Hilary Mantel – Reconstructionary Tales

Fetch a flitch of bacon

(John Frederick Herring II, ‘Farmyard with Saddlebacks’: Haworth Art Gallery)

The year has turned but, unfortunately, the direction of human travel has not, bringing to mind the old ballad:

It was mirk, mirk night, there was nae starlight,
They waded thro’ red blude to the knee;
For a’ the blude that’s shed on the earth
Rins through the springs of that countrie.[1]

We have long passed ‘that blessed season’, which Saki so liked, ‘between the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer’.[2] I read hungrily, if not always strictly relevantly to the projects currently in train.

‘Every time I consider autobiography’, Guy Davenport wrote to the author and publisher W. C. Bamberger in June 2000, ‘my mind instantly runs to senseless (but satisfying) recrimination.’ He went on to detail the losses – due to carelessness or dishonesty – of valued letters, priceless association copies of books, drawings made to accompany essays or stories, which were jettisoned by editor or publisher once the material had been printed. ‘One of them was a Greek mask I’d worked on for a week, pen and ink, perhaps the finest drawing I’ve ever done.’ He added: ‘And there’s the art book with color plates that a fellow grad student at Harvard borrowed and kept his place with a slice of bacon,’ before concluding: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres.’[3]

(Portrait of Lady Charlotte Harley as Ianthe: drawn by Richard Westall, engraved by W. Finden)

Bacon, you say. . . . Francis and Roger and Francis, and how many more? There was Lady Charlotte, wife of Colonel Anthony Bacon of the Lancers and daughter of the Earl of Oxford. Bacon was involved in the War of the Brothers, 1832-1834 (Pedro and Miguel) in Portugal, in the cause of Dom Pedro. Charlotte was the ‘Ianthe’ to whom, at the age of ten, Byron wrote his introductory stanzas at the beginning of Childe Harold.[4]

Such is thy name with this my verse entwined;
And long as kinder eyes a look shall cast
On Harold’s page, Ianthe’s here enshrined
Shall thus be first beheld, forgotten last[5]

There was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the Great Seal to Queen Elizabeth I, who built a fine house mentioned by Ronald Blythe in his discussion of Stiffkey, a Norfolk village more famous since for the rector, Harold Davidson, who was defrocked after being charged with immorality – and died as a result of being mauled by a lion.[6] Francis – not the painter – supplies two epigraphs to Dorothy Sayers in her 1935 novel, Gaudy Night.[7] More entertainingly on the bacon front, Peter Vansittart writes that, until the Hundred Years’ War, the patron saint of England was Edward the Confessor. ‘Then Edward III, in debt to Genoese bankers, replaced him with their patron, the more aggressive St George, who was not to escape the attention of the supreme English ironist, Gibbon: he dismissed George as a dishonest bacon contractor, loathed by Christian and pagan alike.’[8]

Anyone fretfully wondering how long it will take Ford Madox Ford to rock up can now put their mind at rest. In Ancient Lights, Ford segued from a memory of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s limericks to an anecdote about ‘another poet, a descendant of many Pre-Raphaelites, of whom it was related that whilst reading his friend’s valuable books at that friend’s breakfast table he was in the habit of marking his place with a slice of bacon.’ He added that he knew this anecdote to be untrue.[9] How might he be so sure? Slip forward twenty years and Ford is remembering his doctor, Tebb, with whom Ford stayed for a while when the good doctor was treating him in the late stages of a breakdown. He writes of Tebb inventing ‘one of the most ingenious lies’ about his guest: that Ford marked his place in Tebb’s ‘priceless first editions and incredibly sumptuous large paper copies with a slice of bacon.’[10]

Reading the recently published collection of shorter pieces by Hilary Mantel—and reminding myself of just how funny she can be—I come across an article, written for Vogue, on perfumes. Mantel remarks: ‘What women have always wanted to know is what scent drives men wild; researchers have the answer, say Turin and Sanchez [co-authors of the book Perfumes: The Guide], and it’s bacon.’[11] It’s just possible that this news may not have brought unalloyed delight to those inquiring women.

Bacon features largely in Ford’s letters around the end of the First World War, given the twin factors of meat rationing (introduced in 1918) and Ford’s own pig-breeding ambitions. ‘I got as far as the above’, he wrote to Stella Bowen in a letter that stretched over two days (28-29 April 1919), ‘when sleep overtook me—or rather sleepiness, for, when I went to bed I c^d not get to sleep. I fancy an unmixed diet of bacon is telling on my liver.’[12]

William Cobbett – farmer, MP, soldier, traveller, radical journalist, printer, avid dispenser of practical advice to the common people (‘The Poor Man’s Friend’) – who took a positive view of pigs, wrote in his Cottage Economy:

A couple of flitches of bacon are worth fifty thousand Methodist sermons and religious tracts. The sight of them upon the rack tends more to keep a man from poaching and stealing than whole volumes of penal statutes, though assisted by the terrors of the hulks and the gibbet.[13]

It was also a matter of personal preference. On one of his famous rural rides, he arrived at Ashurst ‘(which is the first parish in Kent on quitting Sussex)’, where, ‘for want of bacon’, he was ‘compelled to put up with bread and cheese for myself. I waited in vain for the rain to cease or to slacken, and the want of bacon made me fear as to a bed.’[14] So he rode on through the night and the driving rain. Better drenched than baconless.

