Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories

by Angela Carter

  You could almost have believed, not that he was waiting for the person who always fed him to come and feed him again as usual, but that he was pining for Letty herself.

  Then his hind legs began to shudder involuntarily. He so convulsed himself with shuddering that his hind legs jerked off the ground; he danced. He jerked and shuddered, shuddered and jerked, until at last he vomited up a small amount of white liquid. Then he pulled himself to his feet again and lurched back to the windowsill. With a gigantic effort, he dragged himself up.

  Later on, somebody jumped over the wall, more sprightly than I and left a bowl of bread and milk. But the cat ignored that too. Next day, both were still there, untouched.

  The day after that, only the bowl of sour sops, and cherry blossom petals drifting across the vacant windowsill.

  Small sins of omission remind one of the greater sins of omission; at least sins of commission have the excuse of choice, of intention. However:

  May. A blowy, bright-blue, bright-green morning; I go out on the front steps with a shifting plastic sack of garbage and what do I see but the social worker’s red Fiat putter to a halt next door.

  In the hospital they’d henna’d Letty. An octogenarian redhead, my big babushka who contains my forty, my thirty, my twenty, my ten years within her fragile basket of bones, she has returned, not in a humiliating ambulance, but on her own two feet that she sets down more firmly than she did. She has put on a little weight. She has a better colour, not only in her hair but in her cheeks.

  The landlord, foiled.

  Escorted by the social worker, the district nurse, the home help, the abrasive yet not ungentle niece, Letty is escorted down the unswept, grass-grown basement stairs into her own scarcely used front door that someone with a key has remembered to unbolt from inside for her return. Her new cockatoo crest—whoever henna’d her really understood henna—points this way and that way as she makes sure that nothing in the street has changed, even if she can see only large blocks of light and shadow, hear, not the shrieking blackbirds, but only the twitch of the voices in her ear that shout: “Carefully does it, Letty.”

  “I can manage,” she said tetchily.

  The door the policemen battered in closes upon her and her chattering entourage.

  The window of the front room of the cow upstairs slams down, bang.

  And what am I to make of that? I’d set it up so carefully, an enigmatic structure about evanescence and ageing and the mists of time, shadows lengthening, cherry blossom, forgetting, neglect, regret … the sadness, the sadness of it all …

  But. Letty. Letty came home.

  In the corner shop, the cow upstairs, mad as fire: “They should have certified her”; the five grand the landlord promised her so that he could sell the house with vacant possession has blown away on the May wind that disintegrated the dandelion clocks. In Letty’s garden now is the time for fierce yellow buttercups; the cherry blossom is over, no regrets.

  I hope she is too old and too far gone to miss the cat.

  Fat chance.

  I hope she never wonders if the nice warm couple next door thought of feeding him.

  But she has come home to die at her own apparently ample leisure in the comfort and privacy of her basement; she has exercised, has she not, her right to choose, she has turned all this into crazy patchwork.

  Somewhere along my thirtieth year, I left a husband in a bus station in Houston, Texas, a town to which I have never returned, over a quarrel about a peach which, at the time, seemed to sum up the whole question of the rights of individuals within relationships, and, indeed, perhaps it did.

  As you can tell from the colourful scraps of oriental brocade and Turkish homespun I have sewn into this bedcover, I then (call me Ishmael) wandered about for a while and sowed (or sewed) a wild oat or two into this useful domestic article, this product of thrift and imagination, with which I hope to cover myself in my old age to keep my brittle bones warm. (How cold it is in Letty’s basement.)

  But, okay, so I always said the blossom would come back again, but Letty’s return from the clean white grave of the geriatric ward is ridiculous! And, furthermore, when I went out into the garden to pick a few tulips, there he is, on the other side of the brick wall, lolling voluptuously among the creeping buttercups, fat as butter himself—Letty’s been feeding him up.

  “I’m pleased to see you,” I said.

  In a Japanese folk tale it would be the ghost of her cat, rusty and tactile as in life, the poor cat pining itself from death to life again to come to the back door at the sound of her voice. But we are in South London on a spring morning. Lorries fart and splutter along the Wandsworth Road. Capital Radio is braying from an upper window. An old cat, palpable as a second-hand fur coat, drowses among the buttercups.

  We know when we were born but—

  the times of our reprieves are equally random.

  Shake it out and look at it again, the flowers, fruit and bright stain of henna, the Russian dolls, the wrinkling chiffon of the flesh, the old songs, the cat, the woman of eighty; the woman of forty, with dyed hair and most of her own teeth, who is ma semblable, ma soeur.Who now recedes into the deceptive privacy of a genre picture, a needlewoman, a quilt maker, a middle-aged woman sewing patchwork in a city garden, turning her face vigorously against the rocks and trees of the patient wilderness waiting round us.

  Appendix

  AFTERWORD TO FIREWORKS

  I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in. So the size of my room modified what I did inside it and it was the same with the pieces themselves. The limited trajectory of the short narrative concentrates its meaning. Sign and sense can fuse to an extent impossible to achieve among the multiplying ambiguities of an extended narrative. I found that, though the play of surfaces never ceased to fascinate me, I was not so much exploring them as making abstractions from them, I was writing, therefore, tales.

  Though it took me a long time to realise why I liked them, I’d always been fond of Poe, and Hoffman—Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious—mirrors; the externalised self; forsaken castles; haunted forests; forbidden sexual objects. Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.

  The Gothic tradition in which Poe writes grandly ignores the value systems of our institutions; it deals entirely with the profane. Its great themes are incest and cannibalism. Character and events are exaggerated beyond reality, to become symbols, ideas, passions. Its style will tend to be ornate, unnatural—and thus operate against the perennial human desire to believe the word as fact. Its only humour is black humour. It retains a singular moral function—that of provoking unease.

