Obituary Essay on Angela Carter
THERE’S A PIECE ON Byron by William Hazlitt in which, as he’s routinely and genially abusing the latest instalment of Don Juan, he learns that Byron is dead. Well, of course, Hazlitt says, he was the greatest writer of the age. The sudden deaths of contemporaries wrong-foot us: we have to turn too quickly into posterity’s representatives. A living writer is part of the unsatisfying, provisional, myopic, linear, altogether human present, but add a full stop and you can read the work backwards, sideways, whatever, because now it’s an oeuvre, truly finished.
Angela Carter annoyed people quite a lot when she was alive (‘I certainly don’t seem to get the sympathy vote,’ she observed with more than a shadow of satisfaction when last year’s big prizes were announced). But when she died everyone scrambled to make up for it, and perhaps there was more than a shadow of satisfaction behind some of those glowing obituaries, too: she isn’t going to come up with any more surprises; that disturbing sense of someone making it up as she went along will fade; Literature can take its course. For the first time I see that there’s at least one virtue in literary biography: a ‘Life’ can demythologize the work in the best sense, preserving its fallibility, which is also the condition for its brilliance.
This has been critical heresy for a long time. Writers’ lives merely distract us from the true slipperiness and anonymity of any text worth its salt. A text is a text is a text. Angela, of course, was of the generation nourished on the Death of the Author (Barthes, 1968 vintage), as was I.
Looking back, she recaptured some of the euphoria of that time:
Truly, it felt like Year One … all that was holy was in the process of being profaned … I can date to that time … and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.
But she went on to qualify the ‘sense of limitless freedom’ you get by sloughing off the myths with a sentence which ought to stand as the epigraph to any attempt at a biography of her: ‘I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline.’ Well, perhaps not. But it is a remark that captures her tone pretty exactly: I can just see the moue of amused disgust (but also disgusted disgust at the same time, morally and intellectually fastidious disgust) with which she’d greet the notion that you could somehow levitate out of history.
A Life doesn’t have to reinvent its subject as a ‘real’ person. Angela Carter’s life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and self-education, the early marriage and divorce, the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It’s all happening ‘on the edge’, in no man’s land, among the debris of past convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more or less like a glove, but that’s because she’d put it together, by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her genius for estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times. She was, indeed, literally thin-skinned: her skin was very fair, pink and white; she weathered quite a bit but never tanned, and you could see the veins easily. You might almost say her body thought. She had very good bones and was photogenic, so that it didn’t matter that she’d stopped looking in mirrors and painting her face. She let her hair grow out white in wisps two or three years before she got pregnant. I could have been a grandmother by the time she was a mother, and I was younger than she. The shape a woman’s life takes now is a lot less determined than once it was. Or: the determinations are more subtle, you’re sentenced to assemble your own version.
Beginning
There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: ‘Where was I before I was born?’
In the beginning was … what?
Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders …
Angela Carter, ‘The Curious Room’, SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature), 1990
She cultivated the role of fairy godmother and/or witch, and – in The Bloody Chamber (1979) – rewrote the Bluebeard story with pistol-toting Mother riding to the rescue at the last minute. However, it was not her own mother, one of a family of ‘great examination-passers’ (a scholarship girl who’d left school at fifteen to work at Selfridges) who provided the model for this kind of figure, but her maternal grandmother, who’d come originally from South Yorkshire. Granny came to the rescue in the year of Angela’s birth (1940) and evacuated herself and her grandchildren from south London back to the gritty coal-mining village of Wath-upon-Dearne, kidnapping them safely into the past for the duration of the war.
Skipping a generation took Angela back to ‘Votes for Women’, working-class radicalism, outside lavatories and coal-dust coughs. Granny ought, perhaps, to have surfaced in the fiction as the spirit of social realism, though actually it makes sense that she’s in the magical mode, since her brand of eccentric toughness was already thoroughly archaic from the point of view of the post-war and the south of England. In Angela’s last novel, Wise Children, the granny-figure is killed in the Blitz, but bequeaths to her adoptive grand-daughters Dora and Nora the Brixton house that offers them a safe haven when they have to retire from the stage. ‘When the bombardments began, Grandma would go outside and shake her fist at the old men in the sky … She was our air-raid shelter; she was our entertainment; she was our breast,’ says Dora.
Grandma figures as the house in this book, the matriarchal space of the Carter house of fiction – ‘but the whole place never looked plausible’ (Dora again). In a New Review series on ‘Family Life’ back in 1976, Angela wrote that her grandmother ‘was a woman of such physical and spiritual heaviness she seemed to have been born with a greater degree of gravity than most people’.
Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially Saint Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand – my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt …
Grandmother is a larger-than-life ‘character’ for her – Leninist Lizzie, the heroine’s minder in Nights at the Circus, looks like another avatar – but mother is almost a missing person. Not unusual this, at all, particularly for daughters growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, with upwardly socially mobile mothers who’d given up work: women girlified, exiled and isolated in domesticity, who hadn’t ‘done anything’ with their education. She wrote about her Scottish journalist father with obvious pleasure: ‘very little to do with the stern, fearful face of the Father in patriarchy … there was no fear’ (‘Sugar Daddy’ in Fathers, Virago, 1983). Whereas about her mother, who was younger but died first, she was wry, oblique, regretful, protective: ‘There was to be no struggle for my mother, who married herself young to an adoring husband who indulged her, who was subject to ill-health, who spoke standard English, who continued to wear fancy clothes.’ Angela was supposed to do something with her own education, so instead of course she married young herself, in reaction against what her mother wanted for her, though it didn’t last long. If you look for the provenance of the feminist writer, mother is the key. The women who really nailed patriarchy weren’t on the whole the ones with authoritarian fathers, but the ones with troubled, contradictory mothers: you aim your feminism less at men than at the picture of the woman you don’t want to be, the enemy within. In this case, the girl-wife. Hence (again) a motive for skipping a generation, in imagination.