Mantel Pieces

Almost all the married women who replied said that they believed in monogamy: but of those who had been married for five years or more, 70 per cent were having affairs. There is a lot of deception around; some of it self-deception. Eighty-two per cent of women believed that their husbands were faithful: but earlier Hite research showed that 72 per cent of men who had been married for over two years were seeing other women.

These statistics do seem to contradict one’s belief and everyday experience. But then, to judge by this sample, few extramarital adventurers ever tell, or are found out. Some are most adroit at juggling their relationships; one woman admitted to 12 lovers since her marriage, some concurrent, and affairs that had lasted between two months and 33 years. These lovers are ‘dear men’, ‘precious men’, willing to talk about their deepest feelings, and with a thorough working knowledge of female anatomy. They are generally, of course, someone else’s husband.

Single women joined in the survey too: on her lecture tours round the colleges of the United States, Shere Hite has collected examples of the chat-up lines they have to endure. Attempts to manoeuvre women into bed range from the manipulative (‘There’s a rumour round school that you are a lesbian’) to the circumlocutory (‘Ever heard the “1812 Overture” on CD?’) to the pathetic (‘My balls hurt’). The women feel pressured to marry: it seems that twenty years of the women’s movement has not changed society’s expectations in this or in many other matters. ‘Sometimes I think even if I were a new Mozart it wouldn’t be enough. All my friends and family would still be saying: “And when are you getting married? Are you seeing anybody?”’

At first glance, it seems that it is the lesbians who are most satisfied with their relationships. ‘I believe a love relationship between two women is far more serious than one between a man and a woman. Women run on a higher emotional level than men will let themselves, and they get to deeper levels with each other.’ But when you read on, the same old complaints emerge. There are people who can’t or won’t talk about their feelings, and people who go too far in the other direction and plunge a relationship into what one respondent calls ‘introspective shit’. Some partners are philanderers; others are violent. There are some over-familiar, melancholy anecdotes: ‘I was sitting there with a flashlight, inside the car, trying to read the map, and she was screaming at me, because I can’t read it properly.’ Why can’t a woman be less like a man?

The New Hite Report raises all the difficulties and dilemmas that have beset women for years. Should women fight for change, or lower their expectations? Should they fight for their rights in a man’s world, or make a world of their own, with values they find more congenial? Is there some way in which men can be educated to set greater value on loving relationships? Or should women cut their losses, and accept that heterosexual relationships, and traditional marriage especially, provide limited emotional satisfaction? The hardest thing to accept about Shere Hite’s book is that she believes there are answers to these questions; and for her of course the solutions are not within the individual’s grasp, but are, in the feminist sense, ‘political’. She is an optimist: she looks forward to an era of ‘Feminist Enlightenment’. And she has nothing to say about the current backlash against the women’s movement; nothing to say about Beverley LaHaye and the Concerned Women for America, preaching the virtues of ‘submission’, and campaigning against equal pay.

This is not a comfortable book. You may disagree with Shere Hite’s methods, and with her conclusions, but no one could believe that she has seriously misrepresented what many women feel about their lives. It is no relief, however, if you feel as the Hite respondents do, to know that your problem is multiplied by millions, that you are part of a national trend. And the more one reads, the more one loses the flavour of real life, and the more one despairs of it: the more one feels like the unlucky one of three, waylaid on the way to the wedding by the Ancient Mariner. Miss Hite’s glittering eye is not easily avoided, her skinny hand not to be shaken off. But does she know, one wonders, that the perfect relationship is not to be had? It is not a bad thing to go on looking for it, but as one woman puts it, in the bleakest terms, ‘people will always be separate. That’s how we’re born and that’s how we die, one at a time, one per body, alone.’

