Authors: Jeanette Winterson
The tour was filing dutifully down the stairs. The guide looked back to make sure we were all following, and at the moment he turned forward, I took out my little silver key and opened the door into our kitchen.
Silently, I closed it and locked myself in. Far away, I heard the guide shutting up the lighthouse.
We had been allowed to peer in, one by one, to the makeshift kitchen where Pew and I had eaten herds of sausages. The dented brass kettle was unpolished on the wood-burning stove. The comb-backed Windsor chair, where Pew used to sit, was in the corner. My stool was neat against the wall.
‘It was a hard and lonely life,’ the guide had said, ‘with few comforts.’
‘How did they cook on that thing?’ asked one of the tour.
‘A microwave is not a passport to happiness,’ I said, snappish.
Everyone glared at me.
I didn’t care. I had made my plan.
The lighthouse was open to the public twice a year. Finally, not knowing what I did, I had come back.
Now, listening to the diesel-drone of the tour bus pulling away, I was alone. I half expected DogJim to come trotting through the door.
I pulled out the stool and sat down. How quiet it was without the clock ticking. I got up, opened the drawer under the clock-face, took out the key and wound the spring. Tick, tick, tick. Better – much better. Time had begun again.
The stove had rusted red round the handle. I forced it free and looked inside. Twenty years ago I had left in the early morning and laid a fire, because that’s what I always did. The fire was still there, unlit, but still there. I knocked back the spigot that opened the tin vent of the flue. A shower of dust and rust fell down, but I could feel from the rush of air that the vent was clear. I put a match to the dry kindling and paper. The fire roared up. I grabbed the kettle as the condensation began to mist on it in the heat. I swilled it out with water, filled it up, and made myself a twenty-year-old pot of tea. Full Strength Samson.
The light was thinning, losing colour, turning transparent. The day had worn through and the stars were showing.
I took my mug of tea and climbed up past Pew’s room to the control room, and out onto the deck that ran all the way round the Light.
I leaned on the rail and looked out. Every four minutes the light flashed in a single clear beam, visible across the sea and across the sea of time too. I had often seen this light. Inland, land-locked, sailing my years, uncertain of my position, the light had been what Pew had promised – marker, guide, comfort and warning.
Then I saw him. Pew in the blue boat.
‘Pew!’ Pew!’
He lifted his hand, and I ran down the steps and out onto the jetty, and there he was tying the painter as he always did, his shapeless hat pulled over his eyes.
‘I wondered when you’d get here,’ he said.
Pew: Unicorn. Mercury. Lenses. Levers. Stories. Light.
There has always been a Pew at Cape Wrath. But not the same Pew?
We talked all night, as though we had never gone away, as though that broken day had been hinged onto this one, and the two folded together, back to back, Pew and Silver, then and now.
‘Tell me a story,’ said Pew.
‘A book, a bird, an island, a hut, a small bed, a badger, a beginning…’
‘And did you tell that person what I told you?’ said Pew.
‘When you love someone you should say it.’
‘That’s right, child.’
‘I did what you told me.’
‘Well, well, that’s good.’
‘I love you, Pew.’
‘What’s that, child?’
‘I love you.’
He smiled, his eyes like a faraway ship. ‘I’ve a story for you too’
‘What?’
‘It was Miss Pinch who was the orphan.’
‘Miss Pinch!’
‘Never was a descendant of Babel Dark. Never forgave any of us for that.’
And I was back in Railings Row under the One-Duck Eiderdown, duck feathers, duck feet, duck bill, glassy
duck eyes, and snooked duck tail, waiting for daylight.
We are lucky, even the worst of us, because daylight comes.
The fire was burning down, and there was a strange silence outside, as if the sea had stopped moving. Then we heard a dog barking.
‘That’s DogJim,’ said Pew. ‘Hark him.’
‘Is he still alive?’
‘He’s still barking,’
Pew stood up. ‘It will soon be daylight, Silver, and time to go.’
