Little miss neverwell triumphs

Giving Up the Ghost

A Memoir Hilary Mantel

Henry Holt & Co., $23, 240 pp.

Graham Greene was of the opinion that "the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share." He often hinted that his own oeuvre was a case in point, and its stylistic and thematic consistency lends plausibility to the idea. One would hesitate to make the same inference from Hilary Mantel's novels because they are so various in form: comic, fantastic, soberly realistic, contemporary, and historical by turn. Of course one senses autobiographical sources--a working-class Catholic childhood in Fludd, for instance, or the alienating confinement of an expat wife's existence in Saudi Arabia in Eight Months in Ghazzah Street--but it is hard to believe that the same author wrote both of those fine but very different books.

In short there has always been something of an enigma about the person behind Hilary Mantel's novels, as if each of them were a mask held up to disguise herself in a new and unpredictable way. Now she has dropped or discarded the masks of fiction by writing an autobiographical memoir, focusing particularly on her childhood. The story she tells is fascinating, but it interests us on its own terms rather than as a key to her novels--indeed there have been so many episodes of trauma, anxiety, and physical suffering in her life that one might have expected it would produce a body of work much bleaker and more introspective than hers actually is.

There is a good deal of time-shifting in the narrative, which allows more variation of emphasis than in a conventional autobiography. It is framed by an account of the author and her husband moving house, or houses, in the year 2000 (selling a weekend cottage and a gimcrack "executive home" in order to buy an apartment with its own clock tower in a converted Victorian lunatic asylum) which includes retrospective references to other episodes in adult life. We learn for instance that the author accompanied her geologist husband to Africa, and later to Saudi Arabia, and in between married him a second time, after a two-year separation. "It seemed that what I had left, with my ex-husband, was more than most people started with. So we got married again." That's all we get to know about the marital breach, and it's typical of the fragmentary, allusive, cryptic style of much of the narrative. But two aspects of her life are treated cohesively and in detail: her childhood, and the illness which ultimately prevented her from bearing children herself.

Hilary Mantel was born in 1952 and brought up in an unpicturesque village in Derbyshire, in the northwest of England. The family, of Irish immigrant stock, was respectable but poor, their house a terraced "back-to-back" with no bathroom. Her father, Henry, commuted to Manchester to some unspecified job. Her maternal grandfather, whom she loved, was a railwayman. As a child, he had passed the exam for entrance to a grammar school, but his parents couldn't afford the uniform. Her grandparents lived next door with her grandmother's sister. The infant Hilary liked this extended family, pestering them to read her stories, especially stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. She lived a vivid inner life of fantasy and adventure, confident that in due course she would turn into a boy and be able to act out the stories.

School--a Catholic primary school ruled over by a formidable nun called Sister Malachy--was a great disappointment, the "Palace of Silly Questions" ("Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?" demands the teacher). Her fellow pupils "went around with their mouths hanging open and their noses running, with silver trails from nostril to top lip ... their bleary eyes revolving anywhere but where they should look." There are many brilliant evocations, as vivid as they are funny, of this place. "The lights burned all day in Hadfield winters, the great radiators puffed and fumed and stank, the odor of Wellington boots and nit lotion and nun became so thick you felt that you could graze it with your knuckles."

"Though my early memories are patchy," Mantel writes, "I think they are not, or not entirely, a confabulation." The qualification is important. Her powers of recall are obviously remarkable, but sometimes she reads an adult awareness into the vague intimations of the young child. For instance, at the age of four, looking up at her parents talking, "A thought comes to me, so swift and strange that it feels like the first thought that I have ever had .... The thought is this: that I stop them from being happy ... without me they would have a chance in life." It is possible for a child of four to sense some parental unhappiness and blame herself for it, but not, surely, to have a concept like "a chance in life."

This scene presages a family crisis which throws a dark shadow over the child's existence. They move abruptly away from the cosy terrace of Bankbottom to a bigger but less comfortable house up the hill. A man called Jack moves in with them and sleeps with Hilary's mother, while her father occupies another bedroom. Hilary, now six or seven, doesn't understand what is going on, but realizes something is seriously wrong. "We are talked about in the street. Some rules have been broken." The grandparents are grimly disapproving. Her mother stops going to Mass. Eventually Henry moves out of the house, and Jack becomes Hilary's stepfather. She never sees her father again. If in later life she was ever given an explanation of this extraordinary affaire, she does not pass it on to the reader: all the emphasis is on the child's bafflement and undefined shame. At around this time, while playing in the backyard, she is suddenly stricken by the sense of an evil presence somewhere in the surrounding scrub. "Something intangible had come for me, to try its luck: some formless, borderless evil, that came to try to make me despair." Although she had a Catholic education, and became head girl of her convent high school, she says she never believed in an omnipotent God after that experience.

You might think that there was enough trauma here to keep a psychiatrist busy for years sorting out the consequences, but in fact it was physical, not mental illness that dominated Mantel's later life. She was always a sickly child, subject to recurrent mysterious aches and pains and fainting fits--called "Little Miss Neverwell" by the family doctor, who suspected her of malingering. As a college student and young wife her symptoms got much worse, and she survived on dangerous quantities of painkillers. Ineffectual physicians referred her to a psychiatrist who attributed her symptoms to "stress, caused by over-ambition. This was a female complaint, one which people believed in, in those years, just as the Greeks believed that women were made ill by their wombs cutting loose and wandering about their bodies." We smile at this quaint belief, while using the Greek word for womb to refer to the psychosomatic disorder of "hysteria." In due course Mantel discovered that the ancient Greeks weren't so far off the mark. By her own research she diagnosed her illness as endometriosis, a condition in which cells that belong to the lining of the womb get into other parts of the body, where they bleed and cause the build-up of scar tissue which gets pinched in joints and puts pressure on nerves. "Lately I had known days of my life when everything hurt, everything from my collarbone down to my knees."

The diagnosis was confirmed but her condition was so advanced that the only viable treatment was a hysterectomy, which meant she could never have children. Their hypothetical souls haunt her thoughts like unwritten stories. The post-operation hormone treatment made her put on weight at an alarming, almost surreal rate, and this once slim, even skinny woman now sees herself reflected in others' eyes as a stereotypical fat lady. She wonders why she put up with the indifference and incompetence of the medical profession for so long and attributes it in part to the emphasis on mortification in her upbringing. "I was brought up as a Catholic and it's not easy to throw over the faith. I believed that, short of crucifixion, you shouldn't really complain."

These pages make painful reading, rendered tolerable only by the author's irrepressible sense of humor and lack of self-pity. Giving Up the Ghost is not so much a work of revelation as of self-discovery. "I am writing," she says towards the end of the book, "in order to take charge of the story of my childhood and my childlessness; and in order to locate myself, if not within a body, then in the narrow space between one letter and the next, between the lines where the ghosts of meaning are .... I have been so mauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin and so fat, that I sometimes feel that each morning it is necessary to write myself into being." She has succeeded unforgettably in this book.

David Lodge has just published his latest novel, Author, Author (Viking).

COPYRIGHT 2004 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group