No mention of pork or bacon, unsurprisingly, in our Syrian and Palestinian cookbooks, nor, surely, in Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food? But yes, there is an entry in her index, which turns out to be connected with her visit to El Molino in Granada, a centre for research into the history of Spanish food. She was told that some Marranos, forced by the Inquisition to convert to Christianity, ‘made a point of cooking pork to protect themselves from charges by the Inquisition of continuing to practise their old religion.’[15]

The Librarian and I were recently comparing our inability to remember jokes. Some people have a repertoire of hundreds, others recall not a single one. The Librarian offers only one: it concerns the Pink Panther and she first heard it decades ago. I cudgel my brains and offer a knock knock joke dredged from some long unvisited cerebral recess:

Knock knock! (Who’s there?) Egbert! (Egbert who?) Egbert not bacon!

A brief, pitying smile. She murmurs, with visible effort, ‘That’s quite funny.’

It’s the way I tell them.

Notes

[1] ‘Thomas the Rhymer’, in The Oxford Book of Ballads, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910, reprinted 1932), 3.

[2] ‘The Romancers’, The Short Stories of Saki (London: The Bodley Head, 1930), 311.

[3] Guy Davenport, I Remember This Detail: 40 Letters to Bamberger Books, edited by W. C. Bamberger (Whitmore Lake, Michigan: Bamberger Books, 2022), 79-80. The French sentence is Jean Paul Sartre’s famous line from his play Huis Clos (No Exit).

[4] Rose Macaulay, They Went to Portugal (1946; London, Penguin Books, 1985), 307.

[5] Lord Byron, Selected Poems, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 60.

[6] Ronald Blythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties 1919-40 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 156.

[7] Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935; London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2016), Chapters 3 and 17.

[8] Peter Vansittart, In Memory of England: A Novelist’s View of History (London: John Murray, 1998), 42.

[9] Ford Madox Ford, Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (London: Chapman and Hall, 1911), 44, 45.

[10] Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday: Reminiscences 1894-1914 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1931), 305.

[11] Hilary Mantel, ‘At First Sniff’ (2009), in A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing, edited by Nicholas Pearson (London: John Murray 2023), 332. I also learn from this that Burger King, yes, released a meat-infused scent called ‘Flame Grilled’.

[12] Correspondence of Ford Madox Ford and Stella Bowen, edited by Sondra J. Stang and Karen Cochran (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 109-110.

[13] William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (1823; Oxford University Press, 1979), 103. In past centuries, pigs ‘were kept by everyone, fed economically on scraps, waste, and wild food’: Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, Second Edition by Tom Jaine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49.

[14] William Cobbett, Rural Rides, edited by George Woodcock (1830 edition; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), 171-172.

[15] Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (London: Viking, 1997), 332.

End fact, try – fiction?

Jane-Seymour

(Hans Holbein, Jane Seymour, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Reading of a world nearly five hundred years back in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, you still trip over occasional reminders of the current one: Henry VIII’s new queen, Jane Seymour, has not yet been crowned and the king has talked of a midsummer ceremony. ‘But now there are rumours of plague and sweating sickness. It is not wise to allow crowds in the street, or pack bodies into indoor spaces.’ Even so, ‘The Seymours, of course, urge the king to take the risk.’

Nearly five hundred pages into Mantel’s novel, the name of Thomas Culpeper first occurs: ‘A young man’, ‘The young fellow’.[1] This Culpeper—and the historical one, his age, appearance, character, the stage at which he first encountered Catherine (or Katharine) Howard—who sashays in a little later—sits a little askew with a recent reading of Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth Queen trilogy.

FMF-Fifth-Queen

There, Culpeper—spelt ‘Culpepper’—is introduced early, in conversation between Nicholas Udal and one of the King’s guards and is seen shortly afterwards, leading the mule on which Katharine Howard rides. This Culpeper is cousin to Katharine, rich, aggressive, a braggart, a roaring, swaggering, drunken fellow.[2]

In the first place, I often need to remind myself just how young some of these people were. Culpeper was around twenty-seven when he was executed at Tyburn; Catherine Howard, her birthdate also a little uncertain, was in her late teens, probably eighteen, when she was put to death. Christina of Denmark, subject of Holbein’s marvellous portrait, was widowed at the age of thirteen and was still only sixteen when Henry VIII, after the death of Jane Seymour, tried to secure Christina in marriage.

