Jeanette Winterson and Alastair Campbell My Life in Books

Welcome to My Life In Books, a chance for my guests to share their favourite reads.

Joining me tonight, best selling author Jeanette Winterson.

For a woman who says she was never encouraged to be clever, she's not done badly.

Her 19th book will be published later this year.

Her first, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was made into an award winning television series and is now on

the list of recommended reading for A-Level.

And alongside her, Alastair Campbell.

For nine years he was the press spokesman for Tony Blair.

He's published three books about that time

and there's surely several more to come, as we've only arrived at 1999.

He's also written two novels. The latest only narrowly missed

winning the Bad Sex Award, which will disappoint his many adoring female fans.

Both my guests are northerners, both in their early 50s, but with very different stories to tell.

Thank you both for joining me.

APPLAUSE

We begin with childhood reads, starting with you, Jeanette.

Can you remind us a little of those years?

Yes, Mrs Winterson, my mother, was in charge of language.

And she read the Bible to us every day, morning and evening, to me and my father.

And we always started at Genesis.

The Bible has 66 books, as you'll remember. This is my old copy.

And we went through to Revelations.

And when we got to the Apocalypse, where all the awful people are thrown

into the bottomless pit, she always gave us a week to think about it.

And then we went right back to the beginning and started again.

The Bible as your first choice is quite unusual, really.

Weren't you sick of it by the time you left home?

No, I've carried on reading it.

I think God is religion-proof and you can separate religion from spirituality.

The way that the Bible is written, the sentences are very simple but the language is precise.

And that I think, is a great introduction for a writer.

It stops you saying too much.

You say you wouldn't be who you are today if you didn't have such a great knowledge of the Bible.

No, certainly not.

I think you know all those stories which are the basis of western literature.

It's a great pity, I think, if kids don't know the Bible.

They can reject it, they don't have to believe it,

but it is a literary resource and a beautiful one.

I think it's really good that Jeanette has chosen the Bible.

I don't do God, as they say, but...

You famously said, "We don't do God."

But I describe myself as a pro-faith atheist.

You're absolutely right about

the beauty of the language.

It's important we understand it's an extraordinary book.

I think we should also be encouraged to read the, the books of other religions as well.

Did you grow up with the Bible?

My dad was Hebridian, he came from the Isle of Tiree.

And it was quite a God fearing sort of place.

And we were Scottish Presbyterian.

And whenever I went back to where my dad came from, you felt the power of religion.

Sundays were very special and different and you felt that they were different.

I don't think I've ever actively rejected God.

I think I've just applied kind of my own intellectual thinking

to it and come to a conclusion that I am not a believer.

That said, I have all sorts of kind of spiritual thoughts and moments

and I sometimes do feel myself getting quite close to what I think it is that my parents believed.

Jeanette, your mother was a Pentecostal Evangelist.

She was, we had a gospel tent.

I thought all children did. It was a surprise to find we were the only ones.

She wanted me to be a missionary and when things went wrong

she always said, "Oh, the devil lead us to the wrong crib."

We have a clip here from the television series adapted

from your book, when she's doing just that, I think. Being disappointed in you.

Who was the oldest man in The Bible?

-Methuselah.

-How old was he when he died?

-969.

-What sort of tea is this?

Stand up and be counted.

I mean, Empire Blend.

Just in time for the missionary report.

Can I have my breakfast?

-There'll be no breakfast in Hell.

-I'm not going to hell.

No, not like all these heathens in hot places we'll be hearing about when the set warms up.

LIGHT LAUGHTER

-You were adopted.

-Yes.

And did you think of your mother as a monster at a certain stage, or was that quite acceptable to you?

Always. This was a woman who kept a service revolver

from the war in the duster drawer and the bullets in a tin of Pledge.

And when things got bad she'd get the revolver out.

And if it got really bad, she'd get the Pledge out.

She was too enormous for her life and so she crouched under the shelf

of her life, gloomy and angry and occasionally burst out of it.

