The moment Jeanette found poetry

Jeanette Winterson’s gripping autobiography Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?  provides heart revealing insight into the genesis of a writer.  As an adopted child Jeanette felt alone and very much on the outside. Her adoptive mother was an emotionally and sexually repressed advocate of the Bible and other books were forbidden in the family home, but the exception for Mrs Winterson was her murder mysteries.

One day young Jeanette was sent to the local library to collect a book Mrs Winterson had ordered by T S Eliot which turned out to be a play with poetry, Murder in the Cathedral.  Jeanette was hooked as she finally found those words that spoke to her soul.  She writes :

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 with a sudden painful joy.

I started to cry.

Readers looked up reproachfully and the librarian reprimanded me because in those days you weren’t allowed to sneeze in a library, let alone weep.  So I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.

The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family – the first one was not my fault.  The second failure was definately my fault.

I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat and how to do my A levels.

I had no one to help me, but T S Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or tha it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the stange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the peope doing the saying have had things pretty easy.  A tough life needs a tough langage – and that is waht poetry is.  That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn’t a hiding place.  It is a finding place.

Not long after this experience Mrs Winterson comes across the books young Jeanette has smuggled into the house and hidden under the matress. She burns the lot.   In the aftermath she realies.

something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time.  Only what is inside you is safe…..

I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights.  I had language.

Fiction and poetry are doses, medicinces.  What they heal is the rupture reality makes on imagination.

I had been damaged and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was amy reality, the facts of my life, but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as ong as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.

There was pain.  There was joy.  There was the painful joy Eliot had written about. My first sense of that painful joy was walking up the hill above our house, the long stretchy streets with a town at the bottom and a hill at the top…..

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 words.’