She was in any case sceptical of the idea that criticism in the arts was ‘some sort of science’. She thought it was ‘about taste – and it’s about class, actually’. Towards the end of her life, she explained that she reared away ‘in horror from the Leavisite construction of the sensitive reader . . . I think of someone eczematic.’ A few years earlier, when quarrels about literary theory were raging and cutting careers short in English departments, she wrote in spatting form from Providence: ‘I’ve fallen among semioticians & am trying to make head or tail of the deconstructionists. I havn’t [sic] got a dictionary in my flat & keep forgetting to look “hermeneutics” up in the library. It’s been busy, busy, busy as far as thinking is concerned but I don’t know how much use all this Dérrida [sic] and stuff is going to be when I get home. I keep wondering just what Dérrida is up to &, if he’s so clever, why doesn’t he write a novel of his own?’
Her time at university did leave her with an enduring attachment to medieval literature. She persisted in declaring that, despite the Wars of the Roses and the Black Death and the rise of anti-Semitism and other disadvantages, ‘from the perspective of later history the medieval period looks like bliss’. Reading English also confirmed her fascination with the eighteenth century. She gave Robinson Crusoe a Beckettian makeover in one of her poems, setting him on a beach decorated with ‘dandruff sand’ and ‘used contraceptives, slimey mementos’. She persuaded her tutor to let her write an essay on Defoe, fired up chiefly by the ringing, plausible voices he created for the heroines of Roxana and Moll Flanders, and spoke of Defoe’s writing as a kind of Method acting, close to oral storytelling. The voice that nattered on and cajoled in fiction was the voice she cherished. It is this voice that inspires the narration of Wise Children. It is not a natural voice, this lor-luv-a-duck cockney with lashings of high-falutin’ and of well read: the whole thing is a performance by performers, a mashed-together bit of impro. But it is unmistakably a spoken language.
Fibs
‘A likely story,’ Angela scoffs on the back of a card sent from Auckland in 1990. Its comic-strip picture – in early-movie lime-greens and violet-blues – was of a Maori legend, featuring the rivalry between a large fierce mountain with a glaring mask-like face, and a pacific brown rock: both were after the affections of a ‘dainty’ mound who looks like a heap of sugar. The consequences of their fall-out included a great fire and the creation of the Wanganui River.
There may be here a glancing reference to my enthusiasm for Bruce Chatwin, who had died the previous year. The book that had brought him most fame, The Songlines, had given glowing life to another Antipodean mythology, that of the Aborigines; it had also looped into free-wheeling speculation about primitive man and primeval beasts. Angela, born the same year as Bruce, with whom she had had a friendly encounter, had written warmly about the book but was sceptical about the far reaches of his anthropology. Bruce was looking for the origins of human instincts and belief; Angela’s interest in folklore and myth was in the way it shaped and expressed individual psyches.
In the last few years the lush and ferocious fables in The Bloody Chamber have been turned into a play by Northern Stage, an opera in San Francisco, and enacted by puppets as part of a Halloween show in Atlanta. These are the stories that most clearly proclaim Angela as a feminist writer with an agenda, or agender. Let us allow Bluebeard’s last victim to be rescued not by a man but by her mother. Let us load the prose with red stains and howls, wet lips and shudders, and make evident what is buried in the stories we read to our children. Let us take the girls of traditional fairy tale and give them some force of character: on Woman’s Hour, Angela pointed out that it would be hard to argue that the Sleeping Beauty was ‘a figure full of get up and go’.
The chilly landscape of these stories may, she thought, have come about because they were written in Sheffield, where she had gone on an Arts Council scholarship. She arrived there in the mid-seventies and so just missed William Empson, who had retired as Professor of English Literature in 1971. Like Angela, Empson was a high-wire stylist, an atheist and an admirer of Andrew Marvell; like her, he had lived in Japan. They met later when Angela went to hear him lecturing – her with her flyaway hair, him with the slipping-down beard that he wore round his neck like a bib – but all Angela reported to me about the critical illuminator of ambiguity was that he made (not for her) a seduction drink from tinned raspberries and condensed milk.