-Was your father a match for her?

-By no means.

No. My father left school at 12.

He was one of those First World War babies that they forgot to celebrate.

And he couldn't read and he never really spoke.

So my mother and I, in our sparring...

There he is.

Yes, there he is. That's my dad. I would like to look at that picture, because that is Blackpool beach.

Why are there no people?

She must have got us up at like quarter to five in the morning for the photo!

I don't look very pleased.

But that's my dad. He'd had a rough, hard life. But he did love me.

And, towards the end of his own life, we were reconciled long after Mrs Winterson was dead.

So these things can be redeemed in some way.

-So, he's not Mr Winterson to you?

-No, he's Dad. She's Mrs Winterson.

Yeah. Meanwhile, Alastair, you were brought up in Keighley in Yorkshire.

A lot of books around the house?

Yeah, there were books around the house. I read a lot.

But I kind of read what I had to read. I was very, very...

Well, I wasn't a swot exactly, but I always liked school. And I liked reading.

And your first choice is This Sporting Life, David Storey.

-How old were you when you read this?

-I was probably 13.

And why is it so important to you?

Sport is a huge part of my life.

And I grew up wanting to play football for Burnley and Scotland,

cricket for Yorkshire and England, and Rugby League for Keighley and Great Britain.

This book is, I think, the best novel about sport ever written.

But it's also a love story and it's a social...

It's a portrayal of a particular place at a particular time.

It's beautifully written, but it is about a sort of gritty working class

environment, which wasn't yours, was it?

No, my dad was a vet. And, in a sense, we lived at the top end of the town.

Maybe it is because of my parents' background,

I've always felt a great affinity with that fairly tough, northern approach to life.

We've actually got a clip of the hero with his unforgiving landlady here.

1963, this is.

You don't appreciate one bloody thing I've done for you.

I've given you a life.

A life better than any other woman in this street,

but you will not admit it.

"Admit it"? You must be mad.

I can't lift my head up in this street without somebody pointing at me and saying I'm your slut.

-Who says that?

-"Who says that". Just listen to him.

They all laugh at you. Don't you know that?

Trying to be different. And they point me out, too, and Ian and Linda.

We're not proper people now because of you.

Cos you show off every Saturday in front of thousands of them.

-Because you're just a great ape on a football field!

-Because you want me to be like them!

That's him wrestling with fame, isn't it?

I think it's also him feeling he has to be the hard man.

But actually, beneath him, he's got this passion for the woman

who's being very, very unyielding. But certainly part of the...

I mean, Rugby League players, they're nothing like today's footballers or film stars.

But, within the context of that novel, he was a big figure within a small town.

And he was finding it very difficult to adapt to

the fact that people looked at him and thought they knew him.

-And the whole thing that goes with fame.

-Do you enjoy being famous?

Well, I don't feel I am famous in the way that, you know, others are.

I think it's all changed, anyway.

-Yeah, it has.

-I think the celebrity thing now is so sort of ridiculous

and, frankly, kind of out of control in terms of who's a celebrity, what's a celebrity.

I don't feel like I'm a celebrity at all.

Celebrity to me is Katie Price or it's, you know...

Jeanette might not know who Katie Price is.

-Of course I do!

-Jeanette knows lots and lots of things.

But what I do think, I definitely had a moment, I can't remember when,

but I definitely had a moment in my childhood when I felt I was going

to do something different and unexpected, beyond what anybody in my family had done before.

-So you never really grappled with a lack of self confidence, then?

-That's not the same thing, Annie.

Jeanette, your next choice.

By now you're 11.

Your adopted mother reads to you Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Tell us about this.

Yes. There were only six books in our house.

We had the Bible and the Concordance to the Bible and books about the Bible. But really nothing else.

It never occurred to her that, rather than books falling into my hands, I might fall into the book.

But she used to send me to the library to get her mystery stories.

And I said, "Well, why can you read mystery stories and why can't I read?"

And she said, "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it till it's too late."

