Week Fifty-One - Jeanette

Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson (1992)

Recommended by Anita

My body is written on.

I have three tattoos. Each is a carefully chosen design, patterns I knew I wanted indelibly inked upon me. The nuances shift, but their core meaning doesn’t: they represent transitions. I got each one during the final element of a pupa stage. They are memento moris of my past lives.

(We tattooed people do witter on about how deep ‘n’ meaningful the things are. Boring bores, the lot of us.)

But, lately, I’ve been wondering if there’s another, less highfalutin' reason for my tattoos. I think it’s also an expression of my background, a branch from the same root as liking amusement arcades and gaud at Christmas. Loads of people I grew up with have them. If you don’t tattoo the name of your child on your arm, well, what kind of mother are you? Don’t you love your kid?

I feel kinship with Jeanette Winterson. She has my name! There are precious few of us Little Jeans around. But, too, she was a working-class girl who found herself running with a different crowd when she went to university. For me, the process had already started before I left Norwich (a schoolfriend accused me of being a class traitor), but it certainly solidified after the age of eighteen. I never thought of it as a conscious denial of my background, although I’m sure others saw it that way. As I wrote in Week Sixteen, there are only two people from my pre-uni days involved in Two Readers.

It's a minor part of the book, but Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit captures this chequered experience well: the excitement and feeling of belonging with your new life, coupled with the sense of loss for the old. 

In her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson revisits the material she drew on for Oranges. Her conflicted feelings about her upbringing (and apart from the class aspect, her family circumstances are very different to mine) continue to be source material for her. Having read those two works, I approached Written On The Body with veiled autobiography in mind.

It was an interesting book to tackle directly after The Pursuit Of Love.

I had said them many times before, dropping them like coins into a wishing well, hoping they would make me come true. I had said them many times before but not to you. I had given them as forget-me-nots to girls who should have known better. I had used them as bullets and barter. I don’t like to think of myself as an insincere person but if I say I love you and I don’t mean it then what else am I?

The gender of Written On The Body’s narrator is never revealed, yet (perhaps because of my association of Winterson with memoir) I found myself thinking of that narrator as ‘her’ throughout. I assumed one of the country’s top lesbians must be mining her own relationships with women. But of course it could be a man, or a transgendered person. (There is no Smack My Bitch Up ‘surprise’ twist ending). I also suspect Winterson was drawing attention to the difficulty of expression without gender pronouns, critiquing how binary and constricting those categories are.

We begin by reading of the narrator’s back love catalogue. The prose is graceful, charged and often erotic, although it does sometimes spill into floridness.

I watched her break and butter each piece, soak it slowly in her bowl, let it float, grow heavy and fat, sink under the deep red weight and then be resurrected to the glorious pleasure of her teeth.

I do like it when Winterson gets a bit bawdier, too.

           June. The wettest June on record. We made love every day.

Most of the narrator’s women are flowing-locked anarcho goddesses (‘I had a girlfriend once who was addicted to starlit nights.’ Not addicted to Tetris, then?), but perhaps this is intended to show how the narrator idealises love objects rather than as a parade of unrealistic females. The Helenest of these Helens Of Troy is Louise: the pair embark upon an erotic and emotional odyssey until we discover that Louise’s body is more than honey-filled breasts and love-saturated heart. It has been invaded by leukaemia.

We are beholden to our bodies and, suicide aside, it is the body that has the ultimate control: the power of life and death. (That’s another reason why I decided to get tattooed. The body does enough stuff that you don’t want it to do, might as well get it to do something you do). The narrator now has to come to terms with this, and the book’s interlude, the extended prose poem ‘The Cells, Tissues, Systems And Cavities Of The Body’, explores Louise’s physicality as something more than sexual. It is an expression of the narrator’s love, framed by the new awareness of the cancer spraying graffiti on the inside and outside of Louise’s body.

Will you let me crawl inside you, stand guard over you, trap them as they come at you? Why can’t I dam their blind tide that filthies your blood? Why are there no lock gates on your portal vein?