christina

(Hans Holbein, Christina of Denmark, National Portrait Gallery)

In the second place, wonderfully irresolvable, those relations between history and fiction. Noting that Henry James ‘claims for the novelist the standing of the historian’, Joseph Conrad writes of his belief that ‘the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observations of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impressions. Thus fiction is nearer truth [ . . . ] A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.’[3]

Making-History-New

I was reminded of this by Seamus O’Malley’s discussion of it in his excellent Making History New. He adds that Conrad ‘here desires to defend fiction by comparing it with history, first equating the two, then drawing them apart, then finally bringing them back together’. [4]

In a collection published in 1922, year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, the philosopher George Santayana wrote of ‘those more studious daylight fictions which we call history or philosophy’.[5] Writing more recently of – again – Joseph Conrad, Maya Jasanoff remarked that: ‘Historians don’t go where sources don’t lead, which means they usually stop at the door to somebody’s mind. Even when diaries or letters seem to “tell all,” historians typically treat what happened as one thing, and what somebody made of it as another. Novelists walk right in and roam freely through a person’s feelings, perceptions and thoughts. What happened is what you make of it. That, Conrad argued, could make fiction the truer record of human experience.’[6] And it is not only novelists who ‘walk right in’, as Laura Cummings observes, writing that ‘paintings are fictions, and self-portraits too; there is not a novelist alive who does not believe it possible to enter the mind and voice of someone else, real or imaginary, and the same is true of painters.’[7]

Conrad-via-New-Statesman

(Joseph Conrad via The New Statesman)

I doubt whether there’s wholesale agreement about what ‘fiction’ is – or, perhaps more pertinently, what it isn’t. It certainly doesn’t always stay within its supposed boundaries. In the 1995 ‘Introduction’ to a reissue of his novel Crash, J. G. Ballard wrote: ‘We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind — mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.’[8] Twenty-five years on and such fictions have become more widespread, more insidious, more inseparable from, and indistinguishable in, the fabric of the nation, this nation, all nations.

‘Unlike history,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote, ‘fiction can proceed with confidence.’[9] It can – but often it doesn’t. Innumerable writers have seized on the battlefield aspects of their art, entering the field always on the qui vive, the poem as a field of action, entering enemy territory, looking for cover. Yet the writer, if not in control, has some measure of control, and perhaps the loss of that is sometimes, often, the writer’s choice. Life is not, Penelope Lively observes, like fiction in that ‘[t]here is no shrewd navigator, just a person’s own haphazard lurching from one decision to another. Which is why life so often seems to lack the authenticity of fiction.’[10]

Bertran_de_Born

‘But there is’, William Maxwell wrote, ‘always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.’[11] In Ezra Pound’s ‘Near Perigord’, faced with conflicting evidence and the warring interpretations of Bertrans de Born’s motives and priorities in the canzone he wrote for Maent of Montaignac (‘Is it a love poem? Did he sing of war?’), the Poundian voice counsels: ‘End fact, try fiction.’ And he does:

Let us say we see
En Bertrans, a tower room at Hautefort,
Sunset, the ribbon-like road lies, in cross-light,
South towards Montaignac, and he bends at a table
Scribbling, swearing between his teeth; by his left hand
Lie little strips of parchment covered over,
Scratched and erased with al and ochaisos.
testing his list of rhymes, a lean man. Bilious?
With a red straggling beard?
And the green cat’s eye lifts towards Montaignac.[12]

The poem ends, though, with Bertrans’ own voice, perhaps ‘designed’, as David Moody writes, ‘to show how the dramatic monologue outdoes both “fact” and “fiction”.’[13] As with any first-person narrator, the speaker of the dramatic monologue encloses the reader or listener. There is no outside information to help us with the gauging of truthfulness or reliability. We can only look for clues, slippages, gaps and contradictions – and perhaps assume that the narrator is always claiming, for himself or herself, the benefit of the doubt.

Notes

[1] Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light (London: Fourth Estate, 2020), 192, 486.

[2] Ford Madox Ford, The Fifth Queen (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 23-24, 36ff.

[3] Joseph Conrad, ‘Henry James’, Notes on Life and Letters (London: j. M. Dent, 1921), 20-21.

[4] Seamus O’Malley, Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 24.

[5] George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies ([1922] Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 1.

[6] Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (London: William Collins, 2017), 10-11.

[7] Laura Cumming, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (London: Harper Press, 2010), 93.

[8] J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973; London: Fourth Estate, 2011).

[9] Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘Why I Write’, in A House of Air: Selected Writings, edited by Terence Dooley with Mandy Kirkby and Chris Carduff (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), 508.

[10] Penelope Lively, Making It Up (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2006), 136.

[11] William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It (1948; in Early Novels and Stories, New York: Library of America, 2008), 771.

[12] ‘Near Perigord’, in Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations, edited by Richard Sieburth (New York: Library of America, 2003), 302-308.

[13] A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 306.