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| The Independent 2004 |
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07 May 2004
Jeanette Winterson, one of our finest - and most controversial - writers, is back with a new novel. She tells CHRISTINA PATTERSON how she nearly lost the plot
Of love and other demons
On the window sill of Jeanette Winterson's parlour, there is a framed cartoon. 'She's a feisty dame alright' says one character nervously to another. 'I give her new book a rotten review and she turns up on the doorstep.' In the final frame, a minion pops his head around the corner. 'Barbara Cartland would like a word with you,' he announces cheerily.
The joke, of course, is that it's Jeanette Winterson who is famously feisty. It was she who 'turned up on the doorstep' of a journalist who had given her a bad review, an incident that instantly entered the canon of Authors Behaving Badly. Clearly, she has a sense of humour. A real one, because the cartoon isn't on display, but lying flat behind a curtain. While Winterson is upstairs being photographed, I've been snooping around - gazing in wonder, in fact, at the pared down elegance of her beautiful Georgian house. It's a perfect combination of old and new: walls painted a classy plum or muted grey-green, a PowerBook perched on a Chinese lacquer table, gorgeous cast iron fireplaces and ornate gilt candle sticks set against the stark simplicity of a white enamel sink.
When Jeanette Winterson bursts into the room, she is herself a powerhouse: a tiny, elfin creature in an orange fleece and beige cords. Her hair is wild and gets wilder as we talk. 'There's a Prada opening across the road,' she tells me as we wait for the kettle to boil. 'My friends have said it'll be great for the sales!' There is little sign, as she spoons tea into the pot and asks anxiously about the strength and colour, of the fierce, austere creature I've been led to expect.
It is nearly 20 years since the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the semi-autiobiographical novel of a Pentecostal childhood that made her name and, five years later, gripping television. Her adoptive mother died during the second episode. Poetic justice, perhaps, or maybe the Old Testament kind, for a woman who plucked a child from an orphanage with the sole purpose of making a missionary. She succeeded.
When God was booted out, art burst in. Jeanette Winterson has never stopped being a missionary. Her work, and conversation, is infused with the passion of the true believer, one who believes in the redemptive power of stories and love. Her second novel was even called The Passion. A surreally baroque tale of androgynous ecstasy, it glides between Napoleon's kitchens and Venice in a poetic dance that sets Winterson firmly outside the social-realist tradition. It ends with a statement that is, for Winterson, almost a mantra: 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me.'
Sexing the Cherry followed, a dazzling blend of madrigal-singing toads, dancing princesses and a Dog Woman who lives on the banks of the Thames. Some reviewers were already balking at the weirdness, but most were rapturous. It was only with Written on the Body, a philosophical meditation on the body and love, that things started to go seriously belly-up. Jeanette Winterson, said reviewers, had lost the plot (something which had never, in any case, featured prominently in her work) and must be punished for her hubris.
The PowerBook, published in 2000, marked the first stirrings of a return to grace. Set in London, Paris, Capri and cyberspace, it weaves together coverversions, fairy tales and popular culture in a love story that's also a contemporary fable. In cyberspace, she had found her perfect metaphor: a world without boundaries in which all the traditional markers of linear narrative - time, place and fixed identities - have dissolved. Her new novel, Lighthousekeeping (Fourth Estate, £15), draws on many of her familiar themes, but also introduces a raft of new ones. There's storytelling, love and art, of course, but there's also light and dark, Darwin and the Double.
Motherless Silver, adrift in the world, is taken in by Pew, keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse. While tending the light that keeps seafarers from their death, Pew cooks sausages in the darkness and tells ancient tales of rootlessness and longing. One of these, about a 19th-century clergyman called Babel Dark, takes root and becomes a leitmotiv of love and loss, weaving in and out of Silver's story.
Repressed, cruel Dark has an alter-ego called Lux in a tale with echoes of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. Meanwhile, back in what may or may not be the present, Silver has some kind of (archetypally modernist) nervous collapse. 'I am coloured glass from a church window long since shattered,' she says. 'I find pieces of myself everywhere, and I cut myself handling them.'
