Shelf Life with Jeanette Winterson

Editor's Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Jeanette Winterson was in her mid-twenties when Pandora Press published her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, heralding a confident and daring new voice in English fiction—one that was not afraid to take risks in the service of craft. In the books that followed, including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and more recently, Frankenstein, A Love Story, her playfulness and curiosity have remained boundless. “I am an ambitious writer,” she has written. “I don’t see the point of being anything—no, not anything at all––if you don’t have ambition for it.” Now, Winterson has brought that flair for invention to the ghost story in her new collection, Nightside of the River, in which her fascination with AI and technology finds synthesis with her high romanticism––and a childhood steeped in religion and its associated terrors. We also talk about one of Winterson’s literary touchstones: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, an otherworldly act of fiction in a class all its own. 

Aaron Hicklin: I was at college when your debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was adapted by the BBC. That was in 1990, and it was a genuine cultural event—in large part because of its frank depiction of same-sex desire, which felt radical for its time. It won a BAFTA for Best British Drama; it won you a BAFTA for the screenplay. You were 25 when the book was published. I wonder how its success changed your life. 

Jeanette Winterson: Well, it’s been 40 years since Oranges was published, which astonishes me. You know, you look back at it and you think, “What happened in between?” I didn’t realize the impact it would have—because we never do, you know. We’re in the midst of living our lives. We don’t see the future. It was very important to me to get away from that closeted, shameful idea of same-sex desire. I couldn’t understand––especially because in the Bible we read that God is love––why we would want to limit that love, when humans find ingenious ways every day to hate and torture one another and ruin everybody’s lives, why we then try to proscribe love and say, “It’s this, and it’s not that.” That seemed insane and hateful to me.

So I wanted to write something which would tell the truth about same-sex desire, but that would also speak across the idea of heterosexuality and homosexuality, into a place where we’ve all been, where we feel not understood, that we can’t talk to our parents [about], that the older generation doesn’t get. We feel that we have to have secrets, hide away. All of that is real, whoever you desire. And that’s what Oranges also wanted to speak to. I didn’t want it to get stuck into one place—although I wanted to tell the truth about that place. I wanted it to go out and reach any young person or any person who had ever felt they had to hide themselves in some way.

AH: It’s interesting you say that, because all the way through your recent collection, Night Side of the River, that sense of the universal is very potent, very present. No matter the gender identity or sexual orientation of the characters, every type of human experience is expressed there. But that sort of aiming for something that can speak to all has always been very central to your work.

JW: Yes, I think we have to look for what doesn’t divide us, and sexuality has been used dishonestly to divide people: “You’re heterosexual, you’re homosexual.” But people’s emotions—they’re wanting to be loved, they’re wanting to be understood, not to be betrayed, but to be recognized, to be met. That happens whoever it is that you want to be with. And when I call it dishonest, I do so in the sense that we should not separate humanity, one from another, by using these false weapons. You know, we can be separated, perhaps politically, perhaps by race or class, gender even, but certainly not by sexuality in that way, because the feelings are common to all, and anyone who has ever fallen in love knows exactly what that’s like.

AH: I wonder if you were advised at any point not to publish this book as a debut––if people felt you were maybe taking a risk, or that it would be misunderstood, that it would be seen as niche fiction.

JW: Well, I think to start with it was seen as niche fiction, because that’s one way of trying to police somebody’s work, and also to get it away and say, “This is not important. Don’t worry about this.” It’s a way of containing and silencing something that we find threatening. It’s a kind of soft power. You don’t chuck it on the bonfire, you just say, “Oh, don’t bother with that, it’s not for you.” It’s clever, in its own way. Nobody really anticipated [the success of Oranges], including the publisher. It was only published in paperback to start with, not even a hardback. What would happen in those days, in the ’80s, was that you had little bookshops, so people talked to each other. Especially in the gay community, word got out very fast. “Here’s something different, and you should all read it.” You know, that was the Twitter of the day. Everybody told everybody what was going on—much more of a town square than anything Mr. Musk could ever anticipate. And so it began to snowball, much to the surprise of everyone, and suddenly it was in your face and there was nothing you could do. That’s when the BBC came along and said, “Well, should we do this?” They just gave us the money and left us alone, because they didn’t think it was going to be that important. They were busy with some other big shows. Ours wasn’t the big show. And then it just swept through the BAFTAs [British Academy Awards], and off we went.

AH: You have been extremely prolific. But on the surface, a book of ghost stories—your latest book—might seem like a departure for a writer associated with high experimentation. I wonder, what was the spur for writing these stories in Nightside of the River?

