by Lynn Barber
Her brothers are five and six years younger, so I wondered if they could actually have been Jack Mantel’s sons, but she says firmly, ‘They could have been – but they weren’t.’ But they have no memories of their father because they were so young when he disappeared. She is very close to them, and sometimes emails them several times a day, but ‘I often feel that we are half a generation apart rather than five or six years. Because they grew up very remote from the kind of childhood I had. I lived in Hadfield till I was eleven, and thought of myself as part of a huge Irish family because my grandmother’s many many brothers and sisters were still alive. But by the time I was ten, most of them had died and my younger brothers don’t remember those people, and don’t have any consciousness of being Irish. Their lives started in a much more middle-class community with different expectations.’
The move to Cheshire was only eight miles but it meant a complete break from Hadfield, because Jack and her mother needed to make a fresh start. They told Hilary to change her surname to Mantel and to say Jack was her father. And she started at a new school, where she ended up as head girl and became the first member of her family to go to university. Her mother had had to leave school at fourteen and work in the mill like everyone else, but she was ambitious for Hilary: ‘She encouraged me to think I was intelligent and that I would have chances, if she could provide them.’
Hilary went to the LSE to read law, but after a year of feeling lonely in London she decided to switch to Sheffield University to join McEwen, her boyfriend, who was reading geology there. They married when they were just twenty. But by then she was suffering from a whole clutch of symptoms – headaches, nausea, asthma, pains in her legs and abdomen – that her doctor saw as psychosomatic. He sent her to a psychiatrist, who prescribed stronger and stronger pills – Valium, Fentazin, Largactil, Stelazine – until eventually she had a fullscale nervous breakdown. In consequence, she resolved never to go near a psychiatrist or psychotropic drug again. She had hoped to become a barrister and eventually a politician – she was ‘seethingly ambitious’ – but she realised she would never have the stamina for such a career, so she thought: Well, better get a book up your sleeve because even if you’re sick you can write.
She and her husband moved to Botswana for his work and she wrote her first novel there – a 900-page tome called A Place of Greater Safety, set in the French Revolution. But it was rejected by all the publishers she sent it to and only published eventually in 1992. She thinks if Place had been published at the time she would have stuck to writing historical fiction, but she says in those days historical fiction was seen as ‘chick lit in long frocks’ whereas Place was essentially political. So then she ‘changed her strategy’ and wrote a string of contemporary novels, starting with Every Day Is Mother’s Day in 1985, which established her as a rising literary star.
While writing her novel in Botswana, she also read up medical textbooks and eventually diagnosed herself with endometriosis – a disease of the uterus but with ramifications all over the body. So when she came back to England for Christmas in 1979, she took herself to St George’s Hospital who confirmed the diagnosis, but said the disease was so advanced the only treatment was removal of her ovaries and uterus. So, at twenty-seven, she lost any chance of motherhood. At the time, she didn’t particularly want children but now she says, ‘I miss the child I never had,’ and wishes she’d had a baby at eighteen, when she thinks she still could have done: ‘It wouldn’t necessarily have stopped the endometriosis, but at least I would have had a child.’
Mysteriously, she divorced her husband while they were in Botswana and then remarried him two years later, but she won’t explain why. ‘I can’t really talk about it. I might go back and write about it some time but in a disguised way. I do not think that things would have happened in the way they did if we’d been at home in England. We were very vulnerable, because we were far from family and friends. If you wanted to phone Britain – if the phones were working at all – you rang South Africa and asked them to place a call for you. Letters might or might not get there. You felt as though you might as well have been on another planet. And ours was not by any means the only marriage that disintegrated – it was almost normal. The most amazing thing was the way people ran off with the most unlikely partners, never to be heard of again. That whole society, that expat way of life and how it affected individuals, is something I really want to write about.’
