A Curious Career (19 page)

But she can be very fierce towards women who annoy her (which I think by now might include me). I remember Sam Leith who was then the literary editor of the
Telegraph
telling me he was shocked by the ferocity with which she denounced an author called Judith Kelly. Kelly published a misery memoir called
Rock Me Gently
in 2005 which purported to be an account of her traumatic childhood in a Roman Catholic orphanage. Hilary Mantel went on the warpath when she read it and found that whole chunks were lifted from her novel
Fludd
and that other bits were stolen from Antonia White’s
Frost in May
, and even from
Jane Eyre
. ‘That was the most shocking thing. I was aghast that a book could get through without anyone recognising a passage of
Jane Eyre
. So I made a dossier – I called it my “Quarrelling Kit” – with all the passages that came from other authors. I wanted an explanation. I wanted the publishers, Bloomsbury, to stop prevaricating and pull the book. But they decided to brazen it out. The woman herself pleaded naivety – I don’t think so!’

She is fierce again when I ask if she might return to Catholicism, if she might call for a priest on her deathbed? ‘No. I might very well call for a Church of England vicar, but I would not call for a Catholic priest. I’m one of nature’s Protestants, Lynn; I should never have been brought up as a Catholic. I think that nowadays the Catholic Church is not an institution for respectable people.’ That’s quite strong – does she mean because of all the paedophile revelations? ‘Yes – the fact that it could happen, the extent of the denial, the cover-up, the hypocrisy, the cruelty. When I was a child I wondered why priests and nuns were not nicer people. I thought that they were among the worst people I knew. But in a cold-blooded way, as a writer I’ve had full value from Catholicism – I can say that. It’s a great training in doubleness – this looks like bread but it is actually a man’s body, this looks like wine but it’s actually blood. And that’s very much a writer’s way of thinking – she comes in and says good morning, but she means: Damn you to hell!’

Our lunch is over and Mantel walks painfully up the stairs to see me out. She is as she says ‘a civil person’ and she civilly signs my copy of
Bring Up the Bodies
and thanks me for our ‘nice chat’. But I can’t help wondering if she is really thinking: Damn you to hell! She wrote in her memoirs: ‘My convent years left me a legacy: a nervous politeness, an appearance of feminine timidity that will probably stand me in good stead if I am ever on trial for murder.’ I doubt it will come to that but don’t ever make the mistake of underestimating Hilary Mantel. This animal bites.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Artists

I’m often asked whether I choose my own subjects for interview, or whether they are chosen for me. Generally, I prefer the latter – partly because it often produces names I would never have thought of (sometimes would never have heard o
f
) but also because it spares me the responsibility of ‘backing’ my choice. I can best explain this by giving an example. At some point in the early Noughties I got hooked on Meat Loaf and could never drive anywhere without playing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’. (It’s a particularly good song for driving to.) I loved his voice mainly, but also the fact that he was middle-aged, dishevelled, hugely overweight – i.e. not your run-of-the-mill pop star. So next time we had an ideas meeting at the
Observer
(always a rather movable feast) I said I’d like to interview Meat Loaf. A dozen startled faces turned to me, and one eventually voiced the question that was obviously hovering on all their lips, ‘Why?’ He didn’t even have a new record out. But I spieled away about how he was such a wonderful singer, and such a fascinating man. This was my mistake.

The editor reluctantly agreed to let me interview Meat Loaf next time he was performing in London – he was not deemed worthy of an air ticket – and a meeting was eventually arranged at his hotel, the Royal Garden in Kensington. I was shocked by how old and tired he seemed – and indeed he collapsed on stage a few weeks later – but also how disagreeable. On stage and disc, he seemed to have a wonderful exuberance, but the man I met was a grumpy old codger who barely said hello before launching into a great tirade about the iniquities of British journalists and how they always get their facts wrong. As I wrote at the time, ‘I expected a fearless Bat out of Hell, and found, I thought, a rather timid soul, full of worries and grumbles and actorish concerns about his “image”.’ I made him as interesting as I could in the article (though more by relying on his autobiography than anything he said to me) but it was uphill work, and felt vaguely dishonest. Which is why, ever since, I have been wary of ‘pitching’ my own choices in case I end up with another Meat Loaf.

