A Card From Angela Carter

by Susannah Clapp

  Piping, soft, with clipped vowels, at times Angela sounded like a parody of girlish gentility. At other times she skidded into casual south London. You never knew exactly where you were. She was impossible to second-guess. She was a great curser, and took pride in this: ‘I am known in my circle as notoriously foul-mouthed.’ Yet she was also byzantinely courteous: her most full-blooded protests would often be heralded by an icily disarming ‘forgive me’, accompanied by a salaam and a chuckle. She surrounded her trenchancies with long pauses, wheezes of silent laughter, verbal flutters. She slithered into some of her sharpest remarks through a series of hesitancies that were a world away from diffidence. What seemed to be an obstruction in her speech could become a weapon. I remember her on a television books panel that had been reverencing D. H. Lawrence. She made as if to speak and then unleashed an extremely long, goose-pimpling pause, the sort of silence that is usually cut from a broadcast. Suddenly she let rip: ‘I’ve always thought that Gudrun was, well, the vasectomy queen of the north.’ From the stunned response, you might have thought one of those Hungarian dolls had belched or breathed flame.

  Carnival

  From St Louis in the late eighties Angela sent a card that flew the flag for her writing. Bill Owens’ celebrated photograph of the 1972 Good Times Parade in Pleasanton California is gaudy, comical and at first glance hard to make out. It is a non-posh, popular display – but what exactly is it showing?

  In the foreground of the black-and-white picture are two bare-chested middle-aged men, one wearing specs and the other shades. They are flabby and they are grinning. They look a bit proud and a bit sheepish. They are half in and half out of costume, partly conventional, partly flamboyant. Under their chubby nipples they have painted clown faces; on either side of their paunches are false arms, clad in jackets and white gloves, which almost scrape the ground. They are, in effect, one and a half times the men they were. Behind them is a chap in full parade fig whose real phiz and upper parts are covered by a gigantic striped topper as long as his torso. The proportions are all to cock; it is as if everyone had been snapped in a distorting fairground mirror.

  There is no message on the back of the card, just a greeting. ‘Lots of love, Angie’ is underscored with the wavy line which in the old days of marking up copy for printers was an instruction that the type should be in bold; Angela often used this wiggle to underline titles or her name on an article. The picture was its own message. Here was the America she relished, the country at its most unbuttoned, in carnival display. Here was that disconcerting mixture of the real and the fake, the natural and the manufactured to which Angela returned again and again.

  She wrote about this mixture when she wrote about women and make-up, finding in black lipstick and red eyeshadow ‘the cosmetic equivalent of Duchamp’s moustache on the Mona Lisa . . . cosmetics used as satire on cosmetics’; it could be heard in her conversational manner, which was at the same time artificial and gutsy. She spoke about it when I was asking her how she went about researching her novels. ‘May I digress?’ she asked, with a mandarin politeness that ruled out refusal. She did digress, swerving into a long and luscious description of a ‘very very important’ building from her childhood, the Granada cinema in Tooting. Angela knew how to use an emblem. The Granada’s architecture mingled original and pastiche, the glorious and the kitsch; it was a building that both imposed and teased. As did her own work. Playing with style, making fairy tale and fantasy tell new truths, were at the root of her stories. When she dreamt up Fevvers in Nights at the Circus she produced a creature who was, as for a moment were Bill Owens’ carnival men, rather more than human: an aerialiste who may or may not have had real wings pushing their way through her shoulder blades. Fevvers had as her slogan not ‘Is she flesh or fowl?’ but ‘Is she fact or is she fiction?’ That could also have been Angela’s motto, both on the page and in life.

  She liked to tell the story of how, when she was fifteen, her mother had found her reading a novel and had advised her to stop. ‘She told me to remember what had happened to Madame Bovary.’ Too good to be completely true, perhaps, but not quite as straightforward as it seems at first. Angela might not have shared her mother’s anxiety about moral waywardness but she did think that romantic victimhood was worth combating, and she tackled it in her reimagining of fairy tales.

