This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing books that have made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any book that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove
Jeanette’s First Misfortune
The best start in life is being born to two parents who are already whole, whose hearts are healthy and full of love, for each other and for their children. You need parents who can see all of who you are, and who you are becoming. You want parents to touch and support the diverse segments of your being, to help you to combine those segments and to resolve their conflicts. Better parents want you to be more you, they help you grow organically, without forcing or squashing you.
Alas, in this world teeming with billions, there aren’t enough better parents to go around. We are only human, we all have holes. Many parents are so anxious or needy, so blinkered or broken, that they cannot see their children’s natural beauty. These parents are trapped in their neediness, lost in the holes in themselves. They push their children to fill in their own holes, they require their children to conform to the shallow perfection imagined in their own fevered dreams.
This book’s heroine is Jeanette, a fictionalization of the author’s own youth. Jeanette’s hard fate is to be adopted by a domineering evangelist, who deems herself holy when mostly she is full of holes and desperation:
Now and again my mother liked to tell me her own conversion story; it was very romantic. I sometimes think that if Mills and Boon were at all revivalist in their policy that my mother would be a star.
One night, by mistake, she had walked into Pastor Spratt’s Glory Crusade. It was a tent on some spare land, and every evening Pastor Spratt spoke of the fate of the damned, and performed healing miracles. He was very impressive. My mother said he looked like Errol Flynn, but holy. A lot of women found the Lord that week . . .
My mother, out walking that night, dreamed a dream and sustained it in daylight. She would get a child, train it, build it, dedicate it to the Lord:
a missionary child,
a servant of God,
a blessing.
And so it was that on a particular day, some time later, she followed a star until it came to settle above an orphanage, and in that place was a crib, and in that crib, a child. A child with too much hair.
She said, ‘This child is mine from the Lord.’
She took the child away and for seven days and seven nights the child cried out, for fear and not knowing. The mother sang to the child, and stabbed the demons. She understood how jealous the Spirit is of flesh.
Such warm tender flesh.
Her flesh now, sprung from her head.
Her vision.
Not the jolt beneath the hip bone, but water and the word.
She had a way out now, for years and years to come.
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘This world is full of sin.’
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’
Winterson’s Precocious Debut
Jeanette Winterson wrote Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit when she was only 24, and she wowed the literary world. This book won prizes and praise from all quarters. It is well-written, both in Winterson’s command of language and craft, and in the freshness and daring of her storytelling.
Jeanette, our heroine, is growing up in a northern English provincial town. Her family are poor but not starving. They’re very eccentric, but Jeanette can’t see that, as this life is all she has known. Much of their life is centered around their revivalist church and, although her life is constrained and squashed by the church, Jeanette can’t see that either. She believes in the Lord wholeheartedly, she even develops a gift for preaching.
I found this book compelling and often delightful, but I expect it was too much for some readers. Jeanette’s life feels oppressive, wrong-hearted, simply grim at times. Her story was leavened by dry and, for me, perfectly aimed wit. As Jeanette grows, she gradually weaves in occasional dreams, and then episodic fairy tales, which reflect her real-life struggles in allegory. These bright, fantastical reflections enliven her journey with more meaning and hope.
The hard and heavy parts of Jeanette’s life rarely felt overwhelming to me, because her feminist narrative voice maintained such clarity and conviction. Even when her life was completely unjust or confusing, Jeanette refused to submit to that wrongness.
There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said ‘You never know until it’s too late.’
Jeanette makes plenty of mistakes, but she’d never settle permanently into a trap like that.
Her Puissant Pomegranate
When you read all of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, this next paragraph will be more meaningful in context. But standing alone, it’s still a knowing and poetic picture of the secret garden that each woman possesses. It’s refreshing to see eroticism made mythical, instead of tawdry:
On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit had tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you can say goodbye to the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open a gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit tells the tale of how Jeanette comes to be her full self. She is dropped into a colorful home, sometimes warm, but other times weird and oppressive. She fumbles her way through this minefield, towards her own individuality and adulthood.
Being female is a handicap in Jeanette’s world, just as it has been everywhere throughout most of history. But lust and sex are far more perilous, in the judgment of her revivalist church. Lesbianism is perdition, a plague on her soul sent by the devil.
But we barely see the lesbianism, at first. I think there are only two inklings of lesbianism in the first half of the book (though it is densely woven, and there may be hints that I overlooked).
Just a few pages in, when Jeanette is seven, she is coddled by two kind, harmless women who live together. A gypsy tells Jeanette, “You’ll never marry, not you, and you’ll never be still.”