And I used to think, "Too late for what?"

LAUGHTER

So, naturally enough, I was curious about books. I longed for books.

But we weren't allowed to have them.

And in fact, in our house, I had to start smuggling books in.

I was either reading them in the loo or I was smuggling them into the house.

And if you've got a single bed and a collection of paperbacks,

you can get 76 under the mattress and one under the pillow.

And that's what I did, and my bed was rising visibly, I was like the Princess And The Pea.

Then one day, because she was a suspicious woman by nature, she came in and she saw the corner of

a book sticking out, and she pulled it and it was really bad because it was DH Lawrence "Women In Love".

-Oh, God!

-And she knew that Lawrence was a Satanist and pornographer.

All the books came tumbling down, me as well, she threw them out into the back yard,

and then she took the paraffin stove and she poured the paraffin over the books and set them on fire.

And it was a saturnine January night and there were these orange flames going up

against that black slate-like sky, and I watched them all go and in the morning there were fragments

everywhere and I picked up these fragments thinking like TS Eliot "These fragments I have shored

against my ruin", and I carried these burned bits in my pocket for a long time and then I thought,

I can write my own.

-That's wonderful.

-Yeah. But one of the books she did read to me, and I don't know why,

was Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre.

She loved it, and I think it was meant to be some sort of moral uplift, because she was a very

good reader, and it was only much later I realised what she'd done,

because in her version she has Jane Eyre marry St John Rivers,

not Rochester at all, and they go and be missionaries.

-So she was writer as well?

-Yes. And it was only much later when I read it for myself that I realised what she'd

done, so it was a very post modern moment, because she'd got it and rewritten the text, which was perhaps

an example to me because I thought, well, you can do anything with language if you make it your own.

Before you read us a little bit, can you just sum up the plot for us?

Well, you all know the story, because it's the staple of Mills and Boon.

It appears to hinge around who will Jane Eyre marry.

Will she marry the gorgeous, sexy Mr Rochester, or will she give in

and will she marry the awful, pious milksop, St John Rivers and go and be a missionary in fact.

And of course there's the mad Bertha in the attic, Rochester's first wife and all that burns down and Rochester

goes blind, because if you're going to have a sexy hero, he at least has to be a blind one.

But she missed out all the bit, Mrs Winterson missed out all the bit about Jane going back and finding

Rochester blinded and being able to accept him and the wife dead and all the rest of it.

And instead we had this, "Reader, I married him.

"A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and the clerk were alone present and when we got back

"from the church Mary was cooking the dinner, and John was cleaning

"the knives, and I said, 'Mary, I've been married to St John Rivers this morning'."

-Of course it was meant to be Mr Rochester.

-That's wonderful.

Alastair, your next book, Madame Bovary.

-What a choice.

-Gustave Flaubert.

-Fantastic choice.

-Is it? Oh, good. I thought you were scolding me.

-No, no.

I think it's quite, if I may say so, it's quite an unusual choice.

-Why?

-For a big, beefy lad like you.

Well, because two things.

One, the heroine is, is not very likeable, indeed no-one in it is very likable.

-Tell us the story.

-Well, it's actually a very, very simple story.

Madame Bovary, well there are two Madame Bovaries, it starts with Charles, who becomes her husband.

Charles is this absolute sort of wimp of a man who's the local doctor.

He loses his wife and he ends up marrying the Madame Bovary of the title, who's Emma...

Very provincial town, but she has extraordinary kind of aspirations, uber-bourgeois aspirations for

herself, and he just never satisfies her in any way at all and she eventually sort of edges

towards having a couple of what today in the Sunday papers would be called inappropriate relationships.

It's an account of one woman and these relationships and why they develop, but I think for me

it was the just the power of a very simple story, beautifully told.

So it had a very, very big impact on me and it's the reason I did

languages at University, it's probably the reason why

we go to France every year for our summer holiday, it's the reason why I feel as passionately as I do.

And I probably read as much French now as I do English.