There were other reasons for that frozen landscape. As a child she had read not only Andrew Lang’s fairy tales but also the stories of the nineteenth-century minister George MacDonald. MacDonald, a friend of Lewis Carroll, Tennyson and Wilkie Collins, came, as did Angela’s father, from Aberdeenshire and embodied a ‘Northern European rational romanticism that I admire very much’. She consumed his work so avidly and in such great quantities that when she started reading Norwegian and Gallic stories for her Virago collections of fairy tales, she experienced something ‘very, very atavistic . . . I felt this genuine shudder inside me as though I’d heard these stories before I was born.’
The other kind of story that ran in her blood was journalistic. Her father had worked for the Press Association: she described him as talking in the ‘stately prose of a 1930s Times leader’ scattered with period phrases: a bitter day was ‘cold, bleak, gloomy and glum, Cold as the hairs on a polar bear’s bum’. It was he who when she left school at eighteen got her taken on at the Croydon Advertiser, where she found in the newsdesk ‘a great source of baroque character’, invented a record-review column and was quickly marked down as a feature writer rather than a news hound: ‘I had a demonic inaccuracy.’ She also hit on a small but significant feature of her later journalism. She began using the first person – in places that person did not usually reach – as a way of making sure she got a byline: her gambit was to use ‘I’ so often that a sub-editor couldn’t be bothered to keep taking it out, and had to put her name on the piece. It was also a feminist device: she decided early on that men often avoided using the first person in order to acquire a bit of gravitas.
Angela found her strength as a journalist in the late sixties, urged on by Paul Barker at New Society. She wrote about Playgirl?’s men, Bradford chimneys and fetishistic fabrics. She wrote about ‘fine-boned, blue-eyed English madness in Bath’, Japanese tattooing and Habitat. During my twelve years on the editorial staff of the London Review of Books, hers was the copy I was keenest to read. She was the only reviewer who could deliver with equal pungency on the ANC and on Colette, and who could tell us that D. H. Lawrence was ‘a stocking man, not a leg man’. With her full-throated admiration, her scorn, her learning and her fearlessness, she made her reviews into enduring essays.
Vile
At the end of 1987 she sent Christmas and New Year wishes from her and Mark and ‘a very spotty Alex – he’s just come down with chicken pox’. The card had two sets of red line drawings: a ‘For Her’ section showed a couple of jewel-encrusted rings, a sports car and a speedboat; the ‘For Him’ section was strewn with plaid slippers, a stag, a pair of binoculars and a crown. Actually, the Crown. The picture shows tinted photographs of Prince Charles and Lady Diana back to back under the headline ‘All I want for Christmas is . . .’ Diana’s answer is ‘A divorce’; Charles’s clenched-jaw response runs: ‘I wasn’t thinking of anything that expensive.’
The royal family afforded Angela the pleasure of rolling-eyed ridicule. She liked to put it about that the Queen had a secret black love-child, claiming that you could see the gleam in the monarch’s eye when she was surrounded by Commonwealth heads of state. Angela would have manned the barricades at a revolution but she kept her vitriol for those who were politically active. A birthday card – bearing her instruction to open ‘wide, but carefully’ – showed her enlisting royal support against a greater grisliness. The picture on the front displays the Queen, in full tasselled, ermined regalia, with Windsor Castle in the background and a speech bubble floating over a plush curtain: ‘I see
London, I see France . . .’ On sliding open, the panels making up the royal image re-form to reveal the then PM, in purple bra, orange boxers (with football motif), high-heeled pom-pom mules and a string of pearls. She is hoovering in front of the telly; above her a gloating comment rhymes with the one overleaf: ‘I see Maggie in her UNDERPANTS!’
It is hard to exaggerate the visceral anti-Thatcherism of the eighties. The complaints, often focusing on Thatcher’s voice, were tainted with misogyny (has any vehement male politician ever been accused of shrillness?); often they were polluted with snobbery (Thatcher sounded ‘suburban’). Angela never held back on abuse of politicians; at the time of the outbreak of the Gulf War the message she left on my answering machine was simply a string of oaths. She did not hold back about Thatcher: ‘I think that no fate is too vile for her,’ she said after the introduction of an internal market in the National Health Service. Yet her real political anxiety was wide-reaching, and prescient: ‘The worst things are probably things we don’t know about. They’re to do with surveillance and they’re to do with the Secret Service, and they’re to do with the inaccessibility of information . . . I imagine that this has been a period of such incredible overwhelming public corruption that it will take years and years before we know about it.’
