Hilary Mantel: By the Book
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Published: May 16, 2013.
The author of “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” prefers books
with action: “I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of
vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities.”
What’s the best book you read in the last year?
The term “best” would have to stretch. There’s reading that’s important
to me, in a personal way: I’ve been working my way through the books of
the psychologist Alice Miller, which are short and very easy to read but
disturbing in implication: so, two hours reading, a lifetime of
thinking over the content. “Best” as simply enjoyable would be Kate
Atkinson’s new novel, “Life After Life,” ingenious and furiously
energetic: it’s exhilarating to see a novelist at the top of her game.
There’s rereading, very important to me now. Last year I was
commissioned to write an introduction to Keith Thomas’s “Religion and
the Decline of Magic,” and it gave me a reason to sit down with it
again. It’s a monumental book, yet with a living treasure on every page,
and probably the book that, in my whole life, I’ve pressed on other
people most energetically. (Selected people, of course. They have to
care for history, and they need a sense of wonder and a sense of fun.)
Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how):
I’d like to be at home, in my apartment by the sea in Devon, just a few
yards from the waves, sitting in the sunshine by a window, smiling, and
picking up some vast immersive novel, like Sarah Waters’s “Fingersmith”:
a book which, when it was new, I read as if I were a child, utterly
thrilled and beguiled by it. In my ideal reading day there would be no
time limit, no e-mails stacking up, and dinner would appear on a
floating tablecloth, as if brought by spirit hands. In practice, this
never happens. I read in snatched hours on trains, or late at night, or
purposively and on a schedule, with pen in hand and a frown of
concentration. But when I think harder . . . my ideal reading experience
would involve time travel. I’d be 14, and in my hand would be the
orange tickets that admitted to the adult section of the public library.
Everything would be before me, and I would be ignorant of the shabby
little compromises that novelists make, and I would be unaware that many
nonfiction books are just rehashes of previous books by other writers.
My eyes would be fresh. I would be chasing glory.
In addition to your novels, you’ve also written a memoir. What makes a good memoir? Any recent memoirs you would recommend?
It’s not recent, but I would recommend “Bad Blood,” by Lorna Sage. It’s a
memoir of childhood and private life that has an almost eerie
immediacy. When I was reading it, I felt as if the author were talking
to me: and I talked back (at least, in my head). Memoir’s not an easy
form. It’s not for beginners, which is unfortunate, as it is where many
people do begin. It’s hard for beginners to accept that unmediated truth
often sounds unlikely and unconvincing. If other people are to care
about your life, art must intervene. The writer has to negotiate with
her memories, and with her reader, and find a way, without interrupting
the flow, to caution that this cannot be a true record: this is a
version, seen from a single viewpoint. But she has to make it as true as
she can. Writing a memoir is a process of facing yourself, so you must
do it when you are ready.
Are there particular kinds of stories you’re drawn to? Any you steer clear of?
Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want
fighting. I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of
vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen
because she’s so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in
every paragraph.) I can take the marginally magical, but I find realism
more fascinating and challenging; it is a challenge for me to pay
attention to surfaces, not depths. I like novels about the past, not
about the future. For light reading I like novels about the present, but
consider them to be an extension of newspapers.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
Stacks of books on cricket. I am fascinated by its history. It’s a story
told in match statistics, but it’s also bred some stylish prose. My
head is full of the ghosts of men in white playing games that were over
before the Great War.
Do you ever read self-help? Anything you recommend?
I’m a self-help queen, dedicated to continuous improvement. I read books
about problems I don’t have, just in case I develop
obsessive-compulsive disorder or crippling phobias. Of course there’s
nothing I recommend. If I ever found anything useful, I’d keep it to
myself, to steal a mean advantage.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
When I was 9, I was given a set of slightly abridged classics for
Christmas, and the same again when I was 10. My mother got them from a
mail-order catalog. We weren’t a household that owned many books so it
was a novelty to fill a whole shelf. There were plain cloth bindings and
no pictures. (That’s just the way I like it; I make my own pictures,
thanks.) That’s when I became enthralled by R. L. Stevenson, and failed
to like Dickens, and met the Brontës. They were clever abridgments, too,
as I came to realize when I read the full texts later. (Imagine, “Jane
Eyre” without the embarrassing bits.)
