T H E    S A L O N    I N T E R V I E W     |     J E A N E T T E    W I N T E R S O N     |     P A G E     2

Tell me about the scientific inspiration for your recent book.

It started out of curiosity about what was happening in science and a desire to fully understand that. I wasn't satisfied with reading the popular books, so what I had to do was to get a friend, who teaches math at Cambridge in England, to take me through some of the mathematical steps. I did that for two years while I was busy reading real science books and trying to come to terms with particle theory and wave functions and warp space, black holes. I felt that if I could fully understand, if I really could explain it, then it could go in the book as a dynamic current, not as some sort of turgid matter slapped in there, which is always very unsatisfying.

What I wanted was for this great weight of material to perform quantum work within the narrative and lift it -- take the gravity out of it and let the thing float upwards. I was using the science as a drive, as its own rocket to power the book, not something sterile, or intellectual, or just too clever, or that would weigh the thing down. It was lightness that I wanted. That's why it took so long. I had a huge amount of matter to digest. I was like a great blind worm, moving slowly, digesting clods of information, breaking it down into something which I hoped people would find exciting.

On the other end of the spectrum, this isn't the first time you've used a Tarot card motif in your books. Do you see yourself as someone who believes in mysterious forces in the universe?

I think it would be very foolish not to take the irrational seriously. There are two ways of understanding reality. There is physical reality, the table, the chair, the cars on the street -- what appears to be the solid, knowable world, subject to proof, all around us. But there is also the reality of the psyche, imaginative reality, emotional reality, the things which are not subject to proof and never can be. We understand the world as oppositions: black/white, good/evil, male/female, mind/matter. What can be touched and what cannot be. But what's invisible to us is also so crucial for our own well-being or health. Life is full of things which are unexplained, full of incidents which happen from nowhere. And those are forces, literally, to be reckoned with. Now, whether you want to call it God or the mystery of the cosmos doesn't matter to me.

You've written autobiographical fiction, or semi-autobiographical fiction, in "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," and also very imaginative fiction like "The Passion."

I wouldn't believe that "Oranges" is my life if I were you. I think that would be a great mistake. I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did. And it has caused a great deal of confusion. I mean, of course the basics are in place, but there is as much of me and my life in every one of my books, as there is in "Oranges."

Many readers see autobiography as a guarantee of authenticity.

That's a very narrow way of coming at anything. After all, what did really happen? What is real now? What is happening here at this moment? The best writers, the best painters, the best musicians, in the end, are the ones who are the best imaginers, the ones who can predict a world which is outside of the world in which they live. Actually, the work that lasts over time is the work which still speaks to us when all contemporary interest in that work is extinct. When it is no longer topical, when it is no longer contemporary. When it no longer has any day-to-day relevance to our lives.

Take the plays of Shakespeare. Those plays cannot possibly have come out of Shakespeare's life. I mean the man would have had to be at least 50 men -- and I don't go for that theory! Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor. And yet the work is fabulous because it's so cleanly and beautifully imagined and it takes all of us into strange places.

That's what separates out literature from confessional. If it is real to you, that's fine, but that is not going to make it real to the people in 18 other countries where the book is being published. There has to be something more than that, a point where whatever has had meaning, whatever is powerful to you, can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know, whose life is entirely different from yours. Otherwise you will always fall into the trap of talking to a peer group or an interest group and you can't reach people whose experience is quite different to yours.

You must have come up against that challenge as a lesbian writer.

But what we know about art is that it cuts through all that, and it doesn't matter whether you are an old guy or a spinster or a punk, it should be able to speak to you, you know, regardless of the experience.

You talk about inventing a fictional identity for yourself. Actually, for a writer, you have quite a dossier. You're a notorious woman. How do you feel about your public image? Do you try to manage it?

You can't manage a public image. It is completely impossible. And there is a lot of crap talked about handling the press. You can't handle them. It is a wild beast and, you know, some days you don't get bitten, some days you get mauled to pieces and it is the luck of the draw. And everybody can be wise after the event and say, "Oh God, why did you say that?" or, "Why didn't you say this?"

