MEdia Dragon Tribute to Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel’s Double Vision
Mantel’s endometriosis was eventually identified in her late twenties, but not before a hysterectomy. (A few years later, hormone replacements would double her weight.) The prodromal migraines, however, never went away. “I had known days of my life when everything hurt,” she explains, and yet “it was within the migraine aura that my words came out wrong.” The headaches unmade the world around her. Language faltered in the face of indescribable pain. But the auras also remade her world. “Migraine stirred the air in dull shifts and eddies, charged it with invisible presences and the echoes of strangers’ voices; it gave me morbid visions, like visitations, premonitions of dissolution.”
Daniel Mendelsohn on the hubris and delusion in “The Mirror and the Light.”
This difficulty in distinguishing what was real in her field of vision led Mantel, however uneasily, to her vocation. In response to the migraine-induced “gaps in the world,” she reached for a concrete, tangible pursuit. On days when she was “half-well,” Mantel began to read up on the French Revolution, assembling her notes, organized across charts and index cards, into what eventually became the historical epic “A Place of Greater Safety.” “I was too sick to do a responsible job, a professional job,” she writes in her memoir. The book gave her something to do. The work of historical reconstruction, of distinguishing established fact from speculation, was a way to negotiate her internal disorientation. “I wrote and wrote it.” She struggled to get the book published. She got sicker. She kept writing. “Bald, odd-shaped, deaf but not defeated, I sat down and wrote another book.”Toward the end of “Giving Up the Ghost,” Mantel offers up a qualified confession, or writerly origin story, that soon grows into something stranger:
I am not writing to solicit any special sympathy. People survive much worse and never put pen to paper. I am writing to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meanings are. Spirit needs a house and lodges where it can; you don’t kill yourself, just because you need loose covers rather than frocks. There are other people who, like me, have had the roots of their personality torn up. You need to find yourself, in the maze of social expectations, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being—even if the writing is aimless doodling that no one will ever read, or the diary that no one can see till I’m dead.
Writing enabled Mantel to locate herself in a body that felt increasingly alien. In the face of confusion and loss, she began to tell stories. Autobiography or confessional writing is often viewed as a genre of exorcism, but in Mantel’s description it is an act of incorporation, or fleshing out. Despite its title, “Giving Up the Ghost” does not end by giving up its ghosts but by reanimating them.
In her fiction and essays, she continually returned to the body in pain. Her work is strewn with bodies in various contortions, from the schoolgirls who shrink and grow in her 1995 novel, “An Experiment in Love,” to the anorexic saints of her cult essay “Some Girls Want Out.” (The symptoms of Gemma Galgani “are an art form and a highly successful one,” Mantel writes in the essay. “Survivors are reluctant to admit that anorexia, which in the end leads to invalidity and death, is along the way a path of pleasure and power: it is the power that confers pleasure, however freakish and fragile the gratification may seem.”) There are phantom pregnancies and infertile wombs. And then there are dead bodies. As she explains in a lecture on why she became a historical novelist, her own great-grandmother was known as “the woman who laid out the dead.” Mantel once described the genre she felt most at home in as horror. Fair enough.
Her writing eschews the simplistic cliché that great art emerges from great suffering. But her novels and essays repeatedly center around figures who invent new ways of ordering the world in response to desperate circumstances. Her most famous creation is arguably Thomas Cromwell, the ruthless, implacably organized antihero of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy, who is the fulcrum of a world-historical epic that features a cast of hundreds of major and minor characters. Yet it is Mantel’s earlier novels, which give voice to narrators in more modest, meagre circumstances, that might be her most exemplary. They exhibit her ability to make the most of the least.
Her inspired 1998 historical novel, “The Giant, O’Brien,” is loosely based on the life of Charles Byrne, the eighteenth-century “Irish giant” who toured London as a spectacle until his premature death at the age of twenty-two. In Mantel’s version, the Giant is not only a sufferer but also a storyteller—a tall man who tells tall tales. On his way to London, the Giant spins out fables that mix “bliss and blood” to entertain and placate the men who act as his agents. Throughout, his relationship to his surroundings is perilous. He is besieged by frequent aching both in his body and in his brain. During one of his headaches, “the skin at his temples seemed frail, and he wondered if inner provocation would break it.” At times his headaches make him fear his skull will burst. At other times they fill his mind with strange visions. In his sleep, “the Giant sat among the dead, and heard the voices of the old men . . . dry whispers, like autumn leaves rubbed in a bag.” But it is not the Giant’s second sight that makes him valuable in his lifetime. No one wants to pay for what he sees; they just want to look at him.
