Hilary Mantel speaks to SYWOL
Exclusive - When Hilary Met SYWOL
I've never met a Booker Prize winning author before so I don't know what I expected to find on meeting this one. Hilary Mantel, the author of this year's winning novel Wolf Hall, is in Sheffield to take part in the Off the Shelf literary festival.
We decided to approach the organisers to see if we could get an interview with her to support our plans for a new women's writing initiative through the website.
Generously, she has agreed , which threw us a bit to be honest!
We didn't really think a woman with the publishing world at her feet and the world's press knocking on the door would have the time let alone inclination for a private meeting with us, but she does.
All we have to do now is whizz through the 650+ pages of Wolf Hall in two days flat and we'll be ready.
Wolf Hall is a reassuringly large volume exploring the political landscape of the Tudor court in the 1520s and the rise of Thomas Cromwell, who went literally from the gutter to the court of King Henry VIII's, where he became his right hand man.
Setting the characters in their present day gives the sense that it is we who are the time travellers, not that these are voices from history. These characters have histories of their own driving them to act as they do. We are all, living and dead, making up our minds as we go along.
The result is an utterly compelling read, full of life: you can see and smell the characters, feel them in the room with you. If it's quiet enough, you'll be able to hear them breathe.
Wolf Hall is, in short, very big and very clever.
Standing outside the room where we are to meet Mantel, I'm expecting a serious lady with a bit of gravitas. Which of course she is though this makes the contrast to her physical presence even more startling: wispy golden hair, bright, wide, blue eyes, easy laughter. Vivid conversation illustrated with feathery hands, Mantel is Tinkerbell as a grown up.
I should have guessed. Here was the woman who impishly proclaimed after winning the Booker last month that she was going to spend the £50,000 prize money on 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll'
I ask how that particular mission is going. Cue gales of that laughter: "Well I haven't had room in my schedule but I'm seeking it! " She'll get to it, she assures me, as soon as her publicist will let her.
She is clearly tired when we meet, a consequence of the hectic post-Booker schedule and a willingness to keep to all the pre-Booker commitments, including being here in Sheffield for the annual Off the Shelf literary festival.
The city has a long-standing pull for Mantel: she was a law student here in the 1970s and lectured on Sheffield Hallam University's creative writing MA . Born in 1952 in Glossop, she feels, she says "I belong to the North."
She was brought up in a working-class family in nearby Hadfield in a household she says was neither bookish nor educated. Apart from an appreciation of a person who makes their own luck, as Thomas Cromwell, does, I ask her to what extent her background informs her work:
"My mum went into the mill when she was 14 and I sometimes feel that my brain is bulging out with the effort of trying to carry the weight of my mother's experience and my grandmother's experience and my great aunt's experience. If only they had written in down in some form.
"Once you feel you have permission to write, in a way, you feel that you've got to do for other people. My great grandmother couldn't read or write at all and I often think I'm trying to give voice to her experience."
This sense of giving voice is the all-pervasive power of Wolf Hall. Mantel seems to live as easily among the Tudor dead as she does in the here and now. Collecting stories, delighting in people, missing nothing. When she talks about her relationship with Thomas Cromwell, it is as though the 500 year age gap is a mere detail. There is a real sense of absence and longing in her voice. Does she miss him, I ask:
"I miss the whole world, the whole Tudor world, I feel homesick for it. In a sense, I'm never away from it because I've got twin realities running along in my head. I think when it comes to the strange bond you make with someone who is real but just happens to be dead, there is something very hard to explain there."
For Mantel, Thomas Cromwell is a person who had to be courted before he would be written about, that his story should not be about piecing together the years between gutter and court but how he lived with his own twin realities:
"I didn't know how amenable he would be to work with. You need to have a character whom you can empathise with and that means they have to have a degree of empathy themselves. What you are trying to do when you are trying to reconstruct a person like that, it's not just in one dimension because you set them up in their present day but they also have memories, they have a whole hinterland. Your characters have a subconscious too and their decisions are not always logical ones, they are not always driven by reason, just like us alive today. They're sometimes pushed and pulled by forces they don't understand. And those may be forces outside them but they also may be forces from inside. "
Not so much writing a novel then as a delicate negotiation with history.
In Wolf Hall, Mantel weaves the fruits of historical research with intuition, as if she scoured every letter and document while holding her breath and listening closely to the voice between the lines. Like a mother with a newborn, learning the difference between one cry and another.
