Jane Haynes and Hilary Mantel

 

The following text is a literal, although not always literary, transcript of an unrehearsed conversation with Hilary Mantel at Dartington Literary Festival in 2009 on Mind, Memory, Mood and Sleep.

Hilary and I met in 1995 and quickly became friends, bonding over our mututal respect for R.D. Laing. Hilary had been deeply influenced by him during her brief period as a social worker. I had worked as Laing’s personal assistant and helped to produce The Dialects of Liberation congress in 1967 before training to become a Jungian psychoanalyst.

Although we do not discuss R.D. Laing in this conversation, it was this connection that drew us into an immediate friendship when we first met for lunch at the Overseas Club in St. James’s.

Over the years, whether in or out of touch, Hilary was always tucked away inside my mind. Her words woven into the fabric of my being. I am certain she’ll continue to occupy a similar space in the minds of her readers. It fills me with joy to know that her written work will join the immortals on a plinth of a literary Acropolis.

Jane Haynes, 2023

Hilary Mantel: I wonder if you’ve ever contemplated why certain novels are dedicated to certain people. I think, very often, the dedication simply signals family ties and family affection – bonds of gratitude. Sometimes, of course, it signals a working relationship between the writer and the person to whom the book is dedicated to. When I wrote my novel Beyond Black, a very dark comedy about a professional psychic, I dedicated it to Jane because I thought she was, among my friends, the only one strong enough to receive the material in it. This may be a sort of backhanded compliment.
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Jane and I met fourteen years ago, we began talking and we’ve never stopped. This relationship has been extremely thoughtful for me and I’d briefly like to say why. As a novelist, I think people imagine that I live in castles in the air, a sort of fairyland, a dreamlike world, just wafting about, jotting a poetic line here and a poetic line there. Yet, I’m also a historical novelist who puts a great deal of emphasis on the factual basis of my book. At the moment, because of the long project I am involved in, my world is linear and logical. I spend a great deal of time in the heavy work of moving around industrial-sized blocks of facts. In some ways, this chimes in with what is instinctive to me, which is what is my nature; to be cautious, to be slow, to suspend judgement. In a sense, I am hobbled by perfectionism: I’m terrified of making mistakes. This is an admirable quality in a lawyer, but not so admirable in a novelist.
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What I have found when speaking with Jane is that, under her influence, I don’t stop to contemplate what I’m going to say next, I don’t pause to defend my position, I just speak. She has given me the gift of spontaneity. I can make a creative flow, which is very different from some of my other proceedings that are very conscious. She has helped me to open the door to the unconscious, given me permission if you like.
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Since I met Jane, we’ve both written memoirs. Mine is called Giving Up the Ghost. It concentrates on two periods in my life – my early childhood, then later in my twenties and the chain of medical disasters that made me unable to have a child myself. My childhood was filled with family secrets and family shame. There’s something that Jane and I have in common. Jane’s memoir, Who is that Can Tell Me who I Am?, is very far from being a conventional piece of life writing.
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Jane Haynes: I decided to write this memoir ten years before it was published, so by the time I had worked on it and reworked it, I don’t think it was a cathartic task. I think it was much more of an exorcised and disciplined piece of cognition. I started writing Who is it that Can Tell Me who I Am? after my analyst dropped dead unexpectedly. This experience brought to my mind, very clearly, the way in which we have no control over fate. You can be in analysis for years and talk about detachment and separation, and then suddenly someone disappears without any warning at all. My life has been rather full of bolts from the blue.
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Although most of my patients have not actually read this book – some have bought it, some don’t even know it exists, some who bought it said they were going to read it and then didn’t – I think what many of them find consoling is that it’s very rare for any of us to get through our lives without experiencing fate’s unwanted, usually tragic, hand. The book is in many ways a tragic book, but also an optimistic book. Essentially, the propelling thought behind this book was not to pathologise patients; I don’t like to use the word ‘patients’, I prefer to say people. Some people are patients, they are suffering, but other people come into therapy or analysis because they want to understand or undo some of the knots of their lives.
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I often think about Coriolanus; he’s an amazing warrior, but he can’t show his wounds and that’s his downfall. He’s virtually sent into exile. It’s very hard – our bodies as well as our minds have a lot of narcissism and it’s very hard to show your wounds. I suppose the wounds I felt I was showing in this book were healed to some extent but, I thought, in order to ask my patients to talk about their wounds, or to allow me to do that, the place to start was not their pathology – I’m not really interested in pathology – but if there was going to be any pathology, it was going to be my own. And so that’s how the book started.
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HM: Coriolanus was too proud to show his wounds. Which afflicts all of us. What we dread is pity – to be invalidated by other people’s pity. I should explain – I’m not Jane’s patient, in case I’ve given rise to a misapprehension there. Before we met, we’d exchanged huge letters.
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JH: I was a fan. I wrote to Hilary about An Experiment in Love – I just happened to read a piece of that prose. Her publishers had put an extract in The Times. I remember it well. And I read the novel and was absolutely knocked out. I’d never written a fan letter before, or since, but I wrote to Hilary via her publishers and said I was so impressed by her syntax and extraordinary prose.
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HM: After a lot of letter writing, we came to meet. I was so frightened by this meeting as I entertained the most fearful fantasies. For my part, you see, I thought meeting a psychologist, would be a bit like meeting Sherlock Holmes. From your body language, your behaviour, your glances, the expression on your face, I thought she’d be able to read me like an open book – one not written by me but by her. I felt powerless and shy and I thought she would use her secret knowledge to gain mastery over me. And you thought?
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JH: I thought – is this woman going to sit observing all my mannerisms, all my idiosyncrasies? My fantasy was that writers steal bits of us and we don’t know until we see them in their books. I wondered what it might be that Hilary would steal from me. Some writers are professional thieves and I suspected that Hilary was one. In the frontis piece of of her novella, The Giant, is a piece of poetry by George MacBeth.
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HM:

