Tag: Hilary Mantel

Emma B. & Elizabeth F.

Over a festive season that stretched my resources, I turned to a German translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; translated by Elisabeth Edl (admired by me for her translations of Patrick Modiano) and much lauded at the time of publication in 2012. And, I must say it seems to have left a greater impression upon me than whatever English version I may have read in the past (but not the one by Lydia Davis, also from 2012) did; for I don’t remember previously having been as stimulated … or, as moved … as this reading has left me.

To be said on this particular edition: Beyond the literary work, the notes throughout are extensive, as is Edl’s translation essay; included also in the volume are the proceedings from the law case brought against Flaubert for … what? … obscenity, shall we say … by the French public prosecutors of the day. This latter inclusion was a first in the German language, and whether it has found its way into any of the English translations to date I don’t know. At least, it – the trial, the outcome (‘case dismissed’, so to speak), the repercussions (for society, for literature) – lives, still, in academia. This essay by Christine Haines published in French Politics, Culture & Society Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer 2005), pp 1-27 and available on JSTOR is just one example.

Of an evening (that is, in bed!) my seriously serious book reading is intermittently interrupted by other forms of Lektüre, sometimes of a more frivolous nature and sometimes not. Definitely belonging to the latter; the latest (or the one before that) issue of the LRB. And, it was there, around about this Christmas time, that I was interested to read a review piece by Julian Barnes (Vol. 45 No. 24 · 14 December 2023) inspired by a new Monet biography by Jackie Wollschläger. With that, I won’t flex my (puny) Impressionist muscles; Julian Barnes may be able to get away with being an amateur art critic/historian/connoisseur, but, I not! It just reminded me that Barnes and Flaubert appear to have taken up firm residence in a similar crevice of my brain. Hardly surprising says she (to herself), recalling a stuffed parrot. But, amongst other things, I also remember his essay (also in the LRB) on the Lydia Davis translation of Madame Bovary, and that it was far from complimentary. And, this I remember because I remember it having coincided with my reading of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in a then new translation and also from Davis, and I further remember having been momentarily concerned that I wasn’t getting the best of Proust. What, if anything, Barnes has had to say about her Swann’s Way, I don’t know. Or, just can’t remember!

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And still more on Hilary M. (2)

In a timely fashion The Booker Prize webpage has a pair of additions to their Hilary Mantel section. Firstly an essay, originally published in 2012, called ‘How I came to write Wolf Hall’ extracted from the just published collection spoken of in the previous post. Well chosen, for it was for this first in the series that she won the Booker in 2009 . The last words of the piece are surely worth dying for: “What I wanted to create is a story that reflects but never repeats, a sense of history listening and talking to itself.” And, then, there is an article by her editor, Nicholas Pearson, that traces the idea of Wolf Hall to its publication, and culminating with the UK’s most prestigious literary prize. (As an aside: How I love that he read the raw manuscript on a long haul to Australia!)

Remembering Hilary Mantel still (1)

& with regret …

An abiding regret for the space left in my literary life with Hilary Mantel’s death; all those bodies and ghosts – royal and heavenly, and not – silenced. Now, just over a year later, today is published in the UK a collection of her essays, exquisitely – albeit misleadingly – titled A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (pub. John Murray). Pulled together by her former editor (at Fourth Estate and now at John Murray), Nicholas Pearson, are pieces from Mantel’s long writing career – on many subjects and from the many stations of her personal and professional life. It is not, then, a memoir in the usual sense, rather I read somewhere it described as a ‘memoir of the mind’ – and what a singularly brilliant mind it was. Perhaps this book will go a little way to fill that space that I still feel.

As her unpublished work and diaries are being deposited with her other papers at The Huntington Library in California and sealed until her husband’s death, for some, this collection is perhaps the last opportunity to wonder at Mantel’s gifts.

In April, a memorial service was held at Southwark Cathedral, around about which time it was revealed that, at the time of her death, Hilary Mantel had been working on an adaption – mash-up of sorts – of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the over-looked Bennett sister, Mary (the ‘plain Jane’ middle one), and tentatively or maybe definitely titled: ‘Provocation’. Lordy! Pride, prejudice AND ‘provocation’! Jane and Hilary in conversation (and now in heavenly union)! Regency England given the Tudor treatment – what a treat that would have been.

