by David Holland
I am still coming to terms with the fact that it’s twelve months since Hilary died so suddenly a year ago on September 22, 2022. I’m also pleased I decided to press on and organise the Wolf Hall Weekend (June 22-23, 2024) in her honour.
I have been overwhelmed by the support we have received from all who knew her, and those who never met the literary genius that was Hilary. She made her mark, it seems, not only because of her skill as a writer, but also because of her great generosity of spirit.
On this first anniversary of her death, I’d like to share some of her own words about her life as a writer.
‘I started writing in earnest at 22. I thought: I am a wreck and have no money and am in poor health – and so how am I going to impose myself on the world? I was seethingly ambitious, I don’t make any secret of that. I needed to be somebody. The only way I could think of was by writing. Because all you need is paper and pencil and you can do it horizontal. But it was never an escape, nor was it the place I was running to – because it wasn’t a refuge – but it was what enabled me, it was my source of power and it was all I’d got and it was the cheapest source of power. Words are free. And when I think: what do I retain from the old days? It’s a turn of phrase.’ – Interviewed in the Observer in 2003.
In the above comments we can see how Hilary was unafraid to make herself vulnerable. Her honesty was incisive and for that reason, although we may never have met her, we feel as if we know her.
And then this,
‘Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshal your resources, just get on with it. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. I don’t write in sequence. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. At the end, I see what the plan was.’
Hilary wrote approximately 2,000 pages across the entire Wolf Hall Trilogy; the third book, The Mirror and The Light, almost equaling the first two in length. This is what she had to say on the subject of the scene she wrote on the topic of Cromwell’s execution – her last published words of fiction:
‘I worked on it very early. Within, I would say, four weeks of beginning Wolf Hall I had begun to draft the final scenes. I wanted to know where we were going and so when I actually came to write it last year, I didn’t have to undergo the emotional process. I was protected from the shock of it.
‘It’s quite seldom that as a writer I’ve found you know when you’re going to finish your book. But in this instance, I knew I had the last section to write, “Mirror and Light.” And once I’d written “Mirror,” I knew that “Light” would be less than one day’s work. So I woke up that morning knowing I was going to finish my book and kill my character, and I set off with a great sense of purpose to the place where I write.
I thought, How long is this going to take? I’ll be finished midafternoon, and I was finished by half past two, but then I thought, What kind of time is this to finish work, you can’t finish work at half past two? [Laughs.] So I immediately started to play the tidying-up exercise, and started filing, and putting my drafts into place, and packing papers away and so on. It was about two hours after that, I thought, Actually I think you could have the rest of the day off, if you wanted to!’ – Interviewed by Hilary Kelly for NewYork Vulture in 2022.
Pre-order the new book – ‘A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing’ by Hilary Mantel (Available 19 Oct. 2023): https://amzn.to/3LQ06Z1