Adaptation

Hilary Mantel on writing historic fiction

BBC Reith Lectures 2017, part five

This is the fifth of Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures — the last in the series — broadcast on 11 July 2017. It’s a beautiful and moving meditation on her craft. Read part one, part two, part three and part four here on Medium.

In the stage play of my novel Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell wants the young nobleman Harry Percy to take an oath to declare that he is not now, and never has been, secretly married to Anne Boleyn. But Harry Percy thinks they are married. He protests, ‘You can’t change the past.’

‘Oh,’ says Cromwell, ‘the past changes all the time, Harry. And I’m going to show you how easily it can be altered.’

He then grabs the young man and bangs his head on the table, as if to knock out his old memories and make space for new.

We all used to look forward to this scene, except the actor who played Harry Percy. Until this point, Cromwell had been an entirely reasonable man.

In the original novel, that scene is more complex. Cromwell persuades the earl that he must do as he’s told, because Cromwell represents the force of the future — and Harry Percy is a member of an economically illiterate warrior class whose day is over. Swept away on a flood of words, concussed by metaphorical rocks, the young man gives way.

Why the difference? The theatre craves action — but it’s not just that. The novel craves it too. But the hardest thing to put on the page is something that happens suddenly. The theatre is superb at surprise. It offers us thought condensed into action, just as the cinema does: it also takes an image and springs it open, so something powerful and unexpected jumps out. It puts the dead back into circulation, within touching distance.

When half-forgotten names are spoken — the names of real people, who happen to be dead — they shiver in the air of the auditorium, resonating in time and space. It makes me ask, is it enough to commemorate the dead by carving their names in stone? Or should we go into an arena and shout them out loud?

In these lectures I’ve argued that fiction, if well written, doesn’t betray history, but opens up its essential nature to inspection. When fiction is turned into theatre, or into a film or TV, the same applies: there is no necessary treason. Each way of telling, each medium for telling, draws a different potential from the original. Adaptation, done well, is not a secondary process, a set of grudging compromises — but an act of creation in itself.

Indeed, the work of adaptation is happening every day; without it, we couldn’t understand the past at all. An event occurs once: everything else is reiteration, a performance. When action is captured on film, it seems we have certainty about what happened. We can freeze the moment. Repeat it. But in fact, reality has already been framed. What’s out of shot is lost to us. In the very act of observing and recording, a gap has opened between the event and its transcription. Every night as you watch the news, you can see story forming up. The repetitious gabble of the reporter on the spot is soon smoothed to a studio version. The unmediated account is edited into coherence. Cause and effect are demonstrated by the way we order our account. It gathers a subjective human dimension as it is analysed, discussed. We shovel meaning into it. The raw event is now processed. It is adapted into history.

Most of us spend our lives in adaptation, aware we have a secret self, and aware that it won’t do. We send out a persona to represent us, to deal for us in public; there are two of us, one home and one away, one original and one adapted.

Now technology has multiplied ways to play with our identities. In on-line games, we can choose an avatar. We can proliferate, untied from physical limitation. Reality TV sets up scenes in which people mimic their real lives — but trimmed to a tidier pattern, and with a neater script. Watching them fumble to imitate themselves, we say, ‘Ah, but they’re not real actors.’ Television and the theatre pick up a fact-based story before it’s cold, and dramatize it. The living being and her impersonator can share a space. In Shakespeare’s day, they didn’t put the current monarch on stage. But our present queen can view herself adapted into different bodies, on stage, on TV, in the cinema.

Meanwhile her humble subjects must make do with faking themselves, photographing their own faces, then adapting the result till they have a self they like better. Its surprising novelists stay in the business, with so many keen amateurs in the lying game.

We writers console ourselves. We say, the media consume stories so fast that demand is always greater than supply. Everything starts with us, we say, sitting in a room: solitary, day-dreaming, scratching away like a monk. We could adapt, we say, if the Middle Ages came back. A paper and pen will do to conjure a world. Our imagination, we say, needs no power supply.

But really, we wish we had a camera and a crew. In ten seconds, the screen can show nuances of character or plot developments that in a novel, or on stage, would be impossible to depict. The cinema has a wonderful easy power to tell us where to look: this is your hero, the man the camera is following.

There is a difficulty for a novelist who writes about what we used to call ‘great men’: we want to keep the greatness, while making them human.

You don’t want to cut them down to size in a spiteful modern way — even if you don’t admire them, you have to recognize that an individual plus a reputation is more than just a private person — he or she is owned by everyone.

So on stage — and on the page — there is a nervous moment, before you bring in the big character — as it might be, Henry VIII, or Marilyn Monroe. The expectation of the audience is vast — can the actor live up to it?

On film, there need be no make-or-break moment. The problematic body can swim out of the background, as if from a psychic veil, a mist: or the viewer can take it in bit by bit — a spur, or a stiletto heel. We don’t need a lookalike. The cinema creates a mythic identity. We watch a film all together, in the dark. We engage in collective dreaming. And we eat — we eat with our fingers, cheap, gratifying, baby food — as if suspending adult life and adult judgement, sinking entirely into the story we are told. The image has taken reason prisoner.