JW: Everybody’s interested in the supernatural, because death is the only hard boundary. You know the saying—“We can’t get away from either death or taxes.” Well, the super-rich have managed taxes, and they’re working on death right now. But I thought to myself, Well, it doesn’t matter whether you believe or you don’t believe, this is a fascinating topic and everybody loves a ghost story. Everybody loves the idea that perhaps there is something beyond the now. And as a woman who was brought up in an ultra-religious Pentecostal cult, the idea of living on several planes of existence, and certainly among the dead, was very normal. And that’s been the case for most humans for most of existence. We’ve always imagined that there are other planes of existence, whether it’s angels, demons, spirits, elves, fairies, you name it. You know, we weren’t alone here.
 
It’s only from the Enlightenment that suddenly we thought we were on our own. And what’s really fascinated me lately with the rise of AI and Big Tech is that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: “Is consciousness obliged to materiality, or could we go beyond the body?”

I don’t think I will live to see life extension, or even the uploading of consciousness, that people are working on and speculating upon. But of course, if consciousness isn’t obliged to materiality, then everything changes. And I often did wonder—and in the stories this question is there—was religion the only way we could talk about this deep intuition that this was not actually the end? That this was not the final answer… this was not where the story starts and finishes. That there would be something else. And some of these stories do deal with it. But they also deal with the ordinary human heartbreak of what it means to lose a loved one. 

AH: You wrote, in one of the interstitials that break up the short stories, about some of your own experiences with the supernatural. You write about living in a Georgian house built in the 1780s in an old part of London, when you were awoken by the sound of clattering footsteps on the stair, and felt a hand on yours. And at another time you had this distinct impression of being haunted by your beloved friend, the late crime writer Ruth Rendell. I wonder if you could recount that story, because it illuminates a central thesis in this book: the way grief lives on after someone’s death. But, also, the way technology and the spectral are intimately acquainted. 

JW: I have a feeling that if there are spirits out there, they will like electricity. Because I imagine that’s what they’re made off. They don’t have a body anymore, you know—which is one of the vexing parts of ghost stories and apparitions, because they always appear in clothes, and you think, Why? They haven’t got a body. But never mind. It may be so we can see them, because I suppose we’re a bit klutzy in Toy Town, and they need to make themselves known, which must be annoying. With Ruth Rendell, it was that she died and we were very close. We had been since I was 26. I went to her house to write The Passion when she was already very established, and she was very kind to me all my life. Never judged me. She was the good mother. And soon after she died, I was sitting at my computer—and I don’t have things open all the time, I’m not that kind of tech crazy. And all of a sudden, for a second, her face flashed onto the laptop. I mean, just full screen, and then it vanished. And it was real. Now, I do have that photo, and it is in Photos, in the file. But I wasn’t looking at it, and I wasn’t doing anything. The point is, it was one of those moments when nothing is happening except you’re thinking about a person, and then there is an event that seems to just puncture space-time, and they’re with you. It did happen, and I can’t explain it, and I can’t forget it. One of the things about life is that we can’t explain everything, and sometimes you have to just put up with living with the discomfort, with the questions, with the non-explanations, and just say, “You know what, I don’t know, I can’t explain it, but I can’t dismiss it.” And I think many people listening today will have had similar experiences that they can’t explain, but can’t dismiss.

AH: I want to stick with Ruth Rendell, because I’ve always loved that idea of your friendship—an intergenerational friendship, a friendship between two women, two writers, but two quite different writers. I wonder if you could tell me how she came into your life, and how you ended up writing so many of your early novels in her garden.

JW: Well, as a young writer—like many young writers—I had no money, and I was living in a flat, and the person upstairs practiced the piano continually, and I mean continually. And he always made the same mistake in the same place, it was dreadful. So this made it hard for me to do any work. [Ruth and I] had the same agent at the time, and I was complaining bitterly that I couldn’t get on with anything because of the piano playing. She said, “Well, my client Ruth Rendell is going to Australia in six weeks, and perhaps you could house-sit for her. She has cats, would you mind?” And I thought, “No, that would be lovely.” So it all began as a job. Then we met, and we just got on. We liked each other a lot, we laughed a lot. She was a very intuitive woman, but also a perceptive, difficult woman. And not easy to be with. She didn’t have lots of friends, but for some reason we found a way to talk about things. She was very widely read. And I was rubbish at ever understanding crime writing. I could never work out who did it. So we had completely different minds.

