Hilary Mantel (1952-2022) became famous for dense historical novels in which she tries to ‘remove the past from the archives and house it in a body’, as she describes it. In the thick bundle Being a writer pieces have been brought together in which she reflects on writing itself.
In the first half she mainly does this in short, light pieces. Should a writer get involved in political debates? Well, if you need the money, but otherwise it’s better to leave it alone. “Fiction multiplies ambiguity,” she explains, and that’s not a good recipe for the singular opinions that flourish in political debates. How does a writer know when a story or book is finished? Difficult issue: writers unfortunately have ‘no intellectual equivalent of the sexual climax. They don’t always know when they’re done.’ Is writing fun? Not really. You always work, you get through much more than you let go and you’re not even the boss, because a story regularly gets away with you. Writers are often like “people walking their dogs.”
It continues like this, witty, sharp and well worth reading, but it is only in the second half that the collection becomes really interesting. There, Mantel focuses on her own genre in longer pieces and thinks about time and history, historical research, the perspective of the contemporary and the complicated relationship between fact and fiction.
Chronology is an illusion
She describes how the English village of Derwent was flooded in the late 1930s to build a reservoir. The former residents claimed that in dry years the church tower rose above the water. That was not possible at all, the tower had been blown up, but they still saw that spire. Mantel uses the image to explain something about history: the past is gone, invisible, but still with us in many respects. The neat order of our time, the chronology, that neat trio of past, present and future, is largely an illusion. In our experience of the world, all those layers of time stick together, like puff pastry, so that it is impossible to peel off a neat layer: pieces and chunks of other layers inevitably come along with it.
We often underestimate this interconnectedness – chained as we are to agenda, planning and pedometers. Everyone realizes that memories carry the past. Far fewer people realize that we have our ancestors with us in our genes, all of them, from the first form of life. And who ever really thinks about the countless remnants of the future: the children that were not born, the books that were not written, the words that were not spoken. It’s all still there, often inextricable, and it continues to play a role in the here and now.
That perspective provides beautiful insights, such as about grief, which Mantel writes about remarkably often. Grief is like a ‘cord stretched between remembering and forgetting’. Every now and then there is something that makes the cord tremble and then the sadness flares up. She regrets that we give little space to our grief and thus close our eyes to the complex interweaving of time.
In the 19th century, mourning was taken seriously with black horses with black plumes on the black head harness, black clothing, black jewelry and black-bordered stationery. Now think about that. ‘Nowadays you get twenty minutes in the crematorium and half a day off work for a funeral attended by a few clumsy people in rain jackets, who fidget shyly while singing My Way.’
Immersed in the past
The genre of the historical novel has long been considered conservative and nostalgic. It was a genre that ‘appeased the reader by embellishing the generally accepted version of events and reassured him by ridding the past of politics.’ That is no longer the case, Mantel notes with relief. Much historical fiction shows the past more honestly: “messy, uncertain, a never-ending disagreement.”
She sees historical fiction as an extension of academic research. The historical novel must remain faithful to the results of that research, she says, but then give it an inside: the dry archive material must be given a living body. To do that, as a writer you must be able to immerse yourself completely in the past. You have to know the texture of it: the rub of homespun wool, the whisper of linen, the weight of brocade. You need to know the color of the wallpaper and what fabrics the furniture was covered with. You should be able to hear the sound of footsteps on packed earth, the clinking of the rosary and keys on your belt, and the chiming of church bells – about the loudest sound in towns that were much smaller than today. Only when you know things like that, she writes, “are you ready to start.”
She warns against the temptation to neatly fence off the past in fiction. History is not a neat card index full of facts from which a beautiful, clear story emerges. History is in any case a different category than the past: ‘It is the method we have developed to organize our ignorance about the past.’ And anyone who chooses the perspective of the contemporary must realize that he or she did not know the outcome: he or she made the best of circumstances that were largely beyond his or her own power and knowledge.
The result is that the past is difficult to grasp. ‘Historical truth is a wild beast: shapeless, bumbling, difficult to tame. It resists stubbornly.’ And then: what truth can be discovered is always a construction afterwards. The past cannot be caught red-handed, but only emerges in the story that a later generation tells about it, before an even later generation tells another story about it.
The reader is responsible
To my pleasure, Mantel places part of the responsibility for good literature on the reader. Writers can’t do it alone. Their fiction must come to life in the reader’s mind and that requires a real effort. There is of course a division of labor. The writer must have something to say, be honest and be able to write well. He or she must be willing to trust the reader. Underestimating is a cardinal sin: ‘If you underestimate the intelligence of the reader, he will put the novel down.’ There is no need for gentleness either. ‘Readers are not victims who need to be protected.’ On the other hand, a reader may feel welcome in the room you describe, “but he should not put his feet on the furniture.” With a successful collaboration, the reader becomes an ‘ally in negotiations with reality’.
Finally, let me confess that I have never read a novel by Mantel. I harbor all prejudices against the genre of the historical novel that she describes in this collection. Did she change my mind? Of course. And am I now going to read one of her books as penance?
Time will tell.
Hilary Mantel: Being a Writer – Reflections, Experiences, Insights. Translated from English by Harm Damsma and Niek Miedema. Meridian; 180 pages; €22.99.