Bliss
From New South Wales came two versions of Utopia. One on each side of a card. ‘What really fascinates me about Australia,’ she wrote, ‘besides the flowers & birds & trees & exquisite mammals – is this: it’s the stage on which the great drama of the British working class is played out on a hugely magnified scale. That’s my pet theory of the moment, anyway.’ Actually, it was a pretty settled theory, to which she returned when I interviewed her for the Independent on Sunday in 1991. Australia was, she declared, ‘the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen and the despised and the rejected have inherited it and . . . after a couple of generations they turn out to be six foot tall, incredibly good-looking, smart and republican. I think it’s terrific.’ She saw Britain becoming ‘visibly less egalitarian all the time’ and Australia inspired her. It showed ‘what America was invented for’; why could Poms not do as Aussies did, and be civil without being servile? When I asked if she wanted to write about the Australian novelist Christina Stead, her response was unequivocally enthusiastic, though her description would not beguile everyone: ‘I think she’s wonderful, by Dostoevsky out of Brecht.’ Her piece, which appeared in the autumn of 1982, spoke with ardour of Stead’s importance: ‘We have grown accustomed to the idea that we live in pygmy times.’ Angela’s own unpygmy-sized theory about fiction was: ‘It is possible to be a great novelist – that is, to render a veracious account of your times – and a bad writer – that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.’
Her postcard eulogy to the Antipodes ended on a domestic note: ‘We are fine. Alex has grown,’ and the picture on the other side was a maternal romance, an apolitical Eden. The Australian artist E. Phillips Fox painted On the Beach in 1909: the picture belongs to the lifetime but not the sensibility of Angela’s grandmother, whom she compared to St Pancras station and who kept three copies of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs in her house. By the side of a green-blue sea, boaters and tucked-up skirts and lacy parasols are dawdling; in the water, sailor suits and high-necked swimming costumes join hands. In the foreground stands a woman with a copper-coloured bun and an empire-line white dress. She is towelling the arm of a small bare girl whose bottom, feet and tilted cheek are glowing red, as if she were standing by a hearth.
Angela said she believed more and more that ‘our lives are all about our childhoods’. She spoke of herself as having been a podgy little girl, of having wanted at the age of eight to be an Egyptologist, of having been ‘a lot of people’s second-best friend’ at her ‘really bad’ direct-grant girls’ grammar school in Streatham. She spoke of Alexander with astonished pleasure. His arrival also meant the beginning of a new era of concern. She knew that ‘as long as I lived I wouldn’t cease to be anxious’, and cited a moment in the Royal Festival Hall when seven-year-old Alex had for seconds disappeared behind a shelf of records: ‘My heart stopped.’
I asked her during my interview to describe Mark. ‘Big and fierce,’ she said. ‘So MALE,’ she said with admiration to her friend and agent Deborah Rogers. Angela sheltered under his silence and supposed ferocity: ‘My co-habitant is very frightening,’ she explained, when Mark arrived to collect her from a Fontana party: she tiptoed away, as if mocking her own meekness – but with alacrity. Alexander was a dreamer and was becoming a word-sharpener. He invented a game called Killer Baby, and, in the cabin of a narrow boat, which his parents kept moored in Camden, told a long and intricate story about a mouse. The creature had caught a cold. A very bad cold. A cold that invited a pause for horror. A very very bad cold. Then it had caught something worse. It had caught. Extremely long pause. ‘A taxi.’ Something of Angela’s had been transmitted here: she always made sure when I, who, like her, did not drive, arrived at The Chase, that I knew the times of the last buses home so that I would not have to shell out for a cab.
The sight of the three of them in their narrow boat was striking. Heading to Ladbroke Grove to pick up groceries from Sainsbury’s, they slipped past the backs of London streets as if they were part of the city’s subconscious. Mark was at the tiller, tall and bearded; Alexander was inside playing. Angela sat at the window, waving like the Queen.
