I went to Hilary Mantel’s memorial service at Southwark Cathedral last week. Sir Mark Rylance and Ben Miles, who both played her hero Thomas Cromwell, did readings and there were memories from her friends and family. Two things emerged: Mantel the feminist and Mantel the muse. They are the same thing: women writers loved her because she showed us the possibilities of art, and the importance of manners. (She had great manners). Thankfully, the priest didn’t stay on long: Mantel and the patriarchy are at odds, and, genial though he was, I scowled at him.
Mantel was self-created. She had nothing but a gift and the hunger to pursue it to the end. Her schoolfriend, Anne Preston, described the summoning of it: they read Shakespeare together on the hearthrug and went to Stratford to watch plays. There was “violence and volatility” in Anne’s house and “underlying tension” in Hilary’s. The lodger Jack Mantel became her mother’s lover, and her father moved out — but “with great delicacy and intuitive teenage wisdom we chose never to refer to them”. They made, instead, a world of happiness and words. What is it like, I thought, to have 12-year-old Mantel as your teacher, as she is learning things herself? And who was the devil squatting on her bed?
In her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, Mantel wrote that her fertility — her possible future — was stolen by a doctor who did not believe the pain that indicated endometriosis. “It was a new pain: but not new for long. It stole my life: it stole it for 10 years and for a double term, and then for 10 years more”. He sent her to a psychiatrist and ruined her health: by the time she self-diagnosed it was too late for children, and she was only 70 when she died. Mantel named the daughter she never had Catriona (“She would be nothing like me at all”) and filled her cupboards with food and supplies. One day she asked herself: “‘Who is all this for? Who am I expecting?’ I knew, if I thought about it, that I was expecting the unborn”.
Then she wrote the best description of the creation of the writer in print: “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 expectation, the thickets of memory: just which bits of you are left intact? When you have committed enough words to paper you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind”. No wonder Zadie Smith, who was in the congregation, looked stricken.
Anne remembered Hilary the child reciting the prologue to Henry V to her: “O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention”. And she found the kingdom because, “She had a muse of fire within her”. I’m wary of sounding like Mrs Gaskell, who buried Charlotte Brontë under a cult of sickness in her life. Mantel was ill, at others’ hands, but her life was an artistic triumph, a feminine triumph. Her early death was a postscript: in life, she won.
Barry Humphries’ unhappy side
Barry Humphries was more at ease with his creations, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, than he was with himself. I interviewed him 10 years ago when he was booked to perform at the London Palladium, which delighted him: he called it “the Pall-ad-ium”. But he was not delighted by the interview. I begged to interview him as Edna, who cannot feel pain, but he refused. I had Barry, and I made him unhappy.
When I asked him about his alcoholism — he wrote about it in his memoir More Please — he denied he was an alcoholic. I wish I’d asked more about his art. He was hanging custard and dead flies on objects, making grotesque installations in the Fifties, 40 years before Damian Hirst.
Edna was his mother, and he couldn’t always produce her: he didn’t want to. I’ll miss them both.