All crib from skulls and bones Who push the pen
Readers crave bodies:
We’re the resurrection men.
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JH: I think Hilary is going to have to admit, that her projection on to me – well, my suspicion was probably more accurate.
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HM: Well yes, I think your fears were more accurate because Jane’s profession of psychotherapy is ethically restrained with scrupulous practices at the heart of it. Writers have absolutely no ethics at all. Nothing constrains us but the laws of libel. You know how Graham Greene spoke of the chip of ice in every writer’s heart. And I have to admit that I do cannibalise people. I very seldomly steal a whole person’s soul, but I do take a little characteristic there and a trick of speech here and roll them up together into one person. It’s a great way of getting revenge, you can be sure. And this has surprised me: people never recognise themselves, of course. If they were capable of recognising themselves in the pages of your book, they wouldn’t go on doing whatever it is they do that made you want them as a character in the first place. In defence of this writer’s ruthlessness, I should say that the person you cannibalise most is yourself. I know how I’ve taken my own life apart, searched it and taken episodes – which at the time seemed unbearable and on the verge of tragedy, manifestations of great pain and internal agony, and I put them on the page for comic effect. So I don’t spare my own experience or my own emotions, I dissect them just as much. But Jane, when I had that projection that you were going to read me – was I being totally naive? Why do people think that is the case with psychologists?
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JH: Well, it’s hard to call Hilary naive, but I would say she was definitely moving in that direction. And, of course, it is a kind of stereotype isn’t it? That shrinks can see inside people. And one thing I am absolutely fascinated by, and I can never decide whether it’s a tragedy or a gift in our human destiny, is that we cannot see into each other’s minds. Our minds are opaque. Of course you can read people’s bodies and sometimes, as people walk in the door, you can smell anxiety, you can smell fear, you cansmell so much about a person if you learn to use all your senses. There are those kinds of things that can be developed, but anyone can do that if they practise. Yet, no one can see into anyone else’s mind.
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One of the things I find a false assumption about my profession, very often expressed, is that because we are trained we can read people’s unconsciouses. That is, sadly, absolutely impossible. As long as the mind is unconscious, it is unconscious. Occasionally, we get given little gifts, when something breaks through – often it is the use of a pronoun. But this idea that we can see each other’s minds? I don’t even really believe in empathy, I believe in sympathy, but the idea that we can enter into someone else’s mind is a rather overblown idea. We can feel for another person, we can be attuned, but we can never know what someone else isfeeling, and with thought it becomes even more complex. Amongst the important things Jung said is that he didn’t rely much on empathy as a tool, the greatest thing that any of us can ever do is respect each other’s difference. I think that’s one of the pitfalls of being a psychotherapist – it’s too easy to think you understand their mind when someone is actually in an entirely different psychic location. Even as I’m talking to you now, I’m fully engaged, I’m listening to Hilary, yet no one has any idea what other discourse is going on in my mind at this precise minute.
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When a patient asks me what I’m feeling, I prefer not to deflect their curiosity by turning it back on to them but try to provide an adequate answer. The majority of patients do not, unprompted, have the confidence to ask such a direct question. In my own analysis, I rarely asked my analyst a direct question, I was always too afraid of rejection, or perhaps too afraid of the honesty of his answer. Sometimes, or very often, I would write to him instead, not expecting a reply. When someone in a session asks you to tell them what you are feeling, it’s a challenge as to a how transparently to respond. Therapists can become unpractised at expressing their spontaneous thoughts and prefer to remain hidden behind their authority. It seems strange – although no stranger than the doctor who refuses on his own behalf the chemotherapy that he provides for his patients – that as a profession we should demand so much spontaneity from our patients and choose a different menu for ourselves. I am bemused by the fact that even people that come into therapy and declare that they know nothing at all about the procedure, arrive with preconceived ideas about what is acceptable, the rules of the game. One rule that every new patient intuitively seems to know about therapy: don’t ask any personal questions because therapists don’t answer questions. It’s true that among many psychoanalytic therapists the emphasis is usually on interpreting why the person asked the question. One result of this technique is that the compliant patient, who is easy to please, conveniently learns not to ask any more awkward questions. Question-asking is a primary developmental route by which children, and even King Lear as he became less inflated, acquired vital knowledge that may help to lead to wisdom and respect.
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HM: This stereotype of the silent therapist – why did anyone ever imagine that sitting in silence while the patient spoke into a void was a valid therapy technique? Surely the essence of the therapeutic process is being listened to?
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JH: I think the therapeutic process is about being listened to in a different kind of way: in being listened to, in being mirrored, one has to learn to listen to one’s own inner voice. The person in therapy has to find or develop the confidence to speak out their internal narrative. I suppose I would compare myself in a way to Wendy in Peter Pan. Wendy helps the lost boys to learn to tell stories, and once they can tell their stories, to find and feel a cohesive narrative, they can go home. My primary use of narrative is to encourage people to discover the narratives inside them that they’d stopped bringing sense or coherence to. The listening process, yes, but the person also has to be able to bear to listen to themselves.
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HM: Jane and I both agree about the importance of truth in memoir. Accuracy is a different thing – it doesn’t matter what year things happen. Very often, what you’re after is sensory recall and emotional truth. I have a very long memory and, rightly or wrongly, I insist on its accuracy. When I think back to my early childhood, my memory seems to envelop me, it’s sensuous and it’s particular: I can remember every button on a garment, I can remember a tone of voice, the way the light might change in a room. Although, as a child, I often completely misunderstood what was happening around me.
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JH: When Hilary talks about memory, not only does she have an amazing long-distance memory but with Wolf Hall I was very struck by one moment in particular. It’s when a starling starts to sing and its song enters into the room. After I read this novel, I wrote to Hilary. I said I was so affected by that moment, when the birdsong entered the room. I asked whether she imagined it or had ever heard it. I received an immediate email, detailing the precise moment when Hilary had been in London, one late afternoon, heard a particular bird singing and metaphorically put the chords of the song into her pocket and took it home.
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HM: Sometimes you have to keep things for years. They’re like those little foreign coins you hoard – you think they’re no use anymore, but one day they will pay your way into a universe to which you really need to go.