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
I’m sorry if it sounds pious, unoriginal and smug, but no book has
mattered to me as much as the dirt-cheap Complete Works of Shakespeare I
laid my hands on when I was 10. Previously I’d only read one scene from
“Julius Caesar” that I found in an ancient schoolbook. It definitely
qualified as the best thing I’d ever read, and I almost exploded with
joy when I found there was a whole fat book of plays. I was a strange
child.
What’s the best thing about writing a book?
The moment, at about the three-quarter point, where you see your way
right through to the end: as if lights had flooded an unlit road. But
the pleasure is double-edged, because from this point you’re going to
work inhuman hours, not caring about your health or your human
relationships; you’re just going to head down that road like a charging
bull.
The hardest or least enjoyable part?
I have to take a deep breath before I start the first full revision. I
used to hate myself for procrastinating, but now I see it might be wise.
You need to pause in holy fear at what you’ve done, and make sure you
don’t wreck it in panic.
What are your memories of being read to as a child?
My family had scant formal education, but I was lucky enough to be the
only child in a three-generation household, with aunts and grown-up
cousins next door. So lots of people were willing to read to me. I had
the capacity to remember by heart what I heard, as if I were a throwback
to a preliterate age, and so I was lazy about learning for myself
because I had slaves to read for me, and I could say the passages over
when I pleased. They had to read me tales of King Arthur and the Knights
of the Round Table. I didn’t really like anything else. It meant that
by the time I went to school I had a bizarre vocabulary and a limited
but martial outlook.
Do you have a favorite childhood literary character or hero?
Once I’d banished King Arthur, and I was 9 or 10, the characters I lived
through were the two leading men in “Kidnapped,” the strait-laced young
David Balfour and the weathered desperado Alan Breck. The lessons I
learned through David were that you had to leave home, go out into the
world, and become your own man; and you must not despise any unlikely
role models you might meet. I didn’t find any similar story to teach me
about being a woman.
What books are on your coffee table?
There’s never anything on my table except the newspapers. I am addicted
to them and read the fat Sunday supplements all through the week. I just
like the stories, I don’t mind if they’re stale. I admire the
indefatigable columnists, and yet I take a malicious pleasure in
watching them struggle to get 800 words out of two bald facts and one
unoriginal opinion.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel
you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you
put down without finishing?
I have a block about Dickens. I know I’m missing something great;
everybody says so. But I didn’t take to him as a child, and I can’t
stand his moralizing and his crass sentimentality, and the galumping
humor that’s sentimental too. I’m not so fond of George Eliot as I might
be, perhaps because in Africa I had to teach “Silas Marner” to a class
of teenagers with basic English; I kept wanting to apologize for it. And
I’m still working on Henry James; at the moment I prefer William and
Alice, but I think I’ll like Henry by and by. I believe it’s fine to
give up books even after a page; there’s so much to read in the world
that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain? With a
widely admired author you should persist, and you should always return
to authors who puzzle you; maybe time needs to pass. I tried Ivy
Compton-Burnett when I was 20, and it didn’t take. I thought, “She can’t
actually write.” I came back six years later, and couldn’t stop reading
her; no 20th-century novelist is closer to my heart.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?
Old Daddy Shakespeare, of course. I don’t believe in asking writers
questions. I’d just follow him about for a day and see what the routine
was. I’d be invisible, of course. I wouldn’t want to spook him.
What are you planning to read next?
As I have reached the stage in life where I assume the role of parent to
my aged parent, I’ve been thinking a lot about families and have just
started reading Andrew Solomon’s “Far From the Tree.” Next I’m going to
read Francis Spufford’s “Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything,
Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense.”