At the beginning of the year she had reviewed an assortment of volumes about food – The Official Foodie Handbook, Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and A Glass of Wine and The Chez Panisse Cookbook – for the London Review of Books. In a sustained piece of invective, and a dextrous analysis of manners, she tore into ‘piggery triumphant . . . [the] unashamed cult of conspicuous gluttony in the advanced industrialised countries, at just the time when Ethiopia is struck by a widely publicised famine’. It was not only the inequity and the waste that enraged her, it was also what she saw as the snobbery of that newly emerging species, the foodie. ‘This mincing and finicking obsession with food opens up whole new areas of potential social shame. No wonder the British find it irresistible.’ Furious responses – some of them alluding to the pregnancy which had delayed her piece – appeared on the paper’s letters pages: ‘A woman capable of splashing blame for the Ethiopian famine on Elizabeth David is scarcely to be trusted with a baby’s pusher, let alone a stabbing knife.’ They spoke of Angela’s ‘Puritanical contempt’ and ‘self-righteous priggery’. More than one took her to task for producing novels at all: ‘many a serious scholar would consider the reading and creating of fiction a frivolous pastime’.
These critics were as wrong in thinking Angela uninterested in food as they were in misreading her to mean that foodies were actually responsible for famine. She did take pride in a certain austerity: she spoke of herself as having been formed by the ‘mild discomfort’ of England in the forties, the England of Stafford Cripps, and approved of its nourishing plainness, of ‘the fact that you were always a litle bit healthily cold, and yet you had brown bread’. Yet austerity in her was the flipside of relish and gusto.
Angela, who talked more about her anthropological curiosity than about turns of phrase, was fiercely interested in the history of food and in its social implications. She injected not dislike or dismissiveness but quizzicalness into her review of the most sacred of culinary cows, Elizabeth David; in 1986 she filed a terrific piece about ‘that godless vegetable’ the potato. The book she had chosen for Desert Island Discs was Larousse Gastronomique: she wanted, she said, to take something that would be ‘a good read’. Still, her interest was also practical, also personal. ‘I’m a domestic person,’ she declared. This was delivered with the assurance of someone who knew that the wild excursions of her novels and essays would never allow her to be thought of as a homebody: the description was something of a bluff, rather in the way that, she pointed out, Elizabeth David’s ‘deftness with the pans is not a sign of domesticity but of worldliness’. Like many of Angela’s statements, this was accuracy parading itself as irony – and none the less ironic for that.
In the kitchen in Clapham she served up rabbit and broccoli, and lamb and apricots (the last cooked with a cat sitting on her lap). She was not much of a drinker; the first time I went to supper at 107 The Chase, I was dashed to see that as soon as the first glasses of white wine had been poured, the bottle was stoppered up and put back into the fridge. She had, she said, cooked ‘endlessly, elaborately’ during her first marriage, and claimed that, after they split up, her husband had accused her of having produced batches of wonderful cakes ‘in order to make him fat and unattractive to other women. That was characteristic of my Machiavellian mind.’
Angela herself did not eat cakes. It was not apparent to most of her friends that, although she was a generous dolloper-out of food, her eating habits had been, for a large part of her life, irregular and sometimes dangerous. As a young girl she had been large, with a chubby face, and had reached her adult height of more than five foot eight by the time she was thirteen. At the age of eighteen she changed. She changed shape as dramatically as a creature in one of the fairy tales that fascinated her. She became anorexic.
She was clear about the reasons for this: she wanted to take control of her life and wrest her future away from her parents. Her father was ‘fearless and unimaginative. I mistook his psychic good health for psychosis. I thought something must be desperately wrong because he was such a very adaptable and cheerful man.’ Her mother, whom she described as coming from ‘the examination-passing working classes’, communicated to her daughter the feeling that if she was not going to go to Oxford or Cambridge she might as well not bother with higher education. Both parents were possessive, though in rather different ways; looking back on her adolescence, Angela thought of herself spending a large part of it entrenched in hostility towards them. Her mother indicated that if her daughter got a place at Oxford, she and her husband would be likely to get a flat or house nearby: ‘I think, that’s when I gave up working for my A levels,’ Angela explained. And just after she’d taken her exams (only two of them), she gave up eating.
