Those damned sentences

“A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems.” This perception belongs to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, in the opening pages of Wolf Hall (2009). An adolescent in flight from his violent father, he must bargain his way onto a cart bound for Dover, and he quickly realizes that the capacity for loading luggage efficiently, especially when paired with an ability not to frighten the horses, may prove invaluable. Reading A Memoir of My Former Self, a collection of Mantel’s nonfiction pieces written from the late 1980s onwards, and including her previously unpublished Reith Lectures of 2017, one feels increasingly that “simple rotation” was her vital and perhaps primary impulse – not merely for the solution of problems, but for the intellectual and creative dividends that a different perspective might provide. In other words: logistical, pragmatic, but also an article of something approaching faith (horse-becalming being low on her agenda).

How did she manage to write on such a wide range of subjects with such interest, such playfulness and such fidelity to the power of interrogation? It helped – us, if not always her – that she couldn’t free herself from the need to write, as she explained in a piece for the Guardian from 2008:

Sometimes, I daren’t go out of the house in case I see something that starts off a chain of those damned sentences. They have me fettered in their service, and I suspect I would be their servant even if they paid no wages. There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.

There is humour here, as there is in much of Mantel’s writing; she probably didn’t expect the reader to believe that she wanted to stem the flow of sentences. But I think she understood what a serious commitment to anything entailed; what you paid for it and what you got in return; and what a life might look like without that thing. In her third Reith Lecture, “Silence Grips the Town”, she focuses on the early-twentieth-century dramatist Stanisława Przybyszewska, whose play The Danton Case (1929) formed the basis – though it was substantially reworked – of Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton (1983). Przybyszewska’s story is one of extreme self-deprivation (she lived and worked in a tiny, freezing outhouse, where she became ever more emaciated and ill), repeated rejection and almost blanket artistic misinterpretation. Mantel notes that when Przybyszewska died in her early thirties, “Multiple causes of death were recorded, but actually she died of Robespierre”.

Most striking here is Mantel’s clear-eyed compassion, her insistence on truthfulness in spite of the quasi-mystical circumstances; the extent of Przybyszewska’s sacrifice does not cancel out the failures of her work, and may indeed have contributed to them. Obsession does not guarantee artistic achievement, let alone worldly success. Mantel wonders whether perfectionism was the problem, a lack of distance: “But, if you pinpoint any moment in an artist’s career, you will see the unfinished. Who is ready for completion? Who is ready for death? It takes us all by surprise – the pen poised, the potential unrealised, explanations wanting, an evaporation of effort into white space. With each line, each sentence, you succeed and fail, succeed and fail”.

Mantel’s succinct expression of the awareness of mortality is, naturally, more painful to read in the wake of her unexpected death just over a year ago. When I interviewed her in 2020 for the publication of The Mirror and the Light, the final instalment of the Wolf Hall trilogy, she was realistic about the balancing act of interesting projects versus likely lifespan, and wasn’t planning another vast work: “It’s just maths, really”, she said. But in her life and her writing, never easily separable, there is the consistent feeling of urgency, whether she is addressing her family history, her serious health problems, the permeability of the membrane between the past and the present, the quick and the dead.

Frequently in evidence in these pieces is Mantel’s fundamental difference from a commonplace comment writer, a generator of opinion. She can write about Marie Antoinette and other, more recent members of royal families, about inequality in the American carceral system, about her brief residence in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, about writers from Sybille Bedford to V. S. Naipaul, with the same shifting quizzicality, the same understanding that to voice a strong opinion is not to erase the possibility that you have missed something, that your conclusions proceed from where you are standing.

A selection of her film reviews for the Spectator, written between 1987 and 1990, are deliciously frank, and entirely unconcerned with displaying any kind of critical insiderishness. “The noise level is amazing”, she says of Robocop, which she finds “a pure delight for those of us who have never had any culture at all”; she admires Richard Griffiths’s turn as Uncle Monty, “a foam-rubber hippo with priapic ambitions”, in Withnail and I, but is less dazzled than many by the film’s attempt to evoke the 1960s, diagnosing between the lines a certain nostalgie de la boue. David Lynch and Wim Wenders are also met with astuteness rather than reverence, while Mickey Rourke, starring in the “spectacularly bad” Wild Orchid, “has been dyed a strange yellow colour” – the least of his problems. Her line in compliments runs to Wallace Shawn playing John Lahr in Prick Up Your Ears “with the face of a questing grub”, alongside Gary Oldman’s Orton, who boasts “minimal proletarian features turning lustful under a John Lennon cap”.

In what might be termed her incidental writing – though she never allowed anything to become trivial – she is extremely funny, her attention expanding to permit little touches of mockery, snobbery, even the odd moment of scornfulness. But these inflections never feel sour, simply human, to be absorbed within the greater generosity of her writing. Here she is in the New Year of 2009, writing for the Guardian about bottled scent and alighting on Kate Moss’s Velvet Hour: “Such a sad little tale, though. A medieval theologian, had he possessed one of Kate’s tacky-looking blue flasks, could have used it to explain sin – so warm for the first half-hour, and afterwards so banal”.

Perhaps I wondered for too long whether the tackiness of the flask was expressed in deliberately ambiguous language: did Mantel mean that it appeared stickily moist or was she taking aim at the aesthetic of the celebrity perfume, and by extension at those who would be gulled by its promise of sophistication by association? If the latter, though, she is an equal opportunities reputation-pricker, not, as it is given in the current idiom, merely given to punching down: another piece for the Guardian, from 2010, about her love of stationery reveals that “le vrai Moleskine and its mythology irritate me. Chatwin, Hemingway: has the earth ever held two greater posers?”

It is plausible to see Mantel as an outsider – or to believe that’s how she saw herself – from her writings both here and elsewhere. She existed on the periphery of her own family background, unsure how to assimilate her complex Irish and northern English heritage, the available socioeconomic brackets ostensibly unable to accommodate her desire to write and to think. Her identity as a woman, especially after her long-undiagnosed endometriosis had, as she described it, “confiscated” her fertility, was a source of brilliant, furious examination. She had little interest in, or patience for, established literary scenes or labels.

She would probably have little time for posthumous pigeonholing, either; in fact she more or less warns against it. “As soon as we die, we enter into fiction”, she says in her opening Reith Lecture, “The Day Is for the Living”. “Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted.” And, in the last of the lectures, “Adaptation”, in which she argues fiercely, cleverly and persuasively for artists to respect their duty to history while simultaneously welcoming the audiences and readerships who are just as much a part of it, she emphasizes the bottom line: “Most of us spend our lives in adaptation, aware we have a secret self and aware that it won’t do. We send out a persona to represent us, to deal for us in public; there are two of us, one home and one away, one original and one adapted.”

Here, then, are multiple iterations of that persona and fascinatingly various mediations of that secret self. They will more than do.

Alex Clark is a literary journalist and broadcaster who writes for the Guardian, the TLS and the Observer. She is co-host of the TLS podcast

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