In Sixth Form, I used to walk around with a book in my blazer pocket. All the pretentious English Lit students did; it was a way of flashing the books that we were reading. I blame this on not only a run of attractive teachers in the English department, but also on Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit. Winterson was the first person that I didn’t want to be, but I wanted to write like; I tried to emulate not her style, but her prose.
Recently, I came across Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal. She’s a northern English girl who grew up in Acrington; I grew up on the outskirts of Manchester. She read her local library from A-Z, until she got to N, found Nabokov, was disappointed and realized that she could read around. I’ve always found a similar solace in libraries and literature. She understood what it was to love learning in an environment more conducive to an industrial, rather than industrious, life. As had I.
But she had all these other things to contend with: she was adopted to a mother who showed mostly disappointment toward her; who prepared her for the Apocalypse rather than life; who kicked her out the house for sharing a bed with another girl when she was 16. Given all this, she writes about happiness in a defiantly personal way:
"The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection.
Read on its own that is an absurd sentence. But as I try and understand how life works—and why some people cope better than others with adversity—I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream…
Which brings me back to happiness, and a quick look at the word.
Our primary meaning now is the feeling of pleasure and contentment; a buzz, a zestiness, the tummy upwards feel of good and right and relaxed and alive…you know…
But earlier meanings build in the hap—in the Middle English, that is ‘happ’, in Old English, ‘gehapp’—the chance or fortune, good or bad that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play.
How you meet your ‘hap’ will determine whether or not you can be ‘happy’.
What the Americans, in their constitution, call ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’ (please note, not ‘the right to happiness’), is the right to swim upstream salmon-wise.
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy—which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
If the sun is shining, stand in it—yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass—they have to—because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centered.
What you are pursuing is meaning—a meaningful life. There’s the hap—the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use—that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realize that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms."
Halfway through the memoir shifts, and Winterson writes about her ‘descent into madness’, which broke with a suicide attempt. I’ve been trying to work out how to take you through how she regained her sanity, but its complicated and I think you can only look to that part of the book. But what did strike me was how she became aware of what she calls ‘the creature’, something or someone in her; she regains her sanity through acknowledging, having daily dates with, and finally befriending that part of herself that was ‘savage’ and ‘feral’.
She also leans on the sanctuary of books (Shakespeare and Company in Paris and the Norrington Room, located within Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford), her own writing and poetry; structured days built around ‘the sanity of the book in the mornings and the steadiness of gardening in the spring and summer evenings; the ‘countryside, the natural world, my cats’ and friends. Once she was ‘well enough to want a framework in which to think about what was happening to me’, she looked at the writings of psychotherapist Neville Symington.
I’ll end on two comments that struck me as particularly poignant, and then point you in the direction of the library:
"And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now that at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.
Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time."
And this:
"Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result."