In her correspondence – as in her journalism – she shot straight: no metaphors, no obliquity and much literal reproduction of conversations. There was also tremendous bileful opinion: a meek inquiry about the progress of a review would be met with vivid, sometimes violent political paragraphs.
From Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980, Angela reported: ‘Most people take it for granted Reagan will get in.’ I thought at the time that she must have got this wrong, or gone loopy. ‘Everybody tells me not to go out after dark; the Mayor of Providence is [accused of having] raped a woman at gunpoint, admittedly some years ago in another town.’
A little later in the year she used her political disgust as one of her excuses for failing to file some copy: ‘I was overcome with wild, weary anger at the spectacle of the criminals, psychotics & retards whom Reagan has appointed to man the ship of the States & could not lend my mind to Sloane Rangers. No, truly. I’ve been contemplating Last Things in the frozen solitude of the New England winter & I couldn’t think of anything insightful to say about Ray Gosling & the other bloke except that they are really rather alike, which isn’t a very interesting thing to say, since the same culture produced them.’
In Providence she mused: ‘I briefly contemplated joining the Communist Party on my return to the U.K. Then I thought, while I was here, I’d join the American C.P. & see if they tried to extradite me. Then I fell into a state of sullen & terrified apathy. (I may join the I.M.G., if this goes on.)’ She felt her seething made her foreign. In Providence, ‘ordinary people are so decent & kind – &, as for blacks, they’ve cut their own throats by being decent & kind. One of my students gave me a story in which the narrator goes to London & takes a taxi in from Heathrow & the taxi-driver says to him: “That’ll be fifteen bleedin’ quid, you miserable wanker.” How did this upper-class Eastern seaboard American child capture the exact speech rhythms of the British working class? It made me weep with nostalgia for the sheer rudeness – the vile, obscene, funny rudeness – of everyday life at home. Certainly Europeans tolerate & probably actively enjoy a degree of verbal abuse amongst themselves that would be unimagineable here. Here, physical violence is tolerated. The crime rates would go right down, I think, if Americans stopped saying: “Have a nice day,” to one another. At least it would stop me from contemplating violence; when people in shops & so on order me to have a nice day in this authoritarian way, I want to kill, kill, kill. When I mutter “sod off” under my breath, they think it is a Russian Orthodox benediction.’
Bum
The bum arrived in the post over twenty years ago. Angela always liked a bit of rude. Bawdy – as in pantomime, or the Wife of Bath – was a kind of rude she particularly favoured. In her twenties, and a lover of the Scots Chaucerians, she produced a salty version of William Dunbar’s ‘Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’:
‘I’m tied to a shadow, a worm, a blind old man so shagged out he can’t do anything but talk. He’s nothing but a bagfull of snot.
He can’t even keep his trousers clean. He’s always
Scratching himself, scratching everywhere,
No shame.
It’s disgusting.
I could burst into tears when he kisses me.
His five o’clock shadow bristles like pig-hide (but it’s
The only thing about him that can stand up to attention, if you get my meaning).
She would also go along with kitsch naughtiness, as in the card sent from Le Beausset in the Var, franked 4 August 1990. At first glance they look like rocks, two substantial mounds set in a purpling blue sea. But the drops of water on the slopes are too pearly, and the slopes themselves too luxuriantly yielding to be stone. They are another of Angela’s now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trompe-l’œil, parts of a semi-submerged body, jauntily captioned in pink lettering: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’on est bien dans l’eau! . . .’ Angela’s message is simply: ‘lots of love, Angie, Mark & Alex. XXX’
The card was sent in the last year of good health, or, rather, the last year in which she was not shadowed by the certainty of being ill. Twelve months later, when that shadow hovered around everything, Carmen invited Angela, Mark, Alexander and me to stay with her in the South of France. It was hot; Alex played in the swimming pool; a bat got into the room where Mark and Angela were sleeping, and scared her; Angela drew with her bright crayons. Two photographs, taken during a supper by the side of the Canal du Midi, now seem charged, by a trick of the light, with a threatening intensity: the faces around the table swim out of an almost pitch-black background. Alex, looking like a star, is throwing out a wide and radiant beam; Angela – in specs and a black dress, her hair catching the light like a beacon – is smiling gently; Mark looks troubled. One afternoon during our stay we started to talk about exploring the region at different times of the year. Carmen and I said we’d like to come back in the spring; Angela joined in enthusiastically. But, sitting behind her, Mark slowly shook his head.
For much of those last two years, when I saw Angela, her vitality still held. She was forthright, not elegiac; she cursed rather than complained; her feminism and socialism did not waver. Speaking up for sex rather than romance was a thread in this vitality. ‘Say what you like about Catholicism,’ she threw out, ‘they do think married couples ought to have sex.’ She held it against Britain and Protestantism that one idea of a happy marriage could be (she slipped in a reference to Virginia and Leonard Woolf) a chaste liaison. And she despised the idea that ‘now that women have got their men in the kitchen, doing the washing-up, making meals, now they’ve got them in the nursery changing nappies, they don’t like them any more . . . they can’t get off on them.’ Her own view was altogether different: ‘I find nothing more erotic than the spectacle of a man up to his elbows in the sink.’