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If I think of myself as whole and entire and a powerful person, an unafraid person, I have to go back there to being under four-years-old. When I was a small child, I wanted to be either a knight errant or a railway guard like my grandad. I thought I’d turn into a boy in order to achieve these ambitions. I was waiting for it to happen. We have had a kind of, not a dispute, but we’ve been talking about self and the true self and what it means to have a self. I know Jane thinks there is no true self but, for me, if there is one, it’s back there when I was four-years-old. Yet, I lost it when I went to school and the world got in.
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Three, four, I am still four: I think I will be it for ever. I sit on the back doorstep to have my picture taken. Fair hair gushes from under my bonnet. My clothes are a pair of brown corduroy trousers, and a pink woolly cardigan with a zip; I call it a windjammer. I have another just the same but blue. I have a yellow knitted jacket, double-breasted, that I call a Prince Charles coat. Summer comes and I have a crisp white dress with blackberries on, which shows my dimpled knees. I have a pink and blue frock my mother doesn’t like so much, chosen by me because it’s longer; people of six, I think, have longer skirts, and I am beginning to see that youth cannot last for ever, and now hope to be taken for older than I am. The onset of boyhood has been postponed, so far. But patience is a virtue with me. We go to Blackpool to stay at Mrs Scott’s boarding-house, just the three of us, all together: my mother, my father, myself.
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I insist that we stand before a mirror, all three. They are to pick me up and hold me between them, my fat arms across their shoulders, my hands gripping them tight. I call this picture ‘All Together’; I insist on its title. I know, now, that this tableau, this charade, must have caused them a dull, deep pain.
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Standing on the pier at Blackpool, I look down at the inky waves swirling. Again, the noise of nature, deeply conversational, too quick to catch; again the rushing movement, blue, deep, and far below. I look up at my mother and father. They are standing close together, talking over my head. A thought comes to me, so swift and strange that it feels like the first thought that I have ever had. It strikes with piercing intensity, like a needle in the eye. The thought is this: that I stop them from being happy. I, me, and only me. That my father will throw me down on the rocks, down into the sea. That perhaps he will not do it, but some impulse in his heart thinks he ought. For what am I, but a disposable, replaceable child? And without me they would have a chance in life.
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The next thing is that I am in bed with a fever raging. My lungs are full to bursting. The water boils, frets, spumes. I am limp in the power of the current that tugs beneath the waves. To open my eyes I have to force off my eyelids the weight of water. I am trying to die and I am trying to live. I open my eyes and see my mother looking down at me. She is sitting swivelled towards me, her anxious face peering down. She has made a fence of Mrs Scott’s dining chairs, their backs to my bed, and behind this barrier she sits, watching me. Her wrists, crossed, rest on the backs of the chairs; her lady’s hands droop. For a minute or two I swim up from under the water: clawing. I think, how beautiful she is: Monday’s child. Her face frames a question. It is never spoken. My mother has brought her own bed-linen, from home, and below my hot cheek, chafing it, is a butterfly: spreading luxuriant wings, embroidered on the pillowcase by my mother’s own hand. I see it, recognise it, put out my hot fingers to fumble at its edges. If I am with this butterfly, I am not lost but found. But I can’t stay. I am too hot, too sick. I feel myself taken by the current, tugged away.
