There is a
growing body of opinion, which is gaining momentum in the right wing press,
that the double Booker Prize winning novelist, Hilary Mantel, has gone bonkers.
There are those who are prepared to concede—never let it be said that the right
wingers cannot be reasonable—that Mantel might still have some links with
reality, but (imagine them nodding their heads sadly) the connection is faulty.
Mental illness can strike anyone, and being a talented artist does not make you
immune from succumbing (it’s a strange word, succumbing; it denotes that it is
somehow the fault of the succumbee that they have succumbed, say, to cancer or
to alcoholism; and only if they had the strength of the character, more will
power, they would have seen the threat off) to mental conditions. Indeed some
might argue that being a genius might even make you vulnerable to losing your
mind. It is always sad when a once talented artist’s once talented mind
disintegrates into lunacy, but these things happen. When the Swiss psychoanalyst
Carl Jung analysed James Joyce’s daughter when she was beginning to lose her
marbles, Jung felt compelled to diagnose schizophrenia in not just her but also
in her father. There was that mathematician—I forget his name; you know whom I
mean; the one on whose life the Oscar winning film Beautiful Mind was
based—who was an absolute genius and also a schizophrenic. Perhaps these things
are related. (I should point out that the reverse is not necessarily true: just
because you are a schizophrenic, you are not a genius.)
Is Hilary
Mantel a genius? I think she is. And I say this not having read either of her
Booker winning novels. A friend of mine told me that Wold Hall, Mantel’s 2009
Booker winner, was one of the worst books she had ever read. (My friend, that
is, not Mantel. I do not know what Mantel thought of her own novel, but I doubt
very much if she thinks it is one of the worst novels she has read, although I
have also read that many authors choose not to read their own novels; so I
don’t know.) She could not go beyond the first ten pages, apparently, my friend.
However, since my friend’s literary appetite is more than adequately assuaged
by the free Waitrose kitchen magazine, I am not sure that her withering verdict
of Wolf
Hall is necessarily a reflection on the quality of Mantel’s novel. Why
do I think Mantel is a genius? I have based my verdict on two (non-Booker
winning) novels of Mantel I have read, both of which, I thought, were superb.
So we agree
that Mantel is a genius. This, we also agree, makes her more vulnerable to
developing a mental illness than Mr. Shabuddhin, who owns a corner-shop round
the corner from my flat. Mr. Shah (as he is known in the area) has not written
any book to the best of my knowledge. He once told me that he had never read a
book in his life, as he could not see the point, and considered the activity to
be a waste of his time which he would rather spend in his shop. (Although I
have not directly asked him, I don’t think Mr. Shah would consider himself a
genius. While there are downsides of not being a genius, if it protects you
from going mad, it has got to be regarded as a plus.)
In addition to Mantel’s (deserving) claim to
being a genius, are there any other vulnerability factors that make Mantel more
prone—than Mr.Shahabuddhin—to succumbing to mental illness? I have heard that
those who go doolally are frequently remembered by their friends as always
being a bit weird. Is Mantel weird? She might be. I have read a non-fiction
book of Mantel entitled Giving Up the Ghost , which I thought
was very readable; but I also remember thinking, when I finished it, that, no
offence, but the woman was a bit weird. (Mantel describes in the book a
childhood experience—which has stayed with her all her life—when she
encountered evil in the back-garden of her house; and she is not talking
metaphorically).
Who has
diagnosed mental illness in Hilary Mantel? A chap called Timothy Bell—who is a
Lord—is convinced that Mantel is a dangerous lunatic. Lord Bell—a friend and a
former PR advisor to Margaret Thatcher, according to Independent (and to a number
of disgraced celebrities, dodgy companies and third world dictators, according
to another article in the Guardian) thinks
that Mantel should (a) be investigated by the police and (b) see a therapist.
