And yet, only months later, I stood in her yard, watching as she descended the stairs slowly — she’d recently broken her ankle. With her cane, she shooed away a peacock named George (for Byron) and called her dogs, Magpie and Michael. Dogs and birds she loved; she could not abide cats. “Disastrous animals. They eat their weight in small animals every day,” she said, hobbling to sit by a bench in the shadow of her farmhouse. She fixed me with blue eyes, vivid behind spectacles. “I mean, what is a cat? The poor bugger’s genes are so fucked up.”
This struck me as odd, because if I were to imagine Greer as an animal, it would be a cat: solitary, independent, capable of taking down prey with one well-aimed swipe. Cats would not be the only target in our conversation, which was supposed to centre on her biography of Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare’s Wife, but instead ranged from her disappointment with modern-day feminism to her disappointment with Hillary Clinton to her disappointment with Ian McKellen’s cock (which she saw from a distance, when the celebrated actor was playing Lear and decided to display it for the audience. “Great, pale, rubbery thing it was,” she said, shuddering. I asked, gingerly, if she didn’t find it at all impressive. “In an elephant’s trunk-y kind of way,” she conceded.).
She stretched out in the sun — yes, like a cat, or some other predator that enjoys toying with prey foolish enough to stray into its path. And yet there was nothing particularly fierce about her, except her pronouncements and her disdain for many of the failings of the modern world, including, but not limited to, the politics of feminism, the town of Stratford, and Shakespearean actors. She was tall and beautiful in the manner of a wild-crested and free-roaming bird; cat and bird at once.
What I remember from that afternoon is the nature of her pronouncements, which were candid, unfettered, sometimes bonkers, and always entertaining. At sixty-nine, she seemed a liberated thing: I wrote that she had the quality of a medieval siege engine cut loose from its moorings, barrelling down a steep hill. It is a rare thing to meet a woman, especially a famous one, whose opinions are not wrapped in equivocations and apologies and packaged for mass consumption.
She had just written a column stating that Uluru, the giant rock sacred to Australian Aboriginals, should be closed to the public, because the public is debasing it. “People say, do you only write about things that get people mad? Do you go looking for trouble?” She flexed her bad ankle in front of her. “No, but when you’re dealing with crass stupidity you have to call it. If they don’t like it, tough.”
Some of those opinions were so out of step with accepted thought that they got her in deep trouble — such as her (painfully wrong, in my opinion) argument that trans women aren’t really women and that they cannot understand the oppression that women face. Years after our interview, there would be calls for her to be banned from giving a speech at a college campus over her views on transgender issues.
But I thought, as I sat talking to her in the warm June sun, that her appeal lay not in what she said, always, but in the way she said it — in the power and vigour of her outspokenness, in her lack of respect for orthodoxies. She steamed forward on a solo path, “the dreadnought women’s libber,” as William Buckley once called her. Living by herself in the English countryside, writing her books, accompanied by her animals and her quick, questing mind, she seemed free from the dinner-party straitjackets that the rest of us wore, the boring adherence to a set of principles on which our in-group could agree.
I had just finished rereading The Female Eunuch, the dizzying, discursive bestseller that made her name in 1970 and provided one of the incendiary rhetorical bombs of second-wave feminism: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” It’s a loopy, non-linear book, and not one that can be read like an IKEA manual. It is not a guide for building a movement. It is a guide to blowing up an oppressive system, though.
I was not surprised that she became neither a leader nor a member of any movement. She was intellectually unsuited for a narrow path, and constitutionally unsuited for anything requiring teamwork and consensus.
“I can’t do committees and meetings and agendas. I’m too undisciplined, too impatient,” Greer said. “You wait and wait for people to get to the point. I can only utter my barbs and wait and see what happens. If I was involved in feminist politics I think I would be terribly, terribly, disheartened. Miserable.”
We sat for a minute, watching the birds in the trees. She asked if I was hot in the sun. I was not. I would have been happy to sit for hours, listening to her. Later, I would think about whether there was a trade-off involved — the solitary house, the freedom it entailed — and wonder if it was too facile an observation. I wish I’d asked her. Instead, I asked if we were living in a post-feminist world, and she snorted.
“As far as I’m concerned feminism has yet to begin. We haven’t even worked out what the enemy is.”
We spent a couple of hours talking about Shakespeare’s poor, forgotten wife, and the general contempt that history shows for wives of famous men. She talked about the dons who refused to have women in their lectures when she was studying at Cambridge University in the 1960s (her doctoral thesis was on the subject of marriage in Shakespeare’s comedies). Then the photographer arrived to take her picture and she looked down at herself, inordinately pleased, and said: “Tits look good!”
When I left — a different cab driver this time, one with all his synapses — I looked out the window and thought of something Greer had said. It would stay with me for years after, a kind of motto, though I was utterly incapable of living up to it. She’d been talking about her reputation, and where it led her. “When someone says to me ‘Do you know how much you frighten people?’ The only thing I can say is ‘Not enough. Nowhere near enough.’”
“HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, HUMAN COURAGE, HUMAN PERSEVERANCE”
DOWNSTAIRS IN P. D. James’s beautiful home in West London was a table where she spread out her materials — notepad, dictionary, thesaurus, pen — and wrote longhand, aiming for ten thousand words a month, a book a year. After the day’s work was done on one of her immensely popular detective novels, she would take up another of her tasks — being matriarch of her family, or giving a lecture on judicial policy, or attending the House of Lords, where she sat as a Conservative peer, Baroness James of Holland Park.
Just thinking about it exhausted me. I wanted to be Germaine Greer but, on the other end of the decorum spectrum, I also wanted to be P. D. James. I had such a girl crush. Can you have a girl crush on a woman who’s eighty-five?
Phyllis Dorothy James was that age when I first met her, and she had just published her nineteenth novel. It was called The Lighthouse, a mystery featuring her poetry-writing detective Adam Dalgliesh, whom readers adored but whom I found irritatingly mopey. I loved the books; I just wished Dalgliesh would occasionally punch a wall or spill sauce on his shirt.
By the time she ushered me into her exquisite sitting room, with its pale green William Morris wallpaper, I was already in love. She’d written a terrific sort-of memoir called Time to Be in Earnest, a year’s worth of diary entries — though she loathed the idea of diary-keeping — in which the past kept seeping in, cold and dark as floodwater. And what a past it was: her parents’ unhappy marriage, her husband’s suicide, her blazing late-in-life success as a novelist. All these things she did with an unshowy, uncomplaining commitment to the task at hand. She would be a mother. She would work. She would write.
Phyllis wore a lavender blouse, her thick grey hair swept majestically up. There was a heavy silver pendant around her neck, which swung forward as she poured tea from a china pot. All around her were the trappings of an intellectual life, quiet acknowledgements of accomplishment: early editions of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, photos of her children and her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In a small office, tucked away, was a picture of her wearing velvet-and-ermine ceremonial robes at the state opening of the House of Lords. Otherw
ise, there were no indications of her worldly success, no gaudy testaments to vanity. This, of course, made me love her more.
We chatted a bit about her new mystery novel, but what I really wanted was a glimpse into her creative heart. What had been the grit in her oyster? Now that she could buy all the pearls she wanted, what kept her going? Her memoir offered intriguing glimpses of pain, including her parents’ miserable marriage. (“Of course it lasted,” she wrote. “Marriages, however unhappy, did in those days.”)
Her own marriage was loving but shattered by forces outside her control. Her husband, Connor Bantry White, had been a doctor in the Second World War. He returned home devastated and spent much of the rest of his life in mental hospitals, dying by suicide in 1964. (She wrote and spoke very little publicly of this, although once in a radio program she said simply, “I found him.”) James and her two daughters moved in with her in-laws, and she would write at night, when she came home from her job in the health civil service. She’d write on the train when she went to visit her husband. She snatched moments when she could. This devotion to craft is something I, who rarely commits to a whole season of television, can barely fathom.
Or perhaps writing was solace? I suggested it cautiously, but she waved away this nonsense with a ringed hand. “Solace? No, I don’t think so.” A compulsion, then? “Yes, I think so. One psychiatrist said that creativity is the successful resolution of an internal conflict. There’s something in that. For people in any form of art, there is a compulsion.”
Whatever it was, I found her devotion — to her day job, and her writing dream, and her family, and not least to public service — deeply moving. And she wasn’t po-faced about it; she had a macabre streak, at odds with her pretty house. As a child, she would imagine which little classmate might die before the end of summer. Her mind was filled with poison and knives and hands that shoved bodies off high cliffs, but she placed those thoughts where they belonged, on paper, just so, and then poured the tea.
FOUR YEARS LATER, I returned to that beautiful house, and I must have been moaning about my early (and never-ending) midlife crisis, perhaps about the way that the flesh was sliding down my face like the icing off a badly baked cake.
Phyllis was having none of it. Briskly, she placed her hand next to mine on the gleaming wooden table. Hers was pale, veined, elegant, adorned with silver rings; mine needed a wash. “You can try to hold back time, but you can’t do anything about your hands,” she said. “Compare them, my dear. An old hand and a young one. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
My hands did not seem so young to me. Her old hands continued to make do and mend, in the words of the old wartime posters. She had finished her twentieth novel, a Dalgliesh mystery called The Private Patient, while recuperating in hospital from heart surgery. Now, a few days before her ninetieth birthday, she was working on a secret book she didn’t want to talk about, lest it didn’t work out.
It wasn’t a mystery novel, at least not a typical one: She dreaded the idea of churning out novels, like Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh, merely because her publisher and her public clamoured for them. Yet she told me something that day about the appeal of writing mysteries that made me understand her inner cogs and gears a little better: “No matter how difficult problems are in life — in your own life or in the life of a country or society — in the end they can always be solved, not by divine intervention or good luck, but by human intelligence, human courage, human perseverance.”
It’s what she had done, wasn’t it? Overcome the difficult puzzle of her own life through the application of human intelligence, human courage, human perseverance. I left Phyllis’s house that day as I always did, determined to be less of a whiner. Less lazy. I would work harder on the novel I had just started. She made me want to be better. Not that I would have ever told her that; I could imagine the look of horror on her face.
