Hilary Mantel was a hack. I mean this as the highest praise. Certain writers dwell on remote Parnassus, dispatching now and then their neurotically polished manuscripts. Other writers get their hands dirty, writing prose to order for the periodical press. Everybody reveres the Parnassians but it’s the hacks who help you think. As Saul Bellow once put it: “What are words made of that writers should feel them to be such precious coin, to be struck one at a time and hoarded for years on end? Words are to be spent. They are the currency of the mind.”
Of course, if you want to open up shop on Parnassus, it helps to have what used to be called “a private income,” or to be canny and unsqueamish about wringing state bodies dry of available funding. Otherwise, you must toil on Grub Street, at least part of the time. Viewed from Grub Street, the slopes of Parnassus look seductive. No deadlines! No panic about bills! But for some of us, the whole point of a writer is that she is involved in the life of her time. Writing is not oratory but conversation; and Grub Street is where writers go to talk.
Setting out on a literary career in the middle 1980s, Hilary Mantel understood that the income from her novels (her first, Every Day is Mother’s Day, appeared in 1985) would not be enough; and she “didn’t think she was equipped for any other trade” but writing. She signed up as a reviewer (Literary Review paid her £40 a month). She did not think herself above entering writing competitions. A travel piece she wrote for one such competition, run in 1987 by the Spectator and judged by Martin Amis, won first prize. Mantel was then asked to take over the Spectator’s film column. Over the next four years, she wrote more than 160 reviews. “A weekly column made me visible,” she wrote later, “and led to more work than I could handle.”
1987 was also the year in which Mantel began to write for the London Review of Books; and in 1989 she began contributing to the New York Review of Books. As she grew older and more successful, she was able at last to afford a place on Parnassus — nursing the manuscript of the final Thomas Cromwell novel, The Mirror and the Light (2020), for eight years before publishing. But to the end she kept a pied a terre (though perhaps the term we want here is something less pretentious, like granny flat) on Grub Street.
When Mantel died in September 2022, she left behind a pile of uncollected pieces — lectures, essays, film and book reviews, short memoirs, squibs, travel pieces: casual testament to a career that superbly married pragmatism and inspired perception. Many of the London Review of Books pieces have already been collected, in Mantel Pieces (2020); surely the enterprising staff at New York Review Books (NYRB) will sooner or later give us a volume of the NYRB work.
In the meantime, here is A Memoir of My Former Self, a substantial — though still far from comprehensive — anthology of Mantel’s non-fiction work, put together by Nicholas Pearson, who edited many of Mantel’s novels for Fourth Estate. A Memoir of My Former Self can be recommended to anyone with an interest in lucid thought, but perhaps it should especially be recommended to student writers, not just as an object lesson in the mundane versatility required to sustain, as the subtitle has it, “a life in writing,” but as proof of what a brilliant mind can do given mundane forms to work in: the book or movie review, the travel piece, the Sunday-supplement personal column.
Proof also of what a brilliant mind can do in formal mode: A Memoir of My Former Self also includes the BBC Reith Lectures that Mantel delivered in 2017. Her subject, here, is historical fiction, about which she had thought very deeply. The historical novel, she writes, is often treated as if it were “an exceptionally tricky and labour-intensive way of doing journalism” but “the past is not a rehearsal” for the present; it is the show itself.” These lectures — immensely instructive for the student of fiction — are also a profound argument against condescending to our ancestors, who knew no more than we do about the consequence of their lives.
Why do we read collections of critical prose? Isn’t it that they allow us to observe the operations of a specific intelligence over time? Trawling the books’ pages, what you find are usually the operations of a general intelligence (people thinking what everybody else thinks, or people thinking what Marx or Freud or Foucault or whoever would have them think). Mantel’s specific intelligence took nobody’s word for anything. She was, to a degree unusual even for a writer, an integrated personality: that is, somebody who knew what she thought, and what’s more, somebody who could tell you exactly why she thought that way.
