Lighthousekeeping

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘I have no plans at present for another novel, but for me that’s normal. I never plan ahead. It’s a question of letting new ideas come through and not being afraid of that.’

  You mention on your website that The PowerBook is the end of a cycle. Is Lighthousekeeping the beginning of a new one?

  Yes it is. It’s a new exploration. I don’t know where it will lead, I don’t know what comes next. I have no plans at present for another novel, but for me that’s normal. I never plan ahead. I think it’s necessary for writers always to be prepared to renew themselves and to reconsider the way that they work. I don’t want to parody other people but I don’t want to parody myself either, and nor do I want to start writing the same book, which can be a danger when you’ve been working for a while, and I’ve been working for twenty years now in 2005. So it’s a question of letting new ideas come through and not being afraid of that and not being afraid of things ending, because out of those endings come the possibilities of new beginnings. I don’t think there is any other way to work.

  Lighthousekeeping revolves very specifically around telling stories. Why do you think storytelling, as an act, is so important to us?

  Storytelling is a way of establishing connections, imaginative connections for ourselves, a way of joining up disparate material and making sense of the world. Human beings love patterns; they love to see shapes and symmetries. We seem to have a need to impose order on our surroundings, which are generally chaotic and often in themselves seem to lack any continuity, any storyline. For me, though, the telling of stories is not about imposing an order, it’s about revealing an order which is implicit in a situation but perhaps concealed, perhaps well hidden.

  ‘Art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that’s why writing can never be formulaic.’

  I believe in pattern and in order but I don’t believe that those things are artificial. I think that art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that’s why writing can never be formulaic: it can never be done according to plan because it arises from a deeper part of the self which I think is less neurotic than the conscious mind and less afraid of not immediately having a shape to put on every new situation. We can be obsessive, always wanting to categorise and quantify; we become taxonomists, and it’s not always helpful. It’s often better to let the pattern emerge in its own right. The pattern might be slightly flawed, the shape might be different to the one that we would imagine, but it’s still valid, and storytelling allows that to happen. Nothing in the story ever quite works out in the way you imagine it will: there are always surprises, there are always twists and turns.

  Storytelling teaches us to be unafraid of our imaginative power and I think it teaches us to be unafraid of the exuberance and the unruly, untamed nature of life, of our lives. So in a world which is obsessed with taming, obsessed with making sense of things – which often means reducing those things – stories are a way of making sense differently, of enlarging upon what we are and not being afraid of the unruly elements within it.

  Many of your books cross boundaries of time and history. Do you spend a lot of time doing research before you start writing?

  I pick up things that I need as I go along. I don’t sit down and try and get everything into a neat pile next to my computer before I start. I think you have to let the work suggest its own conundrums and then you start to solve them. So when I need a piece of research I go out and get it. Otherwise I think you tend towards the formulaic, which I believe is unhelpful. If you think you know where the story will go, then you’re perhaps directing it too much with your conscious mind. You need the story itself to suggest things to you.

  I’m a great believer in working with the unconscious, working with those parts of the self which aren’t immediately accessible to rationale or logic. After all, if art reaches anywhere it reaches underneath the surface of the everyday, it reaches past our logical decisions and reasons and it reaches into another place, which is richer, stranger, perhaps closer to the world of the child than to the world of the adult. I don’t think we grow out of that world; I think we suppress it, ignore it and lose touch with it. Reading, looking at pictures, listening to music, going to the theatre, all of those things allow us to regain contact with the parts of our selves that growing up and living in this crazy, corporate world try to squeeze out.

  ‘I’m a great believer in working with the unconscious, working with those parts of the self which aren’t immediately accessible to rationale or logic.’

  Inevitably a high-profile writer’s life and work are conflated. Do you find this irritating or simply par for the course?

  My own writing life has run parallel to a change in the way that writers are perceived by the public and the media. Until the late eighties writers were much more anonymous. They were unlikely to be recognised; they might do one or two interviews but they were not in any sense treated as celebrities, nor were they expected to give opinions on the state of the world and generally air their views. This changed when the media realised that it could treat writers in this way and it would be entertaining because, unlike rock stars and actors, writers tend not to go around with PR people who warn them when to keep quiet and not to answer certain questions. So it’s very easy to make us look ridiculous. Everybody’s had a lot of fun with this. Writers have wised up now: we know how it’s going to be so we’re a lot more careful. Personally I think it’s unhelpful that writers are treated as celebrities; I think it’s better that we should be treated as nobodies and only the work should be on show, but that’s never going to happen. So you have to live in the world that you’re in; there’s no point in lamenting for a lost Arcadia – it won’t come back. My view is to cooperate now as much as I can and to try and keep private what I can.