In fact she started writing a novel about Africa a few years ago, but broke it off to write Wolf Hall. She found she was getting ‘horribly spooked’ by remembering her house in Africa, so she decided to give herself a day off and start Wolf Hall. ‘And I wrote one page – and I was off! In twenty-four hours everything turned round and I couldn’t keep the grin off my face – my mood had completely altered.’ But she says she will reread the African novel when she has finished the Wolf Hall trilogy and see if she can get into it again – ‘I may find it’s not there for me any more. It might have gone stale on me – it might be something I have to let go. I’m not short of ideas at all – I’m just short of time to execute them.’
Her health is still problematic. ‘What happened to me all those years ago has brought a LOT of complications. That was not apparent at the time. I left the hospital thinking that it was true that something cataclysmic had happened, but that I was cured. But that was far from the case.’ She ballooned from a size 10 to a size 20 in a matter of months, and her thyroid eventually failed. She now also suffers from arthritis but can’t take anti-inflammatory drugs because her kidneys are damaged. In 2010, she went into hospital for what was meant to be a minor bowel operation but turned into a weeks-long saga of complications and drug-induced hallucinations. But nothing ever stops her writing and even in hospital she wrote a diary, Ink in the Blood, which she published as a short e-book.
‘I work all the time, I’m incredibly committed. I have things called holidays when I write more than I would if I were at home, but with a plane journey in between. But while the ideas are there, you’ve got to grasp them. That’s not a complaint. I’m not saying I’m a martyr to my art – it’s just a fact.’ Perhaps, I suggest, she belongs in that long list of people such as Charles Darwin and Elizabeth Barrett Browning who suffered from a ‘creative illness’ in order to be free to work? The idea fills her with indignation: ‘I’m not a romantic in that way. I just think a pain is a pain. And I cannot imagine anything in my life that would not have been better if I’d been healthy.’
She is a feminist, but I get the impression she does not like other women much. She told the Guardian in 2003 that she got through her schooldays by ‘the simple expedient of contempt. You just decide to despise it all.’ But again, she bridles when I quote it, and says she was elected head girl by the other pupils which she would not have been if she despised them. ‘No. I tell you what it might have been. I have a huge contempt for women who act differently when men are around, and when I was sixteen or seventeen I did look down on girls who I knew to be sharp and clever but who changed their personality when some spotty youth hoved into view, and it may be that I was saying something like that.’
But would she accept the idea that, in her novels, she’s generally kinder towards men than women? I wondered if perhaps it was because she was an older sister to two younger brothers? She concedes that there might be something in this and that many of her friends tend to be older sisters of younger brothers. ‘They’re very bossy! And very responsible. With younger brothers, you feel it’s your job to do the worrying and make the world right for them. I always, from the moment the first one was born, loved my brothers intensely and I never saw them in any way as rivals because they were just so young. I think maybe if I am easier on men than women, that’s probably the reason but to be honest, it’s not because I don’t like women, it’s because I like men!’
But she can be very fierce towards women who annoy her (which I think by now might include me). I remember Sam Leith who was then the literary e
ditor of the Telegraph telling me he was shocked by the ferocity with which she denounced an author called Judith Kelly. Kelly published a misery memoir called Rock Me Gently in 2005 which purported to be an account of her traumatic childhood in a Roman Catholic orphanage. Hilary Mantel went on the warpath when she read it and found that whole chunks were lifted from her novel Fludd and that other bits were stolen from Antonia White’s Frost in May, and even from Jane Eyre. ‘That was the most shocking thing. I was aghast that a book could get through without anyone recognising a passage of Jane Eyre. So I made a dossier – I called it my “Quarrelling Kit” – with all the passages that came from other authors. I wanted an explanation. I wanted the publishers, Bloomsbury, to stop prevaricating and pull the book. But they decided to brazen it out. The woman herself pleaded naivety – I don’t think so!’
She is fierce again when I ask if she might return to Catholicism, if she might call for a priest on her deathbed? ‘No. I might very well call for a Church of England vicar, but I would not call for a Catholic priest. I’m one of nature’s Protestants, Lynn; I should never have been brought up as a Catholic. I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.’ That’s quite strong – does she mean because of all the paedophile revelations? ‘Yes – the fact that it could happen, the extent of the denial, the cover-up, the hypocrisy, the cruelty. When I was a child I wondered why priests and nuns were not nicer people. I thought that they were among the worst people I knew. But in a cold-blooded way, as a writer I’ve had full value from Catholicism – I can say that. It’s a great training in doubleness – this looks like bread but it is actually a man’s body, this looks like wine but it’s actually blood. And that’s very much a writer’s way of thinking – she comes in and says good morning, but she means: Damn you to hell!’