It's a plot to make the heart sink, but Lighthousekeeping is a brilliant, glittering piece of work, the kind that makes you gasp out loud at the sheer beauty of the language. The key note of Winterson's prose, like her house, is pared down elegance, here charged with a luminous, lyrical intensity.
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'I was walking on the canal in Regent's Park,' she tells me, 'and a sentence came into my head fully formed, which is the first sentence. And I thought, ooh, I wonder who that is... Then I wait to see if the thing goes away, or if it's just an over-excitable bit of lunch I've had and it will pass. It didn't pass,' she grins. 'The process is maddening,' she adds, 'because I don't write sequentially, and I never number pages till the very end. It's a real act of faith - so it's a good job I was brought up the way I was!'
As models of creativity go, it's pretty much the Romantic one, which, she says, 'allows free play amongst those chaotic and disturbing elements that are often lost in the personality and in the busy lives that we lead'. It is clearly no picnic. 'I go to my study and it's just awful,' she confides. 'You can sit there for hours at a time and produce nothing of any value and it all has to be thrown away... This isn't a real fire,' she says, gesturing towards the flames flickering a few feet away from us, 'but in the country all my fires are real, and I always have one at the ready... In a way I think anything that's good will return.'
For this novel, she threw out 1,500 pages in order to reach the 200-odd that remain. She writes in her studio, 'a big, open space with no books in it', and puts the sections in piles on the floor. 'There might be 50 or more sections,' she explains, 'and then if I'm really cross I'll just shove them on top of each other. And then I have to read it all again... I read it obsessively and I read it out loud, and move the sections if I have to.'
In Lighthousekeeping, as in all her work, love is the big theme, love that's as much about passionate engagement with the world as the solipsistic melding of one soul with another. Does she see herself as part of the Romantic tradition? 'Yes, I do,' she smiles, 'and I think in a past life I was probably an 18th-century poet - maybe not a very good one, who wandered about being lovelorn under the window. I do,' she adds, more seriously, 'believe in the redeeming power of love, and I think it's a Romantic image, but it's also a religious idea that love is as strong as death.'
She is, perhaps, a Romantic modernist, one who has in the past talked about being 'the natural heir to Virginia Woolf '. It's a position she now modifies: 'I don't think that I'm the direct heir to Woolf or anything like that. I think I'm doing the work, or taking up some of the challenges, and I'm very excited by other writers who are doing it, too.' Her measured response finally gives me the courage to ask about some of those tricky moments in the Winterson histoire, such as the time she named herself her favourite living author and nominated her own book as her Sunday Times book of the year.
She roars with laughter. 'What did I say? Oh God! This is terrible! People behave like assholes and it's forgotten, but if you're a writer...' she tails off. 'Tell me what I said and I can apologise!'
Alluding vaguely to 'negative publicity', I ask if she has actually shifted her position. Or has she just become more circumspect? 'I'm on a journey of my own,' she says with a rueful smile. 'After Written on the Body was published I went mad. I couldn't write, I couldn't do anything and that's when I left London. Everybody said we hate you and we hate your work, you're an arrogant bastard. But in America and Europe it was the book that completely changed my fortunes. So you've got completely conflicting information coming in. I was ski-ing downhill far too fast, and my skis were going apart. I used to dream this every night.'
The process of recovery was long and slow and included a period when Winterson thought she might never write again. In her account of it, there is every sign of the religious sensibility, and symbolism, that infused her childhood and adolescence. It ended, she said, on the day that The PowerBook was published, when a close friend died, a godchild was born and she had a revelatory moment with a poem by RS Thomas, 'The Bright Field'. She recites it to me, beautifully and, of course, with passion.
'So, I was free,' she sighs. 'I'm not angry any more. I said some crazy things, I did some crazy things, but it doesn't matter, because it feels forgiven in the true sense, in that I have forgiven it and it is anyway forgiven. So,' says Jeanette Winterson with a cheerful smile, 'you go on.'
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