  The tale has relations with subliterary forms of pornography, ballad and dream, and it has not been dealt with kindly by literati. And is it any wonder? Let us keep the unconscious in a suitcase, as Pere Ubu did with his conscience, and flush it down the lavatory when it gets too troublesome.

  So I worked on tales. I was living in Japan; I came back to England in 1972. I found myself in a new country. It was like waking up, it was a rude awakening. We live in Gothic times. Now, to understand and to interpret is the main thing; but my method of investigation is changing. These stories were written between 1970 and 1973 and are arranged in chronological order, as they were written. There is a small tribute to Defoe, father of the bourgeois novel in England, inserted in the story “Master”.

  First Publications

  “The Man Who Loved a Double Bass” first appeared in Storyteller Contest, July 1962. “A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home” was first published in Nonesuch
, in Autumn 1965 and “A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)” was also published in Nonesuch, in Summer/Autumn 1966.

  “A Souvenir of Japan”, “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter”, “The Loves of Lady Purple”, “The Smile of Winter”, “Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest”, “Flesh and the Mirror”, “Master”, “Reflections” and “Elegy for a Freelance”, written between 1970 and 1973, were all originally published in Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (Quartet Books, 1974).

  “The Bloody Chamber” and “The Tiger’s Bride” first appeared in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (Victor Gollancz, 1979). “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” was originally published in British Vogue , “Puss-in-Boots” appeared in the anthology The Straw and the Gold, edited by Emma Tennant (Pierrot Books, 1979). “The Erl-King” appeared in Bananas (October, 1977), “The Snow Child” was broadcast on the BBC Radio Four programme Not Now, I’m Listening. “The Lady of the House of Love” was first published in The Iowa Review (Summer/Autumn 1975), “The Werewolf” in South-West Arts Review (No 2, October, 1977), “The Company of Wolves” in Bananas (April, 1977) and “Wolf-Alice” in Stand (Winter, 1978, vol. 2, No 2).

  “Black Venus” first appeared in Next Editions in 1980, “The Kiss” was originally published in Harper’s and Queen, in 1977, “Our Lady of the Massacre” appeared in The Saturday Night Reader as “Captured by the Red Man” in 1979. “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” was published in Interzone in 1982, as was “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. “Peter and the Wolf” is from Firebird 1, 1982. A version of “The Kitchen Child” was published in Vogue, 1979, and “The Fall River Axe Murder” originally appeared in The London Review of Books in 1981 under the title “Mis-en-Scene for Parricide”.

  A version of “Lizzie’s Tiger” was first published in Cosmopolitan in September 1981, and broadcast on Radio Three. “John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” originally appeared in Granta 25, Autumn, 1988. “Gun for the Devil” was written as a draft for a screenplay and published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Chatto & Windus, 1993). “The Merchant of Shadows” was published in the London Review of Books in October 1989. “Alice in Prague or The Curious Room” appeared in Spell, [Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature], (vol 5, 1990) and “The Ghost Ships” was first published in American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (Chatto & Windus, 1993). “In Pantoland” was originally published in the Guardian in December 1991. “Ashputtle or The Mother’s Ghost” was first published in the Virago Book of Ghost Stories (Virago, 1987), and a shorter version was published in Soho Square. A version of “Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene” originally appeared in FMR Magazine in February 1992.

  “The Snow Pavilion” is published here for the first time. “The Scarlet House” was originally published in A Book of Contemporary Nightmares (Michael Joseph, 1977) and “The Quilt Maker” was published in Sex and Sensibility: Stories by Contemporary Women Writers from Nine Countries (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1981).

  About the Author

  Angela Carter was born in 1940. When she published her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1966, she was immediately recognized as one of Britain’s most original writers. Eight other novels followed: The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971), The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), The Passion of New Eve (1977), Nights at the Circus (1984, James Tail Black Memorial Prize), and Wise Children (1991). Angela Carter also published three collections of short stories—The Bloody Chamber (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award), Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1984), and Saints and Strangers (1985, published in the U.K. as Black Venus)— a book of essays called The Sadeian Woman, two collections of journalism, and a volume of radio plays. She translated the fairy stories of Charles Perrault and edited collections of fairy and folk tales as well as Wayward Girls & Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986). She also wrote the screenplay for the 1984 film The Company of Wolves, based on her short story. A fourth collection of stories was published in the U.K. in 1993 as American Ghosts and Old World Wonders. Most of Angela Carter’s fiction is available in the U.S. from Penguin.

  From 1976 though 1978 Angela Carter was Arts Council of Great Britain Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University, and from 1980 through 1981 she was visiting professor in the Writing Program at Brown University. She traveled and taught widely in the U.S. and Australia but lived in London. Angela Carter died in February, 1992.

  Scan Notes, v4.0: I thought I had a good vocabulary until I tried to proof this book. It took me about three times as long to proof in comparison to any other I have done. Luckily, the OCRd text was one of the most accurate I have seen. She uses alot of non-traditional punctuation, so even if something looks incorrect, please check the DT. The only difference between the DT and this file is that I changed the quotes from ‘British Style’ to “American Style”.

  Conversion Notes: Converted and formatted by antimist on 28/08/14 with reference to the scan of the current book made available by pharmakate on ThePirateBay. The Proofread text comes from the v4.0 RTF, proofread by therealcaterpillar for alt.binaries.e-book. The original Scan Notes, have been retained. Even though it was a v4.0, a few mistakes have been found and corrected. The American style quotes have been retained, from the Original Proofread Text. I have the right to believe that no text has been removed due to conversion to ePUB.