“[T]he only tip you can give to a prospective writer,” Mantel says, in a brief memoir included here, “is ‘try to mean what you say’”. You have likely sped past this sentence before you’ve noticed that you’ve got its meaning backwards, as Mantel probably intended. Not “say what you mean” but “mean what you say”: the writer, scribbling away on Grub Street, is always teetering on the brink of self-betrayal; the need to produce words to order embroils the hack in quandaries unknown on Parnassus. Try not to posture or pose; try not to say what you don’t mean.
Mantel’s vice, as a literary journalist, was not insincerity but cruelty. She sometimes let her virtuosity get the better of her. Musing on her fondness for free local newspapers, she writes: “I like reading the ‘In Memoriam’ verses for people I’ve never known, and feeling sorry they’re dead, if only because their relicts have such a woolly idea of scansion.” That final phrase has the slight coldness of a writer too pleased with her phrasemaking to see the (real) people she so swiftly dismisses; on the other hand, this truly is a superb bit of phrasemaking, and anyone who writes as well as Mantel did will find such temptations tricky to resist.
When she balanced cruelty with insight, she was unequalled. On Princess Diana: “She was not a saint, or a rebel who needs our posthumous assistance — she was a young woman of scant personal resources who believed she was basking with dolphins when she was foundering among sharks.” On Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (cruelty in movie reviews doesn’t count): “It is clear that she has won the most important battle in life — that with her hairdresser — and that Mr. Douglas should look out for himself […] Her fashionable, photogenic face is made up of intersecting hatchet blades.”
Writing for TV, she has “endless meetings with screeching optimists”; entering a secondhand bookshop, she spots “Bound volumes of sermons in lead-coloured covers; missionaries’ memoirs, toad-spotted topographical works on superseded shires.” (Some writers would hoard a phrase like that — superseded shires! — and use it in something permanent, like a novel. Mantel lavished it on a casual piece for the Guardian.)
On the comparative cultural weight of novels by men and novels by women: “Burning the bodies rates higher than burning the cakes.” On Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (the subject of her prizewinning travel piece): “The joyless, oily sea is lined by vast amusement parks, where grave sheikhs and their male offspring test their nerve on the roller coasters; the women, in chaperoned parties, shop for furs and diamonds in vast glittering malls.”
Reread that last sentence and keep an ear out for the vowel sounds — listen to the way the oys of “joyless” and “oily” modulate, by way of “lined”, into the sharp snap of “vast amusement parks” and then into the longer, flatter As of “grave sheikhs” and “male”… Note the way in which both sexes are assigned “vast” locales in which to disport themselves — the only equality on offer, in Jeddah, in the 1980s, and the only equality on offer in this nonchalantly magisterial sentence. And then go back and read the line for its sense: it has not been lost on Mantel that, in Saudi Arabia, adult men are free to act like children; adult women (“chaperoned”) are given no choice.
“Everything in her work attests to long practice of keen observation, a hoarding of images and facts, and the painstaking perfection of a craft which allows her to address the most pungent and raw subject matter in a style remarkable not just for vigour but for delicacy and finesse.” This is Mantel on Annie Proulx; but writers often smuggle sly self-portraits into their praise of someone else. The habit of observation that allowed Mantel, in her 2005 novel Beyond Black, to notice the “Heathrow sheep”, their “fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel”, served her in almost everything she ever wrote. Her journalism speaks many things aloud; one of the things it whispers is that the road between Parnassus and Grub Street might, in certain rare and special cases, be shorter than you think.
Further reading
Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986)
Like Hilary Mantel, Amis toiled on Grub Street throughout his career. If he sometimes gave the impression of being less a Grub Street native than a godling on holiday from Parnassus, he never truly condescended; his journalism is as densely packed with jokes and epigrams as is the best of his fiction.
Zadie Smith, Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009)
Zadie Smith didn’t really need to visit Grub Street — her first novel made her an overnight success in her 20s — but her literary journalism (book and film reviews, polemics, short memoirs) is always a pleasure to read.
Clive James, From the Land of Shadows (1982)
Clive James’s reputation never quite survived his trashy TV programmes; but he was that rare thing, a brilliant writer who worked best in short forms. The essays collected here are marvels of erudition and wit; every page contains at least one superbly memorable sentence.
