Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

When I was sixteen I had only got as far as M – not counting Shakespeare, who is not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour. Black is all the colours and Shakespeare is all the alphabet. I was reading his plays and sonnets the way that you get dressed every morning. You don't ask yourself, ‘Shall I get dressed today?’ (On the days you don't get dressed you are not well enough, either mentally or physically, to be able to ask – but we will go there later.)

  M was the seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell. After my encounter with T. S. Eliot on the library steps, I had decided to add poetry to the reading list. Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

  Marvell wrote one of the most wonderful poems in English – ‘To His Coy Mistress’. That's the one that begins: Had we but world enough, and time . . .

  World enough, and time: I was young, so I had time, but I knew I had to find world – I didn't even have a room of my own.

  What gave me great hope were the closing lines of the poem. It is a seduction poem, which is its charm, but it is also a life poem, urging and celebrating love and desire and declaring desire as a challenge to mortality itself.

  We can't slow time, says Marvell, but we can chase it. We can make time run. Think of the hourglass, the cliche of the sands of time slowly dribbling away, and all those Faust-like wishes of immortality – if only time could stop, if only we could live forever.

  No, says Marvell, forget that, turn it round, live it out as exuberantly as you can. Here he is, much better than me:

  Let us roll all our strength and all

  Our sweetness up into one ball;

  And tear our pleasures with rough strife

  Thorough the iron gates of life.

  Thus, though we cannot make our sun

  Stand still, yet we will make him run.

  Read it aloud. And look what Marvell makes happen by putting the line break at ‘sun’. The line break right there forces a nano-pause, and so the sun does indeed stand still – then the line gallops forward.

  I thought, ‘If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.’

  I began to realise that I had company. Writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways and castaways. These writers were my friends. Every book was a message in a bottle. Open it.

  *

  M. Katherine Mansfield – the only writer Virginia Woolf envied . . . but I had not read Virginia Woolf.

  In any case, I did not think in terms of gender or feminism, not then, because I had no wider politics other than knowing I was working class. But I had noticed that the women were fewer and further apart on the shelves, and when I tried to read books ‘about’ literature (always a mistake), I couldn't help noticing that the books were written by men about men who write.

  That didn't worry me; I was in danger of drowning and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak.

  Katherine Mansfield – another tubercular writer like Lawrence and Keats, and they all made me feel better about my non-stop cough. Katherine Mansfield – a writer whose short stories are as far away from any life experience I had had at sixteen.

  But that was the point. Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read, ‘My life stood – a loaded gun’ we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

  So I read on. And I read on, past my own geography and history, past the foundling stories and the Nori brickworks, past the Devil and the wrong crib. The great writers were not remote; they were in Accrington.

  *

  The Accrington Public Library ran on the Dewey decimal system, which meant that books were meticulously catalogued, except for Pulp Fiction which everybody despised. So Romance was just given a pink strip and all Romance was simply chucked unalphabetically onto the Romance shelves. Sea Stories were treated the same way, but with a green strip. Horror had a black strip. Mystery stories shlock-style had a white strip, but the librarian would never file Chandler or Highsmith under Mystery – they were literature, just as Moby-Dick was not a Sea Story and Jane Eyre was not Romance.

  Humour had a section too . . . with a wavy orange giggle strip. On the Humour shelves, I will never know why or how, was Gertrude Stein, presumably because she wrote what looked like nonsense . . .

  Well, maybe she did, and often she did, though for reasons that made a lot of sense, but The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a delightful book, and a true groundbreaking moment in English literature – in the same way that Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is groundbreaking.

  Woolf called her novel a biography, and Stein wrote somebody else's autobiography. Both women were collapsing the space between fact and fiction – Orlando used the real-life Vita Sackville-West as its heroine, and Stein used her lover, Alice B. Toklas.

  Sure, Defoe had called Robinson Crusoe an autobiography (Stein references that), and Charlotte Bronte had to call Jane Eyre a biography, because women were not supposed to go around making things up – especially stories where the morality is daring if not dodgy.

  But Woolf and Stein were radical to use real people in their fictions and to muddle their facts – Orlando, with its actual photos of Vita Sackville-West, and Alice Toklas, the supposed writer, who is Stein's lover but not the writer . . .

  For me, fascinated with identity, and how you define yourself, those books were crucial. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

  The night I left home I felt that I had been tricked or trapped into going – and not even by Mrs Winterson, but by the dark narrative of our life together.

  Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible, unseen except in its effects.

  What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?

  It was never a question of biology or nature and nurture. I know now that we heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one – by obsessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment. Mrs Winterson was her own secret society, and she longed for me to join her there. It was a compulsive doctrine, and I carried it forward in my own life for a long time. It is of course the basis of romantic love – you + me against the world. A world where there are only two of us. A world that doesn't really exist, except that we are in it. And when one of us fails the other . . .

