Winterson is a fierce and eloquent supporter of the literary arts, having lived through Thatcher’s England as a university student at Oxford, and beyond:
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that’s what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It’s a finding place.
Books quite literally result in a major crisis in the Winterson household, when Jeanette is caught with dozens of contraband books hidden beneath her mattress:
Anybody with a single bed, standard size, and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that seventy-two per layer can be accommodated under the the mattress. By degrees my bed began to rise visibly, like the Princess and the Pea, so that I was soon sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor.
Mrs. Winterson discovers a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and knowing that Lawrence was a “Satanist” and a “pornographer,” throws the books out into the yard and burns them. Determined to outwit the monster-mother, Jeanette begins to memorize her favorite texts.
Of course the most severe crises in the adolescent Jeanette’s life are those involving her affections for other girls, which were not, as Winterson says, primarily sexual but emotional; looking at women’s bodies “was a way of looking at myself, and, I suppose, a way of loving myself.” The great trauma of Jeanette’s stepdaughter life with the Wintersons is an exorcism to which she has to submit in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, which had been “the center of my life for sixteen years”; the exorcism follows a sermon by the minister in which it is announced to the congregation that “two of the flock were guilty of abominable sin.” (See Romans 1:26: “The women did change their natural use into that which is against nature”). Jeanette’s girlfriend Helen, with whom she has been intimate, runs out of the church, but Jeanette can’t escape, presumably because Mrs. Winterson has captured her. The circumstances of the exorcism are not clearly described by the author but don’t seem to have involved the more lurid rites associated with exorcisms in the Roman Catholic Church:
When I was locked in the parlor with the curtains closed and no food or heat for three days, I was pretty sure I had no demon. After being prayed over in shifts and not allowed to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, I was beginning to feel that I had all Hell in my heart.
At the end of this ordeal, because I was still stubborn, I was beaten repeatedly by one of the elders. . . . He shoved me onto my knees to repent those words and I felt the bulge in his suit trousers. He tried to kiss me. He said it would be better than with a girl. A lot better. He put his tongue in my mouth. I bit it. Blood. A lot of blood. Blackout.
That the exorcism in the Elim Pentecostal Church doesn’t provide a comical episode for Jeanette to transform into prose seems to suggest it was too damaging. Following it, the sixteen-year-old “went into a kind of mute state of misery.” Soon she is expelled from the Winterson household and never returns.
Yet, Jeanette Winterson cautions the reader not to judge the church as a crude and primitive religious sect, but a place of contradictions:
The camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do—set this beside the cruelty of dogma, the miserable rigidity of no drink, no fags, no sex (or if you were married, as little sex as possible), no going to the movies . . . no reading anything except devotional literature, no fancy clothes . . . no dancing . . . no pop music, no card games, no pubs—even for orange juice.
Winterson asserts that the principle of this extreme form of Protestantism, which draws its congregation together no less than six evenings a week, is a valid one, overall:
I saw a lot of working-class men and women—myself included—living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the Church. These were not educated people; Bible study worked their brains. They met after work in noisy discussion. The sense of belonging to something big, something important, lent unity and meaning. . . . The Western world has done away with religion but not with our religious impulses; we seem to need some higher purpose, some point to our lives. . . . For the members of the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, life was full of miracles, signs, wonders, and practical purpose.
Unfortunately, one of these practical purposes is the casting out of demons from unruly adolescent bodies.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is, in a less original and engaging way, a kind of self-help manual. Winterson has obviously been in therapy and would seem to have benefited enormously from it, judging from the fact of this memoir, as much as its literary quality. The subtext of her story is Love—her perpetual quest for love, the perpetual bafflement and disappointment in love, her panic at believing herself incapable of either giving or receiving love. A woman lover tells her that most women are trained to “give” love but “find it hard to receive” and that she, Jeanette, daughter of Mrs. Winterson, is particularly handicapped in receiving love, and she thinks:
No . . . I am the wrong crib . . . this will go wrong like all the rest. In my heart of hearts I believe that. The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don’t have to be alone. I don’t have to fight for everything.
Yet, her legacy from Mrs. Winterson is a profound distrust of love from any quarter:
Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love—the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. . . . Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.
Winterson’s suicide attempt is bluntly recorded, without embellishment and with little of the narrative context of the Mrs. Winterson chapters:
In February 2008 I tried to end my life. My cat was in the garage with me. I did not know that when I sealed the doors and turned on the engine. My cat was scratching my face, scratching my face, scratching my face.
Yet, with that doubleness that characterizes much of the memoir, Winterson has casually remarked that her mother, who’d loved “miracle” stories in the Bible, had overlooked a “miracle” in her own stepdaughter:
I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there to happen.