And tell me, whose French was better, yours or Tony Blair's?

Mine, by a mile.

-Really?

-So when you were in France with him you could talk to Chirac and the others.

-Yeah.

-In their own language.

-Yeah.

But it's wise with the French to

pin them down through interpretation.

Right.

Jeanette, we move on to your university days,

and about the same time that Alastair was going up to Cambridge

you went off to Oxford to read English.

That was a pretty large achievement, getting to Oxford.

It was for me, because we didn't know anybody

who'd gone to university at all, let alone to Oxford or Cambridge.

I tried to get into Oxford and when I went for my interview,

I was so frightened and I didn't do well at all, I could hardly speak,

and then I didn't get a place, so my world collapsed at that point and people were saying,

"Oh, you could go to another university", and I thought I can't.

So at that time I had a little car, a Hillman Imp, and I got in it and I drove back down to Oxford

a year later and I camped in a campsite, because I'd no money,

and I went round to see the senior tutor

and I said, "Look you have to give me a place, you don't understand, this is everything to me".

It's probably the longest car journey you'd ever made.

Well, yeah, I hadn't been past Blackpool.

When eventually I did go to Oxford, nobody told me that there were

motorway service stations where you could get petrol, so I just had to fill up all these tins and have

them in the back of the car, and then stop on the hard shoulder!

So I'd have the engine running and I'd be filling up with tins of petrol

and then going onward on my journey.

I mean it seems astonishing to people that this was the late '70s

but we knew nothing in Accrington, never been further than Blackpool.

So they did give me a place which was fantastic.

Anyway, your next book choice, this is while you were at St Catherine's.

-Yes.

-Is Orlando by Virginia Woolf.

Yeah, it's a simple story.

Really it begins with a young nobleman, Orlando, in the days of Elizabeth I, and he's reckless

and restless, and of course passionate and full of love.

It's the story of Orlando changing gender, going across time and across sex, so it's a very audacious

and bold book, in fact the first line of it is, "He, for there could be no doubt about his sex....", and then we

spend the rest of the book doubting his sex entirely.

-It's what she was so good at.

-So did this make you feel you could be who you really were at Oxford?

-Yes.

It made me feel that I could learn to be myself, or begin that journey, and that your gender wasn't

so important, and that you could be a girl who's a boy who's a boy who's a girl and just not worry about it.

-And do you think the written word can change views?

-Completely.

We are creatures of language, human beings invented language because we have to deal with all these things.

Not just our outside world, our inside world, and we have to find

a way of expressing that and a way which is complex.

And the great thing about literature and why it's important never to dumb things down is that in a complex

world you need a complex language, otherwise you're reduced to the equivalent of a pair of hot and cold

taps, "I like it, I don't like it, I feel good I feel bad", it's pathetic.

What language does is give you that range to express your world.

And reading Virginia Woolf, this great romp, this gusto, this extravagance,

this excitement with language, I thought, "That's what I want to write like and to be."

It's this world beyond the world first seen through Mrs Winterson's eyes and The Bible.

Alastair, your next choice is Team Of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

It is a fantastic but historical account of Abraham Lincoln.

The reason why it's called Team of Rivals

is because he, when he started out on his road to become president,

he was the fourth favourite for the Republican nomination.

There was a guy Bates, Seaward and another one called Chase who were way ahead of him.

And he was just seen as this kind of backwoods lawyer.

He wasn't terrible impressive, he wasn't terribly charismatic,

but he had real qualities within him that over time came out.

What you do feel with this book is the link, I feel a direct link from him through all sorts of historical

figures, probably Martin Luther King most importantly, to Barack Obama being president.

Barack Obama could not be president had it not been for some of the things that Abraham Lincoln did.

But the point about Team Of Rivals, and Obama learned

from this in appointing Hillary Clinton in the way that he did,

he gave the top jobs when he became president to his rivals.

And the other thing about Lincoln and this book is that he was

a depressive, I mean, he had really, really bad depression.