  I think questions of autobiography are always misleading because every writer uses themselves in their work; they use their own experience, they use what they observe, hopefully they use what they can imagine but perhaps that’s less frequent than it ought to be. But really autobiography tells us very little. What we should be looking for is authenticity: if this comes from the centre of the writer, if it comes from a real place in the writer then that will show itself in the work. And I think it’s authenticity we should be looking at, not autobiography. There’s only so much the autobiography can tell us. But at present we are obsessed with writers’ lives, with what we think of as true life, with what we think of as the real story. There is no real story, the real story is in the fiction.

  What was it like to start, finish and sell Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit? What was that first book like?

  It was entirely innocent. You really only get that for a couple of times in a writer’s life because then you start to be out in the world, you become a published figure – the whole perspective changes. The innocence goes and your only hope then is to make a William Blake-style journey from innocence to experience. There is no other way to recover that particular joy and surprise that you get in your work right at the beginning. Trudging through the middle period can be rather dreary. I have got the joy and surprise back now but it has been a very particular journey.

  Thinking back on Oranges, it was done in the heat of enthusiasm; it was done without consideration for what anyone might think, without looking over my shoulder, without hesitation. I had nothing to lose, I had everything to gain, it was very free. Inevitably that changes. I was surprised that it did as well as it did. It shouldn’t have because it was only published in paperback and it didn’t get any marketing behind it, but it began to move under its own momentum and the rest of the story is, I think, well known.

  Oranges was enormously successful both as a book and as a television series. None of your other books has been televised. Would you want them to be?

  I wouldn’t particularly. I enjoyed doing The PowerBook for the stage, for instance, but although television is very persuasive
because everyone watches it and you hope that then they’ll buy the book – well, publishers do because then they make lots of money – it’s not something I feel is particularly necessary. For me the pleasure is the book and the books are what I want to write. So it may happen but I don’t really care either way.

  Boating for Beginners is often dismissed whereas it is in fact a very funny, very enjoyable book. Does it annoy you that it doesn’t get as much press as some of your other books, that it’s a lost book?

  No, if it’s a lost book it is because, I have let it be lost simply because although I’m very fond of it, it is what it is. It’s a particular kind of comic book and I didn’t put myself into it in the way that I have done with my other books because I didn’t take it seriously. It was written very quickly, it was written in six weeks and it was just to fund me. I didn’t have any money in those days and I was asked to do it for the humour list for Methuen at the time and I thought,’Why not?’ It was at the time that I was writing my fitness book and I would do anything just to keep myself going. I’m a writer, I hope I’m a good writer – if not, everybody’s been conned for the last twenty years – but that means you can turn your hand to anything. I often think of myself as running a little workshop: I make things to sell, I’m not precious about it. I feel that I can pretty much write anything that anybody wants me to write because that’s the professional side of it, the skill side of it, and then there are the things you do because you put your heart into them.

  ‘My own writing life has run parallel to a change in the way that writers are perceived by the public and the media.’

  Do you have a favourite book of yours?

  No, they all occupy particular spaces. To some extent it’s like looking back on your old record collection, or diaries that you don’t read any more. You were there, you were that person, they meant everything to you at the time. But you move past them, you are somebody else, you become somebody else because of writing the book. The books are your tutors and your guide: they make you as much as you make them. But then they are absorbed at the level of familiarity because they’re in your DNA and at the same time, which is a paradox, they’re absolutely strange. I look on the shelf – in a bookshop somewhere – and think, ‘Oh, I wrote those’, and that’s always a little bit of a surprise.

  ‘I think it’s unhelpful that writers are treated as celebrities; we should be treated as nobodies and only the work should be on show.’

  Your website not only supplies information about your own work but also that of many other writers, especially poets. Would you say that poetry is something that influences you, or that you are trying to achieve, and would you ever consider writing it?

  I wouldn’t consider writing it, no. Poetry is the thing that matters to me more than anything else. I use it like caffeine: when I’m tired I’ll have a shot of poetry. I always carry it with me; I look for that exactness of language, that sensitivity and feeling. But I won’t write it because I have decided that my experiment is to use those poetic disciplines and work them against the stretchiness of narrative. It may be a foolish experiment in a world that speed-reads – although I only write short books, they don’t lend themselves to being read very quickly. The sentences matter, every word in every sentence is made to matter, it’s not simply about conveying information. I try to do more than that. So it’s absolute anathema to the idea of reading six books a day leaning against the fridge, as I believe they do for the Booker Prize!