Bambi
‘I decided I’d be thin and it all got completely out of hand.’ It happened very quickly. She lost about thirty-eight kilos in six months and suddenly looked completely different. ‘I would look in the mirror and not recognise myself – except that I would still seem big.’ She was spindly, with very short curly hair, and she did not know whether this extraordinary new appearance was nice or nasty. Sometimes ‘I looked like Byron’. Often she looked like a model, though even when her shape was tight, her features were luscious. And she dressed ‘like a 30-year-old divorcée’. It was 1958: she got herself up in Chanel-style suits, stilettos and black stockings, and ‘a cream tweed duster coat which I wore with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows’. The effect was smart but rakish, fast and a bit loose.
One of her postcards suggests something of this teenage shape-shifting, though it does not feature a teenager. In the late 1980s, thirty years after she had dwindled, Angela sent a droll picture from somewhere near the Eerie Canal. It captured her bemusement and her fashion sense, though not the beauty of the young, primly costumed Angela. ‘I think this is very funny, but I’m not sure why,’ runs her message. The black and white drawing shows a woman in a blouse with a Peter Pan collar and hair like an ornamental tea cosy. She is encased in her clothes, curved over and wary. The toe of one court shoe taps the ground; her tiny mouth is puckered; her button eyes are almost flying out of her stolid face with astonishment. The caption declares: ‘Bambi’s mother, reincarnated as a middle-aged divorcée, pawed the ground in her support hose and mid-height heels, quite bewildered in her new surroundings.’
The dainty fawn was on Angela’s mind in the eighties. In 1985 she sent a card from Boston to her friend Edward Horesh: it showed Bambi on two legs holding a missile. It was entitled ‘Bambo’.
Angela reckoned that as an acute condition her anorexia lasted for about two years, but in its chronic form it went on well into her mature life. Until she left home, until she split up with her first husband, there were many things she did not eat; right up to the birth of her son her eating patterns were ‘still strange’. For some twenty years she levelled out at about sixty-three kilos but, after Alexander, she steadily put on weight. ‘But I wasn’t worried any more. I felt so much better when I was fatter. It made me think that inside every thin woman there’s a fat woman trying to get out.’ She went back to her pre-anorexic size.
Like A Flamingo
In 1986 Angela posted sunny sentences from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. ‘I like it as much as I’ve liked anywhere in the States, including the French Quarter of New Orleans. (Though it’s nothing like the French Quarter, of course). Everso rural; cornfields, and exquisite clean farms, like toys, and county roads white with dust. Al is starting to look like Huck Finn.’
This cracker-barrel cheeriness is given a sardonic twist by the picture on her card. Out of a lake of frozen sludge pokes the Statue of Liberty. You can see the spikes on her head, her drooping eyes and, alongside, the hand clasping the torch which looks dead; it would be hard to prove that she is sinking rather than emerging, but that’s what it looks like. The image was the creation of the Pail and Shovel Party, who in spring 1978 gained control of the student government at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They pledged to arr
ange for all clocks on campus to run backwards, so that classes would finish before they had started, and they covered the lawn outside the administration building with a flock of 1,008 pink flamingos. The Liberty erection was their most famous feat: a forty-foot high replica made from papier mâché and chicken wire, which appeared on Lake Mendota in February 1979; the story was that the statue had been accidentally dropped from a helicopter.
Angela was at ease with such performance art and skilful at flipping between cosiness and wild surmise. It was a pattern established early on in her writing career. She had married at twenty-one; her husband, Paul, from whom she took her surname, was some eight years older and taught chemistry at what was then Bristol Technical College. Nearly thirty years later she could still patter off the routine of those years: ‘Got up made breakfast sent husband off to work sat down and read the paper maybe did the crossword did a little light word-smithing.’ House-smithing, light or otherwise, was not part of this scheme, so that when she later read Betty Friedan’s call to pack in domestic chores and lay claim to a fuller life, it struck no chord: ‘I never did any housework.’ Instead, she dragged her husband to New Wave films and went to auctions with friends, accumulating heaps of furniture – ‘people would come in and write 1789 in the dust’ – and, as a birthday present for her husband, a bright red vintage vacuum cleaner. ‘I hope he liked it.’ She invested in what she claimed to be the largest collection of sardine tins in southern England; she liked the look of them and made, through her fascination with their design, a lifelong friend of a fellow enthusiast, the artist Corinna Sargood, who was to illustrate Angela’s fairy tales with her swirling lines and whorls and dark carnivalesque.
