Why Be Normal When You Could Be Happy?

Two ostensibly dissimilar broadcasts this week – Jeanette Winterson reading extracts from her new memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? on Radio 4′s Book of the Week and Alan Yentob’s Imagine film on Grayson Perry’s new show at the British Museum – seemed to me to share the same joyous sense of triumphant nonconformity and human spirit.

Both artists experienced lonely, unhappy and often violent childhoods. When Perry was five, his parents divorced. His father had discovered his mother having an affair with the milkman. Perry has said that his father’s departure from the family home was the defining moment in his life. To escape from a difficult family situation and his stepfather’s violence, he retreated to his bedroom or the garden shed where he became absorbed in a fantasy life, sometimes involving his teddy bear, Alan Measles, who became a ‘surrogate father figure’ and is the only thing he still possesses from his childhood days. In these lonely hours Perry developed an interest in drawing and building model aeroplanes, both of which were to become themes in his artistic work.

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester and adopted by Pentecostal parents from Accrington. Her mother raged at her, beat her, locked her out of the house at night, and did not approve of reading, unless it was the Bible. Much of this was fictionalised in Winterson’s best-known book, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and recounted powerfully in her own reading – with her expressive Lancashire intonation – of the new memoir.

But the young Jeanette developed a love of books, first in the local library, then, as a teenager, buying paperbacks and hiding them under her mattress, only for her mother to discover them, throw them into the backyard, and then set fire to them.  At 16, Jeanette left home, having happily fallen in love with a girl. Her mother’s parting words give the new book its title: ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

Although I didn’t grow up in family circumstances quite as distressed as Perry’s or Winterson’s, I did experience something like it as my mother, suffering from agrophobia, steadily withdrew herself from the world.  As her confidence crumbled and I scrabbled a course through grammar school, she would sneer and rage at my books and the time I spent studying.  So I understand when Jeanette Winterson writes, ‘I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence’. She explains the need and the purpose behind excavating the past in her memoir thus:  ‘There are markings here, raised like welts. Read then. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt’.

There are marvellous passages inWhy Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  For example, on the importance of books in enabling her to survive her cruel childhood:

There were six books in our house. One was the Bible and two were commentaries on the Bible. My mother was a pamphleteer by temperament, and she knew that sedition and controversy are fired by printed matter. Ours was not a secular house, and my mother was determined that I should have no secular influences.

I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books, and she said, “The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.” I thought to myself, “Too late for what?” [...]

And then there’s the story of those paperbacks hidden  under her mattress:

I used to work on the market on Saturdays, and after school on Thursdays and Fridays, packing up. I used the money to buy books. I smuggled them inside and hid them under the mattress. Anybody with a single bed, standard size, and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that 72 per layer can be accommodated under the mattress. By degrees my bed began to rise visibly, like the Princess and the Pea, so that soon I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor. My mother was suspicious-minded, but even if she had not been, it was clear that her daughter was going up in the world.

One night she came in and saw the corner of a paperback sticking out from under the mattress. She pulled it out and examined it with her flashlight. It was an unlucky choice; DH Lawrence, Women in Love. Mrs Winterson knew that Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer, and, hurling it out of the window, she rummaged and rifled and I came tumbling off the bed while she threw book after book out of the window and into the backyard. I was grabbing books and trying to hide them, the dog was running off with them, my dad was standing helpless in his pyjamas.

When she had done, she picked up the little paraffin stove we used to heat the bathroom, went into the yard, poured paraffin over the books and set them on fire. I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone.

In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps. What does Eliot say? These fragments I have shored against my ruins …

I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. I began to memorise texts. We had always memorised long chunks of the Bible, and it seems that people in oral traditions have better memories than those who rely on printed text. The rhythm and image of poetry make it easier to recall than prose, easier to chant. But I needed prose too, and so I made my own concise versions of 19th century novels – going for the talismanic, not worrying much about the plot. I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights. I had language.

