It's not a big deal to be alive

1

Some beefy Hollywood thing was several years ago touted as the sexiest man alive. Having taken a look, I thought to my self, holy Christmas! They've gone out and done it! They've cloned Caracalla! and decided that -- being alive was clearly much overrated.

Now I find people who agree with me: not one, but two.

2

Here Hilary Mantel talks -- very engagingly -- in a series of five five-minute programs -- about her work on the autobiography of Stanislawa Przybyszewska: poor Stanislawa, locked in a 15 square meter room in Danzig/Gdansk, eaten alive by T.B., dead of morphine overdose at age 35, obsessively writing and rewriting and rewriting her endless The Case of Danton.

3

The play's oceanic length has meant that it's never been staged in its entirety: and the one time it was staged -- in a drastically abridged five-hour version -- it flopped. Perhaps, suggests Mantel, the length of the drama grew out of Przybyszewska's feeling that the only way to do justice to her hero -- Robespierre -- was to write a play which would last as long as the events it describes? Anything shorter would be an abridgment: an abridgment of the accused's right to defend himself.

4

A twelve-year theater performance, then?

And why not? The Balinese Ramayana cycle takes seven or eight years to complete; and it derives much of its power precisely from the way it does not end, but, going on and on, interacts with life: from the way its actors and audience live, so to speak, hurriedly and absent-mindedly, in the intermissions of the play, between its acts.

I can't help thinking: an un-stageable drama which yet spell-binds certain readers... is that somewhat like Parnicki's unreadable novels, spell-binding me precisely on account of their impenetrability?

(Look about you: this isn't Kansas anymore: we're right in the middle of Borges territory).

5

Now, Mantel's strong attachment to Przybyszewska stems from the two women's shared love for Maximillien: the pure, the self-less, the dedicated, the loyal. Mantel herself took an inordinate amount of time out of her life (five years of a twenty-five year old person is well-nigh eternity) to write a novel about Maximillien. A place of greater safety, too, is immense even by the Anglo-Saxon book-by-the-pound ("value for money") standard: 768 pages!

6

Mantel speaks frankly about her obsession with Maximillien: perhaps like Przybyszewska, she says, she finds dead men more attractive than live ones. Bitter words, but expressive of a notion not unfamiliar to antiquarians: the past is better; and much of its superiority lies in the fact that it is dead: a dead man cannot jilt you, for one; a dead writer who has never written anything stupid can no longer blot out his myth by saying something stupid now; the mystery of a work of art whose author is dead is guaranteed never to disappoint by revealing itself.

7

Mantel says that Wajda lifted large sections of Przybyszewska's dialogue into his Danton.

Which is incredible: the film feels like an accusation of Robespierre; yet, says Mantel, the play was meant to be his defense. An interesting point about human minds, this: the same text, the same words, diametrically opposed interpretations.

Different brains, clearly.

8

Googling, I find that Przybyszewska, practically unknown in Poland, is becoming a bit of a minor celebrity in the West: take this, for example. In this, she's much like Bruno Szulc whose prose is thought too baroquely romantic for the Polish taste (which has had a surfeit of baroque romanticism over the centuries); but which sounds new and fresh to Anglo ears fed on the usual mixture of dry fact and cutting wit.

(I have recently had a chance to observe how ordinarily Slavic Nabokov's English prose sounds -- that prose which every anglo seems to think such a thing of beauty, a literary break-through, etc.)

9

The Mantel mini-series is part of a larger BBC radio series called Work in Progress. It is to be found here. Not all of it is as interesting as Mantel; most is -- plainly embarrassing. The projects people work on seem mostly incredibly pedestrian and uninspired; and what they say about the work is hackenyed and ordinary; one wonders why anyone bothers.

Ian McEwan is surely the dullest man alive. And the fellow who had designed the V&A addition, if the way he talks about it is any indication of the quality of his design, surely deserved to have it yanked.