Letter (and kill fee) from Mary-Kay Wilmers to Hilary Mantel, 1988

Diary

Bookcase Shopping in Jeddah

1989

WHEN the Salman Rushdie affair broke, the first thing I thought of was the day we tried to buy a bookcase in Jeddah. Jeddah is Saudi Arabia’s most sophisticated, cosmopolitan city. Compared to the capital, Riyadh, it is liberal and lively. It is also of course very rich. Its shopping malls, with their icy air-conditioning, are temples of marble and glass, of lush greenery and tinkling fountains. They are something like the Muslim vision of Paradise; only the houris are missing. You can buy a fox fur, if you like, or a portrait of King Fahd, or an American-style donut; a king-size sofa with a stereo built in, if that takes your fancy. But you couldn’t, in 1983, find a bookcase anywhere. No call for them.

When I first went to Jeddah I thought I had arrived in some ultimate abomination: the Bookless City. The supermarkets had racks of newspapers and magazines in various languages, and sometimes a little stack of doctor-nurse romances. There were things called bookshops, but they sold stationery. Of course, there was the book, the Holy Quran. The shelves that contained it had an untouched air, and the big volumes in the stiff cheap-looking bindings put me in mind of the sets of children’s encyclopedias once found in the homes of the aspiring classes. The censors were active, but it was images, not words, that they seemed concerned about. The newspapers from America and Europe came with sections blacked out with broad felt-tip pens. But it was the photographs and not columns of type that were mutilated. It was Joan Collins’s bosom, Zola Budd’s legs.

Saudi Arabia is a video culture. Housewives whose mothers sat in tents spend the days in their urban apartment blocks watching Egyptian soap operas on TV. Students at the university would not buy books, their European teachers said: it was necessary for a department to buy enough copies of the standard texts, and place them in the library. My closest Muslim friend, a well-travelled and articulate woman, had a degree in English from a college in Pakistan. She mentioned one day that since her marriage, three years previously, she had read only one book.

During my four years in the Kingdom the supply of books began to improve. It was possible to buy a limited selection of paperbacks. People going out on vacation would be given a list of books to bring back – but they would have to get their purchases through the Saudi customs. Some governments publish lists of prohibited books, but if the Saudis had an Index I never saw it: it was only rumour that told you what had most recently given offence, and your fortunes might depend on how pious or touchy was the customs officer who turned out your cases. We believed that the customs men could not read English; that if they could, they wouldn’t; that a book would be judged by its cover. My copy of Robert Lacey’s monumental work The Kingdom travelled safely inside the dust-jacket of Vincent Cronin’s Louis and Antoinette. Perhaps it was not the wisest choice, since Saudi Arabia has a few things in common with the Ancien Régime: but I was confident that the customs men wouldn’t see the connection.

However, it soon became clear that the censorship was interested in words after all. The word ‘pork’, for instance. The censorship had its catering corps. It was someone’s duty to go through consignments of imported food and check out such items as dehydrated sauce mixes, in case they had recipes on the back; and then to strike out that dreadful word wherever it appeared. After a time I realised that far from being unimportant in this society, as I had thought at first, words were in fact the most important thing of all. You cannot abolish the concept of pork from the world, but if you are assiduous you can unsay the word; if your felt tips are busy enough, and numerous enough, you can take away its name and thus gradually take away its substance, leaving it a queasy, nameless concept washing around in the minds of unbelievers, a meat which will gradually lose its existence because there is no way to talk about it.

In the holy city of Qom, it is said, the Iranians have a Quran with pages two metres square, each vellum sheet illuminated by hand. The Saudis would despise such a display; they would think it a piece of showing-off, the kind of thing that Shi’ites go in for. They favour contests at which the Quran is recited, with much public fanfare and the award of large cash prizes. I learned that the Holy Quran had little to do with the book on the shelves of the stationery stores. It was a living book, and its very language was sacred. Its verses were charged with power; they could heal the sick. Each word was a little fighter in a daily war.

Okaz, Jeddah’s Arabic daily, carried in March 1986 a doomladen, prescient column about the power of words. ‘The war of words,’ the writer said, ‘is more harmful than World War Two. Words are forcing the world to World War Three. Words – written in newspapers, magazines, books, uttered on radio and television – are tools to massacre the souls of people.’

