LRB · Hilary Mantel · Diary

I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, and three Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, though later I can’t remember which ones. I read a new biography of Catherine of Aragon in proof. I read On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf. What schoolgirl piffle, I think. It’s like one of those compositions by young ladies mocked in Tom Sawyer. I can’t understand what she means when she complains about the ‘poverty of the language’ we have to describe illness. For the sufferer, she says, there is ‘nothing ready made’. Then what of the whole vocabulary of singing aches, of spasms, of strictures and cramps; the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the pricking and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old words. No one’s pain is so special that the devil’s dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it. There is even a scale you can use to refine it: ‘Tell me,’ the doctor says, ‘on a scale of one to ten, how much this hurts’: one being a love bite, I suppose, and ten the fiery pit of hell. Pain may pass beyond language, but it doesn’t start beyond it. The torture chamber is where people ‘speak’. No doubt language fails in that shuttered room called melancholia, where the floor is plush and the windowless walls are draped in black velvet: where any sound you make carries only feebly to the outside world, and can be taken for some accidental, natural sound, a creak or a sigh from doorframe or drawer. But then, mental suffering is so genteel; at least, until the dribbling sets in. Virginia only has decorous illnesses. She has faints and palpitations, fevers and headaches, though I am mindful that at one stage they tried to fix her by pulling out her teeth. But she is seemly; she does not seep, or require a dressings trolley, she does not wake at dawn to find herself smeared with contact jelly from last night’s ECG. Virginia never oozes. Her secretions are ladylike: tears, not bile. She may as well not have had bowels, for all the evidence of them in her book...