On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
I pretty much covered my “journey” with Jeanette Winterson here, in a post about her memoir, although I’ve written about her a lot over the years. The first book I read by Winterson was Sexing the Cherry
Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
In her refusal to become a poster-child, or allowing her work to be co-opted by a special interest group, she became more and more isolated. In her memoir, in her other writing, she talks about her need for solitude, her need to live a slow life, where she gardens, and chops wood. She does not “play well with others.” This is just an impression, based on her writing. And God help the woman writer, let alone the gay woman writer, who does not “play well with others”! Winterson has to deal with a lot of “But … but … I thought you were gay” nonsense from people who think sexual orientation is the be-all/end-all of identity. Much of this has to do with class, in the strict British sense of the word, as Winterson makes perfectly clear in her most recent book, another memoir about her search for her biological mother, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
She’s just one of those writers I can’t wait to see whatever it is she will do next. I am not a big fan of her children’s books (too didactic), and there was a good 10 years there where I thought, “Okay, the girl’s lost it” but you know what? I kept reading. I felt a resurgence of the old power in Lighthousekeeping
In 1995, in the first real wave of her fame, she published this collection of essays called Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, a very Wintersonian title. I would love it if she would publish more essay collections! They’re fascinating. In these essays, she writes about art, the writers who inspire her, the painters, she writes about the whole “Queer Literature” thing, she writes about sex and literature, and book collecting. It’s an eccentric bizarre little collection of essays and her voice is as strong as ever. Sometimes she misses the mark in her language. (For me, the “art is aerobic” in the excerpt below is a perfect example.) It can get too cutesy, almost like a precocious child who has just discovered puns. A better editor might have taken some of that stuff out. However, I do know that the very things that drive me crazy about Winterson’s work (I say that with affection) are the very things that other people ADORE. In other words, what do I know. I like Winterson’s early novels best: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, The Passion
Regardless: Art Objects features some fascinating insights into Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot … Winterson loves those modernists. And sometimes you can feel the ego (like when she puts Oranges in the same list as Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) … but if you love Winterson, you have to love that ego. It sometimes leads her astray, and it sometimes leads her right to the point. I find her supremely entertaining, even in those moments where I think she needs an editor.
She’s a writer who takes risks. She’s a writer who believes in herself. And when you hear about her harrowing childhood, the fact that she believes in herself is a miracle. It takes great strength of will to believe in yourself this hard, against such obstacles of class, gender, and sexual orientation. The class thing is really important, and something her memoir makes perfectly clear. She came from illiterate working-class people. She decided to be literate. I mean, it’s as simple as that. And her adoptive mother was not proud of her brains. On the contrary, she found Jeanette’s brains to be Satanic and sinister and tried to crush her daughter, through punishment and enforced poverty and all the rest. Nightmare.
Jeanette Winterson decided to be educated. She decided to read books. When she ended up at Oxford on a scholarship, she felt instinctively the difference in class between herself and the other students. Literature was not a “given” to her. Literature was hewn out of the earth, gorgeous, dangerous, illuminating, a life-saver. That’s how she approaches books.
In the first essay in this collection, she talks about her ignorance in regards to painting and painters. She had no sense of what was good or what wasn’t good. The whole thing was mysterious to her. Because Winterson is who she is, she realized her own ignorance and decided to get educated. It became an obsession. She frequented art galleries, she read books on artists, she read art criticism, etc. The essay is a description of that process.
Here’s an excerpt.
Excerpt from Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
The only way to develop a palate is to develop a palate. That is why, when I wanted to know about paintings, I set out to look at as many as I could, using always tested standards, but continuing to test them. You can like a thing out of ignorance, and it is perhaps a blessing that such naivete stays with us until we die. Even now, we are not as closed and muffled as art-pessimists think we are, we do still fall in love at first sight. All well and good, but the fashion for dismissing a thing out of ignorance is vicious. In fact, it is not essential to like a thing in order to recognize its worth, but to reach that point of self-awareness and sophistication takes years of perseverance.
For most of us the question “Do I like this?” will always be the formative question. Vital then, that we widen the “I” that we are as much as we can. Vital then, we recognize that the question “Do I like this?” involves an independent object, as well as our own subjectivity.
I am sure that if as a society we took art seriously, not as mere decoration or entertainment, but as a living spirit, we should very soon learn what is art and what is not art. The American poet Muriel Rukeyser has said:
There is art and there is non-art; they are two universes (in the algebraic sense) which are exclusive … It seems to me that to call an achieved work ‘good art’ and an unachieved work ‘bad art,’ is like calling one color ‘good red’ and another ‘bad red’ when the second one is green.
If we accept this, it does not follow that we should found an Academy of Good Taste or throw out all our pet water-colors, student posters or family portraits. Let them be but know what they are, and perhaps more importantly, what they are not. If we sharpened our sensibilities, it is not that we would all agree on everything, or that we would suddenly feel the same things in front of the same pictures (or when reading the same book), but rather that our debates and deliberations would come out of genuine aesthetic considerations and not politics, prejudice and fashion … And our hearts? Art is aerobic.
