Conversing with the 'restless dead' – a posthumous collection of Hilary Mantel's writing illuminates her singular literary achievement

Hilary Mantel after winning the Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall, October 2009. Alastair Grant/AAP

Read more: Hilary Mantel was one of the great voices of historical fiction – and so much more

A celebration

A Memoir of My Former Self is a selection of Mantel’s writings by Nicholas Pearson, her book editor of two decades. To make his selection, Pearson read all of Mantel’s work for newspapers and periodicals, an experience he describes as “a revelation”.

Presented by its publisher as “a celebration of one of Britain’s greatest contemporary writers”, the book appears roughly a year after Mantel’s death as a salve to the many readers saddened that she will write no more. I feel confident Mantel would fully and deeply understand this response to the news of her death. I think, too, that she would appreciate my choice of tense here. In her own words, her “concern as a writer is with memory, personal and collective: with the restless dead asserting their claims”.

The book is published by Hachette’s literary imprint, John Murray, for which Pearson began working as Publishing Director in January 2023, around six months after he was let go by Mantel’s longtime publisher Fourth Estate. Mantel was reportedly “furious” about Pearson’s departure. There is thus the potential to read this book as a fascinating artefact of publishing history in the making.

Mantel frequently described the work of writing as a type of congress with “ghosts”, a description that extends to Pearson’s anthology. “You talk to the dead one way or another,” she observed, “and you make it pay.”

There are ghosts asserting their claims everywhere in this book, and throughout Mantel’s oeuvre, including the ghost of the author herself. “As soon as you sit before the screen,” she wrote, “you start haunting yourself.”

Many of the pieces were written by Mantel to “subsidise, financially, the slow process of art”, to support her true calling as a novelist. Reading the collection’s first essay, On the One Hand, I imagined the ghost of Mantel finding humour in the timing of this book’s release for Christmas, the season when the inseparability of art and commerce is most undeniable. “For many imaginative writers,” she insists,

working for the press is a fact of their life. But it’s best not to like it too much.

The goal and passion of the novelist, as Mantel presents it, is not to generate the columns, reviews and occasional lectures selected for A Memoir of My Former Self, but to produce a “couture response – lovingly tailored, personal, an unmistakable one-off”.

I am therefore reading with the grain when I write that, while I liked this book, I did not like it too much.

The shock of personal connection

I liked this book most for Mantel’s reflections on the distinctive sensibility and habits of readers and writers. I disliked this book most for its flagrant literary exceptionalism, which is communicated through Mantel’s repeated use of “ink” as a metaphor to communicate her essential writerly identity. She is a person for whom “ink is a generative fluid”. A Memoir of My Former Self will be affirming for people seeking endorsement that, as avid readers of high-shelf literature, they are on the better side of human history and culture. Nevertheless, there were many times when I felt that delicious shock of personal (almost too personal) connection with the writer that Mantel herself describes. It was as though the “author leaned out of the text and touched my arm”. In 2015, reading Hilary Mantel was my work for several months. I read every one of her books, in the order of their publication, for my essay Hilary Mantel: Raising the Dead, Speaking the Truth, published in James Acheson’s collection The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000. I thus felt directly addressed when Mantel, meeting an “amiable man” who remarks that she seems “to have plenty of energy”, asks “what are authors to academics, except more work?” For avid readers, the potential for such moments of connection is abundant. Mantel recalls a time in her life when she was “unable to walk past a bookshop without going in”. She confesses that she once stole a book from her school library that had been “lying unappreciated on the shelves” since its publication. She claims she is “addicted to the physical act of reading”. The book is subtitled “A Life in Writing” and Pearson concludes his short introduction with the claim, What emerges is a portrait of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own words, “messages from people I used to be”. What it means to succeed or to fail as a writer is the unifying question of A Memoir of My Former Self, but for readers new to Mantel this book is not the place to start considering her success. Instead, begin with Wolf Hall, the novel that explains why she was the first living writer to have her portrait commissioned by the British Library. For readers who read and loved the Cromwell trilogy, I would recommend her 2005 novel Beyond Black or her 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost (in that order), both of which connect deeply with the Cromwell books and may well inspire you to reread them rather than pick up this volume. Many of the pieces gathered here – articles from the Guardian, film reviews from the Spectator, the 2017 Reith Lectures – are freely available online. Charting your own journey through Mantel’s short-form writings might be a better route to the “revelation” Pearson experienced in making this volume. There is, for example, a special pleasure in listening to the Reith Lectures, recorded live in Manchester and available to stream from the BBC. Mantel’s breathy voice, simultaneously tremulous and supremely confident, gives the lectures a spectral quality they lack on the page. Having read the 15 film reviews included, Mantel may now be my favourite film critic, and I am impatient to dig into the Spectator archive to read more. But I wish that I had found more coherence in Pearson’s organisation of this book. Perhaps I am simply missing the powerfully controlled authorial voice of Mantel’s books, which no posthumous selection can achieve. It seems fitting to give the last word here to Mantel’s Cromwell, from the final pages of Wolf Hall: It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Authors: Lisa Fletcher, Professor, University of Tasmania

Read more https://theconversation.com/conversing-with-the-restless-dead-a-posthumous-collection-of-hilary-mantels-writing-illuminates-her-singular-literary-achievement-216910

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