And then we come out into the street and are angry with ourselves, for believing what we see. The cinema is excellent at verisimilitude but less good with the truth. Time’s the enemy. There’s a limit to how many complex events you can digest into the average length of a feature film. It is a rare gift, to be able to find images to carry facts. We have explanatory devices — voice-overs, captions; they can add creative value, or they can be desperate measures which regress to the text. I think that what the adaptor must do is set aside the source — whether it’s a history book or a novel — put down the text, and dream it. If you dream it, you might get it right, the spirit if not the letter; but if you are literal, you will set yourself up for failure.

Mostly, as I take it, film-makers don’t set out to lie. Draft One may tell the truth: but a casual rewrite, in a series of rewrites by different hands, can shake out the truth and shake in a lie. As an audience, we recognize that film has the tools to do a really bad job. So a whole industry has grown up, of resistance: an industry of carping and picking holes.

We need the pedants and the complainers, to drive us back to the sources, and to open debate about what people call ‘real history’, and how it is sold to us. But it’s a mistake to focus on trivialities. The people who demand total accuracy usually do it from a position of ignorance. To satisfy them would mean too much destruction. It would be vandalism to dig up a 21st century garden, so you only show 16th century plants. You can make a literal reproduction of an eighteenth-century chair but that doesn’t bring an eighteenth-century person to sit on it.

Not that accuracy is to be discouraged. A faithful representation is one that is stabilized by physical reality. In portraits of great women of the sixteenth century, they have a characteristic way of standing: head up, back straight, hands folded at the waist. Put a modern woman into a replica of that costume, properly weighted, and she can’t stand any other way. Reality has a coercive force. The body adapts, and the body underneath matters as much as the clothes on top. It’s the same with dialogue. Pastiche is not creative. We don’t need our characters to mouth the words of another century, but to possess the common knowledge of their era — so they don’t say what they could never think.

Compared to viewers 30 years ago, we are swift and sophisticated consumers of narrative. We have seen so many stories on the screen, and eaten them so fast with our gaze. Television can make our familiar world hyper-real, lying to us that no camera is present. But we wished to be undeceived — so we evolved the mock-documentary, which makes fun of its own workings. The actors flick a furtive glance at the camera, mimicking the embarrassment of a real person, caught in the nefarious act of going about their day.

It may be because we are used to this ironical mode — realism smirking at itself — that the dramatic reconstructions inserted into history programmes now look so earnest and clumsy. We can see its low budget impersonation, and we refuse to suspend belief.

In the theatre we seldom refuse, as long as the events we’re shown have emotional truth. Schiller’s play Maria Stuart, first produced in 1800, sets up a meeting between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I. In real life, these rival queens never met. But we recognize the dramatic need to put them in the same place: after all, they must have met in the space within their heads. They probably dreamed of each other, and the playwright joins us to the dream. The theatre allows us to be complicit in deception, without feeling guilt — because it doesn’t disguise its artificiality. As with the cinema, we wait till the lights go down, then abdicate from our stubborn literal selves.

History is always trying to show itself to us. In the western tradition, drama was a mature art when the novel was still young. We have built theatres for centuries — special buildings for the specific purpose of repeating human experience with small variations. In these buildings, day by day, everything is the same but not the same.

To adapt a history for the stage you must make time and space, obey your laws. If you are working from a novel, that fiction becomes the canonical text, standing in for history. The novelist has some advantages. His stage sets are built out of black marks on white paper. On the page, a cast of a hundred is as cheap as a cast of two. For the stage, the adaptor must reduce the personnel, for practical as well as artistic reasons. Cut down the number of characters and you must adapt the story, reorganize events so that one person stands in for another.

It takes skill to manage that shift so you are still telling the truth — though not the literal truth. All we have is what Shakespeare calls, ‘the 2 hours traffic of our stage.’ However gripping the action, it’s a sad truth that an audience gets restless at ten o’clock. They might crave to see the wedding or the execution, then the curtain call. But they don’t want to miss their train, or go home on the night bus with the drunks.

Each art form works when it plays to its strengths, or at least, understands its weaknesses. The screenwriter knows his director can populate a city, or whistle up a mob using computer-generated imagery. The playwright’s mob is too meagre to be scary. His battle scene suffers because he only has four combatants and some clattery shields. It’s tough if your story ends in a battle. But then, look at the climax of Richard III. No one forgets Richard yelling out his big offer: ‘My kingdom for a horse.’ But no-one is going to bring him a horse, because the real and chilling end to his story has already happened in the tent on the eve of battle, when the souls of the dead gather to tell him that the game’s up. ‘The lights burn blue; it is now dead midnight.’ Their intimate whisper is more final than the force of arms.