So attuned is Mantel to the supernatural and so alive to her own intuition that it is hard not to talk about her in otherworldly terms. After all, she does commute to the 1520s for work. It comes as a bit of a shock then to meet the 21st Century Hilary Mantel, not the wispy medium with the friends from half a millennia ago, but the savvy businesslike author with a diamond-hard intellect.
For Mantel, winning the Booker Prize was a definite career goal, one that would bring with it not only some tidy prize money but a multitude of possibilities. She knows it has made her even more marketable: having had a patchy record in translation, since the Booker prize Wolf Hall is now on sale in 18 countries including China and the former Eastern Bloc countries - and the deals are still rolling in.
The literary value of Wolf Hall would have stayed the same whether or with or without the prize but the financial opportunities would not; she knows that. Mantel was the bookies favourite to win and spent the night of the ceremony in the Guildhall in London crossing her fingers that this wouldn't work against her.
"Because I've been a Booker judge myself, I know that once the judges go into that final session anything can happen really. There was such a lot of talk about Wolf Hall being the favourite that you do hope the judges aren't going to be perverse because it would be human to want to give people a big surprise."
As she talks about the night of the award itself, it's clear that the prize money and accolades weren't all she took away from the ceremony. She says she was surprised by the enormous amount of affection her win has inspired. At the same time, she was all too aware of the effect of her win on old adversaries. After all, she is a writer with one eye always out for the grist to the mill. The ceremony itself provided rich pickings.
"I was surprised by the number of people who did want me to win plus of course (laughing) a handful of hypocrites who told me they wanted me to win. I remember one particular literary figure shaking my hand and wishing me well and I thought: How can you say that? It was quite an instructive evening actually and obviously it will go straight into the next book you know. Nothing is lost."
Ouch!
But she herself says she wasn't surprised to win: "This is a mountaintop I've been climbing up to for a long, long time and you do hope you get there because it's the kind of recognition that frees you up afterwards. I think the Booker looms so large in the lives of novelists and every year when you're publishing, it makes autumn extremely tense. It dominates everything really and once you've won it, no-one expects you to win it twice, including yourself.
"In a sense, the pressure is off and I can think 'my autumns are my own now' and I don't have to keep my eye on the Booker judges. It's astonishing to what extent that one particular prize does dominate the landscape."
Despite her faith in the book, there was a point where she did consider not entering it because she felt there was prejudice towards historical fiction. She smiles: "I got lucky with my judges. They were prepared to read it objectively and not get sniffy about historical fiction and that aspect of it did surprise me. Having said that, as soon as I began it I knew it was going to be my best book, which I do feel it is. This is something I've been trying to do for a long time. I chose the right time to do it and it plays to all my strengths."
Mantel had the courage of her writerly convictions from the beginning. She began writing when she left university. Her health was being wrecked by undiagnosed endometriosis and she was told her symptoms were all in her mind. She was prescribed anti-depressants and Valium.
"I had a feeling of doors slamming in my face. I decided to do something for myself, if you like. A secret plan... it didn't bother me that I didn't know anyone who was a writer or didn't know anyone that was in publishing. I had probably a quite insane faith that when the time came, it would appear."
She says she wrote her first book because she wanted to read a novel about the French Revolution that wasn't about aristocrats but told from the point of view of the revolutionaries. She couldn't find what she wanted to read so she set to and wrote it herself. It appeared as her fifth published novel, A Place of Greater Safety.
Mantel remains committed to supporting new writers although sadly, her visiting professorship at Sheffield Hallam University's Creative Writing MA has just come to an end. She says: "You are a writer when you say you're a writer, not when the publishing industry says you are. Your commitment starts with your first wish to be a writer. I think a large part of teaching writing is instilling confidence because often people think, there's nothing special about me, I have no particular life experience that's interesting, but everybody has. Everyone can become a writer. Not everyone will become the finished article, but everyone's experience can be enriched by writing and anyone can do it."
Her main advice to her students is that they learn to live like a writer: keeping journals, collecting ideas and not running away when a person at the bus-stop starts telling you their life story.
She encourages budding writers to be hospitable to new ideas when they come along: "Take them in, sit them by the fire, give them a cup of tea and see what happens. Don't shut the door on them."
She makes you feel that anyone could do it - and fervently believes they can.
As for the future, there's talk of moving to the coast and there's the sequel to Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light.
And of course, there's those sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll to chase down, once she gets a minute.
Kathryn Reaney, October 2009