. . . I hadn’t thought about getting married anyway. There were two women I knew who didn’t have husbands at all; they were old though, as old as my mother. They ran the paper shop and sometimes, on a Wednesday, they gave me a banana bar with my comic [incidentally, this is the first mention of any fruit that is not an orange in the book]. I liked them a lot, and talked about them a lot to my mother. One day they asked me if I’d like to go to the seaside with them. I ran home, gabbled it out, and was busy emptying my money box to buy a new spade, when my mother said firmly and forever, no. I couldn’t understand why not, and she wouldn’t explain. She didn’t even let me go back to say I couldn’t. Then she cancelled my comic and told me to collect it from another shop, further away. I was sorry about that. I never got a banana bar from Grimsby’s. A couple of weeks later I heard her telling Mrs. White about it. She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets.
So here’s a foreshadowing of Jeanette’s sexuality, and of how rashly her mother will recoil from it.
Why do people fear and scorn what they don’t understand? Why don’t they try, first, to understand it? There are so many shadowy parts of the human heart, driven by bestial instincts, enlightened neither by reason nor by love. We are living in troublesome days. Looking around these disunited states, the shadows appear ascendant. If we cannot calm our fears and scorn, if we can’t all listen and empathize across our differences, we will rip this nation to shreds. And as we rip and hate, we rip apart ourselves, we shred our own humanity. Why does Jeanette’s mother cut so cruelly against two friendly biddies, who show her no threat or danger? Why is she furiously shredding her own humanity?
Here comes the second inkling of lesbianism. Jeanette’s mother, before she found the Lord, “had a job teaching in Paris, which was a very daring thing to do at the time.” While there, she met and had a fling with Pierre, which ended badly. Soon afterwards, on the rebound, she married Jeanette’s father, an amiable but soft man. Here are Jeanette and her mother, looking through photos of her mother’s old flames:
Sometimes I think she married in haste. After her awful time with Pierre she wanted no more upsets. When I sat by her looking through the photograph album at ancestors with stern faces, she always stopped at the two pages called ‘Old Flames’ in the index. Pierre was there, and others including my father. ‘Why didn’t you marry that one, or that one?’ I asked, curious.
‘They were all wayward men,’ she sighed. ‘I had a bad time enough finding one that was only a gambler.’
‘Why isn’t he a gambler now?’ I wanted to know, trying to imagine my meek father looking like the men I’d seen on films.
‘He married me and he found the Lord.’ Then she sighed and told me the story of each one of the Old Flames; Mad Percy, who drove an open-topped car and asked her to live with him in Brighton; Eddy with the tortoiseshell glasses who kept bees . . . right at the bottom of the page was a yellowy picture of a pretty woman holding a cat.
‘Who’s that?’ I pointed.
‘That? Oh just Eddie’s sister, I don’t know why I put it there,’ and she turned the page. Next time we looked, it had gone.
So Jeanette’s mother once had a fling with another woman. I like how Winterson leaves this clue here so quietly, how she lets Jeanette’s mother sweep it out of sight, hoping Jeanette won’t guess its significance. Logically, Jeanette’s mother having once dealt in unnatural passions herself, that experience should help her to understand and empathize later, when Jeanette does the same. But we’re back in the shadows and storms of the human heart. Sometimes those flaws that we fear in ourselves are the ones we most abhor. We can’t bear to recognize them in our own hearts and, when we see them in others, we project all our self-doubt and scorn against that other instead.
Halfway through Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Jeanette, now 14 or 15, gets her first crush. On a girl, naturally.
Winterson is a sterling storyteller. I won’t reveal more details of her plot, as she tells it so deftly, across the whole tapestry of her novel. But I strongly recommend that you find Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and eat every segment for yourself: tangy, often tart, but wholly delicious.
In handling Jeanette’s lesbianism, Winterson walks a tightrope with poise and perseverance. She might easily have preached the virtues of lesbianism a little too loudly, or played the righteous victim. But she never blusters nor beseeches. She simply navigates Jeanette’s growing up, through all her trials and dilemmas, gradually arriving at a clear, firm grasp of her mature self. In this way, Jeanette’s narration convinced me completely, and earned all of my respect and sympathy for her.
My iMac Thinks it’s a Grizzly Bear
Last week my iMac feasted heartily, then crawled into a cave and fell into a deep sleep. I took it to the Apple store, and it’ll be home soon, and back in its right mind.
For now, though, I’m writing to you from the Santa Monica Public Library. Which, if you’re reading this on Sunday evening, is closed. I welcome all your comments, and hope you’ll talk among yourselves; but I won’t be back to reply to you all until sometime Monday.
I’d been meaning to read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for years. After agreeing to write a diary for this fine series that Chrislove and Chitown Kev bring us, I finally did. This book was a delightful surprise, and this diary a labor of love. Maybe you should try what I did? Sign up to write an upcoming LGBT Literature diary, enjoy a good book, and expand your horizons along the way.
LGBT LITERATURE SCHEDULE
February 25: jarbyus
March 25: Chitown Kev
April 29: Chrislove
May 27: OPEN
June 24: OPEN
July 29: OPEN
August 26: OPEN
September 30: OPEN
October 28: OPEN
November 25: OPEN
December 30: OPEN