Authors: Lynn Barber
Three years ago, when she won the Man Booker prize for
Wolf Hall
, Mantel said that she was working on a sequel, to be called
The Mirror and the Light
, which would follow Thomas Cromwell’s career to his execution in 1540. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Her new novel,
Bring Up the Bodies
, finishes with the execution of Anne Boleyn, and there will then be a third volume taking us to Cromwell’s death. ‘When I got deeply into this one, I just realised that the drama had gathered such power, the reader is going to want to pause and not rush on to the next wife. And when I wrote those words “Bring up the bodies”, it was like an electric shock – I thought this is a book and this is the title!’
Wolf Hall
took her five years to write, but
Bodies
came much faster because she had already done most of the research and, she says, it’s ‘so short’ – though still over 400 pages. ‘I had this huge stack of handwritten material and I knew the book was in it somewhere but then I had to sit down and pull it together which I suppose took about six months.’ She never starts with chapter one, but simply jots down scenes or bits of dialogue as they occur to her, in the notebooks she carries with her always, and then puts them in order at the end. ‘So when my publishers ask, “Where are you up to?” I say, “All I can do is weigh it!” ’
Many authors claim to be almost paralysed with fear after winning the Booker, but not Mantel: ‘Actually it’s been entirely positive for me. I just thought: Oh good, they’re giving me a big cheque!’ She had always found Septembers difficult, waiting for the announcement of the Booker shortlist, but she never even made the shortlist until
Wolf Hall
, though many critics expected her to for
Beyond Black
in 2005. ‘And now I don’t have to go through that again. It’s something you want to achieve – and then the second phase of your career begins. And you feel freer.’
The £50,000 Booker cheque – and all the enhanced royalties when
Wolf Hall
became an international bestseller – enabled her and her husband Gerald McEwen to move to Budleigh Salterton in Devon. For twenty years they’d lived in an apartment in a huge converted lunatic asylum called Florence Court near Woking. But she wanted to be by the sea, and ‘It was a time of change in our lives anyway. My husband had been very ill with peritonitis and it was a fullscale surgical emergency – life was turned upside down in an hour. And when he came out of hospital he didn’t really want to go back to work. He’d been working twenty years as an IT consultant and I think he felt that’s enough. So then
Wolf Hall
and the Booker enabled me to say well OK don’t go back to work, come and work for me. He took over the business side of things, and he’s the road manager, and he really looks after me.’ Apparently he drives her everywhere in silence, while she sits in the back of the car, writing. She writes everywhere, even on holiday; she never stops.
The move to Devon brought other changes too. At Florence Court she was just Mrs McEwen – none of their neighbours knew she was a writer. ‘I’d hardly ever admit to being a writer, because of the reactions you get from people. They say things like “Do you pay them to publish you?” Or “Do you do children’s books?” Or they say, “I’ve always thought if I had the time I’d like to write a book.” So I found it better to pretend to be a lady of leisure. And we lived surrounded by retired people who filled their days with golf so they were completely incurious – and that was fine by me. But life’s different now we’ve moved to Devon. I’m involved with the literary festival and there’s quite an active cultural life. So now people know what I do.’
The best guide to who she is and what she does is her wonderful memoir,
Giving Up the Ghost
, which she published in 2003. She started writing it because her stepfather died, and she was packing up his things and making notes about each object and eventually found that the notes were ‘really about Jack’s death, and I found it easing me back. So it hardly seems that I made a conscious decision that it was time to write a memoir. Of course it was mainly about childhood, it wasn’t in any way a complete account of my life – which wouldn’t have been interesting. And in a way it was private writing, explaining things to myself. You know they say never apologise, never explain and I think if you’re a really strong person, that’s the philosophy that could guide your life. But I’m not like that, and I wanted to explain.’
In particular, she wanted to explain the disappearance of her father, Henry. She was born in 1952 in Derbyshire, and lived in the village of Hadfield, near Glossop, surrounded by relatives – she was part of a vast Irish Catholic family. When Hilary was six or seven, her mother took in a lodger, Jack Mantel, and her father – who was always very retiring anyway – somehow retired into the spare room. And then when they moved house, to Cheshire, when she was eleven, they simply left her father behind – she never saw him again. Only when she published her memoir did she learn what happened to him. Apparently he married a widow with six children and the eldest daughter wrote to tell her that he died in 1997, but that he had seen her on television once and was proud of her.
Mantel once said that the loss of contact with her father came ‘surprisingly low down’ on her list of regrets, but she told me that was not quite correct: ‘I think what I meant was that by the time the parting of the ways came, I had come to despise my father, and it was only later that I very much regretted that we had lost touch. Perhaps it’s only when you’re an adult it comes home to you, what’s lost. I didn’t ever feel that I was Jack Mantel’s daughter, whereas my brothers thought of themselves as his sons. So I feel unfathered.’
Her brothers are five and six years younger, so I wondered if they could actually have been Jack Mantel’s sons, but she says firmly, ‘They could have been – but they weren’t.’ But they have no memories of their father because they were so young when he disappeared. She is very close to them, and sometimes emails them several times a day, but ‘I often feel that we are half a generation apart rather than five or six years. Because they grew up very remote from the kind of childhood I had. I lived in Hadfield till I was eleven, and thought of myself as part of a huge Irish family because my grandmother’s many many brothers and sisters were still alive. But by the time I was ten, most of them had died and my younger brothers don’t remember those people, and don’t have any consciousness of being Irish. Their lives started in a much more middle-class community with different expectations.’
The move to Cheshire was only eight miles but it meant a complete break from Hadfield, because Jack and her mother needed to make a fresh start. They told Hilary to change her surname to Mantel and to say Jack was her father. And she started at a new school, where she ended up as head girl and became the first member of her family to go to university. Her mother had had to leave school at fourteen and work in the mill like everyone else, but she was ambitious for Hilary: ‘She encouraged me to think I was intelligent and that I would have chances, if she could provide them.’