AH: You’ve slightly anticipated my next thought, given that the ghost story is so well-acquainted with the murder mystery, and in facxt some of these stories involve murder, could you imagine yourself disrupting the murder mystery genre? 

JW: Unfortunately not, because there are some people who couldn’t commit murder—but I’m not one of them. I could, and I would do it, and in some cases I wouldn’t look back and I’d never tell anybody. But that’s the whole problem, you see: it would be over and done with. So, it wouldn’t make much of a story. So that’s a different mentality. Whereas Ruth was so interested in exploring and unwinding the growing confidence of people who commit crime. She said that part of it becomes about contempt for others. I don’t have any contempt for others. I have anger and bafflement, but not contempt. And because that’s not in me, I think it’s difficult for me to imagine it in somebody else. There are some things, even as a writer, you cannot get your head around. And for me, part of it is contempt.

AH: It’s interesting listening to you talk there about being angry. There were times early in your career when you were given a bit of a hard time, and I think one of your friends—it might be Ian McEwen—said words to the effect of, “In England, success is always greeted with envy.” I wonder if you encountered a lot of that envy, and if you ever thought about, perhaps as Martin Amis did, upping sticks and moving to another country.

JW: Can you ever move somewhere else? I think it comes with you. I like living in England, for all its problems. Even after Brexit. So I guess I’ll stay and see it through.

There was envy, and I didn’t understand it. And I didn’t understand it because as a bookish child, I had naturally read all the fairy stories where the overlooked third child who is just rubbish wins the princess and the treasure and everything’s fine. And I thought, Hey, look, shouldn’t I have won the princess and the treasure and shouldn’t everything be fine, having come all this way? And the answer was no. That was a shock. I didn’t realize the of level of vitriol. But also, my politics weren’t in place in those days—and this is really important, they just were not. My sexual politics were, but I really didn’t understand the politics of class in Britain, and that no matter what Margaret Thatcher said—because she was Prime Minister at the time—this was not a meritocracy. This is not a place where people could seamlessly move up the ladder just because they were talented and worked hard. And I believed the myth. I believed the storyline. I got a place at Oxford, and I thought, “This is the beginning.” And in many ways it was. I thought none of those things would come back to find me, and they all did. So it was a huge shock. And I guess it was the beginning of my politicization, my understanding about class, about gender, about feminism. So I’m glad it happened, because if I’d had the golden elevator up Trump Tower, maybe I wouldn’t understand any of this.

AH: Your childhood was one of coruscating trauma, as anyone who has read Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, your wonderfully titled memoir, will know. Your mother wanted you to be a missionary. I wonder if you ever gave that any serious thought.

JW: I did, and it worried me, because the idea of going somewhere hot to convert the heathen was not exciting. But, you know, of course she did get her way because I am a missionary—I do want to change people’s lives. I do want to change people’s minds. I do want to convert them. I want to say that the life of the mind matters, that the imagination is preeminent—that it’s not all about getting and spending. That it is something quite other, which of course preoccupies any of us who love books, who don’t feel caught and bound by our physical circumstances. Perhaps she was right. 

AH: One of the revelations in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is that when you do eventually meet your birth mother, you reject the idea that staying with her would have been a better life for you necessarily. You felt that that experience, that childhood, the one you did have—in the end served you well. It gave you the foundation for who you are. And without it, you might not be someone able to see so clearly, perhaps, the world around her from the outside in.

JW: I think that’s right. Somebody asked me at an event what I would have been, had I not been a writer. And the answer was immediate and clear. I said I would have been a criminal. I would, because my brothers were both criminals—my half brothers, as it turned out. And they obviously didn’t mastermind their businesses very effectively. Now if I’d been around, I could well have taken over. And I could have imagined myself just running this criminal outfit from Manchester, and I’d have had a ranch style house, and I’d be on my fourth husband, and my sixth Range Rover, with a jacuzzi in the backyard. I’d be in Bitcoin now, because my mind would have still been this mind, but it would have gone in a completely different direction. And when I think about that life, I think she did the best she could, and when I met her, I wanted to tell her that. I felt that she was trying to throw me clear of the wreckage, because she was only 16, and what would have happened? I’d have ended up bringing up my two step-brothers, because, the new man wouldn’t have wanted to deal with me. And we’d have been in that place, that time. It would have been very difficult. There’s a line in Why Be Happy talking about Mrs. Winterson, where I say: “She was a monster, but she was my monster.”