There is a way around the practical constraints — it is to use words as arrows that go straight to the heart of an audience. A stage play is a brilliant vehicle for the past, because it is a hazardous, unstable form, enacting history as it was made — breath by breath. The script sets parameters — this time, this place, this body. But the actor is not a repetition machine. Every show is different. History becomes interactive. Without speaking — by clapping, by sighing, by laughter, or by silence — and there are different kinds of silence — the audience directs the show, subtly adjusting the rhythm and nuance of what they see. The barrier that protects the actor is invisible, held in place only by the imagination of the onlookers. Reality can’t be censored out. Sirens from the street cut through the mutter of Roman conspiracy, as if someone had anticipated Caesar’s assassination and sent for an ambulance. In the Schiller drama I mentioned, Maria Stuart, there is an invented character who, towards the end of the play, stabs himself. In 2008 in Vienna, the play’s audience were aghast at the rush of blood — it seemed so impressively real. It was. By some backstage muddle — by error, not malice — the stage knife had been replaced by a real knife.

Next day, the actor was back on stage, patched up. Living and dead in the theatre, we are not safe from each other. In King Lear, art brings a man to the edge of a cliff. Outcast, the blinded Duke of Gloucester comes, as he believes, to Dover, stumbling towards death. He thinks he has arrived the edge of England. He launches himself into the empty air.

We, the audience, can see there is no cliff. The blind man is standing on solid ground. It’s a trick adapted from low comedy, from farce — an old fool reacting to an imaginary peril. But then the truth comes home to us, in a pulse-beat: and not just the truth about the blind duke. The cliff is invisible, but real. That’s where we all live, one inch, one heartbeat, from extinction. It’s not a few seconds we spend there, it’s our whole lives.

King Lear is not history, it’s myth; but it tells profound truths about the workings of power and love. It does the artist’s work of turning history inside out and telling us what’s under the skin. Despite what Marx said, I don’t believe history ever repeats itself, either as tragedy or farce. I think it’s a live show and you get one chance. Blink and you miss it. Only through art can you live it again.

And without art, what have you, to inform you about the past? What lies beyond is the unedited flicker of closed-circuit TV. This technology offers to capture the world without bias, without interpretation. The pictures help us count heads in a crowd. They can help us nail a lie, or spot a wanted man. Yet the images from the mechanical eye have a peculiar chill, because they show us helpless against fate — parched automatons, occupying space without commanding it. Think of those pictures of Diana, 20 years ago, leaving the Paris Ritz through the service corridor — her retreating back, only minutes before her death. To these images you are history’s lonely, appalled witness, the eternal bystander. No creative hand is at work — just life, mutely and stupidly recorded, shown to us when it’s too late to act, too late to learn.

If we told our histories in that mode we would despair. Though the images of Diana are banal, artless, that still doesn’t guarantee their perfect truth. The inquest heard that they came from five banks of cameras that were not quite synchronized: so on that most unlucky night, there were five different time zones on offer in the Ritz Hotel.

Death is certain, the hour of death uncertain, and our precise position on our path towards it is not, even in retrospect, as easy to pinpoint as you would think.

If we crave truth unmediated by art we are chasing a phantom. We need the commentator’s craft, even to make sense of the news. We need historians, not to collect facts, but to help us pick a path through the facts, to meaning. We need fiction to remind us that the unknown and unknowable is real, and exerts its force.

Some writers and adaptors disclaim responsibility. They say the public wants escapism — so let’s give them what they want. They cheat their audience as politicians cheat when they make uncosted pledges: the bill comes later, when we lose a grip on our own story, and fall into individual distress and political incoherence.

I have written a novel called The Giant, O’Brien, loosely based on the true story of a real-life giant who came to London in the 1780s, to exhibit himself for money. In my version, the giant is more than a freakishly tall man: he is the embodiment and carrier of myth, and he has a fund of stories about love and war and talking animals and saints. His followers join in, shouting up with jokes and plot twists of their own. He tries to incorporate them and keep everybody happy.

So his stories are interactive, democratic and popular — the only trouble is, they are corrupt. They get further and further from the story as he knows it to be. In the end, he realizes the folly of telling people what they want to hear. He says, ‘Stories cannot save us… Unless we plead on our knees with history we are done for, we are lost.’

History, of course, hears no plea: it is a human being who hears, the bearer of the tale. The giant’s plea is for art and craft honestly deployed. Our audiences do not need to be protected from stories; they know when they enter the fictional space.

But we owe it to them to stretch our technique to offer the truth, in its multiple and layered forms — not to mislead because it is, on the face of it, the easier option — we should not avoid the complexities and contradictions of history, any more than politicians should abandon debate and govern by slogans. We must try by all the means we command to do justice to the past in its nuance, intricacy, familiarity and strangeness. Historical fiction acts to make the past a shared imaginative resource. It is more than a project of preservation: it is a project against death. In the epigraph to my novel about the Irish giant, I quoted the poet George MacBeth, and I leave you with his thought about what we want from the past and how we get it:

All crib from skulls and bones
Who push the pen.
Readers crave bodies:
We’re the resurrection men.

— Hilary Mantel

Listen to this lecture, and the Q&A that followed it, online.

The Reith Lectures, the BBC’s flagship annual lecture series, began in 1948, with Bertrand Russell’s ‘Authority and the Individual’. You can listen to most of the lectures on the BBC Radio 4 web site, from Grayson Perry to Stephen Hawking to Aung San Suu Kyi to Wole Soyinka and Marina Warner. Listen to them all here.