Hilary went to the LSE to read law, but after a year of feeling lonely in London she decided to switch to Sheffield University to join McEwen, her boyfriend, who was reading geology there. They married when they were just twenty. But by then she was suffering from a whole clutch of symptoms – headaches, nausea, asthma, pains in her legs and abdomen – that her doctor saw as psychosomatic. He sent her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed stronger and stronger pills – Valium, Fentazin, Largactil, Stelazine – until eventually she had a fullscale nervous breakdown. In consequence, she resolved never to go near a psychiatrist or psychotropic drug again. She had hoped to become a barrister and eventually a politician – she was ‘seethingly ambitious’ – but she realised she would never have the stamina for such a career, so she thought: Well, better get a book up your sleeve because even if you’re sick you can write.
She and her husband moved to Botswana for his work and she wrote her first novel there – a 900-page tome called
A Place of Greater Safety
, set in the French Revolution. But it was rejected by all the publishers she sent it to and only published eventually in 1992. She thinks if
Place
had been published at the time she would have stuck to writing historical fiction, but she says in those days historical fiction was seen as ‘chick lit in long frocks’ whereas
Place
was essentially political. So then she ‘changed her strategy’ and wrote a string of contemporary novels, starting with
Every Day Is Mother’s Day
in 1985, which established her as a rising literary star.
While writing her novel in Botswana, she also read up medical textbooks and eventually diagnosed herself with endometriosis – a disease of the uterus but with ramifications all over the body. So when she came back to England for Christmas in 1979, she took herself to St George’s Hospital who confirmed the diagnosis, but said the disease was so advanced the only treatment was removal of her ovaries and uterus. So, at twenty-seven, she lost any chance of motherhood. At the time, she didn’t particularly want children but now she says, ‘I miss the child I never had,’ and wishes she’d had a baby at eighteen, when she thinks she still could have done: ‘It wouldn’t necessarily have stopped the endometriosis, but at least I would have had a child.’
Mysteriously, she divorced her husband while they were in Botswana and then remarried him two years later, but she won’t explain why. ‘I can’t really talk about it. I might go back and write about it some time but in a disguised way. I do not think that things would have happened in the way they did if we’d been at home in England. We were very vulnerable, because we were far from family and friends. If you wanted to phone Britain – if the phones were working at all – you rang South Africa and asked them to place a call for you. Letters might or might not get there. You felt as though you might as well have been on another planet. And ours was not by any means the only marriage that disintegrated – it was almost normal. The most amazing thing was the way people ran off with the most unlikely partners, never to be heard of again. That whole society, that expat way of life and how it affected individuals, is something I really want to write about.’
In fact she started writing a novel about Africa a few years ago, but broke it off to write
Wolf Hall
. She found she was getting ‘horribly spooked’ by remembering her house in Africa, so she decided to give herself a day off and start
Wolf Hall
. ‘And I wrote one page – and I was of
f
! In twenty-four hours everything turned round and I couldn’t keep the grin off my face – my mood had completely altered.’ But she says she will reread the African novel when she has finished the
Wolf Hall
trilogy and see if she can get into it again – ‘I may find it’s not there for me any more. It might have gone stale on me – it might be something I have to let go. I’m not short of ideas at all – I’m just short of time to execute them.’
Her health is still problematic. ‘What happened to me all those years ago has brought a LOT of complications. That was not apparent at the time. I left the hospital thinking that it was true that something cataclysmic had happened, but that I was cured. But that was far from the case.’ She ballooned from a size 10 to a size 20 in a matter of months, and her thyroid eventually failed. She now also suffers from arthritis but can’t take anti-inflammatory drugs because her kidneys are damaged. In 2010, she went into hospital for what was meant to be a minor bowel operation but turned into a weeks-long saga of complications and drug-induced hallucinations. But nothing ever stops her writing and even in hospital she wrote a diary,
Ink in the Blood
, which she published as a short e-book.
‘I work all the time, I’m incredibly committed. I have things called holidays when I write more than I would if I were at home, but with a plane journey in between. But while the ideas are there, you’ve got to grasp them. That’s not a complaint. I’m not saying I’m a martyr to my art – it’s just a fact.’ Perhaps, I suggest, she belongs in that long list of people such as Charles Darwin and Elizabeth Barrett Browning who suffered from a ‘creative illness’ in order to be free to work? The idea fills her with indignation: ‘I’m not a romantic in that way. I just think a pain is a pain. And I cannot imagine anything in my life that would not have been better if I’d been healthy.’
She is a feminist, but I get the impression she does not like other women much. She told the
Guardian
in 2003 that she got through her schooldays by ‘the simple expedient of contempt. You just decide to despise it all.’ But again, she bridles when I quote it, and says she was elected head girl by the other pupils which she would not have been if she despised them. ‘No. I tell you what it might have been. I have a huge contempt for women who act differently when men are around, and when I was sixteen or seventeen I did look down on girls who I knew to be sharp and clever but who changed their personality when some spotty youth hoved into view, and it may be that I was saying something like that.’
But would she accept the idea that, in her novels, she’s generally kinder towards men than women? I wondered if perhaps it was because she was an older sister to two younger brothers? She concedes that there might be something in this and that many of her friends tend to be older sisters of younger brothers. ‘They’re very bossy! And very responsible. With younger brothers, you feel it’s your job to do the worrying and make the world right for them. I always, from the moment the first one was born, loved my brothers intensely and I never saw them in any way as rivals because they were just so young. I think maybe if I am easier on men than women, that’s probably the reason but to be honest, it’s not because I don’t like women, it’s because I like men!’