A new Hilary Mantel? She died in 2022, so no, and yes, sort of. A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing is a collection of her journalism and essays, and the transcripts of her 2017 Reith Lectures. What it is not is a memoir. It’s an odd choice of a title. Old journalism can quickly become stale, the fusty stuff of yellowed pages and elderly fonts. Some writers, like Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Jenny Diski and Rebecca West, magically retain freshness. So, mostly, does Mantel. Like them, she is idiosyncratic and searingly perceptive. And there is much here that will be fresh, if only due to having been previously read and then forgotten.
She can be entertainingly, witheringly witty. Her essay on perfume, “At First Sniff”, is a delight. She sees no reason why scents can’t be reviewed in the same way as books or film or opera. “Yes, I would argue. One word, for example, would sum up [David] Beckham Signature: Illiterate.” Of Kate Moss’s Velvet Hour she writes: “A medieval theologian, had he possessed one of Kate’s tacky-looking blue flasks, could have used it to describe sin – so warm for the first half hour, and afterwards so banal.”
In her essay on the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, who became a friend, she is vivid and livid. The reason Howard’s books “… are underestimated – let’s be blunt – is that they are by a woman”, and because Howard’s work is about the domestic realm of the well-off. “It is true that her social settings are limited; so are Jane Austen’s.” Howard is one of my favourite writers. I discovered her in a shabby second-hand bookshop in a shelf titled Women Writers: Romance.
Her essay on Rebecca West is incisive about her talent, and her flaws. Howard and West were defined, after their deaths, not by their work but by their sex lives, their failed affairs. The not-very-subtle subtext was that they were, therefore, somehow failures as women.
Her kerfuffle-causing “Royal Bodies”, the 2013 London Review of Books lecture transcript, is not here; it was published in Mantel Pieces, a collection which came out in 2020, so you can understand its absence. But I would have liked to have seen it perform an encore. It might have been interesting, and quite possibly illuminating, to reread it post-furore, now that the furious have moved on and found other things to be furious and offended about. It was her description of Kate Middleton, now Princess of Wales, as “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore” that incurred the ire. That observation reads like a lament to me. And as much a keen observation of us watchers of the royals as it is of her. We define her by what she wears. There’s not a lot she can do about that, other than get around in sackcloth and ashes – and then we would define her by that.
In the concluding essay of the collection, “Touching Hands with The Lost”, first published in 2007, she writes about “afterlives”. That defining princess, Diana, “because she was not an intellectual or analytical woman … was able to present us with a blank slate and present fate with a blank slate. To the public she was entirely a figure of fantasy, and she became a fantasy to herself, representing herself in the last years of her short life as someone with healing powers, like a medieval monarch …”
How dare she criticise the saintly Diana? Is that what she was doing? She is criticising the monarchy, certainly. Still, it is impossible to read this essay and not note the underlying air of sympathy. Who would want to be a fantasy? Who would want to be a blank slate? Faced with a blank slate we, as with Kate, assume a right to project whatever we choose on that slate. In other words, we are complicit.
Mantel knew about complicity, about the workings of royalty. She won the Booker Prize, twice, for two of the novels in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Cromwell was Henry VIII’s minister, confidante and compliant chief fixer, until he had his head chopped off for treason. She knew about how royal women were seen, lauded and paraded, observed in their glory, blank-slated, then disposed of. She brought back to life the long dead in her fiction.
Not all of this collection will be of interest to even the most ardent Mantel enthusiasts. A section consists of old film reviews. Old film reviews are difficult to bring back to life.
The title of that final essay is fitting. The best of this slightly lopsided collection allows us to touch hands, and minds, with Mantel. For the last time? That depends on whatever writing she might have left behind just waiting to be unearthed by her publisher, perhaps from an old chest in her attic.