WHEN I SAW her a final time, the following year, her secret book had been revealed: She’d been working on a novel called Death Comes to Pemberley, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice with a mystery at its centre (it became an enormous bestseller, like her other novels, and then a miniseries).
She was ninety-one, and there was a walking stick propped next to her while we talked; I couldn’t remember it being there during our last visit. Not that she had slowed down in any noticeable way. After I left she was going to get dressed for a reception at 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s residence.
If anything, age had liberated her. Only at ninety-one did she feel ready to commit an act of lese-majesty and tread on the ground of her beloved Jane Austen. She had loved Austen for eight decades, ever since, at the age of ten, she’d had to choose between two books on the shelf at Sunday school: Pride and Prejudice or Jessica’s First Prayer. You can guess which one she took home.
For years after, Austen was her great passion. She watched, bemused, as other novelists took Austen’s characters and twisted them into outrageous shapes, sending them off to fight zombies or time-travel through history. It was not quite drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa, but close.
“There are about seventy previous sequels to Pride and Prejudice. Some of them are quite extraordinary,” Phyllis said. “Zombies and sexual goings-on, the most extraordinary things. I think she’d be pretty fed up about those!”
Why should an accomplished writer who adored Austen not be allowed to play with characters who were, as she put it, “so much the furniture of our minds?” And so she did, crafting an excellent mystery while also giving us a glimpse into Fitzwilliam Darcy’s inner thoughts and his marriage to his beloved Lizzy.
Here was the final lesson that Phyllis taught me, about the freedom that arrives like a gift with age. Yes, I’d seen a hundred magazine cover lines screaming “The Best Years of Your Life!” and “Gain Years, Gain Confidence,” but it had always seemed like so much magazine bullshit. And, as I say, I was in my forties and preoccupied with my melting face. But Phyllis, like Germaine Greer, was living proof of the fuck-you ticket that is issued along with your senior citizen’s bus pass. Who cares what critics think? Who cares if Jane Austen would roll in her grave? The curtain would come down soon enough, all noise drowned out.
Death Comes to Pemberley was the last book that Phyllis would write. Three years later, I was sitting in my winter-dark living room in Toronto when I heard the news that she’d died. Immediately, I felt a choking sorrow. Something good and noble had moved out of the world, a stout heart, a craftsman. But it felt useless, just sitting and mourning. Idleness solved nothing. I went to my computer and began to write a column about Phyllis, about what it meant to lead a life well lived.
“SO NOW GET UP”
WHEN HILARY MANTEL was in law school in England, she started suffering terrible internal pains. No one took a young woman’s agony particularly seriously, especially if it was situated uterus-adjacent. She went to visit a psychiatrist, who diagnosed the source of her anguish: It was stress, he said, caused by overambition. He wondered if law school was too taxing. Mightn’t a dress shop be a better outlet for her talents?
What none of the doctors knew, but Mantel suspected because she was consulting surgical textbooks, was that she was suffering from a severe and undiagnosed case of endometriosis. The drugs prescribed for her psychological and physical misery led her to a mental-health clinic. There, she began to write a short story about a changeling — that is, about a woman in rural Wales whose baby is snatched and switched for another. When she outlined the story to her psychiatrist — the one who prophesied a dress-shop career — he said “I don’t want you writing.”
I don’t want you writing! And you, Picasso, put down that stupid paintbrush. There are tomatoes to be packed. When I came across that anecdote in Mantel’s wonderful, spiky memoir Giving Up the Ghost, I almost shrieked. What if she had given up writing? A tragedy for the world of literature. A tragedy for me, personally: She is my favourite living author.
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I’m firmly of the opinion that a journalist should never meet her heroes. They will invariably disappoint, not because of their own failings, but because they have been constructed out of some bright-sky material in the journalist’s brain and will necessarily be duller in real life. But, in a few cases, some of which I document in this chapter, they do not disappoint, but leave an indelible, electric impression instead. Such was the case when I took the train one day to meet the woman whose latest novels had made her, against all expectations, a smash success.
Hilary Mantel’s little town on the Devon coast was ridiculously pretty, as pretty as a village from a BBC detective series in which the killer is the vicar or the lady who puts up the best pickles. It was prettier than it had a right to be. It actually had a café called the Cosy Teapot.
And here lived a woman with a singular gift for inhabiting dark and sinister worlds, past and present, and finding the humanity and humour in them. Most of her novels were contemporary, though it was the most recent pair, set in Tudor England, that had made her a star. They were all novels born of her body’s pain, written in spite of that pain, or perhaps because of it — how better to transcend the body than imagining a world that is different, distant, peopled with intriguing strangers?
There was no darkness in the cheery flat overlooking the sea, or the woman who answered its door. Mantel had the round, bright blue eyes of a china doll, even though her smile suggested a doll possessed by a mischievous demon. The phone was ringing when I entered and hardly stopped (it was answered by her husband Gerald McEwan, a man she had divorced once and married twice). The phone rang because, after a life of critical acclaim but popular obscurity, she had achieved a whacking great success with her novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (a final novel in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, is in the works).
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