However, having said that, there is an exception to my no-pitching rule. I am always clamouring to interview artists at any opportunity. So whenever I have built up a head of credit by interviewing half a dozen actors on the trot (editors
always
want actors, the bane of my life), I pipe up and say time for an artist now. My reasons are several. First, I don’t think artists get nearly enough media coverage. They get more now than they did twenty years ago, but even so if you count the column inches devoted to, say, Lucian Freud over his entire lifetime versus the column inches devoted to, say, Victoria Beckham or even (God help us) Liz Hurley, you will find that Freud counts as practically unknown. And yet who will be of more interest in fifty years’ time?

Second, I love looking at art. My husband was an artist and although I have absolutely no artistic talent myself (I managed to fail art O level) I have always enjoyed going to art galleries and exhibitions. Even in my teens, long before I met David, I would head for the Tate or the National Gallery whenever I had a free Sunday. In those days I loved the Pre-Raphaelites in the Tate and the Veroneses in the National Gallery. David had to spend years educating me and I still haven’t really seen the point of Poussin – but going to galleries together became one of our strongest bonds. He would have been amazed (and rather shocked) to learn that I was a Turner Prize judge in 2006 but if I do know anything about art it is all thanks to him.

Thirdly, I like artists. It is quite rare for me to meet one I don’t like. And, for interviewing purposes, I like the fact that they don’t come laden with PRs – you can usually approach them directly or through their gallery and nobody sits in on the interview to make sure they don’t say anything that might damage their image. Artists don’t have images, thank God. And most of them drink and smoke and give good parties so being around them is fun. My only complaint is that they keep difficult hours – all their best partying is done after midnight so I have to listen to a lot of ‘Oh you should have come on to Vanda’s – that was a really
great
party, we didn’t finish till dawn.’ I wish I’d discovered art parties when I was young and able to dance all night but nowadays I am a slave to bedtime. Apparently if you take cocaine you can stay awake much longer, but I feel I’m a bit old now to embark on cocaine.

There was no question of interviewing artists when I was at the
Sunday Express
in the 1980s. Our readers were determinedly philistine and still made jokes about Picassos with two noses, or Henry Moores with holes in them. Rolf Harris was probably the only artist they approved of. But when I moved to the
Independent on Sunday
in 1990, it was possible to slip the occasional artist into the celebrity mix. I started with Gilbert and George who gave their usual fine performance and from then on I interviewed two or three artists a year, starting with the obvious ones like David Hockney, but moving on to less obvious ones like Patrick Caulfield, Gillian Ayres, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Gillian Ayres became a good friend – but I blame her for the fact that I’m still smoking. I actually gave up for two months a few years ago, with the help of a wonder drug called Champix, but then I had lunch with Gillian at the River Café. As soon as we’d ordered our meal she said, ‘Time for a fag,’ and started tottering painfully (she was in her late seventies) towards the door. It was snowing so fiercely outside you couldn’t see more than a yard but the waiters, obviously used to Gillian, assembled a ring of patio heaters round us, and Gillian lit up. It was not the moment to say, ‘I’ve stopped,’ so I took a cigarette and that was the end of my smoking cure.

Until the mid-1990s I interviewed a rather random selection of artists, but then the YBAs came along and seized the media’s attention including mine. Damien Hirst was the first and I interviewed him (not very well) just after he won the Turner Prize. I also interviewed Rachel Whiteread and Sarah Lucas and the Chapman Brothers early in their careers, before the public knew much about them. They were all quite hard work. Jake Chapman threatened to kill me because I asked Dinos about his deformed hand. He thought it was ‘rude’ to discuss it – this from a man who was busy sticking phalluses on children’s faces, and modelling scenes of Nazi atrocities.