Our lunch is over and Mantel walks painfully up the stairs to see me out. She is as she says ‘a civil person’ and she civilly signs my copy of Bring Up the Bodies and thanks me for our ‘nice chat’. But I can’t help wondering if she is really thinking: Damn you to hell! She wrote in her memoirs: ‘My convent years left me a legacy: a nervous politeness, an appearance of feminine timidity that will probably stand me in good stead if I am ever on trial for murder.’ I doubt it will come to that but don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating Hilary Mantel. This animal bites.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Artists
I’m often asked whether I choose my own subjects for interview, or whether they are chosen for me. Generally, I prefer the latter – partly because it often produces names I would never have thought of (sometimes would never have heard of) but also because it spares me the responsibility of ‘backing’ my choice. I can best explain this by giving an example. At some point in the early Noughties I got hooked on Meat Loaf and could never drive anywhere without playing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’. (It’s a particularly good song for driving to.) I loved his voice mainly, but also the fact that he was middle-aged, dishevelled, hugely overweight – i.e. not your run-of-the-mill pop star. So next time we had an ideas meeting at the Observer (always a rather movable feast) I said I’d like to interview Meat Loaf. A dozen startled faces turned to me, and one eventually voiced the question that was obviously hovering on all their lips, ‘Why?’ He didn’t even have a new record out. But I spieled away about how he was such a wonderful singer, and such a fascinating man. This was my mistake.
The editor reluctantly agreed to let me interview Meat Loaf next time he was performing in London – he was not deemed worthy of an air ticket – and a meeting was eventually arranged at his hotel, the Royal Garden in Kensington. I was shocked by how old and tired he seemed – and indeed he collapsed on stage a few weeks later – but also how disagreeable. On stage and disc, he seemed to have a wonderful exuberance, but the man I met was a grumpy old codger who barely said hello before launching into a great tirade about the iniquities of British journalists and how they always get their facts wrong. As I wrote at the time, ‘I expected a fearless Bat out of Hell, and found, I thought, a rather timid soul, full of worries and grumbles and actorish concerns about his “image”.’ I made him as interesting as I could in the article (though more by relying on his autobiography than anything he said to me) but it was uphill work, and felt vaguely dishonest. Which is why, ever since, I have been wary of ‘pitching’ my own choices in case I end up with another Meat Loaf.
However, having said that, there is an exception to my no-pitching rule. I am always clamouring to interview artists at any opportunity. So whenever I have built up a head of credit by interviewing half a dozen actors on the trot (editors always want actors, the bane of my life), I pipe up and say time for an artist now. My reasons are several. First, I don’t think artists get nearly enough media coverage. They get more now than they did twenty years ago, but even so if you count the column inches devoted to, say, Lucian Freud over his entire lifetime versus the column inches devoted to, say, Victoria Beckham or even (God help us) Liz Hurley, you will find that Freud counts as practically unknown. And yet who will be of more interest in fifty years’ time?
Second, I love looking at art. My husband was an artist and although I have absolutely no artistic talent myself (I managed to fail art O level) I have always enjoyed going to art galleries and exhibitions. Even in my teens, long before I met David, I would head for the Tate or the National Gallery whenever I had a free Sunday. In those days I loved the Pre-Raphaelites in the Tate and the Veroneses in the National Gallery. David had to spend years educating me and I still haven’t really seen the point of Poussin – but going to galleries together became one of our strongest bonds. He would have been amazed (and rather shocked) to learn that I was a Turner Prize judge in 2006 but if I do know anything about art it is all thanks to him.