Like Dennis Quaid in Innerspace, the narrator roams around: you can hear fingertips running on the corrugated roof of Louise’s mouth. But, when the narrator returns to the corporeal world, the hard fact of Louise’s illness is still there. What is more important, the health of the body or that of the heart?

One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning?

This novel didn’t, for me, have the personal clout of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: the story seems deliberately not as strong, almost as if Winterson thinks that an abstract narrative is a more valid approach to literature. But I really enjoyed getting lost within Louise’s capilliaries, climbing her spine stepladder, being swaddled by her intestines. 

And while we’re thinking of bodies, what body do you picture when you hear ‘mermaid’? Ariel in The Little Mermaid? Daryl Hannah in Splash? Cher in fancy dress? Jerry Hall on the cover of Siren? Chances are it isn’t this…

 

Cryptozoology is a word I had never encountered before I met Anita. It refers to the study of fake or unproven creatures like the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, and Norfolk’s own Black Shuck. (Look at this fascinating list of cryptids – a Man-Eating Tree!). And then there’s The Buxton Mermaid, that beauty above.

Anita restored her. She is also her ambassador, telling her story to the press and to museums. Her care of The Buxton Mermaid goes beyond a job, and that is typical Anita. She will give her time and her support to those (and crypto-those) who she loves. She’s certainly done it for me. When I was in the midst of a crisis, Anita not only propped me up with words and hugs, she came to my place and did my washing-up. When everything is surreal because sadness is so huge, to have someone who can gently re-orientate your world, so you’re in no doubt it’s still worth living in because you have friends like her… it is a key to recovery.

I love conversing with Anita about books. (She's Tim's sister, equally as erudite as he) and as the year, and this project, has written itself on my body, I've realised I have my Two Readers friends to thank for more than just their book recommendation. It’s talking about the posts, sharing thoughts on the books in person, and to hear other interpretations of the stories and ideas that has been so incredibly inspiring, and the motivating factor in getting me to book fifty-one out of fifty-three.

Hold on to your hats. There are two amazing works coming down the Two Readers bridleway before midnight on the 31^st of December, 2013.

Week Fourteen - Jude

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (2012)
Recommended by Kathryn Cook

Christ, what a week to read this. For the first half of it, I was in my childhood home. In the second half, Margaret Thatcher died.

I've never read any of Jeanette Winterson's books before. Which is amazing really, given the way that she writes (which I love), and the things she writes about (things I'm interested in). However, I did see the TV adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit many years ago, and at the end of last year saw a BBC documentary about Winterson, closely linked to this book.

So I knew a few things already. From the documentary, I knew that Winterson still had a slow, strong Accrington accent. From that and from Oranges, I knew she was working-class, self-taught, and incredibly clever. That she had been adopted by a mad, cruel mother and a dad who didn't intervene. That she had read her way through the local library, very ravenously, like I had, and went to university in Oxford to read English, as I had.

I didn't know that the real story of her life was even weirder, even nastier, even tougher, than that.

But before all that: Kathryn Cook. I met Kathryn in the lovely summer of 2001, as a friend of my then-boyfriend Barry, and best friend of some other working-class girl called Jeanette (hello, lovely Jeanette). Kathryn and I shared a love of pop music, sitcoms, massive bottles of Tesco's own-brand Soave, and later shared two flats together – one when we'd both broken up with our boyfriends so did a house-swap, and then one for a year together in Hackney. Those were glorious days.

Kathryn also has an encyclopaedic brain on most subjects –with her husband Rupert, she only went on AN EPISODE OF POINTLESS and WON.  But she's not only an expert on obscure glam-rock/indiepop/rave singles, and how to accessorise an outfit just-so (she's gleefully brilliant at both). She's also razor-sharp on books and politics, and always has forthright, refreshing opinions.

(She is also someone who has helped me so much over the years with her wonderful chats and advice, and that matters most of course. She is one of my loveliest friends.)