  Her own reading tilted as much towards anthropology and philosophy as towards the novel. In her journals the writers she mentions – quoting and annotating them as if for scrutiny by an invisible tutor – include Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell, Barthes, Engels, Marx, Thomas Szasz, Lukács, Sartre, Marcuse, Frances Yates, Walter Benjamin, Louis Aragon, Nietzsche, de Sade, Novalis, de Rougemont, Melville, Adorno, Tzvetan Todorov. There they are, these bigwigs, alongside notes on The Book of Clowns, A Dictionary of Angels, the American Heritage Cookbook, The History of the Harlequinade, The Haunted Screen, Wild Tigers and Tame Fleas.

  When Wise Children was about to appear in the summer of 1991, I asked her about the books that had been most important to her. She came up with her candidates without blinking. ‘Nothing frivolous about my list, I’m afraid.’ First was Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Then anything by Shakespeare, for ‘brilliant storytelling’. Jude the Obscure was next, because in it Hardy ‘took the working class seriously’. She hesitated over the Brontës: she liked Wuthering Heights, though preferred reading Jane Eyre, and was not sure that she would take either of them to a desert island. I had rather expected her to plump for the comic extravaganza and forthright social commentary of Dickens – to like the skirmishes between realism and grotesquerie – but she did not find him funny. She had reread Bleak House while writing Wise Children and been very disappointed: ‘not because the plot was predictable and mechanical: I liked that. But the thinness and skeletisation of the characters rather oppressed me. It was a bit like being in a world of comic strips. It did seem to me a very clockwork universe.’ She was keen on Ronald Firbank, about whom she wrote her radio play, A Self-Made Man. It featured the song of nightingales and of Ewan MacColl and the voice of the aesthete complaining to one of the play’s narrators: ‘I wish you wouldn’t call me Firbank; it gives me a sense of galoshes.’ Although she did not read much poetry later in life, she retained some of her early enthusiasm for the work of Andrew Marvell: ‘The combination of exquisite formalism and ideological correctness I find very attractive.’ She asked that a poem by him should be read at her funeral.

  Yet for her deepest admiration she went further back. Chaucer – who was ‘so nice about women’ and who, in the Wife of Bath, created a character she loved – was to her the ‘sanest, the sweetest and most decent of English poets’. She liked the idea that he wrote ‘before English became a language of imperialism’. She liked the notion that The Canterbury Tales, coming from an oral tradition, had to be direct and forceful enough to transmit when read aloud to a room full of people who were busy ‘sewing or shelling peas’. She liked the aspects of Chaucer’s work that pre-dated the novel, and half-disapproved of the genre in which she made her name. ‘I’m sufficient of a doctrinaire to believe that the novel is the product of a leisured class. Actually.’ That ‘actually’ dangling from the end of a sentence was habitual when she spoke. Dainty but adamant, it was like the flick of a heel or the toss of her head. It warded off objections but also invited contradiction. It both emphasised and slightly undermined what she had just said. Actually.

  Geisha

  Geisha Boop arrived in my flat on a card in vivid Technicolor. The Betty Boop features – lidless eyes as round as coins and cheeks as fat as a mumps sufferer – squat between a fat hairstyle and a fan. Beside her, a hybrid animal in a kimono sits on a mat, strumming a samisen; in the background is a snow-capped peak.

  The card, evidently sent in an envelope, is undated and unfranked but must have been dispatched in the late eighties. It is partly a work message: ‘Forgive my narcissism, but I really do want somebody besides me & Lynn Knight at “Virago” to read this, & you are
the one. If any Brontë stuff ever comes in, can I have it? Nobody has written about them properly, everything is crap.’ Towards the end of her life she planned to put that right, by making a heroine of Jane Eyre’s stepdaughter.