Here is The Guardian magazine piece that ends with the extract provided by Mantel’s widower, Gerald McEwen, and which was read at the memorial service. (What a divine thought: Darcy is not the brightest!) There are interesting reflections from McEwen and others, and I was reminded of Mantel’s Reith Lecture in which she said: “the dead are invisible, they are not absent”. I didn’t remember that to be a quote from Saint Augustine (looking back, those were indeed the first words of her first lecture), but it does then seem appropriate that her memorial service was held in Southwark with its ancient Augustinian tradition.

As I say, there can only be regret.

The long and short of it …

Of the Booker fiction prize 2022, that is. I feel like I’ve been neglectful of all the other works that made it to the last or the last but one round. So here is the so-called long list and the short listed finalists. I have read but one – Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!

Long List announced on July 26:
Short list announced on September 6:

The winner we now know.

I should say that the Booker website is an absolute treasure trove, including reading guides for the shortlisted books, quizzes that may (or may not) help one decide on what to read (or read not), information on the judges (Neil MacGregor was Chair this year), extracts, interviews and videos. And a featured list of works from Hilary Mantel as a tribute to her place in Booker history, in British writing – of their own history but not only.

Hilary Mantel (2) – LRB et. al.

Hilary Mantel was for many years a contributing editor of the London Review of Books and for this weekend (only, one should say, and it is now almost gone) her many essays, reviews, stories, etc. are freely available. For those without a subscription, a collection of her work in the LRB titled Mantel Pieces: ‘Royal Bodies’ and Other Writing for the London Review of Books was published in 2020 – and mentioned by me here.

A statement from her publisher is here. And from her friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, at The Huntington Library here.

Many sincere tributes written for The Guardian can be accessed here. The New York Times (subscription mostly required) obituary is here, also “What to Read by (and About) Hilary Mantel” . And today, an opinion piece from Kamila Shamsie in which she relates an anecdote of a meeting with Mantel at a dinner party (they share agents) not long before the publication of Wolf Hall; encapsulating some of my own thoughts on the extraordinary narrative voice that Mantel created:

[…] It was as though she’d been present and was relating, full of delight, a piece of slightly scurrilous gossip that she overheard while pouring wine, unseen, into Wolsey’s cup.

I told Hilary someone needed to record an audio guide to Tudor London, narrated by her, that visitors could listen to while walking past locations of significance. It was a mark of her graciousness that she looked amused though I’d reduced her to the role of tour guide instead of recognizing that she had a different way of entering King Henry VIII’s England than anyone else who’d ever written about it. When I started to read “Wolf Hall” a few months later I recognized instantly the narrative voice though I had never before seen it on the page: It peers over Cromwell’s shoulder, unseen, before entering his mind.

Kamila Shamsie “Hilary Mantel Was the Magician and the Spell” in The New York Times Sept. 24 2022.

Shamsie goes on to say: ” […Hilary Mantel] embodies both the magician and the spell, and part of the particular wonder of reading her is the knowledge that no one else has ever written like that before nor will again. She seemed to see so clearly the things — the past, the spirit world, the intricate relationship between the self and power — the rest of us saw through gauze or not at all”. I love that: ‘both the magician and the spell’! Interestingly, Shamsie says that upon hearing of Mantel’s death she returned to the memoir piece “Someone to Disturb”, read by me just a short time ago as “Sorry to Disturb”, marveling again at the strange disquiet, inconsistencies – internal and external to herself – that Mantel could identify and render so wonderfully in her writing.

Again, I say: A great, great loss.

Wednesday 28th September 2022: A tribute from Hilary Mantel’s friend to whom she dedicated her Wolf Hall series, Mary Robertson, from The Huntington Library in California where Mantel’s papers are being collected.

Saturday 1st October 2022: Just how great a loss can be most realized only in reading Mantel’s work but she was unafraid to enter the public fray, and the depth of her intellect and humanity is apparent in her wonderful Reith Lectures series for the BBC in 2017 – available here.

Hilary Mantel

6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022

It has just been announced that Hilary Mantel, one of Britain’s truly finest novelists, died yesterday. She has rarely been well – suffering most of her life from chronic endometriosis – but it comes as a shock just the same. And in my humble opinion a monumental loss to contemporary literature.

Only a few months ago I wrote about Hilary Mantel, and before that, and before that, on a number of occasions. Only last week did she come to mind as, swept away somewhat by the furor following the Queen’s death, I suddenly had the urge to steep myself in Royal dynasties, history, tradition, and my bookshelf could only offer up Antonia Fraser and Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.