AH: Jeanette, there is a wonderful story in Nightside of the River called Ghost in the Machine, which begins with this line: “When my husband died, I got to know him better.” It tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a non-binary, nominally Cuban avatar, Ariel. The story is obviously fiction, but the premise is really not. Elsewhere you’ve pointed out that if we can fall in love with teddy bears, and I certainly did, it’s not at all silly to believe that we can fall in love with an avatar. I wonder if you feel that is the inevitable world that we’re moving towards.

JW: Well already, as you know, you can get an app which will continue to send you messages from your dead loved one. It will scrape their social media profiles, and it’s possible now to include dead people in photos that are taken contemporaneously so that they’re just there at the party. It’s crazy. And we’re going to go further with that because of course, if you have a MetaVerse—which isn’t just about selling people stuff in the MetaVerse—if you and your partner go in there as avatars and your partner dies in the real world, there’s no reason why the avatar shouldn’t keep going, and you shouldn’t have that other life continuing. So we’re looking at some extremely strange outcomes, via new technologies, and we don’t know how they’ll affect us as humans. I don’t know what that does. I don’t know what it does to grief. I don’t know what it does to self-development. I don’t know if we’re then all stuck in the same stage forever, but it’s a possibility. 

And you know, in that story, it’s simply that she has her husband as an avatar where they are in the alternative universe, but actually she falls in love with this creature who was always a program. But they have a proper connection. And if we imagine that we will not have real connections with programs, I think it’s naive. As soon as you start to talk to something and you think it’s talking back, you cannot help but build a relationship with that entity whether it’s biological or not, whether it’s alive or dead. And again, as we said at the beginning, this hard boundary between life and not life is about to be disrupted anyway, because if AI becomes sentient or has consciousness, whatever that means, and it is not bound by our biological rules, i.e. it doesn’t die. This is very strange. I mean, vampires don’t die, and again, we’ve been in that territory of having to live across centuries. What does it mean? What can it mean? Mary Shelley touched on it in Frankenstein, but we didn’t know that’s what she was touching on at the time. The idea of creating something, or a being, not subject to our group with whom we have what we would call a relationship. It’s going to happen. We need to explore this, and what a good way of doing it is in fiction. It always has been a good way of doing it. In all the Greek myths, in all those stories where humans have relationships with gods or god-like entities, that is a way of exploring what it means to be in relation to a non-biological entity. So we’ve been rehearsing this for a long time.

AH: On that note, ghosts do go back all the way to Homer’s The Odyssey, to the Bible. In the introduction to Nightside of the River you talk about some of your own favorite ghost stories. What do you think are the ingredients for a good ghost story? What are the things you’re looking for when you read one?

JW: Well, the American Ghost Story is actually slightly different because it brings in the idea of the place as a player, rather than just the backdrop where a situation happens – something like the Overlook Hotel, where the place itself is complicit with the craziness in the person’s mind, and these things happen simultaneously. It’s not an innocent party walking into a haunted house or whatever. Everything is complicit. So that’s always exciting, if the place itself feels that it has some secret or some evil or at least some memory. Ghost stories are really quite simple, because always, something happens and you think, No, that’s just ordinary, that was just a coincidence. And the second thing happens and you think, Uh oh…hmm…maybe that wasn’t a coincidence. And then the third thing happens and you think, Ah ah…

So in that sense, from a formulaic—and I use that word specifically—point of view, they’re quite satisfying. And, of course, once you realize that you are looking for that build, until the reader or the viewer is convinced that something awful is going on. And at that point, all Hell can unleash, but you have to get to that build. That’s fun to play with, because it does have rules. It’s like jazz piano. You want to bend them, and you want to work with them to create something that’s a little bit different.

AH: You often said that you’re a glass-half-full person. And I’m curious about that in relation to AI. There’s quite a wonderful TED talk you can find on Google, where you spend a lot of time focusing on what the story of being human is today. And the question you ask is, “Are we smart enough to survive now smart we are”—the implication being that technology could destroy us or it could liberate us. And I want to ask you that question that you pose maybe rhetorically. Are we smart enough to survive how smart we are?

