Friday, October 19, 2012

Hilary Mantel: 'If I'm suffering, I can make that pay'


Her second Booker prize has established her as one of the greatest living writers of historical fiction. She talks about the pressure of winning a third – and the dangers of getting lost in the past

 - The Guardian,

‘Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious’ … Mantel.
‘Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious’ … Mantel. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

'You do teeter on the edge all the time," says Hilary Mantel, the morning after she became the first woman and the first Briton to win the Booker prize twice. "It's the place of obsession – a dangerous obsession." Mantel is talking about the risks to a writer's mental health of indulging in historical fiction, of ventriloquising the dead. Or, as she puts it: "What if you visited the 18th century and never came back?"

This is what happened to the woman who will be the subject of Mantel's next but one book. The Polish playwright Stanislawa Przybyszewska became so obsessed with the French revolution that she dated her letters by the Revolutionary calendar. She wrote a play about the French revolution that lasted five hours even after savage pruning. She was obsessed not just with the French revolution but with its leading monster, Robespierre. Mantel's book is provisionally entitled The Woman Who Died of Robespierre and it's hard not to think of it as Mantel looking into the abyss to see what could happen to her. Przybyszewska died a century ago aged 33 of malnutrition and morphine addiction, her short life lost to her obsessive interest in the French revolution.
"I understand what was going on for my Polish playwright," she says. "You try to abandon your analytical self, your grounding in the everyday. I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel." This is the Mantel paradox: a forbiddingly analytical woman with a vocation that involves stepping beyond those qualities into the uncontrolled and the unknown. "I used to think when I set out that doing the research was enough, but then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you. For me – I'm a now, now kind of person – that was hard."

In the late 1970s, Mantel wrote her first book, an 800-page novel set during the French revolution called A Place of Greater Safety. "I became just as obsessed as Przybyszewska," she says. Just as Przybyszewska dated her letters by the Revolutionary calendar, so Mantel inadvertently dated her cheques 1790. Mantel, then in her late 20s, wrote much of this novel in Botswana, where she was living with her husband, Gerald McEwan, a geologist. It was there that she discovered from reading that the pain she had been enduring for years had a medical name. It was endometriosis, a condition that means uterine cells move to other parts of the body. Those errant cells bleed and cause painful scar tissue.

Armed with a self-diagnosis and a draft of her first novel, she returned to England, hoping to publish the book and get treatment. "I came to a crisis in my life," says Mantel matter of factly. Her book was rejected by a publisher. Worse, she emerged after 10 days in hospital minus, as she puts it, "ovaries, womb, bits of bowel". "Knowing that I was not going to have children, with a body that I didn't know what it was going to do next, and not even cured, and my book rejected, I just wanted to get back home, which was Africa."
This, or so you would have thought, would have been the moment that Mantel would not so much teeter as fall over the edge. But she didn't. "On the surface my life was completely in pieces. It was so awful, it was almost comic – it was like something I had arranged for a character in one of my novels."

After the hospital operation, she was prescribed hormones that made her gain weight fast. She has never lost it. Even now she monitors grimly how interviewers describe her appearance. The booby prize for most misplaced adjective goes to whoever described her as "maternal". It's not her appearance that strikes me today, but her voice: she sounds like Vivienne Westwood. No wonder: both hail from nearby villages. And, while the comparison shouldn't be pressed too far, both are indomitable, creative women. Mere Derbyshire (no offence) couldn't contain either of them.

"I was tremendously clear-sighted," says Mantel of how she overcame that awful time. "I had a powerful sense that I had to draw a line under it. I realised I should go away and do something else. And so I wrote something short, a standard modern novel. I said to myself: 'If that doesn't work, I'll seriously have to question what I'm doing.'" That "standard modern novel", Every Day Is Mother's Day, published in 1985, was billed for years as what it is not – her first novel.

More at The Guardian

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