Twin Peaks
Conjoined cherubs dimpled on the invitation to the Wise Children party on 12 June 1991. They were the only picture on the card; in those days, publishing invitations were plain affairs. The putti were Chatto’s colophon, but they could have been a sly reference to the heroines of Angela’s book. She had based Nora and Dora Chance on the Dolly Sisters. The Hungarian-born twins were famous for their vaudeville dancing acts (they appeared on stage as candied fruit and, with a troupe of performing dogs, as ‘The Dollies with their Collies’), their gambling, and their lovers: one of them had Gordon Selfridge in thrall, a fact on which Angela, whose mother had worked as a cashier in Selfridges, was particularly keen.
Writing about their rambunctious days was one way of restoring the life of Angela’s aunt Kit. The pre-war London of Wise Children, ‘a city of casual glamour, off-hand, rather masculine’, had been enjoyed by Angela’s mother, ‘a Socialist who liked a nice frock’, but it had made Kit miserable. When she failed her exams, her parents thought she might ‘go on the Halls’ but she was pushed by a prim headmistress into a job as a ‘clerkess’ in Victoria Street. In the war she took to wandering the streets during the blackout: she ‘adored seeing those flying bombs’. She died in Tooting Mental Hospital. Wise Children showed the giddy time she might have had. It did so by putting her into a theatrical dynasty, which Angela told me she had based on the Redgrave family.
‘It’s nearly killed me,’ she said of Wise Children. ‘It’s taken me ages to do this book. I had this deep conviction that when I’d finished something awful would happen.’ Yet, ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ proclaims Dora Chance, and the book was published with much hoofing delight. Chatto made posters of the Dollies with plumes on their heads and stiff gauze skirts sprouting from their waists. They also put together a tape. The music on it expressed the heart of the book and much of its author: ‘Brush up your Shakespeare’ from Kiss Me Kate, Ivor Novello’s ‘Rose of England’, ‘Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby’, Kathleen Ferrier singing ‘Che Faro’, ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby’, ‘The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin’, Fred Astaire crooning ‘Let’s Face the Music and Dance’. At the party in
Carmen’s Ladbroke Grove house, Angela sat on the sofa with Mark at her side and received a stream of guests. Yes, she said, unusually fulsome, when I said she must feel pleased by the packed room and the plaudits, ‘I feel loved.’ Chatto’s Jonathan Burnham played the piano. Francis Wyndham sang ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’. The hostess ended the musical turns with ‘The Red Flag’.
Wise Children was written in what Angela regarded as an era of London fiction. Martin Amis had published London Fields three years earlier; Michael Moorcock’s Mother London had appeared in 1988; Iain Sinclair was beginning to expand his mystic sociology and East End explorations, and Angela reviewed Downriver in the London Review of Books. The city was, she thought, being biographised just as it was being irrevocably altered, torn down and its history wiped out. The Lord Morrison pub in Lambeth had had the Low cartoon of London taken off its sign and been renamed Stockers Wine Bar; the Ernest Bevin School in Tooting might have its name changed ‘maybe not to Michael Heseltine but to Twin Peaks or Four Seasons’. All wrong, this, she thought. At the very least, ‘In two hundred years’ time people would have said, “Who is this fucker Morrison?”, like one says, “Who is the Duke of Clarence?”’ Still, I think she would have been pleased that when flats and a playground were built on a derelict patch of land in Brixton five years ago, the spot was given a new name: Angela Carter Close.
Ritzy
‘Oh,’ she said to Corinna Sargood on the phone, soon after the news of her illness had broken, ‘A man’s coming to the door.’ Pause. ‘It’s all right. I’ll let him in. He hasn’t got a scythe.’ In the Brompton Hospital a month or so before she died, she worked on the manuscript of the second Virago Book of Fairy Tales. She had gathered these stories from all over the place – from Norway and Burma and Palestine and Mordvinia – and grouped them under headings which included ‘Strong Minds and Low Cunning’ and ‘Up to Something – Black Arts and Dirty Tricks’. ‘I’m just finishing this off for the girls,’ she explained, with a nod at the manuscript on her bed. Back at home, with Mark at the front door warding off people who took it into their heads to drop in, she entertained. I remember her, in October 1991, angry because the Labour Party had rung her on the day she came out of hospital to badger her about a fund-raising dinner; she had recently been asked by the Evening Standard why she supported Labour: ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the Labour Party, it’s like an old sofa, you go on sitting on it even if it is Kinnock-stained.’ She was thin, then, and wore a red ribbon wound around her head and tied in a bow. While Mark cooked pasta, Alexander read a children’s encyclopaedia that had been sent by the Guardian. Angela claimed the literary editor had taken a poll of reviewers and that she had come out as ‘the most deserving’; she enjoyed explaining that a first copy had been sent with ‘£100 worth of books’ stamped on the parcel, and had been swiped.
In the midst of her treatment, she concocted a riposte to the Booker, which expressed her comic contempt for much of the fiction flying around the place. Once more missing from the shortlist for the prize, she had, she noted, failed to get the sympathy vote. So she would write a long novel featuring a philosophy don, his mistress and time travelling. It would be called ‘The Owl of Minerva’ – and she knew it would win.
