For Author, Necessity Is Mother of Reinvention

For controversial British author Jeanette Winterson, writing well is the best revenge. She’s transformed memories of a rotten childhood into literary gold, and braved personal media attacks to become one of Britain’s top postmodern writers.

“For me, it’s constantly about reinventing yourself,” she said. “I’m a restless person, a quest person.”

The first lines of her latest work, “The.PowerBook” (Knopf, 2000) reinforce this: “To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself I stay on the run.”

Winterson was reared to be a missionary by her adoptive parents, working-class evangelical Pentecostals who believed every word of the Bible to be literally true. By age 8, at her parents’ urging, she was spreading the word of God, drawing believers from miles around her North England mill town.

But the precocious child was denied the thing she craved most: books. Her parents permitted only six books in the house: two were Bibles, a third was a concordance to the Old and New Testaments. The other three were classics.

Winterson hid paperbacks under her mattress and, at night, sneaked into an outhouse to read them by flashlight (the family home lacked indoor bathrooms). She continued until her mother found her cache and burned it.

When Winterson was 16, her parents discovered that she was having a lesbian affair. Both her parents and her church publicly denounced her. She left home, moved from place to place, and worked nights and weekends, so she could continue her education.

Winterson’s jobs included ice-cream van driver, domestic at a mental hospital and undertaker’s assistant.

But her dedication to her studies paid off handsomely. She was admitted to St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University, where she majored in English. She graduated in 1981, then tried unsuccessfully to land employment at advertising and publishing firms.

When she applied for an editorial job at Pandora Press, the publisher turned her down, saying that she was “too wild.” But the publisher, bemused by Winterson’s colorful autobiographical tales, dared her to set them on paper.

The result was “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” a fictionalized account of her early years, broken into eight chapters titled after the first eight books of the Old Testament. It was released in 1985. Winterson’s mother, who had told her that “the trouble with books is that you don’t know what’s in them until it is too late,” was reportedly mortified by her daughter’s revelations. The two never reconciled; Winterson’s mother died in 1991.

“Oranges” was a huge hit in Europe and America, and Winterson was hailed as “one of the most unusual and promising young talents in English fiction.”

Critics praised the then-26-year-old for her lyrical phrasings, clever wit, and richly layered allegories. Her career seemed to be soaring and she was lavished with awards. She won the Whitbread Prize for a First Novel. Her television script for “Oranges” won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award. A second screenplay, “Great Moments in Aviation,” won the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival and the FIPA d’Argent Award at the Cannes Film Festival.

There was more. After quickly penning “Boating for Beginners”--a satirical retelling of the Biblical great flood--to generate some cash, she wrote “The Passion” (set in Napoleonic times about a web-footed adventuress and a chef), which garnered her the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Then she completed “Sexing the Cherry” (a 17th century fable about Dog Woman, a pock-marked giantess) which won the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Winterson was over the moon. In 1992, she raked in more than $210,000, according to Vanity Fair. And Gore Vidal was calling her “the most interesting young writer I have read in 20 years.”

But unaccustomed to all the attention and acclaim, Winterson, at 33, behaved against the expectations of British literary society, which preferred its elite authors to be humble and reserved. She nominated her own book as Book of the Year and named herself as her favorite living author. On late-night TV, she claimd to be the natural heir to Virginia Woolf. She also carried on an affair with her agent, Pat Kavanagh, the wife of author Julian Barnes, then acknowledged it to a reporter.

Fame, British reporters said, had gone to her head. There were tales that she was demanding chauffeur-driven transport to book signings, asking men not to wear shorts to her readings, and hosting a coven of sycophantic “yes-women” at her North London home.

Some of the gossipy media tales at the time were over-the-top, including one that Winterson allegedly prostituted herself at Sloane Square hotels in exchange for Le Creuset cookware. Then there were the litany of tabloid reports about Winterson’s alleged wild dalliances with married women--though Winterson was in a long-term, committed relationship.

“Winterson’s vilification in the British press is quite a tricky business to unravel,” said Anne Varty, an English Department lecturer at the University of London. “The success of ‘Oranges’ when she was only 25 set her on something of a pedestal, from which it was easy to fall.”

Winterson is more decisive about the attacks. “It was very personal. It was about my sexuality, about the money I was making. I’m a colorful character, I’m not a wallflower. They were saying, ‘She’s lesbian, she’s working-class, she doesn’t go to the parties we throw, we don’t like her.’ ”

By 1994, the year Winterson describes as “the absolute worst,” she had become the Bad Girl of English Letters.

To regroup, she fled her London home with her partner, editor and academic Peggy Reynolds, and took up residence at her country home in Gloucestershire.

“I’d had enough of turning the other cheek,” she said. “I got very angry and defensive. I had a lot of rows with people. I realize now I didn’t handle the trouble well, and I shouldn’t have gotten as angry as I did. But at the time, it was overwhelming. All I could do was put my head down and get back to work.”

But she couldn’t.

“I couldn’t write, couldn’t do anything,” she said at the time. “I just carried on doing the only thing I could think of, which was reading books, listening to opera, and going to look at pictures. I thought, ‘This will heal me.’ ”

The emotional storm clouds began to lift over the next two years, and Winterson emerged wiser and thicker-skinned. She got back to work, sometimes spending up to 16 hours a day writing.

“Those three years very much strengthened and steadied me.” In 1997, she released “Gut Symmetries,” a metaphysical tale of passions and scientific musings.

Today, Winterson has revived her reputation as a risk-taking writer. She often eschews linear time in her stories, interweaving past, present, and future. She juxtaposes the magical with the real, and liberally intersperses classical and historical references in her tales.

“It’s been an amazing career to watch from up close,” said Winterson’s agent, Suzanne Gluck of ICM, who has represented Winterson for 15 years. “She’s one of the rare writers who sets herself a new challenge every time she sits down at the typewriter. She wants to push the limits of the novelistic form and of language itself.”

Winterson’s gripe today is about stereotyping. Why, she asks, do some critics and readers insist on pigeonholing her novels as “lesbian genre” because she’s in a relationship with a woman?

“I don’t think of myself as a woman writer, or, God help us, a lesbian writer,” she said. In her compendium of essays, “Art Objects,” Winterson wrote: “A writer’s work is not a chart of their sex, sexuality, sanity and physical health. We are not looking to enlist them in the navy, we are simply trying to get on with words.”

Unlike many writers, Winterson, at 41, is very much in control of her business affairs. In 1991, she formed her own company, Great Moments Ltd., to oversee the non-literary elements of her career. She takes great pride in the contracts she hammers out, and in her ability as a negotiator.

“When I see some of the contracts that writers sign without a lawyer, relying on their agents who don’t have a legal background, well, it amazes me,” she said.

And she’s got the library she longed for as a child. On its shelves are signed, first edition books of writers whom she admires: Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell. She purchases these books not for their investment value, but for personal delight.

“It’s a fetish thing, I suppose,” she said. “To think that they touched it, signed it.”

Years ago, Winterson wrote that she agreed with T.S. Eliot: to continue developing stylistically, a writer must grow emotionally. After struggling with the drawbacks of fame for the past decade, Winterson has emerged more comfortable with her public persona, more patient with critics, and at peace with her personal history.

“The past is not a prison,” she said. “I don’t have to be bound by it.” She acknowledges that, with her latest release, “The.PowerBook,” she’s reached the end of a seven-book cycle. “The things I’ve been discussing for 15 years, I don’t want to discuss now.”

Now that a chapter has closed in Winterson’s writing career, she’s poised to open another. She’s not sure yet of its plot line. “That’s my next challenge,” she said.