The world conspiracy against Islam of which Tehran now speaks is not the fantasy of one elderly paranoiac: in the Kingdom it was a fantasy purveyed as fact to the whole nation. Talented young Arabs, the newspapers alleged, went to Europe to study, and by their abilities excited the envy of their hosts, who would quickly set about ruining them by addicting them to drugs and introducing them to prostitutes. In Marks & Spencer’s London stores, specially trained agents of Zionism lurk, ready to pounce on Arab shoppers, accuse them of shoplifting, throw them into jail and publicise their disgrace worldwide through Reuters and UP.

In November 1986 the Saudi Gazette reported a pronouncement by ‘the General Presidency of the Departments of Religious Researchers, Ruling, Call and Guidance’, warning against certain Italian floor tiles that had been imported into the Kingdom. These tiles were aimed at ‘purposefully offending the sentiments of Muslims’. Hidden away in their swirl of pattern – not obvious at a casual glance, but evident on close inspection – were the words ‘Allah’ and ‘Mohammed’. Or so the authorities said. The eye of faith is formidably sharp. If a floor tile can offend Islam, what chance has a novel?

The Saudi response to The Satanic Verses has been lowkey; the ayatollah, who refers contemptuously to their faith as ‘American Islam’, has stolen their thunder. But it is not difficult to imagine the depth of outrage. The first popular reaction in the West to the death threat was, I think, amazement, tinged by what came near to a disbelieving hilarity: ‘But it’s only a novel.’ We could not believe that people would riot about a story.

Novelists have various tricks for concealing what they are about. If they want to use a real person as a character they can, if competent, cover their tracks well enough to avoid being sued for libel. If critics call their work ‘brutal’ or ‘offensive’ they can smirk and say that they were spinning a metaphor, forging a conceit, creating an allegory. They can, like Salman Rushdie, allow their characters to dream. Writers no longer talk about their muse, but they are willing to talk about how their characters take over, about how the author himself is a minor part of the process, carried along on some irresistible creative tide. It is all part of the mystique; authors enjoy it. In the West, it does not matter whether they slide away from the implications of their work in this way.

Elsewhere, of course – in the Eastern Bloc or in South Africa – a novel is taken perfectly seriously as a vehicle for ideas. Its writer is forced to stand behind the points he makes, and is given no particular privilege. The censor will peel the novel’s defences away and say, so this is what you really meant; and penalise and punish the author accordingly. But elsewhere the censor may not bother to strip away the conventions; he may not even recognise that they exist. Art for art’s sake will mean nothing to him. The Satanic Verses may be a great work of art, the pattern on the floor tiles may have been aesthetically pleasing: but both are political acts. The defences of merit and of good intention that we are accustomed to erect around a persecuted work of art cannot help Rushdie’s book, in countries where they are not recognised as defences. In Tehran, malice is understood. It is taken for granted. There is a worldwide conspiracy against Islam, and Rushdie is its ‘mercenary’.

If his defence cannot be made in artistic terms, it must be made in political terms, but it is hard to feel pleased with the politicians. When the British government says that it understands that Muslims are offended by the book, it means it understands that offence has been taken. It is not near to understanding the nature of the offence. The prime minister says that great religions should be strong enough to withstand criticism, and her remark is alarming because it is so wide of the point. Unlike modern Christianity, Islam does not make a virtue of tolerance. In theory it accommodates the faith of Christians and Jews, the ‘people of the book’, but the Kingdom, at least, does not permit any form of worship other than the Islamic; projecting their own intolerance on the outside world, the faithful in Jeddah found it hard to imagine that in Britain their co-religionists could go freely to a mosque, and they only half-believed it. If you are in Britain, Islam appears an inward-looking and self-protective faith, but when you are in the East it appears vital, active and proselytising. Not long ago, the same could be said of Christianity. Unless we are prepared to think about our own history, enter into it a little, we cannot know what the Muslim writer is talking about when he speaks of ‘spiritual torment and torture’. The silly and the secular do not understand the God-driven. Fundamentalists look at our cheerful modern notion of live-and-let-live, and find it immoral and incomprehensible.

