The novelist Jeanette Winterson has just published her autobiography, entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and on Saturday the Guardian Review published an extract from it. The broad outlines of the story are familiar to anyone who has read her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (or who has seen the TV adaptation). A magnificently mirthless Pentecostal Christian woman living in a two-up, two-down terraced house in Accrington adopts a daughter who becomes the principal victim of her oppressive domestic regime. Among the many bans to which the young Winterson is subject is a ban on literature–she’s not allowed to read books, because ‘the trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late’. ‘Too late for what?’, the girl wonders, sensing a world of pleasures and dangers that lies just out of view.
The story from there unfolds rather like the inspiring autodidact narratives that Jonathan Rose collected in his study of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). It’s the tale of an individual empowered by books, and above all by the books in the local library, which in Accrington was a stone building finished in 1908 with money from the Carnegie Foundation, with carved heads of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and Dante outside and the words ‘KNOWLEDGE IS POWER’ on a giant stained-glass window within. There, Winterson remembers, she worked her way through the fiction section, starting with A for Austen. But she also bought herself books, which she hid under her mattress in layers composed of 72 paperbacks each. She was, she recalls, ‘going up in the world’ until her mother found the hidden treasures, threw them all out of the window into the backyard, and set light to them, leaving only charred fragments behind.
The event was, in Winterson’s retelling, foundational. Literature went inward: ‘The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed’. The bonfire of the vanities was the birth of the writer. But this writer is exceptionally alert to the inextricability of fact and fiction, and she must surely be aware of the resonance of her book-burning narrative. What went on in this terraced house in Lancashire is an uncanny recapitulation of the scene early in the first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) in which the priest and the barber go through the mad knight’s library deciding which books to keep and which to massacre. The evil chivalric romances that have so beguiled Quixote are flung out of the window into the courtyard, where they are burnt to ashes by the housekeeper during the night. (Winterson’s burning is also a nocturnal event).
The main discrepancy between the two accounts is that Cervantes’ censors go through the books with some care, and find innumerable reasons to save their skins (ranging from sheer love, via the beauties of style, to personal associations: ‘Keep it back, because its author’s a friend of mine…’) They set the scene for a narrative that is enormously affectionate towards the absurd stories that it spoofs. No such luck for D. H. Lawrence and his companions in the twentieth century. They end up as ‘burnt jigsaws of books’, fragments which turn prose into broken poetry.