That latter became – and remains – my all time favorite work of historical fiction. I was immediately drawn into the space that Mantel created, the historical stringency she adhered to up until the point she didn’t and the imagination took over, enthralled by the unusual narrative voice adopted – so present in every sense and tense, so powerful, so intimate, and so very modern – and by the splendidly drawn characters, intricate plot construction and the vividly realized descriptive passages. All put to page with majestic elegance.

I don’t know what Mantel was currently working on, or planned to work on next. I do distinctly recall reading that, totally unforgiving of the Brexit fiasco, she and her husband planned to move to Ireland; also that she wrote the theatrical ending to Wolf Hall for the RSC but that it arrived amidst the confusion and uncertainty of Covid restrictions at the end of last year – and suffered accordingly. At that time she stated that she had belatedly come to the conclusion that the theater was her true medium of expression. I can believe that; for my reading of Mantel’s Th. Cromwell saga quite often had the effect of transporting me up there amongst the players on medieval floor boards and into the midst of a profoundly human drama with all its essential elements of love and jealousy, power and denial, that just happened to be a Tudor drama. And at other times I felt myself transformed into an invisible body – mingling there at Court or at Austin Friars, immersed in the constant human struggle of the day to just see in the next dawn. Such was Hilary Mantel’s gift as a story teller: to make certainty and doubt, closeness and distance, reality and imagination all somehow complementary and making clear in the present the blurred reflections of a shared past.

Surely many admiring tributes will be written about the great Hilary Mantel in the next days. For my part; I’m just feeling very sad indeed.

Reading at intervals

For the last days, sleep has come at intervals, and when it arrives then never lasting very long. Too warm nights interrupted by god knows what, and accompanied by mentionable – and not – bodily needs, including the cerebral. Unable to return to sleep, this latter (the head bit) is satisfied only by reading until the eye lids become heavy and then drop. At times such as these, it is not usually to the book(s) I am presently in the midst of that I turn, rather I reach to short stories or essays that I can read through in one fell swoop.

So it was, during one disturbed night last week, that I picked up Hilary Mantel’s 2014 short story collection “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher”.

I remember at the time of publication, there was a right royal hoo-ha at the title – lent from the final story of the collection. (Printed somewhere pre-publication, and read by me back then.) This was, after all, not very long after Thatcher’s death and the bells (in our heads) still rung with the sounds of: Ding dong! The Witch is dead. That, a rather distasteful appropriation I thought, and those chanting said ditty (not as the Munchkins do in the Land of Oz; rather, substituting a word that rhymes with ‘witch’ I seem to recall) too young and too privileged to have been affected by Thatcherism and the social coldness it brought. The title Hilary Mantel gives to her story, which very much describes the substance of it – not a metaphor, not a dream – doesn’t particularly concern me; I am confident that the author’s disaffection of Thatcher would be well informed and well felt, and could hardly surprise. Margaret Thatcher, after all, may have been a lot of things, but boring was she not, and offers a perfect template for a fictional character. And, a writer of the Mantel magnitude can well afford the well earned luxury of artistic risk and transgression. In my opinion. And, one could surmise she knew she would be asking for trouble; perhaps she was looking for it!

The collection (eleven stories) is framed by its opener and the said Assassination, and while the latter gets the title and ISBN, most of the attention and the tut-tuts, it is the first, “Sorry to Disturb”, that paves the way (one is tempted to again return to Oz and trip along a yellow brick road) that leads to the grisly end, via a series of various degrees of grotesque interludes. I say framed, because both stories evolve from male strangers intruding into the constricted domestic space of a woman; their motivations may be other but both are accompanied by an aura of deceit and the suspicion of a ‘not good’ agenda. In the first story, that agenda is based on opportunism, cultural expectations and misunderstandings and is, in the end, warded off and ultimately harmless, in the last, both the intent and the outcome are clear – and deadly.

“Sorry to Disturb” is written in the first person and is a memoir piece (first published as “Someone to Disturb“ in the LRB in 2009 and referencing diary notations) set in Saudi Arabia where Mantel lived with her husband during the 1980s. An excellent read, in my opinion, that illustrates well, and gives perspective to, the daily dilemmas Westerners living for a time in countries with vastly different social and cultural norms are confronted with – the atmospherics (in an extended sense), the solitude, and just the sheer strangeness of the whole adventure.

After reading the Assassination story again, I was struck, not just by how extraordinarily similar the narrative voice was, but the odd sameness of the structure. Almost like the same story spun on its axis and transplanted from the suffocating heat of Jeddah to the leafy green of the English home counties. In both stories the narrator is not just complicit in the chain of events that follow, but makes herself almost into a co-conspirator, even as she – or is it another entity – stands outside the plot considering the action. Do I recognize the magnificent style of the Cromwell trilogy here?

