STANDING ON THE side of the hill where it slopes into the quarry, it’s possible to see where Melanie used to live. I met her by accident during the second year I didn’t live at home. She was pushing a pram. She had been serene to the point of bovine before; now she was nearly vegetable. I kept looking at her wondering how we had ever had a relationship, yet when she first left me I thought I had blood poisoning. I couldn’t forget her. Now she seemed to have forgotten everything. I wanted to shake her. Pull off all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell REMEMBER THIS BODY?
Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.
She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it and maybe knot it up some more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat’s cradle.
She said those sorts of feelings were dead – the feelings she once had for me. There is a seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter, and recolour what’s dead – it won’t complain. Then she laughed and said we probably saw what had happened very differently anyway. She laughed again – she said that the way I saw it would make a good story, her version was just the history, the nothing-at-all facts. She said she hoped I hadn’t kept any letters, silly to hang onto old things that had no meaning. As though letters and photos made it more real, more dangerous.
I told her I didn’t need letters and photos to remember what had happened. Then she looked vague and started to discuss the weather and the roadworks and the soaring price of baby food.
SHE ASKED ME what I was doing and I longed to say I was sacrificing infants on top of Pendle Hill. Anything to make her angry. But she was happy. They had stopped eating meat and she was pregnant again. She had even started writing to my mother.
It was getting dark as I came down the hill, swirls of snow sticking to my face. I thought about the dog and was sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss. But the dog was buried in the clean earth and the things I had buried were exhuming themselves; clammy fears and dangerous thoughts and the shadows I had put away for a more convenient time. I could not put them away for ever; there is always a day of reckoning. But not all dark places need light. I have to remember that.
I DO HAVE to remember that – all these years later. Not all dark places need light.
The Passion
LOVE AS THE night-haunter, the blood-hunter, the body’s rack, antagonist of commonsense.
Love as the space between utility and despair.
Love as the enemy of ease.
When I wrote The Passion I was magnificently and recklessly in love with a married woman twenty years older than me. To deal with the feelings this invoked – and I mean invoked (it felt like a kind of conjuring) – I did what writers have always done and transposed the situation.
I went back in time to the Napoleonic Wars and wrote about Henri, a young soldier, about his strange meeting with a woman with webbed feet called Villanelle, about her entanglement with both Henri and a mysterious older woman bored by her marriage. And I set it in Venice, a city I visited for the first time after I had written the book.
I saw no reason to go before I was writing the book – or while I was writing it – it was a novel, not a travel guide, and the Venice of the 1800s was gone. I couldn’t visit it. What I could do was invent it.
It’s not that art imitates life. Creativity releases life from both time and gravity. Events can be reversed, endings change, the weight that bears down on all that we do is lifted.
The Passion is a good story. It’s got love, sex, murder, friendship, war, politics and characters we care about. TV and movies have brought us into the age of story-telling like never before. Advertising and market-manipulation are all about the story. And no one can resist a story – we’re hard-wired to sit round that camp fire and hear what the story-teller has to say.
For me, though, and the texts that interested me, story-telling was a magic carpet to elsewhere. The elsewhere wasn’t the story, it was further on – it was where the story might lead.
The last line of The Passion, and yes, it does get printed on T-shirts a lot, is this:
I’m telling you stories. Trust me
Why should we trust fictions in a post-truth world?
When I wrote The Passion we weren’t in a post-truth world – or we thought we weren’t. It was the year after deregulation of the markets, the beginning of the economy on steroids that would lead, twenty years later, to the biggest financial crash in history. So everything we were being told, everything we were experiencing, had no truth in it, if truth is lasting, real, dependable, verifiable.
But we didn’t know that. Thatcher and Reagan ruled the world. Love your neighbour as yourself had been replaced with Love yourself. The social contract was dead.
Thirty years later, thinking about The Passion and about fiction versus lying, I realise all the obvious things about invention as a way of getting at a deeper truth, and lying as a way of avoiding any truth at all or, worse, creating a nightmare world where nothing is as it seems, where nothing can be depended upon – we know human minds can’t cope with that, and then we instinctively cling to the ‘strong man’, who is usually the biggest liar of the lot.
All that is clear enough.
What’s less clear is this question of the story itself being a means rather than an end. A map rather than a destination.
And that’s what stories have in common with Love.
Love is a means, not an end. Love is a map, not a destination. That’s why there is no such thing as ‘they all lived happily ever after’.
That’s why Act V of the Shakespeare comedies is often so uncomfortable. We know that, in the mirth and resolution, what lies ahead is the start of another play, another journey.
Love is the visible corner of a folded map.
So my commitment to story-telling, like my commitment to love, is a commitment to discomfort, not security. To adventure, not satisfaction. To possibilities, not answers.
And you’ll note, because it is so obvious that it needs saying, that lies are always offered as answers.
Brexit. Trump. Border control. Make your own list.
