London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  What hit me, when I put the embellished books back on the shelf – Carter tucked in, comfortably, between Djuna Barnes and L.-F. Céline – was the sequence of image changes in the author photos. Author as performer. As starlet in a cinema of self. A graphic autobiography above a growing list of works and awards.

  Shadow Dance: profile in long shot. Rocking chair like Russian sledge. And the monster cat I mistook for a baby. Carter’s expression is wary. Everything behind her is on the tilt. As if the house were caught at the start of an earthquake. With the white wall, the chair, the picture, the girl, the reference to a still from Jean-Luc Godard is evident.

  Some writers let the same portrait run for decades. Others work their way up to a session with Jerry Bauer. Carter re-presents herself every time: new book, new woman. The second novel, The Magic Toyshop (1967), has a severe, turtleneck, close-cropped look. Dark helmet of Sorbonne hair and the passport strain of trying not to blink. Asked about herself, Carter says, ‘I’m fond of cats.’

  Can it be the same woman on the back of Several Perceptions (1968)? Left profile, big Wyndham Lewis hat, spectacles. Bloomsbury fierce. Watch out, boys.

  Heroes & Villains (1969). Thinner face. Wire specs. Combat jacket with epaulettes. Feminist communard. By way of Portobello Market. Maoist-period Godard.

  Love (1971). Womanly. Mock formal. Studio. Carter describes this novel ‘as a tragedy of contemporary manners’.

  And so on to Fay Godwin (if it’s not Jerry Bauer, it’s Fay). The Bloody Chamber (1979). The real person – performed – at last. Generous lips, smiling. A garden. A captured moment in a conversation between two women.

  For Nights at the Circus (1984), Carter is again mid-sentence, stopped in the mode of hesitation Emma Tennant describes. Serious comedy specs and a conspiratorial smile. Hair straight and running free.

  In the portrait for Wise Children (1991), the hair is now grey. This is the last novel. Later publications, Expletives Deleted (1992) and the rest, are posthumous. The Tara Heinemann author photo runs on. For Burning Your Boats (1995) there is a smiling, hurt-eyed variant with copious swathes of hair.

  I met Carter, with the opportunity for a different kind of conversation, at a party for the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1988. She was on an upper level, among excited courtiers and ten-percenters, a silver-maned Gloriana. Beryl Bainbridge, in a little black dress, smoked to something less than essence, clinked on the next perch. So brittle you could flick her with your nail and she would ring like Waterford crystal. They were as necessary to the occasion as the Chance sisters in Wise Children. No literary gathering would be complete without one or both.

  Angela made a gracious descent into the pit. She really did feel like the godmother for a better class of subversive writing. Through her late novels, I saw our city as a beautiful monster, a mythical being as deformed, heavy-bodied, flighty, vulnerable as her swan-winged aerialiste Fevvers. Carter wrote of Michael Moorcock’s imagination as ‘a vast, uncorseted, sentimental, comic, elegiac salmagundy … so deeply within a certain tradition of English writing, indeed, of English popular culture, that it feels foreign’. She could have been describing herself, books like Nights at the Circus and Wise Children. Moorcock and Carter, South Londoners both, and world-travellers too, ran the newsreel of history back to music hall, through war traumas and the tricks and feints of bureaucrats and bullies. There was an absolute respect for working lives, an autodidactic love of Shakespeare and the English classics, with no pious whispers in the pews or bowing to established dogma.

  I was walking with Moorcock one time when we came, from the north, unexpectedly, mid-conversation, upon Westminster Bridge. He froze. I had a car parked on the other side in Lambeth. I’d have to fetch it and return to pick him up. He would not cross the Thames; it was a kind of death. And yet he writes with tender exasperation of his childhood in Norbury. Maybe that’s it: the memory-place should remain fixed. The attitude to the great sprawl of the metropolis is verging on Oedipal: Mother London for Moorcock and Wise Children for Carter. ‘Nothing could be more magical than the real fabric of the city,’ says Carter, defending Moorcock’s brand of myth-making. ‘He takes you on a grand tour of the forgotten, neglected parts of London, as far as Mitcham in the South, but always coming back to W11.’