Thirdly, I like artists. It is quite rare for me to meet one I don’t like. And, for interviewing purposes, I like the fact that they don’t come laden with PRs – you can usually approach them directly or through their gallery and nobody sits in on the interview to make sure they don’t say anything that might damage their image. Artists don’t have images, thank God. And most of them drink and smoke and give good parties so being around them is fun. My only complaint is that they keep difficult hours – all their best partying is done after midnight so I have to listen to a lot of ‘Oh you should have come on to Vanda’s – that was a really great party, we didn’t finish till dawn.’ I wish I’d discovered art parties when I was young and able to dance all night but nowadays I am a slave to bedtime. Apparently if you take cocaine you can stay awake much longer, but I feel I’m a bit old now to embark on cocaine.
There was no question of interviewing artists when I was at the Sunday Express in the 1980s. Our readers were determinedly philistine and still made jokes about Picassos with two noses, or Henry Moores with holes in them. Rolf Harris was probably the only artist they approved of. But when I moved to the Independent on Sunday in 1990, it was possible to slip the occasional artist into the celebrity mix. I started with Gilbert and George who gave their usual fine performance and from then on I interviewed two or three artists a year, starting with the obvious ones like David Hockney, but moving on to less obvious ones like Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Gillian Ayres became a good friend – but I blame her for the fact that I’m still smoking. I actually gave up for two months a few years ago, with the help of a wonder drug called Champix, but then I had lunch with Gillian at the River Café. As soon as we’d ordered our meal she said, ‘Time for a fag,’ and started tottering painfully (she was in her late seventies) towards the door. It was snowing so fiercely outside you couldn’t see more than a yard but the waiters, obviously used to Gillian, assembled a ring of patio heaters round us, and Gillian lit up. It was not the moment to say, ‘I’ve stopped,’ so I took a cigarette and that was the end of my smoking cure.
Until the mid-1990s I interviewed a rather random selection of artists, but then the YBAs came al
ong and seized the media’s attention including mine. Damien Hirst was the first and I interviewed him (not very well) just after he won the Turner Prize. I also interviewed Rachel Whiteread and Sarah Lucas and the Chapman Brothers early in their careers, before the public knew much about them. They were all quite hard work. Jake Chapman threatened to kill me because I asked Dinos about his deformed hand. He thought it was ‘rude’ to discuss it – this from a man who was busy sticking phalluses on children’s faces, and modelling scenes of Nazi atrocities.
I loved Sarah Lucas from the start – I wrote that ‘I have never so much since school wanted to call someone my friend’ – but also found her difficult because (like most artists) she refuses to explain her work. She will talk about how something is made (e.g., by frying two eggs and placing them with a kebab on a rickety old table) and even let me watch but not about its meaning. I once spent two hours watching her stick Marlboro Light cigarettes on to a blown-up yellow lifejacket. I could see it was extraordinarily painstaking work, which banished for ever the idea that her art is ‘just thrown together’, but when I asked why, she only murmured something about the cigarettes representing self-destruction and the lifejacket a false hope of salvation. As an interview, it lacked a certain something. But then her gallerist, lovely lovely Sadie Coles, said that Sarah was doing a show at the Cologne Art Fair and I should come over and help. I’d never been to Cologne so I thought: Why not? Sadie rang and asked me to pick up a couple of salamis at the airport. What sort? I asked. ‘The size of a very big penis,’ she instructed.
I arrived at the show shortly before it opened, when Sadie was unpacking shopping bags, and Sarah was busy tying two fried eggs on to a coat hanger. She said that getting the fried eggs right had been a nightmare – she’d thought the hotel chef could do them but he never got them hard enough. There was very little visible art on show – a pair of concrete boots, a sagging sofa with two pumpkins inserted at breast-height, and some beer cans stuck together to look like a penis and balls. Sarah told me that my job would be drinking lots of beer to provide more beer cans. I thought this was a bit unnecessary but then the doors opened and dozens of visitors hurtled towards our stand and started queuing to buy beer-can penises at 999 D-Marks (about £330) a pop. I was astonished. I was also very quickly drunk, trying to consume enough beer to keep up with demand. Sadie had banknotes spilling out of every pocket and reckoned she took about £50,000 on the day.