JW: No. I am an optimist, and I’ve always been an optimist—I always have to believe that there is a way through, and that’s my strength and it’s my weakness. And I’m really aware of that. So, I’m still optimistic. But it’s not the technology that’s ever worried me. It’s always been the human part of the bargain that’s worried me, becausewe’re greedy and mean-spirited and warlike, and if we cannot do something about these qualities which seem to be innate then I don’t know how we go forward with this new technology which could promise unlimited abundance. This is a reset. I think it’s an evolutionary jump that we could make now—because who said that our evolutionary inheritance is over with? You know, humans have only been around for 300,000 years. That’s a salami slice of space-time. Whether we move forward, at this point, or whether we manage to destroy ourselves and have to start the whole damn thing again. Can you imagine? It would be so maddening to go back and start it all again from nothing. I don’t know which way it’s going to go. Because it’s not just about how smart you are, is it?

And, of course the people who are in tech at the minute are very smart, but in a very limited way. And I just think, You people have not read anything! You haven’t thought about anything, you don’t know anything about history, about philosophy, about religion – and you are in charge of the future? Give me a break. And that is the problem, you see, because they don’t know what they don’t know, which, is nearly everything.

AH: Jeanette, you’re a writer of books. How concerned are you that people read less and less, and the implications of that for being empathetic human beings?

JW: I think self-reflection softens the heart, in that it makes you more aware, more compassionate, more understanding. Vampires famously have no self-reflection, do they? And the world’s being run by a lot of bloodsuckers who just want to get everything out of us and have no idea who they are or what the world looks like beyond their own narrow goals. And that is frightening. And you look around now and you think, well, is it just psychopaths and sociopaths that get power? Whether it’s financial or political…what do we do about that? And so it can seem as though this is a valiant rearguard action to say, “Look, the life of the mind matters. The life of the imagination matters.”

That is why when you asked me to choose a book, I chose Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I know we’re going to talk about. Because at the end of that book, they’re talking about the inferno of the living as something that’s already here, and that the way to deal with that is to either accept it and become part of the inferno, so you can no longer see it. Then, at the very end of the book, we find that the second way is to seek, and to learn to recognize who and what is in the midst of the inferno and what’s not the inferno—and to make them endure, and to give them space. And I suppose if this is the inferno of the living that we’re in now, then we never know who it is—what young person, what older person we’re empowering. These are chance encounters. 

It might be with a text, it might be with a piece of work that can change the way someone thinks or the way someone is, and we do not know what influence they will have – and that’s why I guess I remain optimistic. Because although humans are trained on data sets in just the same way that AI is, actually, you can have a change of heart. You can change your mind, you can see things differently. The world can open up to you in ways that were completely unexpected, simply because there’s a disruption in your dataset and you think, “I’ve just read this – what? I’ve just seen this movie, this picture, everything I thought was wrong” – or, “I’m going to change my mind.” That’s the kind of epiphany that happens very often in people’s lives. It happens in religious conversion all the time. We’re used to it. People say, “Ah, I completely see the other side now.” But it happens through the agency of art in that we see what we did not see. And that’s why it is so important. It’s an imaginative act that happens among humans, for humans. And it always has. There’s no evolutionary necessity for it, like growing food. We’ve always done art of some form or another, and so it’s real to us, and that’s why I hold onto it. And that’s why I think even now, in a world where nobody in Big Tech seems to read or care about the life of the mind, it’s still worth us going on.

AH: You’ve written at some length – and in fact, narrated a BBC radio series on Manchester – about this engine of the industrial revolution as a touchstone for you. But you write in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, “I love the industrial North of England and I hate what has happened to it.” I wonder if you can talk a little about what has happened to it in your lifetime that has deflated you so much.

JW: With the industrial revolution, you think about it as the world’s first collective nervous breakdown. Because you’re moving from an agrarian society into something which has never been seen before: the coming of the machine. Often, people talk about all those 12-hour days in the factories. Well, on a farm, you always do a 12-hour day. So to begin with, it’s not actually a cruelty. It’s just what people know. This is how it is; it’s a different rhythm. But when you bring the rhythm of the fields into the factory, of course, it is dehumanizing and destructive and intolerable, and no one can manage it.

