Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred. What you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life.

the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

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 a 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.

a working-class tradition is an oral tradition, not a bookish one, but its richness of language comes from absorbing some of the classics in school – they all learned by rote – and by creatively using language to tell a good story.

Jung, not Freud, liked fairy tales for what they tell us about human nature.

I had no idea of what to read or in what order, so I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen . . .

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.

When the sandwiches were made I took them to the big high bed – I was about four, I suppose – and woke up Grandma and we ate them and got jam everywhere and read. She read to me and I read to her. I was good at reading – you have to be if you start with the Bible . . . but I loved words from the beginning.

Dad got paid Fridays and by Thursday there was no money left. In winter, the gas and electricity meters ran out on Thursdays too, and so the onions and potatoes weren’t quite boiled enough and we ate them in the dark of the paraffin lamp. Everybody in the street was the same. Blackout Thursdays were common.

it is better to accept my not quite adjusted need for distance and privacy.

Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

Christ’s injunction that his followers must be twice-born, the natural birth and the spiritual birth, is in keeping with religious initiation ceremonies both pagan and tribal. There has to be a rite of passage, and a conscious one, between the life given by chance and circumstance and the life that is chosen.

In a world that has become instrumental and utilitarian, the symbol of the kingdom of God – and it is a symbol not a place – stands as the challenge of love to the arrogance of power and the delusions of wealth.

every year when Mrs Winterson saw the tent in the field, and heard the harmonium playing ‘Abide With Me’, she used to grab my hand and say, ‘I can smell Jesus.’ The smell of the canvas (it always rains up north in the summer), and the smell of soup cooking for afterwards, and the smell of damp paper printed with the hymns – that’s what Jesus smells like.

had she had a fancy man? If she had it must have been in the war. Her friend said every woman had had a fancy man in the war – married or not, that’s how it was.

I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

Auntie Nellie made love into soup. She didn’t want thanks and she wasn’t ‘doing good’. She fed love on Tuesdays and Thursdays to all the children she could find, and even if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had knocked down the outside loo and ridden into the stone-floored kitchen, they would have been given soup.

When the first supermarket opened in Accrington nobody went because the prices might be low but they were set. On the markets nothing was set; you haggled for a bargain. That was part of the pleasure, and the pleasure was in the everyday theatre. The stalls were their own shows. Even if you were so poor that you had to wait to buy your food at the very end of the day you could still have a good time down the market.

When I left it was as though I had relieved her and betrayed her all at once. She longed for me to be free and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

The only time that Mrs Winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the Mormons were coming round. Then she waited in the lobby, and before they had dropped the knocker she had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation. This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job.

her clearness was like water, cool and deep and see-through right to the bottom.

‘Jeanette, will you tell me why?’ ‘What why?’ ‘You know what why . . .’ But I don’t know what why . . . what I am . . . why I don’t please her. What she wants. Why I am not what she wants. What I want or why. But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’ She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited. She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

When I was sixteen I had only got as far as M – not counting Shakespeare, who is not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour. Black is all the colours and Shakespeare is all the alphabet.

I did not think in terms of gender or feminism, not then, because I had no wider politics other than knowing I was working class. But I had noticed that the women were fewer and further apart on the shelves, and when I tried to read books ‘about’ literature (always a mistake), I couldn’t help noticing that the books were written by men about men who write. That didn’t worry me; I was in danger of drowning and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.

There is always a wild card. And what I had were books. What I had, most of all, was the language that books allowed. A way to talk about complexity.

‘I thought you were on N?’ said the librarian, who like most librarians believed in alphabetical order.

But can we really leap from N to P? Yet, there are difficulties with the letter O.’ ‘There were difficulties with the letter N.’ ‘Yes. English literature – perhaps all literature – is never what we expect. And not always what we enjoy. I myself had great difficulties with the letter C . . . Lewis Carroll. Joseph Conrad. Coleridge.’

‘My advice is this. When you are young and you read something that you very much dislike, put it aside and read it again three years later. And if you still dislike it, read it again in a further three years. And when you are no longer young – when you are fifty, as am I – read the thing again that you disliked most of all.’

‘Whenever I am troubled,’ said the librarian, ‘I think about the Dewey decimal system.’ ‘Then what happens?’ asked the junior, rather overawed. ‘Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course – as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.’

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies.

the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Literature is common ground.

Mrs Winterson was an obsessive and she had been knitting for Jesus for about a year. The Christmas tree had knitted decorations on it, and the dog was fastened inside a Christmas coat of red wool with white snowflakes. There was a knitted nativity and all the shepherds were wearing scarves because this was Bethlehem on the bus route to Accrington. My dad opened the door wearing a new knitted waistcoat and matching knitted tie. The whole house had been reknitted.

The only thing I hated was the drugs trolley. Inmates were sedated and tranquillised – syringes and tablets look kinder than padded cells and straitjackets but I am not so sure.

At that moment a rival group of carol singers arrived at the front door – probably the Salvation Army, but Mrs W was having none of it. She opened the front door and shouted, ‘Jesus is here. Go away.’

Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead.

The nineteenth century was the century of frightful spectres and shadowy visitations. It was the century of the supernatural in fiction and in the popular imagination. Dracula, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the visions of M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe. The rise of the weekly seance. The century of gas lamps and ghosts. They may have been the same thing.

There was no straight-line connection. You can tell that reading this. I want to show how it is when the mind works with its own brokenness.

Whatever else, the crazy time, and the adoption search, taught me to ask for help; not to act like Wonder Woman.

In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling state.

I am not scared of lawyers and I know that the law is grandiose and designed to intimidate, even when there is no reason for it to do so. It is designed to make ordinary people feel inadequate.

Like most libraries in the UK, books are now less important than computer terminals and CD loans.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t.

I am learning that time is unreliable. Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is. As Mrs Winterson lives in End Time, ordinary time doesn’t mean much to her. She is still indignant about the wrong crib.

She was her own Enigma Code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.

This is the old Manchester working-class way; you think, you read, you ponder. We could be back in the Mechanics’ Institute, back in the Workers’ Extension Lectures, back in the Public Library Reading Room. I feel proud – of them, of me, of our past, our heritage. And I feel very sad. I shouldn’t be the only one to have been educated. Everyone in this room is intelligent. Everyone in this room is thinking about the bigger questions. Try telling that to the Utility educators.