In the first few days after Iran issued the death threat, the support for Salman Rushdie was heartening and unanimous. But we are so used to intellectual consensus and compromise that when we meet an intransigent opponent, with whom no meeting of minds seems possible, we immediately doubt our own case and our own values: politeness may be the ruin of the West. The backtracking has been an unpleasant spectacle. It was unpleasant to hear a young Tory MP say recently that ‘two or three’ of his friends had told him that the book was ‘very second-rate’, and announce that since Rushdie had made so much money he should pay for his own police guard: we do not expect our legislators to be able to read, but we do expect them to be able to distinguish between a private man’s private difficulty and a matter of vital public interest. And just as unpleasant is the defection of those who now cast doubt on Rushdie’s integrity, or urge the withdrawal of the book. Perhaps it is understandable that the authors of children’s books and light social comedies should decline to defend The Satanic Verses. Their freedom of expression is not at issue.

Back in Jeddah, the same woman who had read only one book since her marriage explained one day with great eloquence the consolations of living among believers, in a solidly Muslim society – the feeling of security for the faithful, the freedom from the constant bombardment by alien values. Muslims in Britain live under such bombardment, and they have to accept it and survive as best they can. But their faith still has its consolations, and some good would come of this sorry business if the spokesmen of the Muslim community, and the enlightened and educated Muslims who must be offended by Iran’s decrees, could explain to a sceptical and ignorant Britain what these consolations are.

Postcard from Hilary Mantel to Mary-Kay Wilmers, 1989

Looking Back in Anger

John Osborne’s Memoirs

1991

ONE OF THE more extraordinary revelations in A Better Class of Person, the first volume of John Osborne’s memoirs, was the fact that the author was proposed as the leading man in the 1948 film The Blue Lagoon. The teenage Osborne by his own account had a hollow chest and acne, and a loincloth would not have shown these off to advantage; the opportunity to loll among the palms with Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston. Houston was blond and wholesome, and had a long career, much of it in B-movies; it’s interesting to think that John Osborne might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden … Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby fan, as Dr Watson … He would, you feel, have snarled a hole in the screen.

A Better Class of Person is written with the tautness and power of a well-organised novel. It is a ferociously sulky, rancorous book, remarkable for its account of a lower-middle-class childhood on the fringes of London, and for its vengeful portrait of a mother who had ‘eyes that missed nothing and understood nothing’.

Osborne’s father worked in an advertising agency. He was a semi-invalid for most of his son’s youth; his mother was a barmaid – or, as she put it, ‘a victualler’s assistant, if you please’. They moved often, from one rented suburban house or flat to another. Until he was sent away to a third-rate boarding school, the boy had virtually no education; his mother preferred to keep him at home to go window-shopping with her, or to the cinema. These were the days of the double-feature, and he saw, he estimates, two hundred films a year. He had a crowd of relatives who were, in his view, spiteful, greedy, stupid and pathetic. They manifested ‘a timid melancholy or dislike of joy, effort or courage … Disappointment was oxygen to them.’

It is an atmosphere in which effort is despised, and anyone who has the temerity to try to advance in life must bear the complacent smirking of those who predict that it will all end badly. His mother, Nellie Beatrice (so he calls her – the family called her Dolly), dominates his life and shapes the picture of himself which he gives to the reader. The whole book bears witness to the grown man’s failure to separate himself emotionally from a woman he despises – from Nellie Beatrice with her flaking face powder and her Black Looks. The consequences of this failure are played out in the second volume: they are a disabling misogyny, a series of failed and painful relationships, a grim determination to spit in the world’s eye.[1] He is not loveable, he knows; very well, he’ll be hateful then.