Set in present-day England, Mantel’s 2005 novel, “Beyond Black,” takes place in a very different London but also features a kindred storyteller. Its protagonist, an overweight psychic named Alison Hart, tours London as a travelling performer, telling fortunes for the crowds at seedy venues. Like the Giant, Alison is “a Sensitive: which is to say, her senses were arranged in a different way from the senses of most people. She was a medium: dead people talked to her, and she talked back.” Her powers of divination are often accompanied by migraine auras, in which her senses blur and bleed, infecting the texture of Mantel’s language. Her headaches bring on a “seeping fury, as if something inside her had broken and was leaking black blood into her mouth.”
In “The Giant, O’Brien,” Charles Byrne’s pain is hardly a source of power. It is, Mantel suggests, no more, and no less, than itself: pain, both enduring and to be endured. The Giant’s genius for storytelling is an art of survival, but one that becomes increasingly compromised in the course of the novel. As the Giant keeps expanding, he experiences growing pains. “My feet are enlarged,” he tells his keepers, “and I feel the springy gristle of my ankles and knees to be calcined. My hands are swole, and my arms drag out their sockets.” Eventually, the Giant’s physical swelling begins to crowd out his powers of speech. “I have griping in my brain and my ears,” as he puts it, “where language is destroyed by slow attrition day by day; where thought is bombinated, as if my skull were a besieged city.” By the end of the novel, the Giant is in so much pain that he spends his final days lying prone on the ground. Cradling his impossible body, he rocks back and forth, recalling his phantom mother, “He thinks: no person rocked me, I was a giant child. The cradle would have burst.” He still has the ability to address the dead, but he can barely speak to the living.
Unlike the Giant, Alison is able to make a living off the auras that plague her. But she, too, experiences her sensitivity to the “Spirit World” more as a burden than a gift. The problem with being responsive to the dead is that they never stop calling. A direct line to the afterlife, she suffers from a constant barrage of messages, and needling, from the dead. (The ghost of Princess Diana, for instance, accuses her of being an “oiky little grease spot.”) Far more threatening is Morris, Alison’s “familiar,” or link to the next world. Invisible to everyone else, he constantly invades Alison’s privacy, whispering nasty innuendos and drawing her attention away from the corporeal “earthside” to the “airside,” ultimately leaving her vulnerable to both. In order to cope, she needs “twenty-four-hour care” from her personal assistant, Colette, who fixes her sandwiches in the middle of the night and works as a “spam filter for her brain, to screen out unwanted messages from the dead.” Mantel’s genius in “Beyond Black” lies in how she describes the murderous and monstrous energies of the supernatural in the language of neoliberal corporate bureaucracy. The world is too much with Alison, but also: communing with the dead is a precarious and demanding contract position where you’re constantly on call. It can suck the life out of you.
In the final pages of “Giving Up the Ghost,” Mantel throws up an impossible question: “What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but to write them into being?” Instead of attempting an answer, she recounts a dream, or series of dreams, about half-finished works.
I know some of these narratives will never be finished. I dream of half-formed, fetal beings, left abandoned on a cold floor. Sometimes they are blackened, like frozen corpses. They take malign forms . . . little demons that, if they’re left, will range about the world and will bad-mouth me and misrepresent me and filch from me everything I have. But then I wake up, chilled, and put out my hands to be sure that surfaces are solid, that my own flesh is still warm. I grope for a pen and write down my dream; when the day has settled around me, the prosaic Surrey light, I take my dream to the keyboard and mince it through a second draft.
In Mantel’s writing, the line that divides knowledge or clarity—even clairvoyance—and madness is never stable. But it is from the constant negotiation of that boundary that her imaginative worlds emerge. Her novels surreptitiously and sublimely dance in that narrow space or sliver of light between what is and isn’t there—which is, of course, the line between the living and the dead. ♦
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