Jeanette Winterson speaks with Jeremy Isaacs - noted 12/7/95
This was noted shortly after my first novel 'Temple of Hymen' appeared in paperback; I was still finding my way with 'Bluethroat Morning'. What follows is a precis of the interview, based on the notes I took at the time:
Winterson has very little time for realism. 'You can get that on the streets'. A writer's job, she says, is to 'look into chaos and make it coherent'. To say that 'women's work is by nature 'autobiographical'' is a kind of male put-down suggesting women have a limited imagination, as if imagination were a male prerogative. She suggests we must look outside our own experience, express our ideas not 'what we did today'.
The writer says she needs a broad canvas, she likes large challenges. It is not enough to speak about what we know, rather we should express what we can imagine. To create a place where we are freed from gravity/daily life. Go to somewhere 'other' and in the 'other' place, other problems are revealed (and we return to the real world as more moral human beings). We enter the separate world of fiction, into the realm of Art: in this world the smallness of life disappears/drops away.
We push ourselves forward as a species by inventing what we want to be, imagining ourselves as something other than we are. Art tells us we are more than 'this little life'. Art is not elitist, Winterson says. It's rewards are infinite. It stretches the fabric of life. Art is a way of opening the cage door and saying 'fly'!
There is a choice between staying with the ready-made, limited world or pushing forward into a personal place, an unknown and untried area - we all have this choice, but the choices get harder as we get older.
Winterson says 'failure is to form habits' - when we become so used to our surroundings that we no longer notice them, there is a deadness. The artist cannot be dead - must always arrange things in such a way to show the familiar as new: the shock of the familiar. She speaks of 'daily ecstacy'. "I am surrounded by good gifts. If I were not, I would be churlish."
What does Winterson fear most? Mediocrity. Settling for second best, making life small. Writers divide into 'priests' and 'prophets'. The prophets are those who wish to challenge: prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons, though Winterson adds, she no longer is. Art can unlock dead lives, can change lives.
She speaks of her huge mail-bag which she uses as a rod and staff to move her forward/to break through. In duty.
When I read this entry, I'm struck, most of all, by Winterson's passion which so appealed to me at the time. I admire much of her work, particularly 'The Passion' which was hugely influential in my development as a writer. Her championing of the 'write what you imagine' school of thought reminds me of one of my favourite quotes about writing, also included in this notebook, words of Graham Swift:
"For God's sake write about what you DON'T know! For how else will you bring your imagination into play?"
I often quote Swift to counter that old 'write what you know' advice. As a new writer I found that hugely liberating. It was ok to write a first novel set in eighteenth century London. I was fired up by that. That was what drew me, not the everyday, the ordinary, the known. In fact, I came to write about the 'known' world ten years later; it took me ten years to be ready to write about 'what I know'. At least to write so directly about what I have experienced. Whereas in my earlier work, there is an exploration of the known, through the unknown, hence, doubtless, that thesis on my work 'autobiography and fiction'. One might analyse any writer in that way - how is the truth of the individual writer's perception filtered through the medium? Where is the author in the story - and does it matter? What matters, I feel, is the freshness of the world view, Winterson is right there. And I feel she's right to an extent to point out the male put-down about women writing autobiography - except that this could be used against female writers who do chronicle domesticity so perfectly, such as Shields and Tyler. The latest New Writing anthology in the UK had an introduction that was seen as a faux-pas - because it suggested women were writing about limited subject matter, as if this subject matters was unimportant. Surely the key is to retain what Winterson calls 'the shock of the familiar'. It is not what one writes about in the end but how one writes it.
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