Truth is a questioning place.
Stories are full of questions. What if? What is? Who am I? Who are you? What do I believe? Why do I believe it?
We ask these questions in other ways – of course we do, politically, philosophically, spiritually. We address them head-on.
And that’s the difference, I guess, because, as Freud worked out at the start of the 20th century, human beings cannot always, or even optimally, address the big, the dark, the difficult, the shameful, the guilty, the criminal, the crazy head-on. We have to go sideways, downwards, away from without running away. We use a proxy or an avatar. And that’s what stories let happen.
When we are in love we have the feeling of being understood. The feeling of things being simultaneously settled and disturbed. Hands and voices rummage through us.
We are known while remaining private.
We are held while remaining free.
I’m telling you stories. Trust me
Here, Villanelle, dressed as a boy, meets the mysterious woman for the second time:
NOVEMBER IN VENICE is the beginning of the catarrh season. Catarrh is part of our heritage like St Mark’s. Long ago, when the Council of Three ruled in mysterious ways, any traitor or hapless one done away with was usually announced to have died of catarrh. In this way, no one was embarrassed. It’s the fog that rolls in from the lagoon and hides one end of the Piazza from another that brings on our hateful congestion. It rains too, mournfully and quietly, and the boatmen sit under sodden rags and stare helplessly into the canals. Such weather drives away the foreigners and that’s the only good thing that can be said of it. Even the brilliant water-gate at the Fenice turns grey.
I had been sitting perhaps an hour when I had the feeling of being watched. There was no one near me, but there was someone behind a screen a little way off. I let my mind retreat again. What did it matter? We are always watching or watched. The waiter came over to me with a packet in his hand.
I opened it. It was an earring. It was the pair.
And she stood before me and I realised I was dressed as I had been that night because I was waiting to work. My hand went to my lip.
‘You shaved it off,’ she said.
I smiled. I couldn’t speak.
She invited me to dine with her the following evening and I took her address and accepted.
In the Casino that night I tried to decide what to do. She thought I was a young man. I was not. Should I go to see her as myself and joke about the mistake and leave gracefully? My heart shrivelled at this thought. To lose her again so soon. And what was myself? Was this breeches and boots self any less real than my garters? What was it about me that interested her?
You play, you win. You play, you lose. You play.
I was careful to steal enough to buy a bottle of the best champagne.
Lovers are not at their best when it matters. Mouths dry up, palms sweat, conversation flags and all the time the heart is threatening to fly from the body once and for all. Lovers have been known to have heart attacks. Lovers drink too much from nervousness and cannot perform. They eat too little and faint during their fervently wished consummation. They do not stroke the favoured cat and their face-paint comes loose. This is not all. Whatever you have set store by, your dress, your dinner, your poetry, will go wrong.
Her house was gracious, standing on a quiet waterway, fashionable but not vulgar. The drawing-room, enormous with great windows at either end and a fireplace that would have suited and idle wolfhound. It was simply furnished; an oval table and a chaise-longue. A few Chinese ornaments that she liked to collect when the ships came through. She had also a strange assortment of dead insects mounted in cases on the wall. I had never seen such things before and wondered about this enthusiasm.
She stood close to me as she took me through the house, pointing out certain pictures and books. Her hand guided my elbow at the stairs and when we sat down to eat she did not arrange us formally but put me beside her, the bottle in between.
We talked about the opera and the theatre and the visitors and the weather and ourselves. I told her that my real father had been a boatman and she laughed and asked could it be true that we had webbed feet?
‘Of course,’ I said and she laughed the more at this joke.
We had eaten. The bottle was empty. She said she had married late in life, had not expected to marry at all being stubborn and of independent means. Her husband dealt in rare books and manuscripts form the east. Ancient maps that showed the lairs of griffins and the haunts of whales. Treasure maps that claimed to know the whereabouts of the Holy Grail. He was a quiet and cultured man of whom she was fond.
He was away.
We had eaten, the bottle was empty. There was nothing more that could be said without strain or repetition. I had been with her more than five hours already and it was time to leave. As we stood up and she moved to get something I stretched out my arm, that was all, and she turned back into my arms so that my hands were on her shoulder blades and hers along my spine. We stayed thus for a few moments until I had courage enough to kiss her neck very lightly. She did not pull away. I grew bolder and kissed her mouth, biting a little at the lower lip.
She kissed me.
‘I can’t make love to you,’ she said.
Relief and despair.
‘But I can kiss you.’
And so, from the first, we separated our pleasure. She lay on the rug and I lay at right angles to her so that only our lips might meet. Kissing in this way is the strangest of distractions. The greedy body that clamours for satisfaction is forced to content itself with a single sensation and, just as the blind hear more acutely and the deaf can feel the grass grow, so the mouth becomes the focus of love and all things pass through it and are re-defined. It is a sweet and precise torture.
