Winterson's tales

(continued)

by Ron Fletcher

Winterson also objects to the double standard that critics apply to novelists who appear in their own fiction. "It is a gender thing to some degree. If Milan Kundera or Paul Auster put themselves in their novels very directly, which they both do, it's meta-fiction. If I do it, it's autobiography, something homely and confessional, rather than experimental," she says, sounding the word with mock grandeur. "It makes me quite cross."

The inventiveness, lyricism, and historical whimsy of Winterson's second and third novels, The Passion and Sexing the Cherry, made the charges of her being a memoirist irrelevant. They evidenced a writer willing to use lapidary prose to wrestle with the big ideas: truth, meaning, beauty, time. Such audacious ambition naturally opened Winterson to charges of clunky excess and overdone gravity. Yet many readers found in these novels playfulness and provocation, a writer delighting in ideas and language.

With 1992's Written on the Body, however, Winterson's public persona threatened to eclipse her work. Like compatriot Martin Amis, she found her private life attracting far more attention than her fiction. Questions abounded: did Body's subject originate from an affair with a married woman? Was the woman in question her agent? Did Winterson in her lean days as a young writer really exchange sex for saucepans with wizened and well-heeled London housewives? Did she herself nominate Written on the Body as Book of the Year for a Sunday paper?

"Most of that stuff was blown out of all proportion," says Winterson, more amused than annoyed. "I understand that the press need something to write about." (Yes, we love a good saucepan story.) "Well, when I was 21," she explains, "I used to go to this bar in London, a real old-fashioned gay bar, the kind which could never exist today. It had a rich history; a lot of people from the Left Bank used to visit it, like Sylvia Beach and Djuna Barnes. I used to see these older women there, and they were living double lives in a way you don't see too often anymore. They'd tell their husbands they were going on shopping trips, then head for the club. I spent time with a number of them. Some wanted to buy me presents, but couldn't risk upsetting their traditional marriages with a credit-card receipt for an unlikely purchase. It couldn't be cowboy boots and leather jackets. So the only thing we could think of that would slip through were saucepans." Winterson grins. "Back then I had no money and no possessions, but I had a flat full of saucepans -- an incredible, expensive set that I'm still cooking with today. Fondly."

While in England Winterson endured the barbs and boos surrounding the publication of Written on the Body, on these shores she broke through her cult status into popular and critical acclaim. "The book arrived here free of any agenda," she says. "There were no anxieties about it. People read it without prejudice, whereas in England the critics for some reason had tired of me and with delight declared my demise. That experience taught me much about the micro-world of criticism and media. It's only a few people, not the thousands that you see on a tour. And in the end it's about one person writing a book and one person reading a book. Everything else is irrelevant."

On this tour, Winterson is finding that her American readers resist easy definition. Her appearance in Boston found her fielding questions about topics as diverse as her opinion of the "queer aesthetic" (she doesn't subscribe) and her reading habits (Romantic poets, for this book tour). "Sometimes it's the highly literate and academic who make up my readership, but as often it's people who say, `We don't read books, but we read you,' " she says. "It's kids who are sassy and bad-tempered. They discover that they're not dispossessed from literature.

"Last week I was in Portland and Seattle presenting lectures in these beautiful concert halls to 2000 people a night. Then a day later I'm in San Francisco reading to 600 sweaty dykes in a basement," she adds with affection. "That's my readership here, the well-heeled and the bad girls. I love it."

---

One reader Winterson had no trouble figuring out -- but had one hell of a time dealing with -- was Mark Hogarth, the "Cambridge spiv" who hoped to make a mint selling Web addresses back to the authors whose names he registered as domain names first. After much legal wrangling in the World Intellectual Property Organization, Winterson won the rights to her own name.

For a writer whose abiding theme is identity, the irony of her victory is at once grand and apt. Her new novel, The PowerBook, celebrates the medium that made possible the near-theft of her identity. Breaking with those critics who see in e-mail a corruption of language and a threat to books as we know them, Winterson finds spirit in the material world. She spins a world-wide web of love stories to unveil the ghosts in the machine. For example, in telling anew the tragic tale of Paolo and Francesca, Winterson adds her take on the intersection of desire and obstacle to the perspectives of Dante and Boccaccio. Ali, her narrator -- if not her doppelgänger -- crosses cultures and literatures to connect with an elusive lover. Although indebted to the past, her story belongs to this particular present.

"As a writer, you have to live in your own time, for good or ill," Winterson says. "If you're not a player, if you're not engaging with the moment and all it presents, then you're colluding in your own death. Here I am on the cusp of the 21st century, and I have a responsibility to relay that. Yet I'm also going to continue looking under this time for those permanencies and values which don't date.

"At the moment you've got this great mass of meaningless information constantly coming at you, and what art can do is put the meaning back, or make a pattern that says `Go this way.' Art brings us into a kind of permanent present, so that we're not isolated on little rafts of time. Through a symphony or a novel or a painting your life stretches, and you're no longer boxed in. Through art you live far past your own 80 years."

With the publication of The PowerBook, Winterson intuits the completion of a cycle. She senses a true consonance among her seven novels, something symphonic. Preferring "development" to "change" and ever chary of repetition, Winterson promises to put the pen or PowerBook down well before becoming a parody of herself.

The current book tour and recent ventures in film and the Internet will give her some time away from the page. Juliette Binoche and Gwyneth Paltrow are slated to star in an adaptation of The Passion based on a script from which Winterson claims she was tossed. A deal to bring Sexing the Cherry to the big screen is in the works; she anticipates an active role in its production. And next year, the BBC will make available on its Web site two dozen four-minute episodes that Winterson describes as "old-fashioned creativity in a new-tech world."

Writing novels, nonetheless, remains her sole passion. Winterson says she will "sit by the still pool and wait," an image that evokes the close of many of her works. "All my books end in water," she notes. "It's pretty odd. I only realized this later on. They always end either in the sea or on the river. I think it's because they're always trying to push out the boundaries of the last page, suggesting a sense of continuity. I want always to give the sense that the dialogue between reader and author continues. So that when the reading stops, the book does not end."

Ron Fletcher, an English teacher at Boston College High School, is at work on his first novel. Though a West Coast realtor beat him to the domain-name registry, he can be reached at ronfletcher@bchigh.edu.

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