‘Where are you going?’
Pew shrugged. ‘Here, there, not here, not there, and seasonally elsewhere.’
‘Will I see you again?’
‘There’s always been a Pew at Cape Wrath.’
I watched him get into the boat and align the tiller. DogJim was sitting up in the prow, wagging his tail. Pew began to row off the rocks, and at that moment the sun lifted, and shone through Pew and the boat. The light was so intense that I had to shade my eyes, and when I looked again, Pew and the boat were gone.
I stayed at the lighthouse until the day was done. As I left, the sun was setting, and the full moon was rising on the other side of the sky. I stretched out my hands, holding the falling sun in one hand, and the climbing moon in the other, my silver and gold, my gift from life. My gift of life.
My life is a hesitation in time. An opening in a cave. A gap for a word.
These were my stories – flashes across time.
I’ll call you, and we’ll light a fire, and drink some wine, and recognise each other in the place that is ours. Don’t wait, Don’t tell the story later.
Life is so short. This stretch of sea and sand, this walk on the shore, before the tide covers everything we have done.
I love you.
The three most difficult words in the world.
But what else can I say?
Ideas, interviews & features…
Louise Tucker talks to Jeanette Winterson
OTHER WRITERS ARE referenced throughout
Lighthousekeeping,
as they often are in your work. Why is intertextuality so important to your writing?
Books speak to other books; they are always in dialogue. Books that we have now affect the way we read books that were written earlier, at any other period, because books are a continual commentary on themselves. This is one of the reasons why the process is always dynamic, not static, why it moves, why it’s exciting for the reader and for the writer. I think everyone has the experience of building a private library, not just on the shelves but in their minds, where they’re always comparing and contrasting new books that they’ve read with classics that they loved. For a writer that process is even sharper because you’re dealing with words all the time and you are aware that you write within a continuum, that the books themselves suggest ideas to you which you might not otherwise have had.
I’ve always liked to work with existing texts. I like to do cover versions of stories that we know very well, whether it’s Lancelot and Guinevere or Tristan and Isolde. It’s a way of rewriting what we know, but in the rewriting we find new angles, new possibilities, and the rewriting itself demands an injection of fresh material into what already exists, so the story changes. The thing is kept alive by the retelling, by the changing. It’s a way of
making an oral tradition out of a literary tradition so that the thing is continuously in the mouth. I think words ought to be in the mouth; it’s where they belong. The spoken language is just as important as the written language; the two depend on one another. I think of it not as a literary game, nor as an exercise, but as a necessary nourishment from one text to another.
‘I have no plans at present for another novel, but for me that’s normal. I never plan ahead. It’s a question of letting new ideas come through and not being afraid of that.’
You mention on your website that
The PowerBook
is the end of a cycle. Is
Lighthousekeeping
the beginning of a new one?
Yes it is. It’s a new exploration. I don’t know where it will lead, I don’t know what comes next. I have no plans at present for another novel, but for me that’s normal. I never plan ahead. I think it’s necessary for writers always to be prepared to renew themselves and to reconsider the way that they work. I don’t want to parody other people but I don’t want to parody myself either, and nor do I want to start writing the same book, which can be a danger when you’ve been working for a while, and I’ve been working for twenty years now in 2005. So it’s a question of letting new ideas come through and not being afraid of that and not being afraid of things ending, because out of those endings come the possibilities of new beginnings. I don’t think there is any other way to work.
Lighthousekeeping
revolves very specifically around telling stories. Why do you think storytelling, as an act, is so important to us?
Storytelling is a way of establishing connections, imaginative connections for ourselves, a way of joining up disparate material and making sense of the world. Human beings love patterns; they love to see shapes and symmetries. We seem to have a need to impose order on our surroundings, which are generally chaotic and often in themselves seem to lack any continuity, any storyline. For me, though, the telling of stories is not about imposing an order, it’s about revealing an order which is implicit in a situation but perhaps concealed, perhaps well hidden.