Cats
They were her familiars, the mogs. Angela did not sent me cards featuring felines, but she made a point (she knew her friends) of sending them to her friend and publisher Carmen Callil, a cat lover who names her pets after loved ones, sometimes to disconcerting effect (is it Angela’s great friend and agent Deborah Rogers who has distemper or Carmen’s border terrier?). Carmen got a card of a puss with evilly bared teeth and one of two cats playing chess. While being berated for her attack on foodies in the London Review of Books, Angela sent a card to Carmen to tell her ‘I seem to have won the James Tait Black prize – or at least half of it.’ (J. G. Ballard got the other half.) The picture showed a cat in tux and bow tie giving his order to a feline waiter: ‘I’ll have the chocolate mouse.’ Angela’s PS explained: ‘Thought I might send this card to Susannah as my reply to the abuse with which I have been heaped in L.R.B.’
Ponce and Female – Female being the mother of Ponce, who lived off his mum – were Angela’s own cats. They had been very present in the house, but spent more time in the garden once Alexander, ‘with his father’s eyes and his mother’s short fuse’, began to crawl around the kitchen. Carmen chose for the cover of Angela’s dramatic works a gorgeously coloured crayon picture by the author, which showed black cats with huge triangular eyes advancing in a gang over what looks like the floor of 107 The Chase.
Her first book, written at the age of six, was called ‘Tom Cat Goes to Market’; her mother kept it for some time, then threw it out. In 1979 she wrote a text for the artist Martin Leman’s Comic and Curious Cats and in 1982 a sex-driven version of Puss in Boots. Towards the end of her life The Sea Cat, a feline tale for children, in particular Alexander, combined the comfort of an ugly-duckling story with the disconcerting image of a moggie who was at home not just in the water but under it. That secret life of cats – both fluffy and feral – intrigued her; she wrote two of her best poems about them. In one of them, ‘Life-Affirming Poem about Small Pregnant White Cat’, the creature is a ‘bulging sack of life’ and a ‘melting snow-cat’; her ‘ermine and double-breasted jacket’ evokes Shirley Temple; inside the ‘slit capsicum’ of her womb, kittens are ‘little furry commas’: it is a poem as bursting as the animal she describes. The other is cooler, with a fine stealthy pace and a clever pun in its tail; she gave it no title:
My cat
Is the snow queen.
This frigid virgin four
Winters’ old crooks
Her paw to wash a face
White
As starlight, twice
&nbs
p; As cold.
She puts back
Her ears like spoons
To listen to the wind
Behind her.
She eats
For breakfast, hearts;
For supper, northern lights.
Splattered
‘All DAMNED!’ Angela signed off a missive from Austin, Texas, where she was working at the university in the mid-eighties. Her card was a photograph of an armadillo, a curved creature picking its dainty way, like an elderly millionairess, through prickly undergrowth; her message, which let the picture float like a tantalising emblem, flashed from close-focus to apocalypse. ‘The armadillo,’ she wrote, ‘is the hedgehog of Texas. You see them splattered over roads. First it snowed; then it rained; then it froze. Now the sun shines. How long will it last? . . . No international news gets through at all; what about the miners? . . . this is Boom Town, U.S.A, fairly discreet money – all aerospace industry. All DAMNED!’
The United States brought out with torrential force her feeling that the capitalist world was going to hell in a handbasket. Not that there was ever any mystery about her political views. For all her magnificent humour, Angela was never frightened of coming on as socialist and solemn. She had less fear of the Brechtian placard than any writer I have met, and no one would have much difficulty in deducing her political views from her fiction; she believed that ‘a narrative is an argument stated in fictional terms’. Still, for most of the time her fiction did not state her subversions but embodied them, not only when she was clearly remaking the female mythology of fairy tale but also when she unpicked the fabric of first-person narration. What she did in Wise Children was fundamental and bold: she put the reins of her story into the hands of a working-class woman who tells it colloquially and with eloquence; she is not patronised – or matronised – by authorial comment. The same cannot be said of more obviously observant Leftist writers, and Angela came in for some stick from some of the sisters for being an Uncle Tom. Discussing ‘real novels’ – the sort in which ‘people drink tea and commit adultery’ – she wrote: ‘If a comic charlady obtrudes upon the action of a real novel, I will fling the novel against the wall amidst a flood of obscenities because the presence of such a character tells me more than I wish to know about the way her creator sees the world.’
A Card From Angela Carter Page 4