For what turned out to be Salman Rushdie’s last visit, Angela insisted not only on getting up but dressing up, serving tea with an almost Japanese formality, laying out a tea service (perhaps in memory of the rosebud set her mother so cherished) and biscuits. It was one of her gifts to deal in a sort of double irony, to send up a daintiness of manner and yet to honour it at the same time. As she poured, she cursed her illness but took satisfaction from the fact that just before her diagnosis she’d taken out a whopping insurance policy; she ‘thought it very funny’, Rushdie said, ‘that the insurance company were screwed’.
The last time I saw her, in January 1992, she was in bed, with light belting in from the windows and the smell of incense, given her by her next-door neighbour, filling the room. We had Tuscan bean soup. She wanted news of parties and literary gossip. She was on steroids and morphine; her face looked rosy and round and smooth. The ribbon in her hair this time was pink, and on the cassette machine at her side she played a tape of Blossom Dearie.
She died on Sunday 16 February. She had had some terrible moments of distress – she told Mark that she had been invaded by aliens – but a large part of her illness had been peaceful, and she had taken command of the organisation of her funeral, leaving precise instructions about who was to be there, what music should be played and what might be read.
On 19 February, at Putney Vale Crematorium, Angela’s brother Hugh played the organ: ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ at the beginning and ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’ at the end. We sang the Twenty-Third Psalm (‘Crimond’). Carmen Callil spoke about her friend. Salman Rushdie read Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘On a Drop of Dew’. Alexander carried a lily and a red rose to put on his mother’s coffin.
Coming out of the chapel into the hectic luxuriance of the crematorium grounds, it was as if Birnam Wood had come to Putney Vale. The surrounding trees rearranged themselves. They shifted and they sprouted feet. They marched and dispelled, shaking themselves free of foliage. They changed into Special Branch men, who were moving forward to enclose the author of Midnight’s Children, in hiding because of the fatwa imposed on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini three years earlier. The previous year, when Angela was working on the strongly secular television documentary The Holy Family Album, Rushdie had offered her advice on how to deal with blasphemy. ‘I don’t think,’ she had gleefully retorted, ‘I need any help from you.’
The memorial service, held some five weeks later, was as expansive, inclusive and gaudy as the funeral had been small, plain and sober. Corinna Sargood created a shocking-pink invitation. Not exactly a postcard, but a card certainly, covered in curling black drawings. This was a miniature work of art, by a friend who had been in tune with Angela since they had met in a Bristol shop when they were in their twenties. The card folded over on itself from both ends, its outside flaps were drawn with swagged curtains, gathered at their tops in rosettes, and it opened like a small theatrical event onto its invitation. Two Ionian pillars, on either side of which hovered a wheeling owl and a parrot, contained an onstage menagerie; in front of a row of footlights, on bare boards, were a giraffe and a peacock, a dive-bombing swallow and a leering goose. A pair of workmen’s boots were climbing a ladder; a paintbrush was waving; there was a spade, a bucket, a crescent moon, a shooting star and a hand holding out from the wings a glass of bubbling-over champagne.
The invitation was to celebrate Angela’s life and works at the Ritzy cinema in Brixton at 11 a.m. on Sunday 29 March. The Granada Tooting had been the obvious choice for the event – which Angela would surely not have wanted called a service, or a memorial – but that cinema had become a bingo hall. It was Mark who came up with the idea of the Ritzy. It was a homage to Angela’s love of the flicks; the hoofing heroines of her last novel would have felt at home there; it was splendid but battered, and had nothing super or American about it; it was in south London, where she had made her home.
The morning was based on Desert Island Discs. Angela had been asked to go on the programme towards the end of her life: she had chosen her eight records, the book she would take and her luxury, but she was never recorded. She claimed that Radio 4 had decided to bring forward the transmission of the Prime Minister John Major’s programme and put off the date of her recording; she was then too ill to get to a studio.
At a quarter to ten on 29 March a front-of-house man was doing his best to sweep up the rubbish between the seats at the Ritzy, while keeping an eye on his toddler daughter who staggered around with a dummy in her mouth. A collection for the Brompton Hospital raised over six hundred pounds; Alexander held out a bucket.
Michael Berkeley, composer, broadcaster and friend, was the compère in the crammed and dusty place. He sat on a podium with a cassette machine in front
of a folding screen, which Corinna had painted with tropical verdure. He announced the tapes and summoned up the speakers: people from different parts and times of Angela’s life stood in for her voice. Carmen, wearing her koala bear jumper (‘for Angie’), spoke, as she had at the funeral. Rebecca Howard talked; so did Caryl Phillips. Tariq Ali fired off about the miners’ strike and made Salman Rushdie cross when he called the Ritzy a fleapit. Lorna Sage arrived just before the morning kicked off: she was pale, slightly stooped and breathless. She, too, was to die in her fifties, but her long blonde hair streamed down as if she were a nineteen-year-old.
A Card From Angela Carter Page 5