Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Page 3

  Which brings me back to happiness, and a quick look at the word.

  Our primary meaning now is the feeling of pleasure and contentment; a buzz, a zestiness, the tummy upwards feel of good and right and relaxed and alive . . . you know . . .

  But earlier meanings build in the hap — in Middle English, that is ‘happ’, in Old English, ‘gehapp’ — the chance or fortune, good or bad, that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play.

  How you meet your ‘hap’ will determine whether or not you can be ‘happy’.

  What the Americans, in their constitution, call ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’ (please note, not'the right to happiness'), is the right to swim upstream, salmon—wise.

  Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy — which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.

  If the sun is shining, stand in it — yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass — they have to — because time passes.

  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. There's the hap — the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use — that's going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half—life on someone else's terms.

  The pursuit isn't all or nothing — it's all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories.

  When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.

  The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . .

  3

  In The Beginning Was The Word

  My mother had taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy because it is full of animals (mostly unclean). Whenever we read ‘Thou shall not eat any beast that does not chew the cud or part the hoof she drew all the creatures mentioned. Horses, bunnies and little ducks were vague fabulous things, but I knew all about pelicans, rock badgers, sloths and bats ... My mother drew winged insects, and the birds of the air, but my favourite ones were the seabed ones, the molluscs. I had a fine collection from the beach at Blackpool. She had a blue pen for the waves and brown ink for the scaly—backed crab. Lobsters were red biro .. .Deuteronomy had its drawbacks; it is full of Abominations and Unmentionables. Whenever we read about a bastard, or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she'd gone, I'd sneak a look. I was glad I didn't have testicles. They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.

  from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

  M

  Y MOTHER WAS IN CHARGE of language. My father had never really learned to read — he could manage slowly, with his finger on the line, but he had left school at twelve and gone to work at the Liverpool docks. Before he was twelve, no one had bothered to read to him. His own father had been a drunk who often took his small son to the pub with him, left him outside, staggered out hours later and walked home, and forgot my dad, asleep in a doorway.

  Dad loved Mrs Winterson reading out loud — and I did too. She always stood up while we two sat down, and it was intimate and impressive all at the same time.

  She read the Bible every night for half an hour, starting at the beginning, and making her way through all sixty—six books of the Old and New Testaments. When she got to her favourite bit, the Book of Revelation, and the Apocalypse, and everyone being exploded and the Devil in the bottomless pit, she gave us all a week off to think about things. Then she started again, Genesis Chapter One. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .

  It seemed to me to be a lot of work to make a whole planet, a whole universe, and blow it up, but that is one of the problems with the literal—minded versions of Christianity; why look after the planet when you know it is all going to end in pieces?

  My mother was a good reader, confident and dramatic. She read the Bible as though it had just been written — and perhaps it was like that for her. I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time—bound. The words go on doing their work.

  Working—class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home, and as there was still a ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ or ‘tha’ in daily speech for us, the language didn't seem too difficult. I especially liked ‘the quick and the dead’ — you really get a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

  In the 1960s many men — and they were men not women — attended evening classes at the Working Men's Institutes or the Mechanics’ Institute — another progressive initiative coming out of Manchester. The idea of ‘bettering’ yourself was not seen as elitist then, neither was it assumed that all values are relative, nor that all culture is more or less identical — whether Hammer Horror or Shakespeare.

  Those evening classes were big on Shakespeare —and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn't difficult — it was the language of the 1611 Bible; 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. The consequence was that uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language.

  A lot of older people I knew, my parents’ generation, quoted Shakespeare and the Bible and sometimes the metaphysical poets like John Donne, without knowing the source, or misquoting and mixing.

  My mother, being apocalyptic by nature, liked to greet any news of either calamity or good fortune with the line ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .’ This was delivered in a suitably sepulchral tone. As evangelical churches don't have any bells, I never understood, even, that it was about death, and certainly not till I got to Oxford did I find it was a misquote from a prose passage of John Donne, the one that begins ‘No man is an island entire of itself...’ and that ends ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls . . .’

  Once, my dad won the works raffle. He came home very pleased with himself. My mother asked him what was the prize?

  ‘Fifty pounds and two boxes of Wagon Wheels.’ (These were large and horrible chocolate—style biscuits with a wagon and a cowboy on the wrapper.)

  My mother did not reply, so my dad pressed on. ‘That's good, Connie — are you glad?’

  She said, ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .’

  So we didn't.

  She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, ‘It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’ That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear.

  She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well—wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, ‘She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’

  This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the ‘dead’ part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended.

  Later, I found the lines in Hamlet.

  A general phrase, for her and others, when making an unfavourable comparison, was
to say, ‘As a crab's like an apple.’

  That is the Fool in King Lea et it has a northern ring to it, partly I think because 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. I think back and I realise that our stock of words was not small — and we loved images.

  Until the eighties, visual culture, TV culture, mass culture, had not made much of an impact up north — there was still a strong local culture and a powerful dialect. I left in 1979, and it was not that much different from 1959. By 1990, when we went back to film Oranges for the BBC, it was totally different.

  For the people I knew, books were few and stories were everywhere, and how you tell ‘em was everything. Even an exchange on a bus had to have a narrative.

  ‘They've no money so they're having their honeymoon in Morecambe.’

  ‘That's a shame — there's nowt to do in Morecambe once you've had a swim.’

  ‘I feel sorry for ‘em.’

  ‘Aye, but it's only a week's honeymoon — I know a woman who spent all her married life in Morecambe.’

  Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . .

  *

  My mother told stories — of their life in the war and how she'd played the accordion in the air—raid shelter and it had got rid of the rats. Apparently rats like violins and pianos but they can't stand the accordion . . .