  Angela had no transpontine qualms. She made the required visits to W11, but she lived and worked in Clapham. She died too soon, much too soon, to partake of the imposed psychogeography of the Overground. It might have inspired new fictions, stories of Honour Oak Park, Shadwell, Kensal Rise. Her game old ladies, the twin Brixton troopers from Wise Children, made play with trams and buses and taxis. On special moonlit nights, they walked. Transport systems incubate different forms of writing: the babble of double-deckers shunting to hospitals, or late-night suburbs, with chemical aggravation. And sudden Jacobean assaults. All the action played out in real time on monitor screens like gallery installations. Trains incline to reverie, Keiller meditations on housing and decaying industrial stock. The bass telltale throb of a cab pricks sexual fantasy, pre- or post-coital, a sealed-off interlude of unearned respite, under the eyes of the voyeur, with his running commentary, as he watches you in the driving mirror.

  A taste of what Carter might have brought to the poetry of London Overground can be got from Nights at the Circus. Her changeling superstar, Fevvers, buys ‘one of those nice big houses off Lavender Hill’ for the family. Escaping from a sacrificial encounter with a hellfire occultist, and still naked, she makes her way home from the country. ‘Then I went from covert to covert, always concealing myself, until I came to the railway line and borrowed a ride off a load of freight … for I needed the railway to guide me back to London. To my delight, the train soon steamed through Clapham Junction and I nipped out just by Battersea Park, to make my way with all speed through the empty dark up the Queenstown Road ducking behind the privet hedges as I went until I got at last happily home.’

  To The Chase. To the home where stories are cooked. To the kitchen table, and the kites and plates and retrieved junkshop bits, and photographs. Angela should have, but doesn’t need, visible wings. She already possessed the spirit, the energy. The words, when she’s on a run, take flight. It’s like the technique William Burroughs describes of trying to hit the shutter of a camera at the instant that allows you to photograph the future. You’re not freezing anything. You are anticipating a preordained set of circumstances. Preordained, pre-written: found footage of possession.

  As I lift my mug at the Clapham kitchen table, in that basement of chosen objects, it strikes me that the room is an extension of all the fabulous Carter sets, the kitchens in her books. And now, years later, going back on my incomplete memory-film of that afternoon when I took tea in her house, I realize that the Wandsworth Road junkshop where Andrew Kötting picked up his Bruce Chatwin draught excluder belongs with the junkshops of Carter’s novels. Metaphors are promiscuous. They leak and spill. There is no way we can walk around the collar of the Overground without animating latent fictions, hitting invisible tripwires, downloading poems we have never read.

  It was perceptive, and ahead of the game, dowsing the state of early Thatcherite London, the time of the strong woman, to call a novel Nights at the Circus. The Thames riverbank would, in a few years, become a circus, with Ferris wheel, chair-lift rides, millennial (discon)tent on the East Greenwich swamps, and a shockheaded mayor as public clown, swinging from wires or falling off a trick bicycle.

  After the Guardian Prize affair, the luminaries of the publishing world, the nicotine ghosts, Russian cultural attaché, William Golding, honourable Grub Street irregulars, Angela invited me down to Clapham to buy a few books. That was still my trade, but I was beginning to venture in fiction.

  We talked. Even Carter, with her status assured, entrained, at regular intervals, to a job in the creative-writing factory in Norwich. She shouldered, I feel sure, more of the grind than was strictly necessary. Her attitude was playful and undeceived about the ultimate
value of such exercises: the real writers would write whatever. She gave value for money, listening, encouraging, demonstrating, distributing proper levels of cynicism.

  She took off with her man, whenever they could, to a narrowboat. I think she said it was parked in Camden, somewhere near London Zoo. Did she lie in her tight bed listening to the lions and the shrieking birds?

  Carter went upstairs to the reserve collection and brought down a bunch of pristine copies of her unsold but desirable stock. It took me time to appreciate that items highly prized by collectors, who had few dealings with the everyday world, meant nothing to the publishing industry. Often a single fanatic could sustain a reputation and keep prices buoyant, as traders scramble to buy from each other, all the way up the food chain. Along with the bag of Hart-Davis titles, Love and The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Carter threw in some early Ian McEwen items and a couple of others from the UEA hothouse. She was never, she implied, going to return to those pages. A boy on the make, McEwen didn’t need her blessing. Which is just as it should be.