There were so many unexpected effects of the factory system, but one of them was that for the first time, women came together. Before then, they’d either been doing little cottage industries, or they’d been in domestic service. They didn’t meet one another in the way that men did. But you put them in the factory system and they think, Eek, we’re working as hard as men, we can do this job, what’s this business about us being second class citizens and weak, and we can’t be paid as much? And, of course, that is the beginning both of a political consciousness, a trades union consciousness, and a feminism. Things start in unexpected places, even in horrible situations that you wouldn’t wish on anybody, like the factory system. The British writer Mrs. Gaskell said, “I’ve seen hell, and it is white.” And that was what it was like when you opened the doors of a cotton mill. People were dying of lung disease in their thirties. It was grotesque. They called Manchester the Golden Sewer, because it made so much money and had so much misery. You know, Marx and Engels went, and Engels looked at the people, and he said, “This is what happens when men treat each other only as useful objects.” And now, of course, with AI, we say, “This is what happens when men treat each other only as useless objects,” as Peter Thiel and co try to put everybody out of work. So, there are huge connections between this 250-year period in our history, when we’ve changed the way that we live. And Manchester is full of energy—it is an alchemical city, it keeps reinventing itself. I love the energy. I love the way Northern people talk to each other. They laugh, they make jokes. It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re a stranger or whether you’re local. Everyone chats to one another. I like that interaction, because I think humans thrive on it. So, when I look now around me, not just in Manchester or in London, New York, Los Angeles—doesn’t matter where it is, I see the same thing: people terrified of one another, afraid to go out, everybody ubiquitously with their headphones on staring at their fucking smartphone. And we are pulling each other away from ordinary interactions. That’s the kind of thing I hate.

And weirdly, I think reading a book, art, it doesn’t separate you even though it’s a private act. Reading is a private act, but it puts you in touch with so many others, and not just in your own little community—though that’s a good thing, and it might be a book club, or it might just be that you go out and talk about it—but it stretches you back across time. You think, “Oh, other people have thought like this, felt like this, experienced this, been this, I get it.”

And I think the chief vice of modern life is this isolation masquerading as community. You’re sitting at home with your laptop looking at conspiracy theories. It’s not a community, it’s people isolated in their terror. Reading does exactly the opposite. It brings you together, in real freedom.  

AH: In your 1987 novel The Passion, Venice is described as a city of disguises. That’s certainly true of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. It’s a series of 55 vignettes of magical cities – strange cities – broken into sections, each of which is preceded by and followed by a sort of commentary from Marco Polo, the great explorer, and the Khan. At one point, Marco Polo informs the Kubla Khan, “‘Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know. There is still one of which you never speak.’ Marco Polo bowed his head. ‘Venice,’ the Khan said. Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’ The Emperor did not turn a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’ And Polo said, ‘Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice.’”

What does Invisible Cities mean to you. In my copy, you’re actually quoted on the back cover describing it as a book that you would choose as pillow and plate alone on a desert island, which is a wonderful image to conjure.

JW: I’ve always wanted to get away from 19th century realism. Not because I don’t love those novels – I’ve read most of them and would read them again. But because I didn’t want to write them. And I was looking at that time to a European tradition to find somewhere I could go that would be about imagination rather than experience. And, with Orange is Not the Only Fruit, I had wanted to write about imagination. I thought I was using myself as a fictional character.I started to look away from the Anglo American tradition towards Europe, and I found Calvino. He gave me permission, he gave me freedom, he gave me space, he gave me an example, a way forward in my writing so that I wouldn’t get stuck. Because it had happened to him, and his first novel was highly realistic. 1947, it’s about a young boy who works for the resistance in the war, which Calvino had done. And then he threw away his next three novels because he couldn’t write them. He says, “I became aware that between the facts of life that should have been my raw materials and the quick light touch that I wanted for my writing, there was a gulf that cost me increasing effort to cross.” And I really understood that. And he solved it by sitting down one day and just writing what looked like a fairy story, The Clove and Viscount, which is about a count who gets blown into by a cannonball and each bit of him lives separate lives—which was of course Calvino’s psyche saying, Hey dude, you know, on the one hand you’re in the communist party and you’re a social realist writer and journalist, and on the other hand, you’re a fabulist who daydreams all day. Whatcha gonna do? 

And the psyche began to heal itself, as it so often does if we give it a chance. And this gave me hope, and I thought, Just go forward and write the book that you want to write. And that’s what I did with The Passion in 1987. And yeah, I hadn’t been to Venice, because with Calvino, I thought, there’s no need to go anywhere—just write about it, and when you’ve written the book, go and see if it fits. And so that’s what I did. So for me as a young person, it was great freedom of mind. And you know, one thing I hate now about creative writing programs and all that stuff—even though I teach on one—is that it’s very easy to turn writers into copies of other writers. To be too prescriptive and not let the mind go into its playful mode and find out what kind of writer you actually are. And that’s what I discovered in my private conversations with Calvino—who was dead. He was about to give a series of lectures at Harvard, the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, and he died on the eve of delivery, which is really fateful. And if anybody wants to read those, there’s a book called Six Memos for the Next Millennium, they’re beautiful essays. But when he died, I found him. And our best friends are dead. We’re back to this business of life and death and “Is there a hard boundary?” As a writer, as an artist, your best friends are often dead. It doesn’t matter, because they’ve left the work behind them and that’s where you can go to find help.