Why is Lord Bell moved to suggest such drastic measures? Lord Bell’s
(unsolicited) advice to the police (that they should investigate Mantel) and to
Mantel (that she should see a therapist) is in response to a short story Mantel
published on line in the Guardian this
month, entitled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, which is one of the
short-stories which will be published in a compilation at the end of the month
(also titled The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher). The short story
depicts a scene in which a Scouser (a bit of a regional stereotype here; why
couldn’t the would-be assassin be from Berkshire?) enters the house of an
ordinary woman whose kitchen window looks on to the back-garden of the hospital
where Thatcher has come for a minor procedure on her eye. In an interview given
to the Guardian Mantel admitted that
she had a “boiling distaste” for Thatcher. The kernel of the story, she also
revealed, occurred to her more than thirty years ago when she spotted an
unguarded Margaret Thatcher from a window in Windsor and apparently thought
that if she (Mantel) were someone else she (Thatcher) would be dead. (In other
words Mantel lacked the guts to kill Thatcher or, like Gandhi, decided that
violence does not solve anything.) So Thatcher survived (only to succumb to
Alzheimer’s decades later, but not before she had brought ruination on working
class communities); but it did not stop Mantel from fantasizing about murdering
Thatcher, and she decided to sublimate her murderous instinct through the
creative avenue open to her. She wrote a story. Mantel said that it took her
more than thirty years to complete the story, a case of a very long writer’s
block, although we can’t really say that, seeing as the woman published several
novels (two of which went on to win the Booker) and non-fiction work in the
intervening decades while she was wrestling with the technicalities of the story.
The right
wing, Tory-loving, press has gone nuts after the Guardian published the story. Lord Bell felt—and he should
know—that the story was “unquestionably in bad taste”. Another Tory MP, Nadine Doris—who I believe
has written a novel which she is flogging for 77 p or some such price on Amazon
Kindle—is “gutted” and “shocked”. Why?
Because the publication of Mantel’s short story is so close to Thatcher’s
death. Thatcher, Doris reminds Mantel, still has a living family. Doris
concludes—to make this issue absolutely clear—that Mantel’s story has a
character, Thatcher, whose demise is so recent.
(Would Doris have minded had Mantel waited for ten more years to publish
this story? She had waited for thirty years already; would ten more years have
been such a disaster?) Another Tory MP, someone called Stewart Jackson, is
convinced that Mantel is a weirdo and her “death story” is “sick and deranged”.
A Conservative activist called Tim Montgomery is disappointed that the Guardian chose to promote Mantel’s
story full of hateful words about Mrs. Thatcher, his hero.
Is writing
a short story about a recently diseased former prime minister of the country
who—shall we say?—a divisive figure in the history of twentieth century British
politics, in which the author depicts a scenario of the impending assassination
of the said prime-minister suggestive of a mental illness in the author? Is it
a criminal act? That depends, one would assume, on what is written. I read the
short-story on line. Now I am no psychiatrist; neither am I columnist in a
right wing, Labour-bashing broadsheet; nor a champagne swigging,
minority-hating, homophobic Tory supporter; but Mantel’s short story struck me
as a very well written piece with glimpses of Mantel’s trade-mark dark humour.
You might accuse Mantel of bad taste or of sick mind but not of a criminal act
that would have police arrive at your doorsteps with a search warrant for your
mind, or social workers and psychiatrists wanting to put you on a community
order unless you accepted antipsychotics. Mantel may be ideologically diseased
and suffering from incurable hatred of Maggie Thatcher on the dubious grounds
that Thatcher was a disaster for the country, but mad and a criminal?
Everybody
has a good and bad side. However, when one is judging a dead person, I see no
good reason why only the best self-manifestations of the diseased should be the
basis of the final judgement.
I am
currently in the midst of writing a couple of short stories. The premise of the
first one is as follows: David Cameron gets kidnapped by an army of cockroaches
which tickles his privates with their hairy legs and giant antennae until he
either agrees to recommend the cockroach-chief as the next leader of the Tory
party, or dies of laughter-induced exhaustion. The second one, which is still in the conception
phase, is an erotic fantasy revolving around the love affair between Teresa May
and a giant cucumber. However, I am
worried now. I should perhaps wait until Cameron and May are six feet under for twenty years before I attempt to publish it.