  Her novel was to be called ‘Adela: A Romance’, and in 1991 she delivered an outline of the plot to Chatto. It was a piece of Angela’s top-notch drollerie, a high-speed collision of the arch and the full-throttle, of literary allusion and bodice-ripper. It is hard to know whether this document would pass muster in today’s publishing climate, more businesslike about the bottom line and used to sleekly presented proposals. Angela’s ‘advertisement’ (she considered ‘synopsis’ too drab a word for the origins of a book) covered one side of a piece of A4 with her non-perfect typing, which sometimes mistook an ‘i’ for an ‘e’ or jammed two words together or missed a letter out: a touching aspect of looking at a typescript is that it registers the pressure of the writer’s fingers. The novel explained what is suggested but not made certain in Charlotte Brontë’s novel: that Mr Rochester’s ward was actually his daughter. Adèle (‘known as “Adela”’) falls in love with her boarding-school headmistress, ‘the aristocratic blue-stocking, Mrs T. who teaches her many things’. She determines to seduce her guardian, not knowing he is in fact her dad – returning to the old saw that gave Angela’s last novel its title, ‘It’s a wise child that knows his own father.’ Adela is discovered in flagrante by Jane Eyre, and runs off to France where she finds her French mother ‘singing incendiary revolutionary song in a notorious caberet [sic] . . . The Franco-Prussian War breaks out, followed by the Seige [sic] of Paris’; Adela’s mother becomes a heroine of the Communards and is executed. Adela is imprisoned, rescued by Jane Eyre, and acknowledged by Mr Rochester as his daughter: ‘Adela says she would rather be known as her mother’s daughte [sic]. The women kiss.’ At the bottom of the page Angela has added three lines of handwritten warning: ‘Adela is set in England and France in the 1860’s and ’70’s and plays some tricks with history; JANE EYRE is set in the 1820’s, after all. But, then, it is a novel . . .’

  The message on the geisha card swings away from Brontë territory. ‘That was a really terrific party on Monday. I was glad I went. But – why has Marianne gone blonde?!?’ It is the reference to Marianne Wiggins that dates the card. The picture itself carries a memory of an earlier time: of Angela’s first big excursion and her escape from England.

  In 1969, when she had published three novels and been married to Paul Carter for some eight years, she won the Somerset Maugham Award for Several Perceptions. The award, given to a writer under thirty-five, was to be used for travel. Angela fulfilled that requirement, but gave it a twist: ‘I used the money to run away from my husband, actually. I’m sure Somerset Maugham would have been very pleased.’

  She ran to Japan, the only country that met her stringent criteria for a bolthole: she wanted to live in a non-Judaeo-Christian culture, but it had to be a culture with a good sewage and transport system. She was convinced that the world was ceasing to be Eurocentric: ‘The Chinese and Japanese were snappy little imperialists when we were running around in woad.’

  She lived for a time in a fishing village by the sea, then very pretty, later destroyed by a freeway, and she worked for a spell in the English language branch of NHK, Japan’s government broadcaster. In 1972 she published The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, ‘the novel which marked the beginning of my obscurity. I went from being a very promising young writer to being completely ignored in two novels.’ She took this dive in novelistic fortune as a sign that the sixties were at an end.

  She had gone off with a Japanese man, a ‘very good-looking bastard’, in whom she found, looking to Revolutionary Russia and early French cinema for her reference points, a combination of Gallic Lothario and Russian nihilist: he had, she remembered, ‘the face of Gérard Philipe and the soul of Nechayev’. The experience was, she claimed, ‘very good, lovely, just what I needed after nine years of marriage’, and it changed her. ‘I became a feminist when I realised I could have been having all this instead of being married.’ In Japan she became enthusiastic about sex. She found even the ads for the VD clinics jolly: ‘Let me,’ they cajoled, ‘cure your chronic gonorrhoea.’

  Sic

  In 1988, four years before she died, Angela sent a bard card from Canada. A glossy black product of the Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival, it showed a cut-out of the playwright’s face, high-domed and egg-like, resting on his ruff. The legend around him wildly signals facetiousness: in fluorescent yellow, Neo-Renaissance Palatine italics and an exclamation mark, it proclaims: ‘So I haven’t written much lately! So what? Neither has Shakespeare.’