It is shocking too. The most conservative and least interested person will probably tell you that he or she likes Constable. But would our stalwart have liked Constable in 1824 when he exhibited at the Paris Salon and caused a riot? We forget that every true shock in art, whether books, paintings or music, eventually becomes a commonplace, even a standard, to later generations. It is not that those works are tired out and have nothing more to offer, it is that their discoveries are gradually diluted by lesser artists who can only copy but do know how to make a thing accessible and desirable. At last, what was new becomes so well known that we cannot separate it from its cultural associations and time-honored values. To the average eye, now, Constable is a pretty landscape painter, not a revolutionary who daubed bright color against bright color ungraded by chiaroscuro. We have had a hundred and fifty years to get used to the man who turned his back on the studio picture, took his easel outdoors and painted in a rapture of light. It is easy to copy Constable. It was not easy to be Constable.
Thank you for this. Inspired by Winterson and also stricken by general gloom at the election results I went out today and bought ‘Why be happy,’ and read it more or less in one go at the hairdressers, and now I’m going to read some more of her as I’ve read nothing of Winterson since reading The Passion donkeys years ago. So much to think about in that book but strikes chords right now in Why Be Happy was getting to Oxford and being treated as an experiment, and also her tutor deciding not to teach her and the female students getting together to teach themselves. Kind of the worst and yet very best of what university education had to offer to someone who came from an unlikely background and yet had a thirst for learning and experience, and I will stop there as this will become a political rant about the state of higher education today.
Helena – Have been following along with your election – I sympathize!!
Very excited, though, to hear that you tore through Why Be Happy in one go. Go, you!! Isn’t it unbelievable?? I feel like all of her posturing (again – it’s something that’s sometimes annoying but it’s so much a part of her that when it works – like in The Passion – it’s GREAT) – but anyway – all of her posturing and purposeful isolation has all been about this specific “origin story” – reacting to it, hiding from it, denying it – what it meant to her in terms of identity. I mean, she was adopted by crazy people!! I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Of course it was probably that upbringing that gave her such a reckless need to grow, learn, experience – so who knows. It all worked out.
I was just FLOORED by that memoir.
I would be interested to hear your thoughts on her other work. Sexing the Cherry is gloriously fun – it was a wonderful introduction to her mind and her style. The Passion is one of my favorite books.
Written on the Body, a Proustian-ish sense-memory book about a lesbian relationship – has its defenders. Many consider it their favorite book of hers. It was so explicit, and so passionate – she really is such a romantic writer. But I missed the fantastical element – that was there in The Passion and there in Sexing the Cherry, and even there in her first book, which was supposedly a memoir (Oranges are Not the Only Fruit). These read like fairy tales. Written on the Body is more like a long mood piece about Love and I started getting bored – Maybe it’s worth a re-read. People really do LOVE that book.
But the one-two-three punch of Oranges, Sexing the Cherry and The Passion … I mean, she could do no wrong as far as I was concerned. Unbelievably powerful start!!
Hang in there!
// getting to Oxford and being treated as an experiment, and also her tutor deciding not to teach her and the female students getting together to teach themselves. Kind of the worst and yet very best of what university education had to offer to someone who came from an unlikely background and yet had a thirst for learning and experience, //
Beautiful. Yes.
I loved her memories of the “uneducated” neighbors back home who could easily quote, verbatim, Shakespeare, poetry – and yet that world seemed so disconnected from “academia”. I should read it again – I just loved it so much.
//I loved her memories of the “uneducated” neighbors back home who could easily quote, verbatim, Shakespeare, poetry //
That was a revelation.
And the teacher who took her in and put her in the right place to apply for uni and supported her – who loved Shakespeare reverentially – with the two galumphing sons – I loved her!
Oh yes, I remember her!
God, all it takes is one person – to recognize the talent/desire in a child – and say, “Here. Maybe try this.”
Very very moving.
I loved when she talked about how she was “accused of arrogance” once she became a success. Her words on what her “arrogance” actually was – gave me goosebumps. I don’t know the exact words – but she was like, “If you could see where I came from, if you could see the kind of background I have, if you go into a bookstore and see how the shelves are lined with books mainly by men … ” Like, it takes guts ANYWAY to try to be a writer, but with her background and in that environment … it’s not “arrogance” at all.
People didn’t want to hear it. They didn’t like being lectured by her – or “shown up” – but I think she’s spot-on.
Oh – realized I had already pulled that quote out in my post about the memoir:
“I had never seen a shop with five floors of books. I felt dizzy, like too much oxygen all at once. And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to be able to write their share, and why were there still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?
I was so excited, so hopeful, and I was troubled too, by what had been said to me. As a woman would I be an onlooker and not a contributor? Could I study what I could never hope to achieve? Achieve it or not, I had to try.
And later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.”
So so good.
And the librarians … organising your life according to Dewey decimal principles