  Then a Norwich friend, the academic and fellow writer Lorna Sage, arrived. The kitchen conference was unbalanced around the gossip they wanted and the single empty chair. I thought of a phrase of Carter’s I’d read in one of the late books: ‘the fourth guest at the table’. The absence, the Banquo space that is cousin to Eliot’s ‘third who always walks beside you’. Mortality. Shadow dance. ‘Those who sit in the style of contentment, meaning / Death.’

  For my transition, like a slow fade never fully accomplished, from bookdealer to author, Angela Carter was the white witch, invaluable in her support. Providing quotations for dustwrappers. Talking to editors. Writing a substantial piece for the London Review of Books on Downriver. It launched me by bringing a fresh eye to territory then unfamiliar to most of the scattered literary and academic community (those who had not yet bought into Hackney, Bethnal Green, Limehouse, Leytonstone). The essay starts with an ascent from the Underworld, Eurydice in Whitechapel. ‘This reviewer is a South Londoner, herself. When I cross the river, the sword that divides me from pleasure and money, I go North. That is, I take the Northern Line “up West”, as we say: that is, to the West End. My London consists of all the stations on the Northern Line, but don’t think I scare easily … Nothing between Morden and Camden Town holds terror for me.’

  Carter, like my earlier film-student self in Brixton, functioned along the black vine of the Underground system, the Northern Line – which suffered from one drawback: fall asleep and you are in High Barnet or Edgware, one of those remote places now supplied by Tesco and Waitrose vans, allowing commuters to order online and never have to venture into a supermarket again. Shopping as a travel accessory.

  ‘To enter, Orpheus-like,’ Carter writes at the end of her first novel, ‘the shadowed regions of death.’ To enter Whitechapel, with its dark history, its toughness, as she comes up out of the tube at Aldgate East on one of her expeditions to Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley. The bookshop is closed. ‘I felt quite the country bumpkin, slow-moving, slow-witted, come in from the pastoral world of Clapham Common, Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec … It was an older London, by far, than mine … I smelled danger … I was scared shitless the first time I went to the East End.’

  London Overground, transporting Clapham bumpkins to Whitechapel, Shoreditch hipsters to Denmark Hill, jobbing Willesden actors to Wapping locations, undoes post-historic dread: ‘the intangible difference in the air of places where there has been intense suffering’, as Carter qualifies it, quoting Patrick White. The railway smoothes history into heritage, neutralizing the venom. Every halt absorbs the last, until the necklace achieves a uniform, dull sheen. Faked pearls on a ginger string.

  I was invited by the people at the LRB for a lunch to celebrate the publication of Angela Carter’s piece on Downriver, which was that issue’s cover story. One of the chapters in Downriver is called ‘Living in Restaurants’. It was the end of that era, the munching with editors, the scheming with agents, the wild three-bottle promises of publicists, the kiss-off for some television commission. This gathering, four at the table, in a close-packed Italian place, Trattoria Bardigiana, happened alongside Russell Square Tube Station on 28 February 1991. I know that because Angela inscribed my first edition of The Magic Toyshop. At the end of the meal. A slip in her dating of the year gave it a troubling numerology: 19111. Add up the digits, unlucky thirteen.

  ‘In Britain an enlightened interest in food has always been the mark of the kind of person who uses turns of phrase such as “an enlightened interest in food” … An enthusiasm for the table, the grape, and the stove itself is a characteristic of the deviant sub-section of the British bourgeoisie that has always gone in for the arts,’ Carter wrote, in a review that provoked a furious reaction from native piggies. ‘Many a serious scholar would consider the reading and creation of fiction a frivolous pastime,’ one of them harrumphed.

  I wonder if John Lanchester was listening. Before he took an enlightened interest in money markets and the state-of-the-nation London novel, Lanchester enjoyed a great success with The Debt to Pleasure. A portrait of a person with the satirical name of Tarquin Winot who progresses quietly around France offering up thoughts on the cuisine, while revealing himself, incrementally, as a monster, a Wilkie Collins villain. Lanchester went on to write foodie pieces for Esquire. Back in 1991, he worked as an editor for the LRB.