The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away. And standing over the smouldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. “Fuck it,” I thought, “I can write my own.”

Curiously, both Perry and Winterson subsequently found happiness with psychotherapists – in the new book  Winterson tells how she recently met and fell in love with the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, while Grayson Perry is married to another psychotherapist, Philippa Fairclough.

The Imagine film showed how Grayson Perry has been working behind the scenes at the British Museum to stage his most ambitious show: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. From the Museum’s vast collection, Perry selected objects mostly created by anonymous craftsmen which inspired, amused or intrigued him — from religious artifacts to cheap souvenir pin badges. He has complemented them with new works of his own inspired by the Museum objects, from his trademark ceramics to an outrageously decorated working motorbike.  Imagine followed as he rode the bike from his home town Chelmsford to its twin town, Backnang in southern Germany, in full make-up and clad in a purple cape and knickerbockers and bright yellow boots. ‘I like delighting people’, he says. ‘One fact that every transvestite has to come to terms with is that a person dressed up in the clothes of the opposite sex is somehow inherently funny. I regard humour as an important and necessary aspect of art’.

His theme is pilgrimage, and how many of us now make pilgrimages to art galleries and the like, where in the past a pilgrim’s destination would be a place of religious significance.  The British Museum has been a place of pilgrimage for Perry since he was a child – though he admitted to a sense of disappointment on his first visit, because the model boats in the Egyptian collection were not as shiny and new as the ones he played with at home. ‘People come here and they stand outside and take photographs of themselves as proof – ‘I was here, I made the pilgrimage”, he says.

Perry places traditional pilgrimage sites such as Mecca, Bethlehem and Amritsar alongside modern secular ones: Disneyland, Ground Zero, Graceland. (www.privategalleriestour.com)

At the heart of the exhibition is Perry’s eponymous Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, a ship like the one from Sutton Hoo, sailing into the afterlife, bedecked with casts of Museum artifacts – mummies, sculptures, busts, plaques – and with as its centrepiece a 250,000-year-old flint axe, the first human tool.  ‘The tool that begat all tools’ as Perry says. ‘This is a memorial to all the anonymous craftsmen that over the centuries have fashioned the manmade wonders of the world. I find the craftsman’s anonymity especially resonant in an age of the celebrity artist’.

The centrepiece of the exhibition - the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (www.privategalleriestour.com)

Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, calls it ‘one of the great imaginative storehouses of the world’, and points out that Perry is not the first to find inspiration in the museum’s historic galleries. ‘Throughout the museum’s history, artists have used the collection to inspire them, to make their own art, but until now, none of them has used it to make his own museum, his own civilization’.  By doing this, MacGregor says, Perry has made everyone – even those who work at the museum – look at the objects differently.  This is Perry’s aim. He wants to inspire in his turn, just as he has been inspired: ‘I hope that when people leave, they want to make something, they want to look at the world afresh’.

For me, the work of these two artists, working in their different fields, are testament to the power of hope and intelligence, love and imagination, to shatter social convention and the restrictions of conformity. Better, for all its faults, the society we have in Britain today with its greater degree of inclusiveness and tolerance, than a return to the restrictions and cruelties of the recent past.  ‘Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love’: for Winterson, this is mystery at the heart of her story.

‘In spite of all … I was and am in love with life’, writes Jeanette Winterson towards the end of her book.  It’s a marvellous book and a generous one which concludes with Winterson tracking down and meeting her natural mother. She writes of forgiveness and the complicated peace that has come from excavating her past: ‘The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is it prompts reflection.’  In the end, she concludes, she couldn’t be the daughter either of her mothers wanted.  She could only be herself.

‘I have,’ she concludes, ‘no idea what happens next.’

Links

• Jeanette Winterson: all about my mother (extracts from Why Be Happy in The Guardian)
• Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: introduction and extract on Jeanette Winterson’s website