was in no state to be badgered for specifics. She complained of a climate of violence, not one discrete incident. Even if they were willing to investigate, a police visit with no follow-through might make things worse. Certainly, I’d never get into the house again.

What sort of judgment was the community social worker making when he swore the stepfather was a nice feller? Was he frightened of the man? That was possible; but more likely he wanted to be his mate. The young social workers of the time, coming up through university courses – postgraduate training after a sociology degree – thought it a sin to be judgmental. In fact they were making judgments all the time. Uneasy about their own middle-class backgrounds, and always feeling vaguely uncool, they believed they should not ‘label’ clients or assess ‘working-class’ people by their own middle-class criteria; so they treated them as if they were dogs and cats, not responsible for their actions. They had a whole set of interesting beliefs about the uneducated and the poor. They didn’t see that they were being grossly condescending, while pretending to be the opposite. Aspiration was a middle-class trait, they thought; the working classes preferred to muddle along. The privileged had their ethical standards, but it was unfair to universalise them. The workers had their own amusements, bless them, and should be allowed their vices. Their houses were dirty, but it was petty bourgeois to worry about grime. And if they were drunken or semi-criminal, and beat each other, wasn’t that their culture? These young graduates took as typical the malfunctioning families with whom their case files brought them into contact. Worse, they wanted their clients to like them. They dressed in recidivist chic and roughed up their accents. Their heads were full of Durkheim, their mouths full of glottal stops. They were occupied in creating a moral vacuum; theirs was a world safe for theory but profoundly unsafe for any child who needed them to shape up and go to work.

The strains of 'Lillibulero'

At the LRB, a strange and mesmerizing bit of memoir from Hilary Mantel about her time in Jeddah:

I was ill in those days, and subject to a fierce drug regime which gave me blinding headaches, made me slightly deaf and, though I was hungry, unable to eat. The drugs were expensive and had to be imported from England; my husband’s company brought them in by courier. Word of this leaked out, and the company wives decided I was taking fertility drugs; but I did not know this, and my ignorance made our conversations peculiar and, to me, slightly menacing. Why were they always talking, on the occasions of forced company sociability, about women who’d had miscarriages but now had a bouncing babe in the buggy? An older woman confided that her two were adopted; I looked at them and thought: Jesus, where from, the zoo? My Pakistani neighbour also joined in the cooing over the offspring that I would have shortly. She was in on the rumours, but I put her hints down to the fact that she was carrying her first child and wanted company. I saw her most mornings for an interval of coffee and chat, and I would rather steer her to talking about Islam, which was easy enough; she was an educated woman and keen to instruct. Monday, 6 June: ‘Spent two hours with my neighbour,’ my diary says, ‘widening the cultural gap.’

Authorship, insomnia?

Hilary Mantel on a Manchester doctor's diaries from the 1960s: "Jan 17th: At 5.20 am, extreme angor animae [fear of death]. Eased off after hot tea."