I read it obsessively and I read it out loud and move the sections if I have to
Posted in General on 02. Oct, 2010
I read it obsessively and I read it out loud, and move the sections if I have to.”In Lighthousekeeping, as in all her work, love is the big theme, love that’s as much about passionate engagement with the world as the solipsistic melding of one soul with another. Does she see herself as part of the Romantic tradition? “Yes, I do,” she smiles, “and I think in a past life I was probably an 18th-century poet – maybe not a very good one, who wandered about being lovelorn under the window. I do,” she adds, more seriously, “believe in the redeeming power of love, and I think it’s a Romantic image, but it’s also a religious idea that love is as strong as death.”She is, perhaps, a Romantic modernist, one who has in the past talked about being “the natural heir to Virginia Woolf”. It’s a position she now modifies: “I don’t think that I’m the direct heir to Woolf or anything like that.
I think I’m doing the work, or taking up some of the challenges, and I’m very excited by other writers who are doing it, too.” Her measured response finally gives me the courage to ask about some of those tricky moments in the Winterson histoire, such as the time she named herself her favourite living author and nominated her own book as her Sunday Times book of the year.She roars with laughter. “What did I say? Oh God! This is terrible! People behave like assholes and it’s forgotten, but if you’re a writer…” she tails off. “Tell me what I said and I can apologise!”Alluding vaguely to “negative publicity”, I ask if she has actually shifted her position. Or has she just become more circumspect? “I’m on a journey of my own,” she says with a rueful smile “After Written on the Body was published I went mad. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t do anything and that’s when I left London. Everybody said we hate you and we hate your work, you’re an arrogant bastard.
But in America and Europe it was the book that completely changed my fortunes So you’ve got completely conflicting information coming in. I was ski-ing downhill far too fast, and my skis were going apart. I used to dream this every night.”The process of recovery was long and slow and included a period when Winterson thought she might never write again. In her account of it, there is every sign of the religious sensibility, and symbolism, that infused her childhood and adolescence. It ended, she said, on the day that The PowerBook was published, when a close friend died, a godchild was born and she had a revelatory moment with a poem by RS Thomas, “The Bright Field”. She recites it to me, beautifully and, of course, with passion.”So, I was free,” she sighs “I’m not angry any more.