In-between are, of course, ten other stories. Maybe some are better than others but, to my mind, all have a peculiar slant and psychological depth. They are short and succinct, and with the fine composition one would expect from Hilary Mantel. Mostly in the first person, but not all. Some are grotesque, some tragic. There is often humor where good taste says it shouldn’t be – which just shows how overrated good taste is. They are very idiosyncratic.

In the end, Mantel’s stories may well have worked magic – but not upon my eyelids; in fact, I devoured the entire volume. However unsettling the subject matter, my conscious self was not over stimulated. Rather, my intellect nourished, sleep became my reward.

A couple of stories from this collection and other works from Hilary Mantel are available in the London Review of Books archive (usually subscription is required).

[22nd June 2022] Well, who would have thunk it! Some things have a longer life on the internet than others – at The Guardian (where it was that I probably first read it) – is, still, the fictional demise of Mrs. Thatcher, titled: Hilary Mantel: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983.

At home with Th. Cromwell

Should one dare claim acquaintance with Thomas Cromwell or, better said, the man so vividly brought within a hair’s breadth of life in Hilary Mantel’s three monumental works of fiction (last spoken about by me here), then publication of new research into Austin Friars, the place (also brilliantly described/imagined by Mantel) that Cromwell called home, is a matter deserving of attention.

The former Augustinian Priory complex from the “Copper-Plate Map” of c.1550 (1 – Church; 2 – Cloister; 3 – Cromwell’s House; 4 – Gate-House)

The University of Exeter historian, Nick Holder, who has spent his (still short and oh so promising!) academic life researching the medieval friaries of London, has published a wonderful article in the Journal of the British Archeological Association (and for all to read!), in which he reconstructs the historical Thomas Cromwell’s original tenement on the Augustinian estate and the expansive residence that he later developed on adjacent land; purchased as his status and circumstances rose, and to be enjoyed only briefly before his grisly demise. Referencing an array of documentary evidence – surveys, deeds, letters – Holder richly illustrates his findings with his own drawings and plans and there is a particularly fine artist’s reconstruction of Cromwell’s mansion on Throgmorton Street in 1539 by Peter Urmston. The piece is detailed – chock a block full of information on purchases, artisans and tradesmen, building materials – but such fun to read and look at and imagine along with, that the lay time traveler is not left behind, rather taken along, back to the hurly-burly of medieval London. Evidenced, also, is a location that thrives from commerce and merchant endeavor and prospers from its cosmopolitan custom and flair – Italians, French, Germans, Dutch. Welcome to the London of the Tudors! (Puts to shame some little England sorts of these days! I say not Brexit, years on I remain in denial!)

As intimated, I consider Mantel’s descriptions of interiors, exteriors, even of posteriors to be absolutely dazzling, but I can’t think that she wouldn’t have been delighted to benefit from Holder’s work. Or perhaps she had been allowed a glimpse, because I did notice Holder’s first engagement with the subject was in his doctoral thesis in 2011 (also available! an academic obviously not adverse to sharing of his scholarship! he shall have his reward!) on the Friaries of London in general; that before the publication of Mantel’s second book.

Beyond the spatial reconstruction, amongst many there has been quite some interest in inventories (of artwork, books, etc.) that have been uncovered, and that seem to suggest Cromwell was not quite the zealous religious reformer that some would portray him, but rather a traditional Catholic of the day. I actually find myself not so surprised; for Mantel’s Cromwell, irrespective of his bluster and impatience with religious fervor, did seem to me to have at least some sympathy with those of the old faith, if not the more fundamentally inclined papists. Certainly, Cromwell’s lengthy, youthful Florentine sojourn (and all the catholic accoutrements that would have implied), seems to have clearly influenced his aesthetic tastes, not to mention provided him with an apprenticeship in the interaction of religion with the politics of sovereignty and power (just think, around about that time, for instance: Medicis, Borgias, Machiavelli, Savonarola!). While, any higher religious imperative that Cromwell may once have had, may at least have been diminished by his pursuit, and hanging on to, of political power and the King’s favor, I recognized an inherent spiritualism, an attraction to mysticism and a respect for the pious (especially when they were women, for instance, Catherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary Stuart, Th. More’s daughter Margaret Roper) that would have been anathema to the Protestant zeitgeist.

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