  I cannot remember whether there was a particular occasion for this card; the message on the back reports only that ‘Canada’s nice. Especially Montreal. Like Scandinavia with liquor.’ What region of Scandinavia can she have been thinking of? At the time she sent this card, Angela was dreaming up Wise Children, her last novel, and her Shakespeare book, a buoyant wise-cracker about hoofing and singing twins. The idea of writing about twins was part of her tribute to the dramatist. She had been struck by a conversation between Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt in which Byatt had remarked that Shakespeare’s influence on Murdoch was apparent in the number of twins featured in her novels. Angela had set out intending to make some reference to all of his plays in Wise Children, but a few eluded her. Her favourite, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was resplendently there, ‘a completely 20th-century great play’, she thought it; what had been delicious fantasy for the Victorians was ‘for us much more’. She replayed Lear’s story twice, in male and female form; she planted two Falstaffs, one male and one female, and ‘a positive welter of late comedies, including a whole lot of Calibans wearing penis sheaths’, but she had not managed to get in Titus Andronicus, unless a ferocious cook counts as a reference to the Roman’s frightful pie: ‘Shakespeare’s a bit of a vegetarian, good on fruit and veg, but rotten on meals,’ she said.

  Shakespeare was part of the yeast not only of her prose but of her plots. She read him ‘like a novel’, regarding Measure for Measure as ‘a page-turner’, and thought his stuff worked perfectly well without all that language: ‘people weep and gnash their teeth over Ophelia in Peru’. She favoured the bland lines that moved the plot on: ‘a ship has come from France’. She was dismissive of the routine idea that had he been alive now he would have been writing for television: he would more likely have been a used-car salesman.

  Her Shakespeare card may also have been offering a semi-apology for a refusal to write something for the London Review; my attempts to coax her onto the page quite often met with refusals. She may have been wincing about the late delivery of a piece of copy. She liked the idea that journalism ran through her veins and was a terrific deadline surfer: ‘the only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an absolutely urgent deadline in the offing’. Pieces had to be wheedled and winkled out of her during epic exchanges on the phone. ‘I’m sorry I’m such a lousy deadline-keeper,’ she wrote from London, enclosing a delayed review. ‘But it’s been the end of term & I had lots & lots of term-papers and I went deaf & I trod on a rabid squirrel & All has been Hell.’ Still, in this Shakespeare card she was most likely nodding to the four years that had passed since the publication of Nights at the Circus, the novel that had brought her a new blast of critical acclaim.

  There was a good reason for the gap between Angela’s books. In 1983 she had become pregnant. She was forty-two, mature for a first-time mother, and she was thrilled and alarmed: ‘Alex came as a great surprise to us,’ she told me.

  Her pregnancy was not calm. She was not altogether well, and she did not take things easy. One of her tasks was the judging of the Booker Prize. It was the year that Fay Weldon presided over an unusually female-strong panel (Angela and Libby Purves sat in judgement alongside the literary editor Terence Kilmartin and the poet Peter Porter), and must have been an unsettling exper
ience for Angela, whose own work had never been selected by a panel of judges.

  It was to become even more unsettling. After the dinner at which the announcement of the winner (J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K) had been made, the television presenter Selina Scott went around with her mike, smiling and making mistakes. She went up to Angela and apparently mistook her for one of the many hangers-on at the feast. She bent over her at the groaning board and inquired what she thought of the judges’ decision. ‘I’m one of the judges,’ Angela explained, leaning away from her interrogator with a grimly polite chuckle. ‘Does that exclude me . . .?’ Poor Scott seemed mystified: ‘I’m sorry . . . What’s your name?’

  The next morning the unrecognised novelist was whisked into hospital suffering from high blood pressure. Cards did not issue from the ward but letters did: ‘Actually, it’s perfectly okay in here, like a girl’s dorm, & rather dreamy & soporific. The ante-natal ward is opposite the delivery rooms, so this sub-David Hamilton atmosphere – big, soft girls in nighties – is riven, occasionally, by the cries of the new-born . . .’

  Chili

  In 1985 she sent me a postcard from Austin, Texas. The picture showed a black cauldron trying to pass as a saucepan. Bubbling with beans and frighteningly red beef, it was sending off a swirl of blue smoke; alongside it lay peppers, an open bottle of Lone Star beer – and a recipe for Texas Chili. Angela’s message runs: ‘Carter’s reply to her critics! Texas chili, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp . . . preferably through his back passage. (I do think all that fuss was comic, though). Temperatures in the ’80s. Everybody is loony, here.’