SOURCE: Field, Michelle. “Jeanette Winterson: ‘I Fear Insincerity.’” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 12 (20 March 1995): 38–39.

[In the following essay, Field provides an overview of Winterson's life and literary career, incorporating Winterson's comments on her writings and artistic concerns.]

Opinion is sharply divided about Jeanette Winterson, far more than any other British writer. She has been subject to so many misleading caricatures that one does not expect her to have all the childlike charm of a Joan of Arc—though one is prepared to withstand another likeness to St. Joan: her forceful belief in herself.

Because Winterson gives few interviews, many profiles of her are written entirely on rumor. Winterson says that because she lives in a world of half-true stories about her, she has become a master of half-truths herself. “People make up so many things about me that I don't think they should have it all their own way. Two can play that game. Now I make up things when I talk to journalists.” PW confesses that it makes us very nervous, and she laughs. “I don't think that's a bad thing—that the press feels nervous.”

In fact, what really makes one nervous is Winterson's virtuosity. She is wildly overqualified for the British bestseller lists where she sits so securely; her new novel, Art & Lies, is just out from Knopf in the U.S. Perhaps some of the antipathy to Winterson exists because most journalists feel intellectually outranked by her. It may also be because she feels the same way, and she reminds you of your ranking.

Winterson feels that modesty is an overrated virtue and refuses to play down her success. Curled like a brown mouse in an armchair in the London office of Random House, Winterson says what she finds surprising is that “some readers … feel as violently affectionate [toward me] as others feel violently angry. I suppose it is better than a lukewarm response. However I think focusing on the writer is pointless, even unhelpful. I will die and the books, if they have any value, will last.”

Winterson's fan club began just 10 years ago, with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a novel which struck a chord with young women trying to liberate themselves from oppressive parents and small-minded towns. The book was written after Winterson applied for an editorial job with the then-new feminist publishing house, Pandora. “It was quite clear they weren't going to give me a job,” Winterson says. Publisher Philippa Brewster “said I was too wild; she knew I'd leave after six months. We laughed, and I was telling her stories—apocryphal stories and true stories—and I told her I was putting them together in this book. She said, ‘If you can write it the way you tell it, I'll buy it.’ Six weeks later, having written like mad, I slammed her half a book.” A few years later, Pandora was bought by HarperCollins, and Winterson, who strongly objects to Rupert Murdoch, ceased publishing there.

AN IMMEDIATE BESTSELLER

As a writer, Winterson had not published in little magazines or reviewed other people's books. After a childhood in a Pentecostal family in a Lancashire mill town (she was adopted and has never traced her genetic parents) and what she calls a “liberation” at Oxford University (1978–1981), Winterson just walked onto the bestseller list as though it were the next room.

Oranges (1985) became an excellent TV miniseries in 1990 and now sells over 100,000 copies a year in the U.K.; sales of the Grove paperback edition continue to grow steadily here and it is increasingly being used in English courses, according to publisher Morgan Entrekin; there are eight foreign-language translations. It was followed by the only book Winterson does not boast about, Boating for Beginners (1986), and then by The Passion (1987), the novel which Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, cites as a modern classic. It is a chilly fairy tale about chivalry, featuring a page of the Emperor Napoleon, who loves a web-looted lesbian called Villanelle. “I have noticed,” Winterson laughs, “that many middle-aged and elderly men adore The Passion. But I think The Passion, like Wuthering Heights, shouldn't be the favorite book of anyone past 30.”

Her next books were Sexing the Cherry (1989) and Written on the Body (1992). The latter was notorious for “outing” the affair she had with her literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, who is the wife of the novelist Julian Barnes, and it was at that point, says Winterson, that the London literary scene became hostile. Her new novel, Art and Lies, a sequence of monologues by characters named Handel, Picasso and Sappho, takes place in the year 2000.

All these books were handled by her agent, Suzanne Gluck of ICM in New York. (When she discovered Oranges, Gluck was so new to agenting that Winterson was her first client.) Gluck sold Oranges to Gary Fisketjon, then at Atlantic Monthly Press; when Fisketjon moved to Knopf in 1990, Winterson moved with him. Winterson says that Gluck and Fisketjon are the two fixed poles in her writing life.

In Britain, Winterson naturally fell out with Kavanagh after Written on the Body appeared, and then she set up her own corporation called Great Moments. “I don't like to leave my affairs to somebody else. It may have something to do with being a working-class girl. I grew up with people who were making their own money, putting their bread on the table.” Great Moments uses ICM as the American subagent.

