Losing Hilary Mantel

I read An Experiment in Love at university. I found it gripping, but it released me as soon as I finished it and never reached for me again. I read Fludd and found it mildly engaging, but again, it kept no particular place in my mind or memory. Being repulsed by its subject, I never went near Beyond Black. Then I read Wolf Hall.

It’s effect on me, as on the world, was electric. It was an apparition. A comet. ‘The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!’ All the superlatives reviewers bestowed were justified. It was beyond anything we could have hoped for: from this author — from any author. Its two sequels bestrode the literary world at the same latitudes, the same altitude. Heights no others would even attempt, let alone accomplish as she did. Immaculate world-building, each thread and fibre held at the precise tension to make the pictures true — in both senses. Lives plucked from the dust of the past and animated with minds, moods, expressions, energies, quirks; unfolding in rooms or woods or gardens where timber and stone, silk, linen, leather, parchment, rowan and lavender give every scene lustre and fragrance, as well as verity. The whole thing stitched to history with strong but secret stitches. Sustained brilliance across some two thousand pages. They were — are — prodigies.

They deserved all the praise. They all deserved the prizes (though, inexplicably, Lee Child stood like a troll on a bridge between them and the Booker trifecta). She wrote them at the height of her powers, and thank God she lived to do it, given the pain and ill-health she lived with so long. She mastered her art, and made her masterpiece, and now she’s gone.

What we’ve lost is not more masterworks (there might have been no more), nor more heights of power or accomplishment, but her way of seeing the world. Her mind and eye, at work together. We keep the work, but we’ve lost the only person capable of such work. The work is miraculous, but we’ve lost the miracle of just that person, that portal, where this idea, this desire, apprehension, aptitude and achievement coincided. She made worlds, but she was a world — as all of us are — and the world she was is now extinct. She once said that these Cromwell books might be the thing she could have done that nobody else could have done. In the wake of her death, they look all the more singular (in the way a supernova is singular). All the more wondrous, given how fragile and contingent, how mortal, we now know her life to have been. I suppose this is true of any death. ‘And blue-bleak embers… Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.’

Fins fletched like wings

Here is Pablo Neruda, Chilean poet of love and revolution, and one of my favourite poets, though I only know him in translation. I chose this one not — as its translator suggests — because it’s shaped like Chile, but because it’s whimsical and lyrical at once. It’s not quite serious, I don’t think, but still it’s in earnest. Like much poetry, and maybe all art, it’s serious play.

I love the idea of a poet standing stock still in the middle of a busy market, musing on a dead fish — diving deep and coming up with riches. This, to me, is part of what animates and exalts poetry: the magnifying glass it trains on ordinary things. When you stop and look through the glass you see the depths and layers you’d otherwise miss, the gleam things wear up close. DG Rossetti said ‘a sonnet is a moment’s monument.’ A poem like this testifies that every moment, each thing, is worthy of such a monument, if you only look. I had to look up ‘catafalque’ – it’s the raised bier on which a casket rests. It’s the right name for the last resting place of a mighty fish. This is ‘Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market.’

Here,   

among the market vegetables,

this torpedo

from the ocean   

depths,   

a missile   

that swam,

now  

lying in front of me

dead.
Surrounded

by the earth's green froth   

—these lettuces,

bunches of carrots—

only you   

lived through

the sea's truth, survived

the unknown, the

unfathomable

darkness, the depths   

of the sea,

the great   

abyss,

le grand abîme,

only you:   

varnished

black-pitched   

witness

to that deepest night.



Only you:

dark bullet

barreled   

from the depths,

carrying   

only   

your   

one wound,

but resurgent,

always renewed,

locked into the current,

fins fletched

like wings

in the torrent,

in the coursing

of

the

underwater

dark,

like a grieving arrow,

sea-javelin, a nerveless   

oiled harpoon.
Dead

in front of me,

catafalqued king

of my own ocean;

once   

sappy as a sprung fir

in the green turmoil,

once seed

to sea-quake,

tidal wave, now

simply

dead remains;

in the whole market

yours   

was the only shape left

with purpose or direction

in this   

jumbled ruin

of nature;

you are   

a solitary man of war

among these frail vegetables,

your flanks and prow

black   

and slippery

as if you were still

a well-oiled ship of the wind,

the only

true

machine

of the sea: unflawed,

undefiled,   

navigating now

the waters of death.