‘Wilfully eccentric and whimsical’ she called these times. But they marked the beginning of her political awakening. Her husband introduced her to ‘big black blues singers and small white folk singers’ and Angela claimed that interviews for one of Ewan MacColl’s radio ballads were recorded in her front room in Bristol. Folk music ‘was, as you remember, a Communist plot’, she instructed me, knowing I had Communist ancestry. ‘I developed a respect for the art of the people via Communist Party propaganda basically.’ And in the Berkeley Café – the frowsty brown building opposite the main University of Bristol building – she chatted to situationists and anarchists. As we sat in her kitchen in April 1991, ten months before she died, Angela said these anarchists had had more influence than anyone else on her politics.
It was during these Bristol days – recognisable from her early novels – that she wrote poems. Strong, argumentative pieces of verse are scattered through her journals of the sixties. She took them seriously, going over them perhaps not systematically but with zeal. Drafts appear pages apart – there are at least four of a poem called ‘The Lady and the Skull’ – with lines crossed out, whole stanzas squiggled through; some attempts are obliterated by a whirligig of scrawls. Alongside some of them are doodles: a baby, dark-centred flowers and (this had some relevance to what she was writing) a phallus-shaped head of Nosferatu; a label has been pasted in advising ‘NEVER OPEN A WARM DOOR’. She published several poems in the Bristol University student paper Nonesuch, and others in little magazines of the kind that used to curl up together in the corners of bookshops; several appeared, rather surprisingly, in a literary quarterly sponsored by English Carmelites. One poem, ‘The Magic Apple Tree’, delivered with panache and a formal precision (the swipe of the last line is a terrific mimetic touch), is an early fierce fairy tale, an anteroom to The Bloody Chamber:
The Queen, with ’ticing apples in her hand,
Went out walking to see what she could see.
‘Plump little boy, rosy little boy, come nearer.
Here is an apple to do you good.
Here is a basin to catch your blood.’
She sticks him with a sharp knife
Between the long ribs and the short.
A necklace of beads, blood trinkling down,
In the Queen’s garden, where the apples grow.
Bud, blossom, bloom and bear,
Ready to tear,
So that we shall have apples and cider next year.
Hat-fulls, cap-fulls, three-bushel bag-fulls,
Little heaps under the stairs,
Cider running out of gutter-holes.
Hip, Hip, Hurrah!
Wipe the blade clean on the grass.
Flickerings
From Taormina in 1987 she posted a picture of Etna exploding like a scarlet cock’s crest, and a message full of delight. Angela loved Italian film – in fact, most film – and what she saw in Sicily could have come straight from the screen. Her sightings were buoyed up by her knowledge of old-time film stars: Rossano Brazzi had seduced his well-coiffed way through South Pacific and Three Coins in the Fountain. On the card she writes: ‘Rosanno [sic] Brazzi (remember him) & his wife bring their poodle to dinner everyday in a shopping bag because dogs are not allowed on the hotel terrace. The other day a gift-wrapped Alfa Romeo was delivered to a pair of honeymooning newlyweds. Its fun. The boys are this moment in the sea, swimming. I sit on the terrace & contemplate my 3rd coffee.’
Up for ‘anything that flickers’, Angela had enjoyable brief encounters with celluloid during the eighties in The Company of Wolves and The Magic Toyshop. In the screenplays that languished unproduced in her filing cabinet, the literary tangoed with the explosively popular. A cowboy morality play, Gun for the Devil, paid tribute, in the name of the character Roxana, to Daniel Defoe. She plunged into Hollywood when in Albany, Upper New York State, toiling in the film section of the university and coming home laden with biographies ‘with titles like “Too Late for Tears” or “Mascara in My Martini”’. Out of this research came great swathes of her last novel.
