I don't want to boast, but . . .

THE ENGLISH are a modest race; the Scottish even more so. The Irish are not modest at all. The Welsh would rather praise the Lord, their rugger team, or their spring lamb. But the English are a modest race, and they don't care for boasters.

The noisy chorus of denigration and scorn that has greeted the latest Jeanette Winterson novel, Art & Lies, in some quarters may not be entirely due to the book's alleged defects. For Ms Winterson is not a modest woman and she does not live modestly; she lives like a pasha, serviced - it is said - by a retinue of devoted women who appear to think their lives well spent in facilitating Ms Winterson and her art.

Plenty of male writers have been, and are, surrounded by facilitating women (the cleaner, the cook, the typist, the fender-off-of-callers, the muse) although usually just one woman plays all the roles, rewarded by the usual sentence in the acknowledgements that begins, 'Finally, thanks to my wife, without whom . . .'

But Ms Winterson, her caryatids and paramour, are not the point at issue. What has really got the English goat is her shameless glorification of her own talent - she would say genius. In 1992, after Written on the Body had been received with only modified rapture, she said: 'My own is this year's most profound and profoundly misunderstood book.'

She did it again last year, and seldom can a Book of the Year commendation have become as famous: 'No one working in the English language now (what, not Rushdie, not Stoppard, not Updike; not even Angelou or Byatt or Gordimer, Lessing or Murdoch or Joyce Carol Oates?) comes close to my exuberance, my passion, my fidelity to words.'

That remark may prove to be the anchor that sank her craft. But I think it will not; on the contrary, I think that by filling her sails with hot air she will waft it to even further shores. Tens of thousands of people who never read book reviews scan the Book of the Year selections for Christmas present ideas. Jeanette Winterson in praise of herself reached the widest possible audience.

The English don't like boasting. It embarrasses them. They call it swank or showing off; they think it bad taste, bad manners, poor form. Their way of rebuking it, of showing their disapproval, is to turn a cool shoulder towards the boaster. They may decline to buy Art & Lies.

On the other hand, Ms Winterson's remarks brought her name and her books to the attention of thousands of people. An author's name is like an unknown brand of cereal to the non-literary public, which has very conservative tastes. They prefer to stick to tried and tested Jilly Cornflakes or Joanna Toasties or Catherine Crunchies rather than risk a new and possibly indigestible Jeanette Krisperson. Once they have heard of her, they may try her. While most authors trundle across country on decorous publicity tours, modestly addressing literary lunches and audiences of middle-aged ladies who then borrow the book from the library, Ms Winterson has the boasters' field all to herself: and sales to prove it. I find myself wondering, what's so wrong with boasting?

Americans are less averse to self-glorification. To them it is a legitimate way of attracting attention. Yet even there, the serious literary establishment prefers to affect a becoming modesty - with one rampant, outrageous exception: Camille Paglia.

This self-appointed guru to the post-feminist era blows her own trumpet at a penetrating and shameless fortissimo. 'I have no rivals,' she has said. 'I was asking the most basic questions before feminism provided pat answers.' When she addressed the University of Texas, 'There was a thousand kids out there screaming like I was Madonna.'

By shouting her wares to the heavens, Paglia has managed to focus much of the post-feminist spotlight on to herself. Yet much of what she has to say is highly original and thought-provoking. 'Male sexual function depends on women theatrically miming a momentary subordination. What's going on is . . . an international conspiracy to keep men from knowledge of their own frailty.' You may not agree, but by God, she makes you want to argue] 'In the last 20 years there has been a systematic denigration of the role of mother and homemaker, but in the Sixties, that was something very radical, hippy women did.' True? Maybe not but again, interesting.

Is it coincidence that both Winterson and Paglia won over their first audience as self-proclaimed lesbians (though Paglia seems now to have retracted, explaining 'I'm too lazy to be a lesbian.'). Certainly, neither woman gives a damn for the heterosexual world, much less do they depend upon male approval: which is best achieved by reticence, self-deprecation, and attentiveness to men's opinions.

I, too, have a book out soon. When people ask if I'm pleased with it, I shift and mumble and say, 'Um, well, I don't know.' What stops me replying, 'It's marvellous] Terrific] My best ever]'? Because I was schooled from earliest youth in the belief that showing off is the least acceptable sort of behaviour: bad manners, bad taste, bad form, not done. I'm English, you see, and the English don't like boasting.