Of night and light and the half light

Here is Yeats, circa 1899: “He wishes for the cloths of heaven.”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, 

Enwrought with golden and silver light, 

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths 

Of night and light and the half light, 

I would spread the cloths under your feet: 

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 

I have spread my dreams under your feet; 

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

It was the last line that got me first. In my swoony youth, it was just the line to take my fancy. Coming back to it in maturity, it seems less romantic. It’s one thing to throw your dreams under her feet, another to tell her: watch your step! Like other gestures of art or love, there’s ego in it. But something about this poem still captures me, in spite of its confused meter and identical rhyme. Something about the third and fourth lines that feels less contrived and striven for, a more pure expression of wonder. ‘Blue’ and ‘dim’ and ‘dark’ give you deep night skies in a way ‘embroidered cloths’ never can. The overwrought first two lines, with their stilted syntax, stock conceit, and dactylic lurch, here give way to a slower, more halting rhythm, and to evocative words that echo each other. Short words that follow each other just the way lights might blink and flash: ‘night and light and the half light.’ Here, the poet looks up. The poem becomes about the light itself and not his own gesture. Then he seems to descend again to ego and cliché.

For all that, it is a romantic poem. It glows with light — he does bring the heavens to her, after all. It ends in intimacy — ‘tread softly’ is a whisper. And the three ‘dreams’ of the last three lines sound like bells, or like an incantation. It’s swoony, but its spell is real. C.S. Lewis wrote: “This is one of the miracles of love: it gives a power of seeing through its enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.” You can see how the spell works and still fall under it. Thus is love like poetry. And poetry like this is like love.

Hurry

As we return to school this week, and some of us start preschool, there’s a poem that reminds me to take it easy, and take it in. It’s “Hurry,” by Marie Howe, New York’s poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. She adopted her daughter when she was in her 50s, so it’s just the two of them. This adds intimacy to the poem, but its dynamics will be familiar to anyone with children — or with parents, for that matter. I know the feeling of hurrying through life, and trying to hurry children, which always seems to slow them down. The poem makes me ponder what’s gained by hurrying, being on time, getting things done, and what might be lost.

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store   
and the gas station and the green market and   
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,   
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.   

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?   
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?   
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,   
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—   
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.   

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking   
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,   
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

I like the way the ‘hurry, hurry,’ and all the other ‘h’ sounds give the poem its pulse, its hurrying breath. There’s pathos in the little girl running behind with her blue jacket unzipped, and something more than pathos in the girl all grown beside the grave in the still middle of the poem. The middle slows us down, as though the poet stopped in the street to ask herself why all this hurry; to picture where it might lead them. Then the hurry begins again, but this time it’s a game, a joke between them. It restores all the childish joy that’s missing from the bustle in the first stanza. Here the hurry is parody, a happy travesty of haste. The final gesture — taking the house keys — takes away weary, rushing adulthood from the mother, and gives back play, make believe, time unmetered and untethered. It could have been a lecture, but it’s the laughter in this poem that tugs at my jacket and asks me: Where are you hurrying to? Why?

The forest

My daughter finds The Lorax genuinely terrifying; as, I think, she is supposed to do. All the more so since we’re well and truly in the future it was about. We know now what the ‘unless’ looks like. She hasn’t known a time before it. In the world she was born to, the rivers already run with waste. The sky thickens. The forests are going.

In the story, the trees, the animals, fish, and birds all depend on one another in the kind of simple circle a child can grasp. In the real forest, the web of life is vastly more complex — more animate, intimate, intricate, and abundant than we imagined. There is no emptiness or waste place; no exhaust. There is nothing outside it. We ourselves, contrary to centuries of exceptionalism, are not outside it. We are closer to it — ecologically and genetically — than we care to think about. The world is full of life on every scale, and old verities about sentience itself are being jostled and stretched.

Some fairly stunning research about forests has lately given rise to a florescence of books about trees. Suzanne Simard writes in Finding the Mother Tree about her discovery of the throbbing webs that lie beneath the forest floor and link the trees in complicated ways. Through mycorrhizae — fungal systems that thrive among tree roots — trees share nutrients and knowledge and even nurture. ‘Mother trees’ care for their offspring through whole lifetimes, as well as for the forest as a whole, to say nothing of what the forest itself does as our planet’s liver and lungs. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben explains that trees will go on nurturing a stump for centuries after the tree has been felled. We used to assume trees were in competition with each other for land and light. By and large, they’re not.

Larkin saw threshing tree crowns as ‘unresting castles.’ Mary Oliver wrote of

that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water.

The unobservable mysteries are now known to be much more complex and collaborative. The forest, and what lives beneath its floor, holds something we might as well call intelligence. The subterranean castle is in fact more like a city or even a civilisation. Wohlleben says ‘there are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet.’ All of it nourishing. All of it cooperative. All of it vital.

In the same moment that we’re learning all this, we’re learning how much of it is threatened with irretrievable loss. Ancient trees are felled and land is cleared at a fearsome rate. We break and burn the forests like we really think there’s no tomorrow. Like so much else to do with climate change, we’re in a race between knowing and doing. I hope the more we know the more we’ll save. The more we understand what we stand to lose unless we change, the more we’ll change. My daughter gives me hope. She talks about how different things will be when she’s grown up. She talks as if we’ve already decided to live deliberately. To recover the forests and clear the air and restitch the web. She was born into this world, but she already lives in a better one.