Wise Children was her London book, but also her film book and her fathers book. There is autobiography embedded here, though not of a literal kind. Dads and movies went together for Angela, whose own father took her as a youngster to whatever was showing at the Granada, Tooting Bec. She was grateful that this led to her exposure to a host of ‘unsuitable’ films: the first she remembered, apart from Snow White, was The Blue Lagoon, which had Jean Simmons flat on her back on the sand to the sound of waves. Angela remembered herself as being six when she saw it, though she must have been nine.
It was not the movies alone that mattered in these excursions: the thirties super-cinema itself, ‘one of the most beautiful, beautiful buildings in the world’, was a dizzy delight and a revelation. A homage to the Alhambra, it had a Hall of Mirrors upstairs and a cyclorama, with the night sky projected on the ceiling of the upper gallery. It had a curved roof, huge murals, a marble staircase and amber mirrors. What transfixed Angela was its ‘very, very difficult mix of real craftspersonship, real marble and fake marble . . . You never quite know what’s what until you touch it. The stairs are real, fabulous marble, but the pillars are painted plaster.’ As a child she ‘took it for real. It’s a masterpiece of kitsch, but in a hundred years’ time no one’s going to be able to tell that it’s kitsch.’
Angela wrote about mimicry and imitation; her prose ducked and dived between the genuine and the ersatz. Those early visits to the Granada gave her subject matter and style. They were a gift from her dad.
Fowl
Back from the States in the eighties, Angela sent a pink and yellow postcard, which might have been designed to illustrate her love for the gaudy and unsettling. It showed a Model A truck being gobbled by a chicken: a huge head and beak perch on the cabin; a long tail sticks out at the rear. The genres were even more mixed than they seemed. This poultry vehicle was actually an ad for a chocolate-covered nut roll; the manufacturers had appropriated the Republican Party’s 1928 campaign slogan ‘a chicken in every pot’ to imply nutritional value.
The other side of this fowl flamboyance is the other side of Angela: the person who told it how it was. ‘We are back – just landed. I have strep. throat. Al has a streaming cold. Mark, with a grim face, is cleani
ng the oven; our tenants did not, not once during their tenancy. Thatcher has a four point lead in the polls. Christmas is but three days away. We go up north, to my brother, for this event – which I hope you will find bearable – but hope to see you soon afterwards. The Mid-West was lots of fun. Truly.’
She snarled and she frolicked: the combination made her strong meat. That and the full-out loquaciousness: few would argue that Angela’s writing had an extensive acquaintance with litotes. After reading a contemporary’s meticulously realistic work, she roared: ‘There must be more to life than this.’ In response to which, the novelist and critic Francis Wyndham raised his head from one of Angela’s extravaganzas to murmur: ‘There must be less to life than this.’
Taxed with overwriting, Angela (‘I’m all for pretension’) explained how eagerly she looked for opportunities to do so. ‘Embrace them?’ she retorted: ‘I would say that I half-suffocate them with the enthusiasm with which I wrap my arms and legs around them.’ Dandyism and irony were, she declared, ‘the weapons of the dispossessed’. They were not attributes that everyone welcomed. After her first success as a writer, the scholarly Henry Gifford declared that he wished she had studied some subject other than English.
Gifford, a mild-mannered but stringent Russian specialist, was professor of the English department at Bristol University, which Angela attended from 1962 to 1965. Her passage to university was not straightforward; nor was her time there particularly stimulating. Marriage had taken her to Bristol, where she applied for a job at the Bristol Evening Post, and was turned down. At a loose end and getting depressed, she was taken to lunch at Mario’s Trattoria by her uncle Cecil. Her male relatives were always helpful: ‘I guess that’s why I’m more sympathetic to fathers than a lot of feminists.’ Cecil suggested that university might stop her looking so peaky: ‘If you’ve got a degree, you can always get a job. You can leave your husband any time you want.’ She did not have enough A levels but the university ‘didn’t seem to mind at all’. She was in, but, as a mature student with a hubby, also slightly out; her social life – apart from one poet, one teacher and her lifelong friend Rebecca Howard – was based not among students but at home.
A Card From Angela Carter Page 3
