Book: A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF: A LIFE IN WRITING
Author: Hilary Mantel
Published by: John Murray
Price: Rs 899
If a reader approaches this book with the expectation that it is a ‘memoir’ along the lines of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, they are in for a surprise. This posthumous publication is not a memoir in any conventional sense of the term; it is a selection of Mantel’s journalistic writings edited and arranged by her long-term editor, Nicholas Pearson. Divided into six sections, the book covers three decades worth of book reviews, occasional pieces, and film reviews published in The Spectator, The Guardian, and The New York Review of Books amongst others; the fourth section comprises the BBC Reith Lectures. The best description of the collection comes from the editor himself — “… a patchwork of a life revealing itself.”
The essays are not organised chronologically; still there are tenuous, almost gossamer-thin, connections between one piece and the next. So slight are these connections that it seems like a challenge is being thrown at the readers to establish them and brood upon the logic behind the arrangement of the pieces. But what remains constant is a recurrence of certain themes, themes that have haunted Mantel’s other writings as well. One of the overarching themes is the relationship between the past and the present, the palimpsest of history that all of us bear in our psyche and is often inscribed on our bodies. Her two other preoccupations are the lives, literary outputs, and reputations of women writers — be it Jane Austen or Rebecca West — and the very materiality of the act of writing itself, the process of putting pen to paper, or typing out words on a keyboard, till a story takes — or fails to take — the desired shape.
The range of her essays is astonishing, from her battle with endometriosis which left her “an unwilling stranger in [her] own body”, to Princess Diana’s carefully curated self-image, from Cardinal Wolsey to perfumes, she touches upon a wide gamut of topics with characteristic verve. What the essays also foreground is Mantel’s wry, and sometimes devastating, sense of humour. Her review of Babette’s Feast and Barfly are cases in point. What also shines through is her complete nonchalance towards current trends of political correctness: Mantel found her four-year sojourn in Saudi Arabia claustrophobic and arid and she does not try to sugarcoat her experiences; she reveals her dislike for Donald Trump in equally powerful and visceral terms.
Admirers of Mantel’s historical fiction — not only the Wolf Hall trilogy but also her other works like A Place of Greater Safety or The Giant, O’Brien — will get a glimpse into her process of writing, of immersing herself in the lives and the actions of personages long dead and gone, and are bound to be impressed by the astuteness of her observations and insights. While writing about the past of England or France, Mantel never loses sight of her working-class Irish lineage, a lineage that she revisits repeatedly in the course of the essays.
While writing about Sybille Bedford, Mantel remarks — “No writer can produce except out of her own experience, however disguised…” It is in this sense only that this book can be termed a ‘memoir’. It does not cater to the biography of facts and dates in an artist’s life. These pieces reveal a dazzling, scintillating mind, witty, incisive, and intensely aware of the shadows of the past that haunt the present and would keep haunting the future. The volume is a must-read for not only admirers of Mantel but also readers who value these qualities in a writer.