But I think he's gone down in history as probably

the greatest American president, this book tells the story why and you really get a feel for it.

And his rivals, come the end, they basically see him as the closest

thing there is to kind of perfection in another political human being.

Will you read us a bit you've chosen?

I have actually gone for a section that is about his depression.

"In Lincoln's time, this combination of symptoms, feelings of hopelessness and listlessness,

"thoughts of death and suicide, was called hypochondria, the hypo or the vapours.

"It's source was thought to be in the abdomen which

"was then considered the seat of emotions containing the liver, gall bladder and spleen."

"Treatment for the liver and digestive system was recommended."

Quoting Lincoln, "'I have within the last few days been making a most discreditable exhibition of myself

'in the way of hypochondriasm', Lincoln confessed to his

"law partner and friend John Stewart on January 20, 1841.

"Desperately he sought a post office job for Doctor Anson Henry who would

"leave Springfield if the job did not materialise.

"'His presence', Lincoln told Stewart, 'was necessary to my existence'.

"Three days later, Lincoln wrote to Stewart again.

"'I am now the most miserable man living.

"'If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family,

"'there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.

"'Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell.

"'I awfully forebode I shall not.

"'To remain as I am is impossible.

"'I must die or be better, it appears to me'".

And I just think that is a description of somebody right at the depths of depression.

And somehow he finds a way through it and to become this giant historical figure

who changed America and the world, as much, I think, as anybody else.

You've written a lot about your own depression. What has helped you?

I don't think there is a cure. I think the most important thing is to accept it, that it's a part of you.

I find sport helps. I find taking some sort of exercise every day is important.

I think being open with my family has helped - it took me a long, long time to be able to do that.

And I did find writing about it incredibly helpful.

This may be just to do with other things, but I have found the gaps between the depressions widening.

Jeanette, your next choice, interestingly, is at a time when you were at an all time low, 2007.

So it's quite recently and, on paper, you're now a huge

literary success and you live comfortably from that.

What happened?

I'd been going through my father's paperwork after he died

and I found various things to do with my adoption, which surprised me.

And it seemed to me that Mrs Winterson knew who my mother was.

I now know who my mother is.

And, so that was the beginning of a very surprising journey,

but it began with the floor opening up and me cascading down into a pit.

I'd also just

been dumped by my partner and I didn't want that to happen.

It was a relationship I wanted to stay in.

So it was about loss. I was in a period of loss.

And that opened up, for me, terror. I don't actually have cyclical depression.

I simply went into those two years in a place of fighting for my life.

You know, trains came, I couldn't get on them.

The doors opened and I was still on the platform.

I had to cancel engagements. I was too humiliated to say why.

If you're in the public eye, everybody hates you because they just think you're being an idiot.

And that wasn't like me.

You turned to poetry.

I mean, I know you'd always been interested in poetry, but you regard

Don Paterson, Carol Ann Duffy and Alice Oswald as lifesavers from this time.

Yes, because they're my contemporaries,

and I think as well as the past, you need a now.

You need people you can turn to.

And poetry has always been the recourse and the inspiration because it is so exact.

And this was a bit of Don Paterson I was reading called The Passing,

where he says, "Be ahead of all departure.

"Learn to act as if, like the last winter, it was all over.

"For, among the winters, one is so exact that wintering it,

"your heart will last forever."

And then at the end of that he says,

"Take all of nature, it's one vast aggregate.

"Jubilantly multiply it by the nothing of yourself, and clear the slate."

And people say to me, "It's elitist, language is elitist, it's only for

"a few, many, poetry, who are they for? Educated people."

I think those people have had an easy life. If you're having a tough life and a tough time,

you want this perfection of poetry, and you need it for yourself.

And we're really doing people down when we don't give it to them.

Your next choice, Alastair, is modern fiction from a few years ago.

It's Ian McEwan's Saturday.

Why this?

I think Ian McEwan is - I know you disagree - I think he is our greatest living novelist.