It might, the reader thinks, have turned out quite differently. Throughout both books Osborne reproduces letters sent to him by his mother and relatives. Uncle Jack writes to him: ‘There is nothing to report, only I have lost the sight of one eye.’ If the Osborne family had lived, say, in Lancashire instead of London, such a letter would have made Jack a local celebrity; a turn of phrase like that would be a family treasure. But Osborne’s humour is aggressive, not black, not self-deprecating, not tolerant; it makes the world a harder place. The letters make the memoirs easier for the reader, however: one looks forward to them. In the days of heady fame – of Broadway and the Royal Court, of pursuit by the press, of ‘love-nests’ and ‘hideaways’ and CND celebrity rallies – the letters still wing their way. ‘Sid is upstairs in Bed. He had all his bottom teeth out on Wednesday.’

How did our hero escape Nellie Beatrice, Sid and the rest? He had a footling journalist career on Gas World – and, briefly, on Nursery World. Primed by his success at the Gaycroft School of Music, Dancing, Speech, Elocution and Drama, he tried the theatre. Talent seems to have been less important than the ability to live on almost nothing and endure insults from management and patrons. Jobs in rep were advertised in terms like these: ‘No fancy salaries, no queer folk.’ Queer folk appear on almost every page of both volumes of memoirs, and Osborne is at pains to point out – many, many times – that he has no homosexual proclivities. He’d rather a dosshouse than a warm sofa where his timid virtue might be imperilled; and indeed many of his theatrical lodgings didn’t rise much above the dosshouse level.

He toured the provinces in melodramas about ‘middle-class girls compromised in their cami-knickers’ and in ‘northern comedies’ where he failed to see the joke. Between jobs, he learned to subsist on evaporated milk and boiled nettles. His Hamlet was a ‘leering milk rounds man’; he featured in a production of Aladdin so bad that the child amateurs who formed the chorus were abducted from the theatre by their furious parents, so that the ‘Big Spectacular’ had to be cancelled. His first play got its world première in Huddersfield, and lasted for a week.

The first volume left Osborne in 1956, at the point where – in 17 days – he had completed Look Back in Anger. George Devine, the first artistic director of the English Stage Company, arrives in his life (in a rowing boat) and makes him ‘preposterously famous’. Osborne vehemently denies claims that the play was first entitled ‘On the Pier at Morecambe’, but a photographed page of his notebook shows that several titles were contemplated. They include ‘Angry Man’, ‘Man in a Rage’ and ‘Close the Cage Door behind You’. Only one strikes you as false to its begetter: ‘Farewell to Anger’.

For in this second volume, it’s hello to some more. Fame makes Osborne savager than ever. What is wonderful is how the years have deepened the ire, how memory has mauled his wounds so that they open again before the reader’s eyes. When he was a boy, a hospital messed up an appendix operation, leaving him with a hole in his side; they gave him a special pencil with which he could cauterise the wound and help it to heal. If you could wish the playwright one thing, it would be a styptic pencil for his psyche. Self-mutilation is, however, a riveting spectacle.

On the cover of Almost a Gentleman Osborne wears a miscellanea of camp togs, and an expression at once quizzical, combative and prissy. As with the first volume, frail jokes and bad puns decorate the text. We know the writer is on form by page 20, when we read of ‘Binkie Beaumont, most powerful of the unacceptable faeces of theatrical capitalism’. There is some repetition: the comedian Max Miller is once again ‘a god … a saloon-bar Priapus’, and various people are ‘a sphinx’, or, in the case of his second wife, Mary Ure, ‘not a sphinx’. The spite, though, comes up new and fresh.

When Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court, the warmest reaction was Philip Hope-Wallace’s ‘spinsterly condescension’ – Osborne has always at his command the exact, skewering phrase – but then the Sunday papers came out. Ken Tynan called it a ‘minor miracle’ and praised it in these peculiar terms: ‘I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.’ Some critics said: ‘It calls out for the knife.’ All these years on, Osborne will not take the point. ‘Hamlet is too long,’ he says grandly.