The other day, I read Hilary Mantel’s diary of the time she spent in hospital fighting a life-threatening illness. That she was ill and in hospital is factually true, of course. Even so, I had to suppress a strange sense of incredulity. I ran daily that summer listening to Wolf Hall on my headphones. As I run now, wrapped warmer, snatches of its prose still scarf the statue men on the beach at Crosby, bracelet a particular twist of ankle, wrap the wheels of an upturned bin in a pond. It seems impossible that those words, so muscular and confident, coexisted with their author’s faltering
I’ve always been a little confused by the reality of writers. They are treacherous, it seems to me, in the way they sneak up on you and die, just as you are discovering the life in their words. That seems just wrong, as if the words should be enough of an anchor to keep anyone breathing. As if writing as immortality were literally as well as literarily true. Of course I know that this is not the case, and I keep my eyes open for clues. Updike’s hospital poems in the New Yorker, an essay by Tony Judt about the power of words written after he’d been robbed of the power of utterance. And then comes that note in a newsreader’s voice when he begins a sentence with an author’s name, so that it becomes a curtain between us and a world containing one fewer writer. They utter the name, and then they pause. The author, so and so, most famous for such and such has.. what? Won a prize? Run a marathon? Punched a flight attendant? No, of course not, though for just that fraction of a second anything might be true. Then they continue. He’s only gone and died.
I find myself looking up authors I haven’t heard from for a while. b. 1948. Good, no d. Let there be no d. I even wrote to an author once when I found no record of her status. She replied sweetly, unaware that I was only checking she was still breathing. Then of course I went and spoiled it all by describing the premise of my work in progress to her.
I always feel slightly guilty when I remember a living writer I’ve neglected recently, as if they’ve only survived despite my lack of attention. If I now hold on tighter to them, perhaps that will be more of an anchor than words.
Religious or not, I guess we’re wired for magical thinking. Either wired, or I’m just weird.</p>
Hilary Mantel, of course, is very much alive.