Tell us the story of this.

Well, it's the day of

the march against the Iraq War, and it's the story of a surgeon and a mixture of some

very mundane things that he's doing through this particular Saturday,

during which there is one violent incident where he gets involved

with this guy who prangs his wing mirror and they get into an argument

and the guy later turns up at the house

and threatens the family and makes one of the people there strip off...

Implausibly, while the guy's damaging his car,

the doctor can diagnose what's wrong with him.

Yeah, you can say it's implausible, but actually he does see certain tendencies that

he's seen in patients before and he thinks this guy has got a disease,

and he tries to talk to him about treatment.

And later on, back to the power of words, his daughter, when the guy turns up at the house for revenge,

the daughter disarms him by reading him a poem

that does say something to him, and he backs off.

And I suppose, for me, what I suppose drew me in,

was that the setting is the march, which obviously was a huge political moment for the country,

and I think that one of the points he's making is that

while these big events are going on, people are still having to live their own lives and deal with their

own issues and they kind of weave in and out of this media reality.

This backdrop that's there, where the media is kind of telling you 24/7 that's all that anybody's

thinking about and talking about, but actually there's all this other stuff going on.

And I think he captures that sort of sense of dislocation that sometimes people feel between

big events and their own lives, which at the time are just as big.

We're going to move on now to ones you've simply enjoyed.

We call this the Beach Read or, if you like, the Guilty Pleasure.

Yours, Jeanette, is Susan Hill's The Woman In Black. Tell us about this.

I think this is the best modern ghost story that anybody's written.

And it is the classic tale, where the young solicitor has to go along to

some dreary and dreadful house and, of course, in the house Mrs Drablow - wonderful name - has just died

and left behind her a dark and deadly secret.

It's terribly frightening, and I love reading ghost stories,

partly because I don't want a world that's entirely bounded by the material.

And I still like to think that there is a possibility of another world beyond that.

Alastair, your guilty pleasure - I hope I'm able to pronounce this

correctly - The Broons and Oor Wullie.

Would you like to correct that?

Oor Wullie. They're cartoons.

They appear every week in the Sunday Post,

and my parents were both Scots and we lived in Yorkshire,

but we got the Sunday Post sent down, every Monday it used to come.

And Oor Wullie is this very likable young boy.

He just has a lot of fun. What I love about it is the fact that

he's been going now for decades and they're very simple morality tales,

and again the values that come out of them are pretty good.

The Broons are a strong family who kind of look after each other.

It's nice. You'd enjoy it, Annie.

-Don't look at me like that.

-No, no, I wouldn't, cos it's part of your Scottish ancestry.

It is, yeah.

Jeanette, if you had to choose just one of those books to recommend from your choices, which would it be?

I think we'd better have Virginia Woolf's Orlando because it combines everything.

It's got the language, it's got the poetry, it's got the plot, it's got the romp.

She always said, "I wrote this at the top of my speed."

She wrote it in six weeks and you think of Virginia Woolf sometimes as an inner depressive.

This is a joyful book.

Alastair, for you?

If I had to pick one it would probably be Team Of Rivals,

but if anybody was not interested in politics or non-fiction, Madame Bovary.

Good choice.

OK. And, Jeanette, what do you think your choice says about you?

It says I'm a romantic.

It says that I believe in the future.

And it says that my hope for myself and others is through the power of language.

Alastair? It's interesting.

As we've been talking, I've sort of realised

a link of depression, because Madame Bovary, she was another one who had what they call the vapours.

Can't blame her though, can you?

No. I think it says that... I think I hope they reflect something of my

interest in the beauty of language and the power of politics.

What do you thinks his choice says about him, Jeanette?

I think that it says that he's a softer guy than we all thought.

Pussycat!

Softer than Mrs Winterton.

-A lot!

-Well, there we are.

Thank you to Jeanette Winterson and Alastair Campbell for joining me for My Life In Books.

APPLAUSE

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and please join me again tomorrow,

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