Laura Tanna - Letter From Laura
THE FIRST Anthony Winkler novel I read was The Lunatic. Did I laugh? Out loud and often until I said: "I have got to meet this man!" Caribbean Review, that excellent magazine published in Miami, commissioned me to interview him. With Tony's usual publishing/filming misfortunes, after decades of stimulating Caribbean stories and collector quality covers, the magazine folded in a dispute over editorial ownership before the Winkler interview could be published. That was some 15 years ago but Winkler and I stayed in touch. So when he wanted to let his readers know that he has Parkinson's disease, he did so through this column last week, in an article The Gleaner tactfully put opposite the death page which undoubtedly appealed to his bizarre sense of humour.
I use the word bizarre advisedly. Readers familiar with his work know that sex, spirituality and a social conscience are often combined in well, a bizarre way. Take his description of a yet unpublished novel entitled The Crocodile about an abused helper who captures God by taking the communion host and putting it in her panties. She traps God in her panties, which leads to the priest having a love affair with her. When I couldn't help exclaiming: "How you come up with these initial ideas is beyond my even beginning to fathom. Where do these bizarre sexual/religious experiences originate within your soul?'' Winkler responded:
GROWING UP IN JA
"When I was a kid growing up in Jamaica I used to have these inexplicable flashes. They were both vulgar and holy, sacrosanct and totally irrelevant and came out of nowhere. I think my mind has no sluice gates, no boundaries, no fences. Everything is mixed up. Where a normal person would think about a house, a condo, a place to live, a trailer, because I have none of these boundaries, it goes from a house, to a kangaroo, a mouse, bacteria, a woman, mixing everything up. It really troubled me. I used to think that I was going crazy when I was a kid because I would have the most bizarre thoughts, under the most unexpected circumstances. I'd be in church and I would just have this sort of intuition that I was crazy. After a while I realised that this is the way my mind is and it doesn't mean that I'm doing any of the things that my mind is suggesting. It just happens that I have to accept myself and follow these thoughts and put them into literature if I can. Lots of times I wanted to go and tell my mother: 'I don't understand what's going on with me.' But I didn't."
He actually has three projects he's working on now, one of which is his autobiography and another a novel about Arawak Indians and a Spaniard. When he gets bored with one work, he goes to another, sometimes on the same day. He did give us a little insight into his own creative process when he told me:
"One of the things about writing fiction that I do, I enter into a dark room. I have no idea where it leads. Where I'm going. I take a step. A light appears in the distance. I take another step toward it. it gets brighter. I take another step. It goes out. I go back. I say to myself: 'Where am I? What am I doing?' I take another step. A light appears over here and I begin to follow it. Eventually what happens, if it works out is I come to the fruited plain from a perspective, a high perspective. I see in the distance the Promised Land, the city of hope and it's all very clear and at that point it actually becomes boring to write. Then I finish it but what's fascinating to me is to be in the dark and to not know where your footing is leading. That's what I find fascinating. It's frustrating, mark you, but it's also fascinating."
For others who may be writing, he observes: "There are two things you have to do if you're a writer. One, you have to have contempt for your medium. If you don't have contempt for language and the slowness and clumsiness of it, if you approach language with the idea of 'Oh My God, I'm doing something that Shakespeare did,' it will overwhelm you, make you feel so cowering and cowardly that you won't push it as hard as you can or use it as a tool. Instead of using it as a hammer to break the idea, you're going to treat it like an egg. You get too delicate about it.
FEELING
"The other one is you have to have something that you feel. If you don't feel it, you can't say it. When I was writing Cool Runnings, the producer used to say to me: 'Write the scene this way. How do you feel about it?' I'd say, 'I could write it that way, but I don't feel it. If I don't feel it, I figure it's not good.' You have to feel it. When I was writing Lunatic or Yacht Race or The Duppy or any of my books, so many of them I rewrote from scratch."
He added: "I don't think anybody writes with an eye to the critic. I know I don't. If you did that you'd write in a very stilted and self-conscious way. You write because you have something to say and you have to say it. You don't give a f... what the critics think. The authenticity has to be there. If you have nothing to say, you should shut up and teach. I always figured there would come a time in my life when I'd say: 'O.K. I've said it all. I might as well teach some place and rest on my laurels.'"
With a collection of short stories about to be published, a drawer full of written but unpublished plays and three works simultaneously in the process of being written, I don't think Winkler will be resting on his laurels anytime soon.