Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [13]
Every week Mrs Winterson sent me to the Accrington Public Library to collect her stash of murder mysteries. Yes, that is a contradiction, but our contradictions are never so to ourselves. She liked Ellery Queen and Raymond Chandler, and when I challenged her over the business of ‘the trouble with a book [to rhyme with spook] is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late …’, she replied that if you know there is a body coming, it isn’t so much of a shock.
I was allowed to read non-fiction books about kings and queens and history, but never, ever, fiction. Those were the books there was trouble in …
The Accrington Public Library was a fully stocked library built out of stone on the values of an age of self-help and betterment. It was finally finished in 1908 with money from the Carnegie Foundation. Outside were carved heads of Shakespeare and Milton, Chaucer and Dante. Inside were art nouveau tiles and a gigantic stained-glass window that said useful things like INDUSTRY AND PRUDENCE CONQUER.
The library held all the Eng lit classics, and quite a few surprises like Gertrude Stein. I had no idea of what to read or in what order, so I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen …
At home one of the six books was unexpected; a copy of Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Mallory. It was a beautiful edition with pictures, and it had belonged to a bohemian, educated uncle – her mother’s brother. So she kept it and I read it.
The stories of Arthur, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Merlin, of Camelot and the Grail, docked into me like the missing molecule of a chemical compound.
I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life. They are stories of loss, of loyalty, of failure, of recognition, of second chances. I used to have to put the book down and run past the part where Perceval, searching for the Grail, is given a vision of it one day, and then, because he is unable to ask the crucial question, the Grail disappears. Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing that he found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not.
Later, when things were difficult for me with my work, and I felt that I had lost or turned away from something I couldn’t even identify, it was the Perceval story that gave me hope. There might be a second chance …
In fact, there are more than two chances – many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.
And of course I loved the Lancelot story because it is all about longing and unrequited love.
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule – even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.
I was scared and unhappy.
I remember going down to the library to collect the murder mysteries. One of the books my mother had ordered was called Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. She assumed it was a gory story about nasty monks – and she liked anything that was bad for the Pope.
The book looked a bit short to me – mysteries are usually quite long – so I had a look and saw that it was written in verse. Definitely not right … I had never heard of T. S. Eliot. I thought he might be related to George Eliot. The librarian told me he was an American poet who had lived in England for most of his life. He had died in 1964, and he had won the Nobel Prize.
I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through ENGLISH LITERATURE IN PROSE A-Z.
But this was different …
I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you