Kathryn recommended me this book a few months ago, and I finally bought it last week. It's fantastic: beautifully written, angry, and stylistically really interesting. It's chronological, sort of, taking us through Winterson's younger years, until the moment she lasts sees her adoptive mother, then bouncing forward to the decade when she finds out her real mother is still alive. It's full of theories about love and family and loss and being a woman, like therapy through literature.

"Words always help" is a very condensed version of what she seems to be saying. I'm not half the writer she is, but words do that for me too.

For Winterson, so does fiction and the editing and filtering of our lives. In Oranges for instance, there was a character Elsie, who helped the fictional Jeanette. In real life, Winterson reveals here: "There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that."

As a lonely child in very different circumstances - my father had died, and I missed him - I found lots of solace in this book. Lots of other passages connected with me personally. When Winterson reads T.S. Eliot for the first time, she experiences the same head-rush and heart-rattle that I did, and describes it with a thump. The stuff about Oxford struck me too, although I was a comp kid who had her own bedroom, not someone who lived in the back of a car.

The stuff about Thatcher too. Jesus. It's been a funny week, obviously, thinking about all that. Jeanette (my Jeanette again) and I talked about this on the phone last night... about how Thatcher's death brought up about so many thoughts and feelings. About how the mythologising of Maggie's time in power, and the whitewashing of her legacy, coloured by the might of her pronouncements, and the projection of her power, ignores just how much she rode roughshod over our own communities and families, and how her ideology fundamentally changed the way many people behave.

In this book, Winterson says why she voted for Thatcher in the 1979 General Election. This happened just after she had been given her place to read English at Oxford. I'm going to quote this just before I sign off – and it's long, and I hope Winterson doesn't mind (and if anyone reading this does on terms of copyright, email me through my website, juderogers.com and I'll take it down pronto). It just seems so important to post this today: the vivid, brilliant words of a girl who came from nothing, and had nothing, and here says so much. The non-italics are her own.

 "Thatcher had the vigour and the arguments and she knew the price of a loaf of bread. She was a woman - and that made me feel too that I could succeed. If a grocer's daughter could be prime minister, then a girl like me could write a book that would be on the shelves of English Literature in Prose A-Z.

I voted for her. 

It is commonplace now to say that Thatchr changed two political parties: her own, and the left-wing Labour opposition. It is less often remembered that Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK broke forever the post-war consensus - and that consensus had lasted for over thirty years.

Spin back to 1945, and whether you were on the Left or the Right in Britain or Western Europe, rebuilding societies after the war could not happen using the outdated and discredited neo-liberal economics of the free market – unregulated labour, unstable prices, no provision for the sick or the old or unemployed. We were going to need housing, plenty of jobs, a welfare state, nationalisation of utilities and transport.

It was a real advance in human consciousness toward collective responsibility; an understanding that we owed something not only to our flag or to our country, to our children or our families, but to each other. Society. Civilisation. Culture.

That advance in consciousness did not come out of Victorian values or philanthropy, nor did it emerge from right-wing politics; it came out of the practical lessons of the war, and – and this matters -–the superior arguments of socialism.

Britain's economic slow-down in the 1970s, our IMF bail-out, rocketing oil prices, Nixon's decision to float the dollar, unruly union disputes, and a kind of existential doubt on the Let, allowed the Reagan/Thatcher 1980s Right to skittle away annoying arguments about a fair and equal society. [...]

In 1988, Thatcher's Chancellor of The Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, called the post-war consensus the 'post-war delusion'.

I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility,  or that the life of the mind will not be counted as good unless it produces measurable results."

And so it continues, and brilliantly. But this last section seemed the right place to end this post, given how much it says about self-education.  Winterson says elsewhere in this book that "reading is where the wild things are". And that for the younger her: "Every book was a message in a bottle. Open it."

I feel this doing this blog. Every book is another trip into the life of the mind. Of our minds. Every book is another pulling-out of a stopper. A means of action that many value, but don't do enough. And we should. After all, education is our most powerful weapon.