  And one of us will always fail the other.

  When I walked away that night I was longing for love and loyalty. The wide yearning of my nature had to funnel through a narrow neck – it went into the idea of the ‘other’, the almost-twin, who would be so near to me but not me. A Plato-like split of a complete being. We would find each other one day – and then everything would be all right.

  I had to believe that – how else would I have coped? And yet I was heading for the dangerous losses that ‘all or nothing’ love demands.

  But – and this matters – you really don't have much choice when you are sixteen. You leave with your inheritance.

  But . . .

  There is always a wild card. And what I had were books. What I had, most of all, was the language that books allowed. A way to talk about complexity. A way to ’keep the heart awake to love and beauty (Coleridge).

  I walked around for most of the night the night that I left home. The night was in slow m
otion, and nights are so much slower than days. Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.

  I was in a night that was lengthening into my life. I walked away and I was trying to walk away from the dark orbit of her depression. I was trying to walk out of the shadow she cast. I wasn't really going anywhere. I was going to be away, free, or so it seemed, but you always take it with you. It takes much longer to leave the psychic place than the physical place.

  I slept in the shelters on the bowling green between about 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. and woke freezing and stiff to the cloud-broken light of October. I went down to the market and bought fried eggs and strong tea, and then took my few things to college with me.

  The next few days were difficult. Janey's father had decided that he really didn't like me – I had that effect on my friends’ parents – and so I couldn't sleep in the caravan. Instead, I slept in the beaten-up old Mini that I was learning to drive.

  It was a very good Mini, and it belonged to a crazy boy at church whose parents were elderly, not religious, but doting. He let me use it because they wanted him to have his own car and he was terrified of driving. Between us we drove it over to Janey's house and parked it round the corner.

  The only way to sleep in a car is to have a plan. Mine was to sit in the front to read and eat and to lie down in the back to sleep. That way I felt like I was in control. I kept my stuff in the boot, and after a few days I decided to start driving the Mini around town, even though I didn't have a licence.

  I was working on the market packing up jumpers three evenings a week and on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. I worked on a fruit and veg stall, so I had money for food, petrol and the launderette.

  Every Saturday Janey and I went to the pictures, ate fish and chips, and made love in the back of the Mini. Then she went home and I went to sleep reading Nabokov by flashlight. I was not happy about reaching N.

  I couldn't understand why a man should find the mature female body so disgusting. The best thing about taking my showers at the public baths was being able to look at women. I found them beautiful, all of them. And that in itself was a rebuke to my mother who only understood bodies as sinful and ugly.

  Looking at women was not really sexual for me. I loved Janey and she was sexual, but looking at women was a way of looking at myself and, I suppose, a way of loving myself. I don't know how it would have been if I had wanted boys, but I didn't. I liked some of them but I didn't desire any of them. Not then. Not yet.

  One day, when I got to my sixth-form college, and we were reading Wilfred Owen and Middlemarch for the exam, I complained about Nabokov. I found Lolita upsetting. This was the first time that literature felt like a betrayal. I had asked the librarian – usually reliable – and she said that she disliked Nabokov too, and that many women felt that way but it was better not to say so in mixed company.

  Men will call you provincial, she said, and I asked what that meant, and she explained that it meant someone who came from the provinces. I asked her if Accrington was the provinces, but she said, no, it was beyond the provinces.

  So I decided to ask my teachers.

  I had two English teachers. The main one was a sexy wildman who eventually married one of our classmates when she managed to turn eighteen. He said that Nabokov was truly great and that one day I would understand that. ‘He hates women,’ I said, not realising that this was the beginning of my feminism.

  ‘He hates what women become,’ said the wildman. ‘That's different. He loves women until they become what they become.’

  And then we had an argument about Dorothea Brook in Middlemarch, and the revolting Rosamund, whom all the men prefer, presumably because she hasn't become what women become . . .

  The argument led nowhere and I went trampo-lining with a couple of girls who weren't worried about Dorothea Brook or Lolita. They just liked trampolining.

  We were making so much noise on our trampoline that we disturbed the head of English, Mrs Ratlow.

  Mrs Ratlow was a middle-aged lady, round-shaped like a fluffy cat. She had fluffy hair and purple eye make-up. She wore red polyester suits and green frilly blouses. She was vain and frightening and ridiculous all at once, and we were either laughing at her or hiding from her. But she loved literature. Whenever she said ‘Shakespeare’, she bowed her head, and she had actually taken the coach to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1970 to see Peter Brook's legendary white-box production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was a kind of Miss Jean Brodie I suppose, though I didn't suppose because I hadn't got as far as S, and when I did get there, there was no Muriel Spark. Too modern for English Literature in Prose A–Z.