AH: I wonder if you consider these cities to be metaphors for concepts around memory, desire, time—and how many of them are based on the real aspects of cities.

JW: I guess I’m always fighting off being lost in the literal. And I don’t want to be in that place. My whole life has been the triumph of imagination over experience. So it’s this balance between the fact that we are 3D creatures who must eat and sleep and do what we do and are bounded by time and will die, but we’re also this hybrid thing—people who can dream and imagine. It’s a ludicrous position to be in, that we must wrestle with and manage. Not the one thing nor the other, but this hybrid that we are. That’s why I hold onto art, the imagination, because I think that’s the way humans have managed the intolerable situation in which we find ourselves. 

The last line of The Passion is, “I’m telling you stories, trust me.” And that felt right to me at the time. I was only 27, but was very clear that that was the last line. And that each part of that was important: that they were stories, but that you could and should trust me. Because what I’m really saying is, “Just trust me as a conduit of the imagination.”

AH: “Trust me,” brings to mind a warning that Invisible Cities begins with, about unreliable narrators. “Trust me” could also reference that Kubla Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions. This is narrative dream telling. You trust the narrator, or you don’t, but nothing is real.

JW: No, it’s not, in the sense that it is a product of the imagination. And Calvino was really trying to push away these monoliths of both Fascism and Communism, both of which always get lost in the literal. And to say, “Surely there is a way of thinking, a way of being outside of these monoliths.” Because that’s what he was growing up with as a young man. Fascism started so much earlier in Italy, kicked off in 1922, and it wasn’t over until the end of the war. That’s a long time, and so whatever time you grow up in is going to shape the way your mind works. Pushing against those monoliths was so crucial – just to say, “Please let a bit of light in, let a bit of lightness in.” He loved the idea of quickness, of multiplicity, things that would rise above. One of his favorite metaphors was of Perseus fighting the Gorgon. The gaze of the Gorgon turns everybody to stone. And Perseus is the only one who can defeat the Gorgon, because he doesn’t look directly at the monster. He uses the shield as an indirect means of vision. And Calvino was really struck with this because he thought, No, I must not look at life directly—life as he had lived: I can’t write this social realist novel and tell you how it is now. I need to do something different, and perhaps activate your imagination as a participant in this story.

AH: Our cities have become much more uniform over time. certainly much more now than when Calvino published this book 50 years ago. I wonder if there’s also a critique here of the sort of growing sameness of our cities. I mean, we can certainly never return to the time when the real Marco Polo went on his journeys, but even so, in a vanishingly small amount of time, cities of old seem to become cookie cutters of each other. This feels like a sort of paean to the city as a unique space built by the people that live there, and as utterly different and distinguishable from all the other cities that populate this book. That feels almost like a lost paradise.

JW: Yes, I think he felt that. I mean, look, Calvino adored cities. He lived in Turin, Milan, Paris with his wife. He was a cosmopolitan writer, human. But he didn’t want to live in the countryside. He wanted to live in the city because he loved the exchange of human behavior, and to be part of that – not just in the intellectual discourses, but just in the ordinariness of shopping, moving around, of seeing people going about their business. And yes, that has been lost, in a sense. But we wonder, well, who’s lost it? Because there are lots of young people now who know nothing else, who never saw cities when there were small shops and things were more individual. 

Back in the ‘60s, the likes of Jane Jacobs were saying, “If we don’t protect our cities now, they’re just going to be highways with miles off them.” Right she was. And I guess I always put my faith in young people, because what I’m hoping is that we begin to redesign our cities back to human scale. And I think there is a push to do that. You know, whether it’s the idea of the 15-minute city where you can walk everywhere or bicycle everywhere, which is a lovely idea. If we could get away from this urban dream, which began as the American Dream – that you’ll just get in your car and go – well, maybe you won’t. And maybe we can work around that again. So I’m always hoping that the human imagination will say, “Enough already!”

AH: I wonder if Calvino’s style, and magical realism as a literary technique, has come into its own more and more as time has passed. And I say this because Calvino seems to me to be a writer whose stature has only grown since his death. And we can’t say that for all writers. I feel we’re living in a time when the classical arc of a traditional, plot-driven novel is of less interest to younger people and maybe anybody in general. Fiction seems to be a little like contemporary art, much more interested in exploring feelings and ideas not through the prism of beginning, middle, and end, but through a more open-ended form. And Calvino seems to be a master at that.