‘Art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that’s why writing can never be formulaic.’
I believe in pattern and in order but I don’t believe that those things are artificial. I think that art is one way of discovering a genuine and unforced pattern in our lives and in the world around us and that’s why writing can never be formulaic: it can never be done according to plan because it arises from a deeper part of the self which I think is less neurotic than the conscious mind and less afraid of not immediately having a shape to put on every new situation. We can be obsessive, always wanting to categorise and quantify; we become taxonomists, and it’s not always helpful. It’s often better to let the pattern emerge in its own right. The pattern might be slightly flawed, the shape might be different to the one that we would imagine, but it’s still valid, and storytelling allows that to happen. Nothing in the story ever quite
works out in the way you imagine it will: there are always surprises, there are always twists and turns.
Storytelling teaches us to be unafraid of our imaginative power and I think it teaches us to be unafraid of the exuberance and the unruly, untamed nature of life, of our lives. So in a world which is obsessed with taming, obsessed with making sense of things – which often means reducing those things – stories are a way of making sense differently, of enlarging upon what we are and not being afraid of the unruly elements within it.
Many of your books cross boundaries of time and history. Do you spend a lot of time doing research before you start writing?
I pick up things that I need as I go along. I don’t sit down and try and get everything into a neat pile next to my computer before I start. I think you have to let the work suggest its own conundrums and then you start to solve them. So when I need a piece of research I go out and get it. Otherwise I think you tend towards the formulaic, which I believe is unhelpful. If you think you know where the story will go, then you’re perhaps directing it too much with your conscious mind. You need the story itself to suggest things to you.
I’m a great believer in working with the unconscious, working with those parts of the self which aren’t immediately accessible to rationale or logic. After all, if art reaches anywhere it reaches underneath the surface of the everyday, it reaches past our logical decisions and reasons and it reaches into
another place, which is richer, stranger, perhaps closer to the world of the child than to the world of the adult. I don’t think we grow out of that world; I think we suppress it, ignore it and lose touch with it. Reading, looking at pictures, listening to music, going to the theatre, all of those things allow us to regain contact with the parts of our selves that growing up and living in this crazy, corporate world try to squeeze out.
‘I’m a great believer in working with the unconscious, working with those parts of the self which aren’t immediately accessible to rationale or logic.’
Inevitably a high-profile writer’s life and work are conflated. Do you find this irritating or simply par for the course?
My own writing life has run parallel to a change in the way that writers are perceived by the public and the media. Until the late eighties writers were much more anonymous. They were unlikely to be recognised; they might do one or two interviews but they were not in any sense treated as celebrities, nor were they expected to give opinions on the state of the world and generally air their views. This changed when the media realised that it could treat writers in this way and it would be entertaining because, unlike rock stars and actors, writers tend not to go around with PR people who warn them when to keep quiet and not to answer certain questions. So it’s very easy to make us look ridiculous. Everybody’s had a lot of fun with this. Writers have wised up now: we know how it’s going to be so we’re a lot more careful. Personally I think it’s unhelpful that writers are treated as celebrities; I think it’s better that we should be treated as nobodies and only the work
should be on show, but that’s never going to happen. So you have to live in the world that you’re in; there’s no point in lamenting for a lost Arcadia – it won’t come back. My view is to cooperate now as much as I can and to try and keep private what I can.
I think questions of autobiography are always misleading because every writer uses themselves in their work; they use their own experience, they use what they observe, hopefully they use what they can imagine but perhaps that’s less frequent than it ought to be. But really autobiography tells us very little. What we should be looking for is authenticity: if this comes from the centre of the writer, if it comes from a real place in the writer then that will show itself in the work. And I think it’s authenticity we should be looking at, not autobiography. There’s only so much the autobiography can tell us. But at present we are obsessed with writers’ lives, with what we think of as true life, with what we think of as the real story. There is no real story, the real story is in the fiction.