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JH: When Hilary told me that she was going to choose that excerpt from Giving Up the Ghost, it made me think that I’m working with memory not as a writer but as a therapist. I’m not at all interested in whether the stories, well memories, that people are telling me are accurate or precise. Very often my energy is more focused on the idea of unsticking, undoing, unfixing a memory, often an suffocating memory, and letting some oxygen in.
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HM: We have a lot of topics to move on to… Sleep, dreams. Jane barely manages five hours a night, just enough to keep her alive, and dreads dreaming.
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JH: Dreads sleeping. Each day dies with sleep.
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HM: If I were allowed to, I would sleep for ten hours a night. I sleep a lot. I depend on my dreams and I depend on sleep to solve problems for me. My novel, Beyond Black, is about a home county psychic, set in the present day. She is a woman who contains nothing as facile as the diagnosis of a multiple personality disorder, but a multitude of people inside her. This novel, for me, was the awful opening of the trap door to the unconscious and a glimpse down the shaft of the well to the horrible sea serpents swimming down there. First, you dream something, you dream it up, then you write it and then it starts to come true. Long after I wrote this book, like my character, I started to have what I can only conceptualise as other people’s dreams, which did make me a bit afraid of them.
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JH: Even talking about being afraid of not sleeping can make you afraid of it. Insomnia is a very trying thing. One of the things that Hilary and I have often explored is the sensations when the centre cannot hold – what is a nervous breakdown? And, of course, when people have nervous breakdowns, they are usually private and quite different from depression, which we’re all used to living with, or knowing about. Parts of us that are normally experienced as involuntary – like breathing, our beating heart, and sleeping – become self-conscious acts. For me, sleeping is always a very self-conscious act. It’s not something I can naturally do.
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People who have experienced a lot of trauma in their past lives do tend to keep these psychic antennae always on red alert, always vigilant. There’s not much any professional can do about that. Scar tissue may heal with time or therapy but the neurons also have memory and may produce cortisol and hypervigilance.
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I think one of the interesting things is that I prefer not to sleep too long. If I don’t sleep for too long, I won’t go into REM sleep and I won’t dream because if I do dream, my dreams are usually absolutely awful. I would rather sleep less than more and not dream. Hilary depends hugely on her dreams, but I’m very aware that it’s not just whether we dream, or whether we remember our dreams – the mood we wake up with in the morning is also crucial. Often our moods are determined by dreams we may have forgotten. The mood of waking up is a critical assessment of the health of one’s sleep. I will never get up in the night, that’s my rule. I won’t go to the computer, I won’t read, I will just stay in bed. Very often in the night, I do resolve things. I know that the next day may turn out to be different from a thought I’ve had in the night. But you, Hilary, have had a very different experience – you even said you wouldn’t be a writer if you acted differently.
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HM: Well, my hours of sleep are like those of a medieval monk – they’re regularly interrupted by a bell clanging inside my head that says, ‘a bit of your book has arrived’, and I’m driven to get out of bed, to write it down, to capture it in the instant, because if I don’t I will forget it. I may remember the words, but what I won’t remember is the feeling, tone and the emotional impulse that drove those words through my subconscious and actually woke me. I will lose their power if I don’t catch them there and then. I say to myself this rather melodramatic thing: if the day or the night ever comes when I wake up with a line of my book in my head and say, ‘No, it is too cold out there, I am too tired, I will not do it’, that’s the time I will be finished as a writer.