  About her life sewing parachutes — all the girls stole the silk for clothes.

  About her life to come, when she'd have a mansion and no neighbours. All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.

  She loved miracle stories, probably because her life was as far away from a miracle as Jupiter is from the Earth. She believed in miracles, even though she never got one — well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn't know that miracles often come in disguise.

  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 it wasn't there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything — the miracle — is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

  The miracle stories she loved were Bible ones, like the Five Loaves and Two Fishes, probably because we never had quite enough to eat, and ones from the front line of Jesus in the World.

  I particularly liked the Hallelujah Giant — eight feet tall, shrunk to six feet three through the prayers of the faithful.

  And there were the stories about bags of coal appearing from nowhere, and an extra pound in your purse when you needed it most.

  She didn't like stories about being raised from the dead. She always said that if she died we weren't to pray to bring her back.

  Her funeral money was sewn into the curtains — at least it was a until I stole it. When I unpicked the hem, there was note in her handwriting — she was so proud of her handwriting— it said:'Don't cry Jack and Jeanette. You know where I am.‘

  I did cry. Why is the measure of love loss?

  4

  The Trouble With A Book . . .

  T

  HERE WERE SIX BOOKS IN our house.

  One was the Bible and two were commentaries on the Bible. My mother was a pamphleteer by temperament and she knew that sedition and controversy are fired by printed matter. Ours was not a secular house, and my mother was determined that I should have no secular influences.

  I asked my mother why we couldn't have books and she said, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late.’

  I thought to myself, ‘Too late for what?’

  I began to read books in secret — there was no other way — and every time I opened the pages, I wondered if this time it would be too late; a final draught (draft) that would change me forever, like Alice's bottle, like the tremendous potion in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, like the mysterious liquid that seals the fate of Tristan and Isolde.

  In myths, in legends, in fairy stories, and in all the stories that borrow from these basics, both size and shape are approximate, and subject to change. This includes the size and shape of the heart, where the beloved can suddenly be despised, or where the loathed can become the loved. Look what happens in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream when Puck's eyedrops turn Lysander from an opportunistic womaniser into a devoted husband. In Shakespeare's use of the magic potion, it is not that the object of desire itself is altered — the women are who they are — rather that the man is forced to see them differently.

  In the same play, Titania briefly falls for a clod wearing an ass's head — a mischievous use of the transforming potion, but one that questions reality: Do we see what we think we see? Do we love as we believe we love?

  Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear ... Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

  I used to have an anger so big it would fill up any house. I used to feel so hopeless that I was like Tom Thumb who has to hide under a chair so as not to be trodden on.

  Do you remember how Sinbad tricks the genie? Sinbad opens the bottle and out comes a three—hundred—foot—tall genie who will kill poor Sinbad stone dead. So Sinbad appeals to his vanity and bets he can't get back in the bottle. As soon as the genie does so, Sinbad stoppers the neck until the genie learns better manners.

  Jung, not Freud, liked fairy tales for what they tell us about human nature. Sometimes, often, a part of us is both volatile and powerful — the towering anger that can kill you and others, and that threatens to overwhelm everything. We can't negotiate with that powerful but enraged part of us until we teach it better manners — which means getting it back in the bottle to show who is really in charge. This isn't repression, but it is about finding a container. In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren't let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

  The fairy tales warn us that there is no such thing as standard size — that is an illusion of industrial life

  — an illusion farmers still struggle with when trying to supply uniform vegetables to supermarkets . . . no, size is both particular and subject to change.

  The stories of the gods appearing in human form

  — scaled—down power deities — are also stories against judging by appearances — things are not what they seem.

  It seems to me that being the right size for your world — and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions — is a valuable clue to learning how to live.

  Mrs Winterson was too big for her world, but she crouched gloomy and awkward under its low shelf, now and again exploding to her full three hundred feet, and towering over us. Then, because it was useless, redundant, only destructive, or so it seemed, she shrank back again, defeated.

  I am short, so I like the little guy/underdog stories, but they are not straightforwardly about one size versus another. Think about, say, Jack and the Beanstalk, which is basically a big ugly stupid giant, and a smart little Jack who is fast on his feet. OK, but the unstable element is the beanstalk, which starts as a bean and grows into a huge tree—like thing that Jack climbs to reach the castle. This bridge between two worlds is unpredictable and very surprising. And later, when the giant tries to climb after Jack, the beanstalk has to be chopped down pronto. This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements — we get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we should
n't let that world come crashing down into the one we can inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large—scale riches from the ‘other world’ can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we ‘win’ will accommodate itself to our size and form — just as the miniature princesses and the frog princes all assume the true form necessary for their coming life, and ours.

  Size does matter.

  In my novel Sexing the Cherry (1989) I invented a character called the Dog Woman; a giantess who lives on the River Thames. She suffers because she is too big for her world. She was another reading of my mother.

  Six books . . . my mother didn't want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books — that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

  Every week Mrs Winterson sent me to the Accrington Public Library to collect her stash of murder mysteries. Yes, that is a contradiction, but our contradictions are never so to ourselves. She liked Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler, and when I challenged her over the business of ‘the trouble with a book [to rhyme with spook] is that you never know what's in it until it's too late . . .’, she replied that if you know there is a body coming, it isn't so much of a shock.

  I was allowed to read non—fiction books about kings and queens and history, but never, ever, fiction. Those were the books there was trouble in ...

  The Accrington Public Library was a fully stocked library built out of stone on the values of an age of self—help and betterment. It was finally finished in 1908 with money from the Carnegie Foundation. Outside were carved heads of Shakespeare and Milton, Chaucer and Dante. Inside were art nouveau tiles and a gigantic stained—glass window that said useful things like INDUSTRY AND PRUDENCE CONQUER.