  But there was Mrs Ratlow – widowed with two teenage sons who towered over her and who always arrived at the college in a hail of threats from Mrs Ratlow as she drove into the car park and shoehorned the huge hulking boys out of her tiny Riley Elf. She shouted all the time. She took Valium in class. She threw books at our heads and she threatened to kill us. All of that was still allowed.

  Mrs Ratlow came tearing out of the English course-work room, foolishly situated by the trampoline room. When she had stopped shouting at us I said it was all to do with Nabokov, and I had to get past N.

  ‘But you're already reading Wilfred Owen.’

  ‘I know, but he's poetry. English Literature in Prose A–Z is what I'm doing. There's a writer called Mrs Oliphant . . .’

  Mrs Ratlow puffed up her chest like a pigeon. ‘Mrs Oliphant is not literature – you may not read her!’

  ‘I've got no choice – she's on the shelf.’

  ‘Explain yourself, girl,’ said Mrs Ratlow, who was interested now in spite of wanting to mark twenty essays on Pride and Prejudice.

  And so it all came tumbling out – the mother, the Mini, the library, the books. Mrs Ratlow was silent, which was very unusual. Then she said, ‘You are living in a Mini and when you are not, in fact, in the Mini, you are working on the market to earn money, or you are here at the college, and otherwise you are in the Accrington Public Library reading English Literature in Prose A–Z.’

  Yes, that was an accurate summary of my entire life apart from sex.

  ‘I have now included poetry,’ I said, explaining about T. S. Eliot.

  She was looking at me like a scene from Quatermass and the Pit, as a previously knowable object was transforming in front of her eyes. Then she said, ‘There is a spare room in my house. Pay for your own food and no noise after 10 p.m. You can have a key.’

  ‘A key?’

  ‘Yes. A key is a metal device that opens a door.’

  I was back to moron-status in her eyes, but I didn't care. I said, ‘I have never had a key, except to the Mini.’

  ‘I shall go and speak to that mother of yours.’

  ‘Don't,’ I said. ‘Please don't.’

  She handed me the key. ‘Don't expect any lifts into college. The boys sit in the back and my bag sits in the front.’ Then she paused, and she said, ‘Nabokov may or may not be a great writer. I do not know and I do not care.’

  ‘Do I have to finish Lolita?’

  ‘Yes. But you must not read Mrs Oliphant. I shall certainly have a word with the librarian at the weekend. And, in any case, you don't have to read alphabetically, you know.’

  I started to say that I had to have an order – like only eating and reading in the front of the Mini and only sleeping in the back – but then I just stopped, just stopped dead, because trampolining had started again and Mrs Ratlow was already firing herself forward towards the sweaty springy bouncing canvas, shouting about Jane Austen.

  I went off down to the library with the little silver key in my pocket.

  I was helping the librarian shelve the books, something I really liked to do because I liked the weight of the books and the way they slotted onto the shelves.

  She gave me a pile of orange giggle-strip Humour, and that is when I first noticed Gertrude Stein.

  ‘I thought you were on N?’ said the librarian, who like most libra
rians believed in alphabetical order.

  ‘I am, but I am having a little look around too,’ I said. ‘My English teacher told me to do that. She says that Mrs Oliphant is not literature. She's coming to see you about her.’

  The librarian raised her eyebrows. ‘Is she now? I do not say that I disagree with her. But can we really leap from N to P? Yet, there are difficulties with the letter O.’

  ‘There were difficulties with the letter N.’

  ‘Yes. English literature – perhaps all literature – is never what we expect. And not always what we enjoy. I myself had great difficulties with the letter C . . . Lewis Carroll. Joseph Conrad. Coleridge.’

  It was always a mistake to argue with the librarian but before I could stop myself I started to recite:

  It were a vain endeavour,

  Though I should gaze forever

  On that green light that lingers in the west;

  I may not hope from outward forms to win

  The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

  The librarian regarded me. ‘That is very beautiful.’

  ‘It's Coleridge. “Dejection: An Ode”.’

  ‘Well, perhaps I shall have to reconsider the letter C.’

  ‘Will I have to reconsider the letter N?’

  ‘My advice is this. When you are young and you read something that you very much dislike, put it aside and read it again three years later. And if you still dislike it, read it again in a further three years. And when you are no longer young – when you are fifty, as am I – read the thing again that you disliked most of all.’

  ‘That'll be Lolita then.’

  She smiled, which was unusual, so I said, ‘Shall I skip Mrs Oliphant?’

  ‘I think you might . . . although she did write a very good ghost story called The Open Door.’