Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Some thoughts on Jeanette Winterson.

I often admire Jeanette Winterson’s work more than I like it. Her novels are technically impressive, intellectually stimulating, but for me at least, not engaging; I have to make myself read them because I know what they contain is good for me. But her recent memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? engaged me spectacularly. I finished it in three days, reading it first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and before I went to bed; I even found myself picking it up while I waited for the kettle to boil.

The difference is partly that the memoir is naked. She’s telling her story, honestly, and it’s a shocking, inspiring, compelling story. Reading the book is like sitting in your room while a fiercely intelligent friend tells you how she got from the beginning of her life to the point where you met her. How could you not want to hear more? Especially when you know that friend’s life began with abuse by a Christian fundamentalist mother and found its way, somehow, to literary celebrity and media fame (not that there are simple resolutions in the difficult emotional trajectory she describes).

But I suspect the limitations I have seen in Winterson’s other books are also limitations, and prejudices, in me. I read a lot of postmodernist texts last year and the techniques and ideas favoured by most of the writers began to blur in my mind, seeming as much the default setting of comfortable middle-aged intellectuals as a just creative/ philosophical response to the particular conditions of early twenty-first century living.

That still has the uneasy taste of truth to me. I say uneasy because I don’t know what the alternative is. But I wonder if I have less patience with Winterson when she inhabits that kind of complex space because her perspective is one I’m not sympathetic to instinctively. Do I give Salman Rushdie, for example, more time because he is a man? I loved Midnight’s Children but is it really any better than Sexing The Cherry? Was I more inclined to work with the exasperation Paul Auster caused me in his New York Trilogy because of the masculine archetypes he used?

I’m not comfortable with these thoughts, or even conscious of them. I would rather think of myself as thoroughly enlightened and unencumbered by prejudice. But we all bring something to our reading experience. I might go back to the key Winterson novels in the coming months and see if they are quite how I first thought of them.

Jeanette Winterson's website: http://www.jeanettewinterson.com

The Bible, Shakespeare & Language Vandalism

I heard the Lord's Prayer recited in a church last year for the first time since I was a child. I couldn't believe how the elegant, poetic version I once knew had been vandalised to make it accessible to the modern churchgoer. Here's Jeanette Winterson from her book "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" on the same subject:

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home, and as there was still a 'thee' and 'thou' or 'tha' in daily speech for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked 'the quick and the dead'--you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

In the 1960s many men--and they were men not women--attended evening classes at the Working Men's Institutes or the Mechanics' Institute--another progressive initiative coming out of Manchester. The idea of 'bettering' yourself was not seen as elitist then, neither was it assumed that all values are relative, nor that all culture is more or less identical--whether Hammer Horror or Shakespeare.

Those evening classes were big on Shakespeare--and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn't difficult--it was the language of the 1611 Bible; the King James Version appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of "The Tempest." Shakespeare wrote "The Winter's Tale" that year.

It was useful continuity, destroyed by the well-meaning, well-educated types who didn't think of the consequences for the wider culture to have modern Bibles with the language stripped out. The consequence was that uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language.