Sexing the Cherry
WHEN JORDAN WAS a baby he sat on top of me much as a fly rests on a hill of dung and I nourished him as a hill of dung nourishes a fly. And when he had eaten his fill he left me.
Jordan …
I should have named him after a stagnant pond and then I could have kept him, but I named him after a river, and in the flood-tide he slipped away.
Sexing the Cherry is set in the reign of Charles the First, and I suppose it’s an historical novel, except that the past is always history, and the past is happening every minute.
I wasn’t trying to reproduce a historical period, or ventriloquise the dead. I was using the past as a place to situate what interested me.
I have never believed that to be relevant we have to write about our own time and place. Literature isn’t documentary. Using the past is a way of escaping the clutter of now.
Sexing the Cherry is my third novel, published when I was twenty-nine. It’s the story of a giantess called the Dog-Woman, who lives on the banks of the River Thames, breeding hounds. She adopts a boy called Jordan, fished out of the river, and this is their fierce unrequited-love story – love between mother and son – love that never quite joins them together. They are both loners, and in an essential sense they remain alone.
Love is baffling. Love can leave us lonelier than we were without love. Love, like a planet that appears in the sky, dazzling and unreachable.
But loneliness is not the same thing as emotional defeat.
WHEN JORDAN WAS a boy he made paper boats and floated them on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail but he never learned how love affects the heart. His patience was exceeded only by his hope. He spent days and nights with his bits of wood salvaged from chicken crates, and any piece of paper he could steal became a sail. I used to watch him standing in the mud or lying face down, his nose almost in the current, his hand steadying the boat and then letting it go straight into the wind. Letting go hours of himself. When the time came he did the same with his heart. He didn’t believe in shipwreck.
And he came home to me with his boats broken and his face streaked with tears and we sat with our lamp and mended what we could and the next day was the first day all over again. But when he lost his heart there was no one to sit with him. He was alone.
The novel previous to this one, The Passion, also has a young man in it, a soldier called Henri, similarly baffled by love. I see no reason to write in your own gender, unless there is a reason to do so. I see no reason to read as your own gender either. Fictional characters are the original avatars for writer and reader alike. In this place of freedom we can choose who we want to be. And we can find a spectrum of feeling, experience, sexuality, even anger or murder, not available in daily life.
But Sexing the Cherry belongs to the Dog-Woman. I think she must be a reading of my adoptive mother, Mrs Winterson, who never wanted to be a nobody, and liked dogs. She was also very large – and I am not. So there is size in Sexing the Cherry, a novel that is in some ways a fairy tale, and contains twelve little fairy tales. And in fairy tales size is often approximate and unstable. Genies and giants, little people and shape-shifters.
The twelve fairy tales are the stories of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I liked that story when I was a child, but I used to wonder about the lives of the girls. Who were they? When I realised I was a writer, I realised I could find out.
Here’s one of the stories:
YOU MAY HAVE heard of Rapunzel.
Against the wishes of her family, who can best be described by their passion for collecting miniature dolls, she went to live in a tower with an older woman.
Her family were so incensed by her refusal to mar
ry the prince next door that they vilified the couple, calling one a witch and the other a little girl. Not content with names, they ceaselessly tried to break into the tower, so much so that the happy pair had to seal up any entrance that was not on a level with the sky. The lover got in by climbing up Rapunzel’s hair, and Rapunzel got in by nailing a wig to the floor and shinning up the tresses flung out of the window. Both of them could have used a ladder, but they were in love.
One day the prince, who had always liked to borrow his mother’s frocks, dressed up as Rapunzel’s lover and dragged himself into the tower. Once inside he tied her up and waited for the wicked witch to arrive. The moment she leaped through the window, bringing their dinner for the evening, the prince hit her over the head and threw her out again. Then he carried Rapunzel down the rope he had brought with him and forced her to watch while he blinded her broken lover in a field of thorns.
After that they lived happily ever after, of course.
As for me, my body healed, though my eyes never did, and eventually I was found by my sisters, who had come in their various ways to live on this estate.
My own husband?
Oh well, the first time I kissed him he turned into a frog.
There he is, just by your foot. His name’s Anton.
Back then, British writers like Angela Carter, Michele Roberts and Sara Maitland were breaking into the sealed and locked rooms of fairy stories, and re-telling them, not as PC versions, or feminist versions, necessarily, but claiming the right to re-write, which is part of the feminist proposal. Text, starting with the Bible, has always been a way of claiming knowledge and tradition. Text has been a class-war weapon to keep people in their place. And a gendered weapon too; who is allowed to read? Who is allowed to write? What is the canon? What is literature? And who claims it?
I was conscious of myself as a working-class woman writing. So I was happy to do a pirate raid on the treasure chest of the past. Anyway, it is only when stories are written down that they become codified – myths, legends, fairy tales existed, and still do, in multiple oral versions. The written version is propositional. Isn’t it?
Love Page 3