JW: Yeah. And I think, with an explosion of streaming TV channels, a lot of that need for beginning-middle-end narrative has been picked up. Picasso, when the camera was coming in and very average portrait painters were having fits of the vapors and saying, “How are we going to earn a living?” he was really excited because he thought, “Good, this will take away from painting the need for representation.” The need for fidelity to the literal, the need for what is. And of course, this is exactly what he was doing anyway. He could paint like an old master when he was 12, and so we have to accept that certain innovations can make space for art to lose some of its weight, shed some of that load, and be able to become more experimental – just lighter on its feet. This is what Calvino hoped would happen. But look, you go to the airport bookshelf, and there’s tons of beginning, middles, and ends. It’s a broad church out there. There’s something for everyone. But yes, I hope, as you say, that young people now are getting savvy and thinking, “Actually, we could do this differently. We’re non-binary, we’re not caught in the same ways, we don’t want to tell our own story in the same way, so let’s not.” And they’re looking for writers who’ve gone before, just as I was looking for a writer who wasn’t in that hard-boiled Anglo-American tradition. You know, there’s enough room out there.

AH: On that note, does posterity matter for you?

JW: No. I think about it. It’s the Indian rope trick. I’d like to just climb to the top of this rope and then disappear. And the best of me is there anyway. Back to this business of not being lost in the literal: not everything can be explained by biography or biology. You leave behind this strange amalgam of circumstance and self states that you are in, in your made and created work, and you just hope that somebody will pick one of these things up one day and find something that speaks to them. And to me, that’s everything. If I’ve done a little bit while I’m alive – and I think I have, because people come up to me at events and so on, and they write to me, and they say that I’ve helped them in different ways, and that’s wonderful. If that can continue, so be it. But at the same time, the world is moving very fast. “Acceleration” and “disruption,” they’re the buzzwords of our period. So it may be that I’m shoved off the end of the shelf much faster than I might have been in a different period. And that’s alright, too. I mean, there’s no need to worry about it. We just have to hope that this story will go in a sufficiently interesting way, because other people want to tell it.

AH: I remarked earlier that you are a prolific writer. You’ve won many awards for your work: you’re an OBE, a CBE. You are still writing. I wonder what keeps you going. What is the sort of magic sauce that makes you say, “I want to start another book?”

JW: I’m interested by everything. I mean, that’s why I got interested in Big Tech and in AI, because I could see that it was a coming thing and I wanted to know about it. And my mind is endlessly curious, so I’m just always taking in what’s going on, processing it through the thing that I am and seeing what I can come out with. You know, when I wrote the book about AI [12 Bytes], it was because I couldn’t find anything that would look at philosophy, religion, history, the story of how we got here. I could only find things that were narrow goals, the same as AI itself. So I had to get past that for myself. And then it was something I was able to tell others—but it always starts out as being for me. I just work with whatever is interesting me at the time and do my best with that.

AH: You’ve also written for children and young adults. I wonder what you discover through your young fans that is distinct from your adult audiences, your adult books?

JW: Well, it may change because of course, the young mind is becoming homogenized by technology in much the same way as the rest of us. And the glory of kids was their kind of openness and weirdness—because they don’t think in the way that older children, teenagers, or adults do. They haven’t been socialized like that. They haven’t been educated like that. They’re open, they’re curious, they’re great fun, and you can really talk to them about anything as long as you’ll sit down and explain and take them seriously. And that’s what I love to do with young people. I love the combination of silliness and seriousness which really suits me. And I just hope with all my heart that that doesn’t get utterly taken away.

AH: Jeanette, if you were to be cast away in a desert island, but it had to be one of the 55 cities in Invisible Cities, which one would you most like to spend time in? 

JW: Do you know, I wouldn’t – because what I’d really like to do is, I’d like to get in that garden with Polo and Kubla Khan (and the chessboard they have, because they always play chess). And I’d like to sit there quietly to one side and be in that encounter. I think that’s the hot seat of the story, isn’t it?

AH: Well, Jeanette, if I can find my way into that same garden, I’ll sit next to you. Maybe we can drink some orange blossom tea and –

JW: Is that all? 

AH: Okay, maybe spiked with Arrack.

JW: A nice Pinot is fine. 

AH: Do you think they had that in the 13th century Mongolian Empire? 

JW: No, but we can import it.