So many years later, after Mrs. Winterson’s death, the middle-aged memoirist is fantasizing, like a rejected lover, the ways in which she might have made the resolutely unhappy stepmother happy. Nothing in the memoir is so touching, as it seems to the reader so utterly improbable.
WHY BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL? concludes with the author’s discovery, after much bureaucratic stalling and frustration, of her birth mother, a former machinist named Ann who’d given her infant girl (“Janet”) away to assure her of a better life, and who lives in a Manchester suburb twenty miles from Accrington. Their meeting is not overly emotional, though Jeanette’s birth mother is “bright-eyed, with an open smile”; the antithesis of the scandalized Mrs. Winterson, Ann is not only unruffled by Jeanette’s lesbianism but proud of her books. Ann is from a family of ten children. Ann has had four husbands: “I like men, but I don’t rely upon them.” Jeanette is relieved and grateful to meet her, but doesn’t want to become a part of her birth mother’s family: “I don’t feel a biological connection. I don’t feel, ‘Wow, here’s my mother.’”
The concluding chapters of Winterson’s memoir have an air of the improvised and hastily written as if, after the death of Mrs. Wi
nterson, the intransigent and fundamentally unknowable soul of the text has vanished. The memoir loses its energies of narrative discovery, incredulity, and hurt and shifts to the self-help mode of impersonal benevolent wisdom: “Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings; Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future.” One feels that this is the sort of consolatory advice the author has been told rather than something she has discovered herself, as she’d discovered the curious interweaving of love and hatred in her childhood. Winterson sees her biological mother again, and they quarrel: “I am shouting at her, ‘At least Mrs. Winterson was there. Where were you?’”
Yet, there is poignancy in Winterson’s discovery, from her birth mother, that Ann’s mother, too, was emotionally distant:
When her mother was exceedingly old Ann found the courage to ask the question, “Mam, did you love me?” Her mother was very clear. “Yes. I love you. Now don’t ask me again.”
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
By Jeanette Winterson
DIMINISHED THINGS:
ANNE TYLER
In his beautifully spare poem “The Ovenbird,” Robert Frost concludes
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
“What to make of a diminished thing” is a proposition that becomes ever more crucial with the passage of time in our lives, and particularly in the lives of writers who began young, with early successes and early fame. Like her older contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth, Anne Tyler has addressed this painful subject in recent novels, notably Noah’s Compass, Ladder of Years, and this new novel, her nineteenth; but she has addressed it in her characteristically minimalist, understated and modest way. Not for Tyler the boldly generic claim of such titles as Toward the End of Time (Updike), and The Dying Animal and Everyman (Roth); hers is The Beginner’s Goodbye—a title so unprepossessing, so quaintly self-referential, you will have to read the novel to understand its significance.
Where Updike and Roth confront mortality in precisely delineated and, at times, excruciating terms, with an emphasis upon the humiliating incursions of time upon the (male) body, in a diminution of sexual desire and of a passion for life generally, Tyler presents her insistently ordinary, seemingly asexual characters with sympathy, but with no claim for our particular attention. These are not special people, Tyler insists; they are not even “interesting” people in the sense in which most (fictitious) people are “interesting.” (For why write about them, otherwise? Only the genius of a Samuel Beckett can transform a mundane subject matter into gold, through the singularity of style.) In Updike’s Toward the End of Time, a long-married and now rather crotchety older couple find themselves, in a quasi-future United States, in a depleted suburban society both familiar and unfamiliar to them; so confined, and needing to wear diapers (“Depends Adult Incontinence Pants”) Ben ponders alternative worlds stimulated from reading science books; the grandfather of eleven children by the novel’s end, Ben acknowledges himself as “impotent”—yet “stirred by perverse fantasy.” The quintessential Updike protagonist has always been a highly sexual being, at times, in such late novels as The Village, with its comically voluptuous (Ingres) cover, to an obsessive and even preposterous degree; the quintessentially Rothian protagonist is no less sexually driven, though, in Roth, the sexual component is often complicated by feelings of resentment, revulsion, rage, even sexual politics, as in The Humbling. In Updike, sexual love is the great, all-encompassing experience, that blinds one—temporarily—to the ubiquitous fear of death; in the epigraph to Couples, from Alexander Blok’s “The Scythians,” are the striking lines, “We love the flesh: its taste, its tones, / Its charnel odor, breathed through Death’s jaws. . . .”