I loved Sarah Lucas from the start – I wrote that ‘I have never so much since school wanted to call someone my friend’ – but also found her difficult because (like most artists) she refuses to explain her work. She will talk about how something is made (e.g., by frying two eggs and placing them with a kebab on a rickety old table) and even let me watch but not about its meaning. I once spent two hours watching her stick Marlboro Light cigarettes on to a blown-up yellow lifejacket. I could see it was extraordinarily painstaking work, which banished for ever the idea that her art is ‘just thrown together’, but when I asked why, she only murmured something about the cigarettes representing self-destruction and the lifejacket a false hope of salvation. As an interview, it lacked a certain something. But then her gallerist, lovely lovely Sadie Coles, said that Sarah was doing a show at the Cologne Art Fair and I should come over and help. I’d never been to Cologne so I thought: Why not? Sadie rang and asked me to pick up a couple of salamis at the airport. What sort? I asked. ‘The size of a very big penis,’ she instructed.

I arrived at the show shortly before it opened, when Sadie was unpacking shopping bags, and Sarah was busy tying two fried eggs on to a coat hanger. She said that getting the fried eggs right had been a nightmare – she’d thought the hotel chef could do them but he never got them hard enough. There was very little visible art on show – a pair of concrete boots, a sagging sofa with two pumpkins inserted at breast-height, and some beer cans stuck together to look like a penis and balls. Sarah told me that my job would be drinking lots of beer to provide more beer cans. I thought this was a bit unnecessary but then the doors opened and dozens of visitors hurtled towards our stand and started queuing to buy beer-can penises at 999 D-Marks (about £330) a pop. I was astonished. I was also very quickly drunk, trying to consume enough beer to keep up with demand. Sadie had banknotes spilling out of every pocket and reckoned she took about £50,000 on the day.

In the evening, we went for dinner to the art publishers Taschen who had an enormous Jeff Koons ceramic of a child and two angels pushing a pig. It was my first glimpse of the other side of the art world – not the lonely artists in their studios, but the plutocrats who buy their stuff, the collectors. I still find them weird. I thought at one point I might like to do a book about them but Doris Saatchi, Charles Saatchi’s first wife and the one who got him into art originally, took me out to lunch and told me that I would find collectors very boring indeed. It was odd, coming from her, and she didn’t really explain it, but she said it so seriously I was inclined to believe her. She advised me to stick to interviewing artists, and I did.

I always feel when I’m interviewing artists that I’m doing something worthwhile. Of course some of them, like Tracey Emin or Grayson Perry, are so articulate they don’t need me to get their ideas across (both of them have written superb autobiographies) but the point at which I feel I’m doing something
useful
is when I interview artists who are not natural self-publicists, and who ‘don’t do words’. This is what I think of as my ‘
pro bono
’ work where, for once, my motive is not showing off as a writer but using my long experience as an interviewer to harvest information that would otherwise never be published. I remember the first time I interviewed Rachel Whiteread it was like hewing coal, trying to get the most basic biographical facts out of her, but I felt that every little nugget I collected would be of use to art historians fifty years down the line. And, as I argued to her then, I do feel that successful artists ought to talk to the media, not for reasons of self-aggrandisement, but to try to make art comprehensible to the widest possible public.

My other great mission is to find a
way
of talking about art that is not the usual repellent art bollocks. This is the jargon taught in art schools and perpetrated in art catalogues that bears no relation to English and serves only to obfuscate the subject. My favourite ever was in a catalogue at the Baltic for a Brazilian artist called Tonica Lemos Auad whose work consisted of tiny piles of carpet fluff. It read: ‘Auad’s carpet installations begin by the artist’s delicate gathering and repositioning of minute strands of fluff, teased patiently from newly laid carpet . . . Auad sees these works as three-dimensional, site-specific drawings that create a space in which the viewer can enter and engage with the settings.’ As my elder daughter pointed out, you could presumably ‘engage’ with the art by hoovering it up. Rather than add to the art bollocks canon, I always try to keep my artist interviews as simple as possible, asking factual questions about their childhood, their early influences, their working practices, rather than about what their art
means
. I feel that if I can supply a solid biographical background, and some account of their technique, the reader can hopefully look at the work and deduce its meaning for themselves.