Well, my brother and I speculate endlessly on this point. We often say to one another, How is it possible such camp little flowers as ourselves emanated from Balham via Wath-upon-Dearne and the places my father comes from, north Aberdeenshire, stark, bleak and apparently lugubriously Calvinistic, witch-burning country? But obviously, something in this peculiar rootless, upward, downward, sideways socially mobile family, living in twilight zones …
This is not about nostalgia but connects with a quite different contemporary sensation: of coming at the end, mopping up, having the freedom of anomie.
‘Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room …’ Crammed with wonders? The beginning, for Carter, is a magical lumber-room. Over the years her own south London house came rather to resemble this cabinet of curiosities. It was a toy-box long before her son Alexander arrived, though he completed its transformation so that there was hardly room to swing a cat. Indeed, the cats were eventually exiled to the garden. A letter she wrote to me just after that first 1977 interview records the beginnings of this process:
The NEW REVIEW piece is smashing. Thanks. The only snag, as far as I’m concerned, is that I only have the one script, alas, so that a number of the details of my autobiography are repeated in the ‘Family Life’ piece – repeated word for word, what’s more. Which is a great tribute to my internal consistency, I suppose; only, my childhood, boyhood and youth is a kind of cabaret turn performed, nowadays, with such a practised style it comes out engine-turned on demand. What a creep I am.
And I always get cast down by my own pusillanimity. The notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going. Of course, I have my own private lists prepared for the purges but … I’m more interested in socialist reconstruction after the revolution than the revolution itself, which seems to mark me out from my peers. We have just had the exterior of this house painted quite a jolly red, by the way. The front steps look as if the Valentine’s Day massacre had been performed on them. However, I also managed to persuade Christine downstairs to have a black front door so it is the jolly old red & black & VIVA LA MUERTE & sucks boo to Snoo’s barley and bamboos; we’re going to have a real Clapham front garden, the anarchist colours & pieces of motorcycle & broken bottles & used condoms lightly scattered over all …
PS I didn’t manage to post this until today, Sunday, or rather 00.30 Monday morning, after a brisk search for the letter (in Portuguese) inviting me to this ruddy do [a Festival of Free Art], which begins to look more and more like a nightmare. Chris [‘Christine downstairs’] wants me to bring home a 6 ft. ceramic cockerel. I have house-guests, just arrived, having driven from Nepal – the sister of a Korean ex-boyfriend of mine plus her bloke. Mark has strained a muscle in his back – I’d planned to have him push me around in my wheelchair in 20 years time; what if I have to push him around in one in 5 years time? It’s like a soap opera in this house, an everyday story of alternative folk, I suppose.
You can see in the discussion of the decor here something of her inverted dandyism; also the self-consciousness which was her inheritance, for better and for worse. The whole place ‘never looked plausible’.
Middle
They seemed to have made the entire city into a cold hall of mirrors which continually proliferated whole galleries of constantly changing appearances, all marvellous but none tangible … One morning, we woke to find the house next door reduced to nothing but a heap of sticks and a pile of newspapers neatly tied with string, left out for the garbage collector.
Angela Carter, ‘A Souvenir of Japan’, Fireworks, 1974
Japan (1969–72) had been her rite of passage in between, the place where she lost and found herself. Being young was traumatic: she’d been anorexic, her tall, big-boned body and her intransigent spirit had been at odds with the ways women were expected to be, inside or outside. Looking back to her teenage years, she always made the same joke:
I now [1983] recall this period with intense embarrassment, because my parents’ concern to protect me from predatory boys was only equalled by the enthusiasm with which the boys I did indeed occasionally meet protected themselves against me.
Her first marriage she portrayed as a more or less desperate measure, with her making the running (‘Somebody who would go to Godard movies with me and on CND marches and even have sexual intercourse with me, though he insisted we should be engaged first’). And in her five 1960s novels the point of view is interestingly vagrant – as readily male as female.
When she impersonated a girl she described the boys as sex objects; when she went in for cross-dressing she did it, she later remarked, with almost ‘sinister’ effectiveness: ‘I was, as a girl, suffering a degree of colonialization of the mind. Especially in the journalism I was writing then, I’d – quite unconsciously – posit a male point of view as the general one. So there was an element of the male impersonator about this young person as she was finding herself.’ That is one way to put it. Perhaps she adopted the male point of view also because, under the mask of the ‘general’, it was more aggressive, more licensed, more authorial. At any rate, the result is that in the early fiction her boys and girls look into each others’ eyes and see – themselves. Then in 1969 she broke the pattern. She and her husband parted company, and she went to live with a Japanese lover, in Japan.
And there her size – and her colour – made her utterly foreign. She compounded her oddity when she stepped into the looking-glass world of a culture that reflected her back to herself as an alien, ‘learning the hard way that most people on this planet are not Caucasian and have no reason to either love or respect Caucasians’. Her 1974 collection, Fireworks, contains three stories that, most uncharacteristically, are hardly fictionalized at all. She must have felt that their built-in strangeness provided sufficient distance, and it does:
I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel. He found me, I think, inexpressibly exotic. But I often felt like a female impersonator.
In the department store there was a rack of dresses labelled: ‘For Young and Cute Girls Only’. When I looked at them, I felt as gross as Glumdalclitch. I wore men’s sandals … the largest size. My pink cheeks, blue eyes and blatant yellow hair made of me, in the visual orchestration of this city … an instrument which played upon an alien scale … He was so delicately put together that I thought his skeleton must have the airy elegance of a bird’s and I was sometimes afraid that I might smash him.
Feeling a freak was a kind of rehearsal for the invention of her lumpen winged aerealiste Fevvers years later. At the time, in Tokyo, whatever she was looking for, she discovered the truthfulness and finality of appearances, images emptied of their usual freight of recognition and guilt. This wasn’t, in other words, old-fashioned orientalism, but the new-fangled sort that denied you access to any essence of otherness. Tokyo offered cruel but cleansing reflections. In another piece called ‘Flesh and the Mirror’, she described an erotic encounter so impersonal it left no room at all for soul-searching: ‘This mirror refused to conspire with me.’
Self-consciousness had been her bane from the start, hence the anorexia. But while most women come out the other side and learn to act naturally, she somehow managed not to, and Japan is the shorthand, I think,