  It’s likely that all the group at the trattoria table wrote about food, cooking, ethnic experiments; about analysing and describing the stuff they put in their mouths, as they did it, pre-digestion. Restaurant as theatre: a period sidebar, along with creative writing, to the freelance life. Nobody has a divine right to indulgence for inflicting contrived fantasies on the public. But somebody has to produce the necessary chaff for academic institutions to winnow: issues, big themes, novel topographies.

  The stuff on the plate was fine. London lunchtime-speed service, with tomatoes and curly pasta, as you’d expect, and rich red wine. Did T. S. Eliot pop out from the office around the corner for a morsel of fish? Or did he snap a cream cracker at his desk? If he did not dine, solemnly, at the club. With bishops and bankers. And poets touching him for an advance on their way to Fitzrovia.

  I was early, so I had time to think about this. And about the whole late-Bloomsbury/publishing/Hawksmoor church/university nexus. I thought about William Burroughs in his strange, submerged years of London exile, checking out mummies, Mayan glyphs and death cultures in the British Museum. I thought about the film Deathline (aka Raw Meat), in which plague-infested cannibals emerge from the tunnels beneath Russell Square to snack on unlucky Tube passengers.

  This was not a topic of interest for Susannah Clapp, Carter’s editor at the LRB, and another former Bristol student. She was next to arrive. She told me that she was working – the project took many years – on a biography of Bruce Chatwin, a slippery subject.

  Angela was the last, a flurry of bags, scarf, hair, bus, bad connections from distant Clapham. But she was the star of the show, the Fevvers figure, settling her invisible wings, amused by everything, talking in eloquent bursts and ripples: the representative of what this literary, serious-fun, periodical-producing coterie should be. Head girl.

  I hadn’t yet adjusted to the idea that somebody would let me publish a book and pay for it. It felt as if I’d nipped out from one of the Bloomsbury hotel book fairs, for a drink and a sandwich, and stumbled on a table of potential signatures. But, as Angela talked, that new identity settled. It was just a job, like any other. The city, London, was the engine. You could feel the beat of it in the simple exchanges of this restaurant, in the tunnels under us. In the old churches and temples of cultural plunder. Writers writing about writers. Walkers colliding and swerving, drawn by the gravity of power in the fossil-crusted stones.

  Memory Lane is a dead end … Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people … Shortly after this lunch, I heard that Angela Carter was ill, lung cancer. It fe
lt completely wrong. Even the news of it was a physical shock. Recognition had arrived, late, and the work was in flood. The last novel, Wise Virgins, lived out, so convincingly, in every creak and jolt, in voice and gesture and bloody-mindedness, the old age in an old city that Angela was never to enjoy. A lovely book that should have flounced off with the Booker. Instead, what is remembered from one of those ceremonies is the episode when the telegenic person who used to be Selina Scott asks Carter who she is and what she does. Which is not so much a criticism of Scott, caught up in action for which she is ill-prepared, but of the notion that prizes, the winning and losing, are a spectator sport fit for an audience who have no intention of reading the books.

  For a few months Carter crossed the river to the Royal Brompton Hospital for treatment. She died in February 1992. Lorna Sage wrote the Guardian obituary, telling us how ‘Angela somehow understood, not just theoretically but sensuously and imaginatively, that we were living with constructs of ourselves, neither false nor true but mythical and alterable.’ And she was right about that. As those books live and prove. They inform and inspire our city.

  Clapham Junction to Imperial Wharf

  At Clapham Junction, we came through an unconvinced retail tunnel, lacking that whiff of open-table stalls, and out into damp air with a promise of river. Transitional malls, such as the shopping centre at Dalston Junction, work a compromise between indoor market and overlit generic shop. Low-paid security guards confirm the impression that the managers and promoters regard all through traffic as potential shoplifters. The smell is: badly cured leather, popcorn varnish, tired feet, acid rain steaming from disnatured wool. The threatened open-air market at Ridley Road is dizzy with forced fruit, glossy bags, meat and fish dicing with food inspectors: it’s real, it’s loud, it works.