One need not be skeptical about this approach, since Winterson is a wizard at contract law. “I would have gone into the law if I hadn't been a writer. I go through everything, and I use an intellectual property lawyer in London who is very sharp. I am particularly proud of my contracts. There is a confidentiality clause in all of them because the publishers are scared that somebody else might demand contracts like mine. Publishing is not a gentleman's game anymore, and it worries me that so many writers are using agents who are not legally trained and who draw up contracts which are simple-minded, to put it politely.”

A RECLUSIVE EXISTENCE

Ten years of writing a novel every alternate year has made Winterson rich enough to buy a romantic estate in Gloustershire [sic]. She lives there with her partner of five years, Australian-born Margaret Reynolds, who teaches at Birmingham University and has edited the Penguin Book of Lesbian Short Stories.

Before they moved from London at the end of last year, Winterson had set a pattern of retreating to the cottage on Ruth Rendell's country estate for two or three months at a time, to write. It seems a strange literary partnership because their fiction is so dissimilar. “Yes, but we're very fierce about one another. And Ruth takes a few knocks as well; so we can talk about this side of our lives.

“I don't have very many friends, mind you—I don't think you can be a good friend to many people because to a friend you must say ‘all my time is yours.’ Apart from Ruth, my only writer friend is Kathy Acker. People say I live in this very closed, cut-off way, but I think it is the only genuine way. I fear insincerity and I want to know that my word is good when I give it.”

Obviously, words are important to Winterson, none more so than the words she chooses and shapes into a text. Her reflections on the craft of writing are soon to be published in the U.K. in her first nonfiction book, Art Objects. And she is feeling a rush of inspiration which has already put a new and very different novel in gestation. “I believe that as soon as you can do something you have to give up doing it. So you are always tying a different limb behind your back.”

Some would say that her greatest accomplishment as a writer has been fitting music to prose style. Art and Lies ends with several pages of musical score from Der Rosenkavalier. “I don't listen to music while I write—but around it, yes. Obviously, throughout Art and Lies I was playing Der Rosenkavalier. I grew up in a very musical household. My mother was an extremely good pianist, and I was taught to read music when I was young, as if it were another, very important language.”

Winterson was also brought up on the sonorous language of the King James Bible and the cadences of northern English speech. When she relaxes she still speaks with a Lancashire lilt. She is acutely conscious of prose rhythms. “If a sentence jars on my ear, I count it out syllabically and can see what's wrong. As I am typing away I am reading it out loud to myself as I go along. Sometimes you can cheat the eye with skimming, but you can't cheat the ear.”

She does not use a word processor but types on a bank of electric typewriters. “I have four and it is rather like a Rolling Stones concert by the time I have finished a novel because I've smashed them up. Not on purpose: I have just knackered the machine. I am paranoid about one going bust, but with a bank of them I can move from one to another as they start whining and complaining.”

Winterson makes a distinction between her novels and the kind of fiction which has been taken over by film and TV. “I am interested in finding a relationship between poetic density and narrative possibility—to bring them together and create something which is different. If the novel is going to survive, it will not be as an annex to television or the movies. It has to be something in its own right.”

She has written just one original film, Great Moments in Aviation, which has been released in France, Germany and Spain, but remarks that film is a medium that continues to interest her. “The problem is maintaining one's integrity within the industry, because the sums of money are so huge. This I find hard to bear: I won't compromise for the checkbook.” She has refused all offers to make films of her novels, apart from Oranges, over which she had complete control.

Her lesbianism was a great drawing card 10 years ago, when she published Oranges, but it seems less relevant now. “Reviewers miss the fact that the base of my audience is very, very broad. The letters which I get, which are many, are from unlikely sources—not very often from little London dykes. Or even little San Francisco dykes. They are from a much broader cross section of the community.”

Some critics say that what makes Winterson's fiction so wayward—or so highly original—is her reclusiveness, which amounts to a disdain for ordinary people and casual conversation. She cut herself off entirely from her parents when she left home for Oxford, declining even to attend her mother's funeral five years ago. She has made a principle of detachment. “What I have tried to do is make my words independent, separate spaces. Reading my books is not about escape but about locating yourself as more than you are.”

Beginning with Sexing the Cherry, Winterson has unshackled herself from plots in order to emulate mythic patterns. “I think you must get more and more and more ambitious. Writers do run out; with hindsight we know that ‘writing lives’ are concentrated in a relatively short span, and it doesn't matter to me whether mine ends next year or in 20 years.” She assures us she will recognize the moment. “And I will be glad because then I'll have done my work in the world. Then perhaps I'll retire and breed bulls, like Shakespeare, who, after all, wrote nothing for 12 years after he finished The Tempest.”