In Roth, any sort of genuine love is rare, and sexual desire is a hook to ensnare us, as in the enigmatic ending of The Dying Animal, when an unnamed (female) companion warns the aging lecher Professor Kepesh against succumbing to the plaintive summons of a former lover, “if you go, you’re finished.” In Roth’s more recent Everyman, a grim contemporary allegory that begins with its protagonist’s burial and works through his largely uneventful life, the unnamed “everyman” becomes obsessed with his health, or rather with his bodily decrepitude, and a terror of what lies ahead: “The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die.” Surrounded by friends and former lovers who are also aging, and dying, Roth’s hapless protagonist feels a sympathy with others that is largely missing in Roth’s younger and brasher protagonists:
She’s embarrassed by what she’s become [through illness], he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn’t? They were all embarrassed by what they’d become. Wasn’t he? By the physical changes. By the diminishment of virility. What lent a horrible grandeur to the process of reduction . . . was of course the intractable pain.
This is the fate of “Everyman” as a species, and no one is spared. Yet, though a heroic gesture is futile, swallowed up in so impersonal a fate, Roth’s everyman is so overcome with emotion when he sees his parents’ graves in a cemetery—(the very cemetery in which he is soon to be buried)—he breaks down:
He couldn’t go. The tenderness was out of control. As was the longing for everyone to be living. And to have it all over again.
By contrast, Anne Tyler’s characters are never subjected to such purely physical extremes. Their creator is not so cruel: her agenda isn’t to terrify her readers, or to wring from them genuine pity and sympathy; her more modest intention is to provide an assurance that what we’ve always known, or should have known, about family life, romantic love, and loss is true after all. Her most engaging novels—Searching for Caleb, Celestial Navigation, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Accidental Tourist—are sweetly sentimental valentines to the ordinary, domestic, unambitious life, usually set in Baltimore’s oldest suburb Roland Park. In these early novels, written under the inspired influence of Eudora Welty, Tyler’s characters are magical without being whimsical or fey; even when down on their luck, they seem to inhabit enchanted realms of the spirit. In more recent novels, however, Tyler’s lyricism has largely faded; the amplitude of spirit—magic—for which Tyler was known has diminished nearly to the vanishing point. Her protagonists are older, and detached from their dysfunctional but not terribly charming families; they are cranky eccentrics for whom it’s often difficult to feel much more than exasperation. There are few poetic moments in The Beginner’s Goodbye, perhaps appropriately, given the depressed state of its protagonist, but there is little to shock or discomfort. This is a novel about grief in which the raw visceral experience of grieving is not explored except in a cursory way. Experiences, impressions, emotions are blunted, as in a soft-focus movie:
We were traveling through the blasted wasteland surrounding [Johns Hopkins University], with its boarded-up row houses and trash-littered sidewalks, but what struck me was how healthy everyone was. That woman yanking her toddler by the wrist, those teenagers shoving one another off the curb, that man peering stealthily into a parked car: there was nothing physically wrong with them. A boy standing at an intersection had so much excess energy that he bounced from foot to foot as he waited for us to pass. People looked so robust, so indestructible.
An actual street scene in this part of Baltimore suggests a very different sort of “robustness”—but Tyler’s characters are suburban whites prone to see what they want to see, out of the habitude of a lifetime, and Tyler is their tirelessly indulgent chronicler. Though their time is supposed to be the present, it’s a sort of time warp into which little of real life intrudes, as in one of those films in which it’s always the 1950s or the early 1960s, before Kennedy’s assassination—and before Baltimore’s home
grown epics Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire. One senses, behind this political timidity, a “liberal” sensibility—but the moral compass of the fiction is determinedly old-fashioned, “traditional” and conservative; it takes no risks, and confirms the wisdom of risklessness. In The Beginner’s Goodbye, a thirty-six-year-old man named Aaron has lost his wife Dorothy in a sudden, freak accident, when a dead tree falls on their house; Dorothy is crushed, though her body is bloodless—“The mound of her bosom was more of a . . . cave. But that was understandable! She was lying on her back.” In a state of affectless shock following his wife’s death Aaron is akin to Macon Leary of The Accidental Tourist, who’d lost his son in a robbery-shooting in a fast-food restaurant, and soon loses his wife of twenty years to divorce. Aaron walks with a limp and suffers from an intermittent stutter; his sense of himself, in physical terms, is rather more that of a seventy-six-year-old man than one of young middle age, as it’s difficult to believe that he ever lived in California or, indeed, had the pluck to approach the older Dorothy, to ask her to dinner. Both novels of regeneration-through-loss present quasi-men who never quite strike us as convincingly “masculine”; their lives are circumscribed by domestic routines of stupefying dullness, of which they seem but dimly aware. Tyler has always been fond of eccentrics, loners, recluses; not “neurotics”—still less “psychotics”; not the passionately God-possessed freaks of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction but milder aberrants who live at the periphery of society in near-anonymity, until someone or something comes along to shake them out of their lethargy.
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