  I don’t have any plans to produce a book of poetry but, who knows, that may change. I think poets and poetry are having a renaissance at the moment – people understand perhaps better than they have done for a long time what poetry is and that it matters; there’s room for it in people’s lives now. That’s a good thing.

  When discussing your editions of Virginia Woolf, you mention how much you dislike literary criticism, especially critical theory. How does it feel, as a writer, to appear on syllabuses the world over?

  We get a lot of emails on the site saying, ‘I’m doing this or that essay’, meaning ‘Can you write it for me?’ The answer is no! It entertains me, and again it’s one of the things that I’m surprised by, that I’m there and being taught. I think you have to leave people alone to work out their own interpretations. I don’t mind what people write about my work and I don’t read it because there’s no need to read it. I think you have to allow the thing to go on its own way and collect whatever it wants along the way without worrying too much or saying, ‘I didn’t mean that.’ It’s redundant for a writer to say, ‘That’s not what I meant’ or, ‘I meant something else.’ The text lives outside of that very simplistic space.

  ‘I often think of myself as running a little workshop: I make things to sell, I’m not precious about it.’

  Of course it’s always difficult when one’s alive; it’s much easier when you’re dead! I think the whole critical push for the death of the author was really wishful thinking on the part of the critics who longed for it. If criticism brings people to think about books, if it helps them to formulate their own thoughts and to read more then it’s a good thing, always a good thing. I think now that there’s so much pressure put on people to produce papers, for academics to write books, the work must end up being poor quality and rather low grade, which is a pity for everyone. Nobody wins in that situation. You should only write about things that you love and where you feel that you’ve got something to contribute, and of course that’s not fashionable any more. I had some A-level students emailing me the other day to ask, ‘What did you mean in Oranges by the “rough brown pebble”?’ and I thought,’Oh, I have no idea!’ I’m going to come up with something for them, I must have meant something, mustn’t I?!

  ‘I look on the shelf – in a bookshop somewhere – and think, ‘Oh, I wrote those’, and that’s always a little bit of a surprise.’

  Your shop opening received a lot of press coverage. What inspired you to open it, and is it in any way a distraction?

  Well, I don’t run the shop. It’s a fantasy of the media that I am to be found there selling olives and Parmesan cheese. I’ve never sold an olive in my life and I don’t intend to start selling one now. I own the building and it’s right that there should be a shop and I wanted the kind of shop that I like to shop in. I didn’t want cushions and candles, a lifestyle shop, and I didn’t want to sell out to a corporation doing coffee or plastic sandwiches. I wanted a real shop and I wanted a beautiful shop. I wanted to know that when I come to London I can pick up my supper and take it upstairs and eat it. It was a great muddle of altruism, high-mindedness, selfishness and ‘I’ll do this because I can’. So I did.

  You write journalism, columns, have edited Virginia Woolf and now own a shop. When do you have time or space to think about writing your next book?

  I’m thinking all the time. I don’t think that ever stops except when I’m in the gym. In fact one of the reasons that I go to the gym is because I can stop thinking there, which is an enormous relief.

  I’m not a New Yorker by temperament; I’m not a frenzied person who only sleeps four hours a night and thinks she has to put everything in and that’s the way to live a perfect life – not at all. But I do think that it’s right to put as much into life as you can and to get as much out of life as you can. Of course that includes doing things slowly and doing things well – finding time for your friends, cooking properly, reading, going for walks, playing – all of the things which apparently yield no results. You don’t make money that way and you don’t get on in life that way, but what you get is something much more important. You get space for your mind. We don’t have a lot of that and of course you can’t believe in art in the way that I do and not believe that people need space for the mind, to slow down and to find time.

  ‘I do think that it’s right to put as much into life as you can and to get as much out of life as you can. That includes doing things slowly and doing things well.’

  People are always saying that t
hey haven’t got time for anything: I think there is time, but it demands prioritising and it demands rethinking the way we live our lives. So I just make sure that I take time: I walk every day, I think about things, I read, I let things come up from that deep place that I talk about. You have to find time for that still small voice. Some people do it by meditation, I do it by switching the phone off, going out and being by myself with my own thoughts.

  Do you know what your next book will be yet?

  No idea. I’m doing a children’s book for Bloomsbury which will be published next year. I’m not thinking about any other projects until I’ve finished it.

  LIFE AT A GLANCE

  Author photo:

  Peter Peitsch/peitschphotos.com

  BORN

  * * *

  Manchester, 1959.