And the truth is it makes no difference. That's something I have learned over 12 years. I have reached a point where I know that there is this thing out there, there is "Jeanette Winterson," this other self, this doppelgänger, who exists in a world which is quite different from the one I exist in. And she can be made into anything.

You just have to forget it and think, "What is important?" What is important is to do the work as best I can, to hope that it will find readers and to live my own life, my private life, decently and honestly and believe that my friends and the people who are close to me know what I am. And that this is enough.

I don't think I know anybody who is in any sense a public figure who recognizes themselves in the things that get written about them. It just doesn't happen. I just let it go now. I think it reached a nadir in England in 1994. On the one hand, I thought, "I just can't cope with this. They are completely mad and out of control and how will I manage?" That was part of my decision to move to the country, because London is a small place and it is very incestuous and people know where you live. Everybody is sort of on top of each other.

Have you ever participated in that literary scene?

I have nothing to do with literary London and never get to parties. I can't be bothered. I never appear at all. That's what's so weird. I am a complete hermit. I have done two interviews in England in five years and yet all this stuff comes out. I guess some people are just magnets of interest, and I don't know why. I don't know ...

The British press is hard on writers.

Yes, but the British press is hard on everybody. They are only interested in two things: how much money you make and who you go to bed with. That's it in Britain now. We're at an all-time low. We are in the sewer and it has been getting worse and worse. It really has. And it's to do with 18 years of very right-wing government, that unleashing from reserve and courtesy and politeness and good behavior. Those things really matter. You can't have everybody going for each other's throats all the time because the whole social fabric breaks down. And the press are always whining on about how people have a right to know. People have a right to know the things which affect those people. They don't have a right to know the intimate details of somebody else's personal life. That is not what the press is for.

Do you really have five typewriters?

Yes. It's because I work at them for so long. When I'm doing my work, I'm down there for hours and hours and they just get tired, you know, even ones with good motors. They can't take it. So that's why I have to swap from one to another, to give them a rest. It's like wearing different pairs of shoes on different days.

What is your routine like? Do you write every day?

No, I don't write every day. I have long spaces in between the books where I simply get on with my life, which means running my little farm. But when I do write, when it is time to get to work, then I go away completely and don't do anything except the work. I cook properly for myself and look after myself, but I go away from home and I just do it. And that can be 16 hours a day.

I've got a cottage on my land and I go there. It's important to lift out of a domestic space because I am a liability at that point. And I can't have it around me. You know, I am very -- I love all those domestic joys, and I love cooking and I like being at home and all the things that you can do together in that space. But I find that I cannot do that -- perhaps because I like it so much -- and really put all of my efforts and energies into my work, so I have always chosen to take off and to do it in a separate space.

Do you just become a wild-haired madwoman drifting around your little cottage?

No, I am extremely clean and neat at all times. But cleaning the little cottage and just, you know, being very focused is quite different from having all of the stuff that normally comes with life. Especially now, with a life like mine. I have an assistant in three days a week to cope with the mail and running of the whole business, you know, because there is a business side to this, quite apart from the writer in her hold.

I do try to make the choices clean so that nobody suffers, my partner doesn't suffer, but most of all so that the work gets done. I need to have that full intensity. I need to go out there, you know, with all the power I've got, when I'm doing it. And of course there comes a point where I think, I'm going to have a fortnight off now, and I just put the manuscript aside and go home and don't think about it. And then I come back and it all starts again.

And were you able to do that when you were younger, when you were just starting out?

Yes. I've always done that because I never cared about money. I used to have a job opening and closing curtains in the theater so I would be able to write all day and then run in and open and close my curtains, serve the ice cream and that would be it. It gave me just enough money to live in my one room and get on with the work.

You didn't have a separate writing place then?

Oh no, but I didn't need one, because I had no life. One room is always enough for one person, two rooms is not enough for two people. That is one of the conundrums in life. When I got older and I wanted to have some of those pleasures that come from sharing space with another person, then it was necessary to say, look, the way I work is crazy and it won't do either of us any good. I mean that has given rise to all kinds of myths about me, that I have an entire entourage of persons to look after me and that I am entirely undomestic and just take on all these male privileges and have some poor girl slaving away. It's just rubbish. This is the way that I have always worked and it's fine.
April 28, 1997

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