Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (2 page)

The collection expands to take in many other fabulous old tales; blood and love, always proximate, underlie and unify them all. In “The Lady of the House of Love” love and blood unite in the person of a vampire: Beauty grown monstrous, Beastly. In “The Snow Child” we are in the fairy-tale territory of white snow, red blood, black bird, and a girl, white, red and black, born of a Count’s wishes; but Carter’s modern imagination knows that for every Count there is a Countess, who will not tolerate her fantasy-rival. The battle of the sexes is fought between women, too.

The arrival of Red Riding Hood completes and perfects Carter’s brilliant, reinventing synthesis of
Kinderund Hausmärchen.
Now we are offered the radical, shocking suggestion that Grandmother might actually be the Wolf (“The Werewolf”); or equally radical, equally shocking, the thought that the girl (Red Riding Hood, Beauty) might easily be as amoral, as savage as the Wolf/Beast; that she might conquer the Wolf by the power of her own predatory sexuality, her erotic wolfishness. This is the theme of “The Company of Wolves”, and to watch
The Company of Wolves,
the film Angela Carter made with Neil Jordan, weaving together several of her wolf-narratives, is to long for the full-scale wolf-novel she never wrote.

“Wolf-Alice” offers final metamorphoses. Now there is no Beauty, only two Beasts: a cannibal Duke, and a girl reared by wolves, who thinks of herself as a wolf, and who, arriving at womanhood, is drawn towards self-knowledge by the mystery of her own bloody chamber; that is, her menstrual flow. By blood, and by what she sees in mirrors, that make a house uncosy.

Carter’s farewell to her mountain-country, at the end of her last wolf-story, “Peter and the Wolf” in
Black Venus,
signals that, like her hero, she has “tramped onwards, into a different story”.

There is one other out-and-out fantasy in this third collection, a meditation on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that prefigures (and is better than) a passage in
Wise Children.
In this story Carter’s linguistic exoticism is in full flight—here are “breezes, juicy as mangoes, that mythopoeically caress the Coast of Coromandel far away on the porphyry and lapis lazuli Indian Shore”. But, as usual, her sarcastic common-sense yanks the story back to earth before it disappears in an exquisite puff of smoke. This dream-wood—“no where near Athens … (it) is really located somewhere in the English midlands, possibly near Bletchley”—is damp and waterlogged and the fairies all have colds. Also, it has, since the date of the story, been chopped down to make room for a motorway. Carter’s elegant fugue on Shakespearean themes is lifted towards brilliance by her exposition of the difference between the
Dream’s
wood and the “dark necromantic forest” of the Grimms. The forest, she finely reminds us, is a scary place; to be lost in it is to fall prey to monsters and witches. But in a wood, “you purposely mislay your way”; there are no wolves, and the wood “is kind to lovers”. Here is the difference between the English and European fairy tale precisely and unforgettably defined.

Mostly, however,
Black Venus
and its successor,
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders,
eschew fantasy worlds; Carter’s revisionist imagination has turned towards the real, her interest towards portraiture rather than narrative. The best pieces in these later books are portraits—of Baudelaire’s black mistress Jeanne Duval, of Edgar Allan Poe, and, in two stories, of Lizzie Borden long before she “took an axe”, and the same Lizzie on the day of her crimes, a day described with slow, languorous precision and attention to detail—the consequences of overdressing in a heat-wave, and of eating twice-cooked fish, both play a part. Beneath the hyper-realism, however, there is an echo of
The Bloody Chamber,
for Lizzie’s is a bloody deed, and she is, in addition, menstruating. Her own life-blood flows, while the angel of death waits on a nearby tree. (Once again, as with the wolf-stories, one hankers for more; for the Lizzie Borden novel that we cannot have.)

Baudelaire, Poe, Dream-Shakespeare, Hollywood, panto, fairy tale: Carter wears her influences openly, for she is their deconstructionist, their saboteur. She takes what we know and, having broken it, puts it together in her own spiky, courteous way; her words are new and not-new, like our own. In her hands Cinderella, given back her original name of Ashputtle, is the fire-scarred heroine of a tale of horrid mutilations wrought by mother-love; John Ford’s
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
becomes a movie directed by a very different Ford; and the hidden meanings—perhaps one should say the hidden natures—of pantomime characters are revealed.

She opens an old story for us, like an egg, and finds the new story, the now-story we want to hear, within.

No such thing as a perfect writer. Carter’s high-wire act takes place over a swamp of preciousness, over quicksands of the arch and twee; and there’s no denying that she sometimes falls off, no getting away from odd outbreaks of fol-de-rol, and some of her puddings, her most ardent admirers will concede, are excessively egged. Too much use of words like “eldritch”, too many men who are rich “as Croesus”, too much porphyry and lapis lazuli to please a certain sort of purist. But the miracle is how often she pulls it off; how often she pirouettes without falling, or juggles without dropping a ball.

Accused by lazy pens of political correctness, she was the most individual, independent and idiosyncratic of writers; dismissed by many in her lifetime as a marginal, cultish figure, an exotic hothouse flower, she has become the contemporary writer most studied at British universities—a victory over the mainstream she would have enjoyed.

She hadn’t finished. Like Italo Calvino, like Bruce Chatwin, like Raymond Carver, she died at the height of her powers. For writers, these are the cruellest deaths: in mid-sentence, so to speak. The stories in this volume are the measure of our loss. But they are also our treasure, to savour and to hoard.

Raymond Carver is said to have told his wife before he died (also of lung cancer), “We’re out there now. We’re out there in Literature”. Carver was the most modest of men, but this is the remark of a man who knew, and who had often been told, how much his work was worth. Angela received less confirmation, in her lifetime, of the value of her unique oeuvre; but she, too, is out there now, out there in Literature, a Ray of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day.

Salman Rushdie, May 1995

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring of those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

That was how Johnny Jameson, the bass player, came to be treated—with respect and admiration; for there could be no doubt that Jameson was as mad as a hatter.

And the musicians looked after him. He was never without work, or a bed, or a packet of cigarettes, or a beer if he wanted one. There was always someone taking care of the things he could never get around to doing himself. It must also be admitted that he was a very fine bass player.

In this, in fact, lay the seed of his trouble. For his bass, his great, gleaming, voluptuous bass, was mother, father, wife, child and mistress to him and he loved it with a deep and steadfast passion.

Jameson was a small, quiet man with rapidly receding hair and a huge pair of heavy spectacles hiding mild, short-sighted eyes. He hardly went anywhere without his bass, which he carried effortlessly, slung on his back, as Red Indian women carry their babies. But it was a big baby for one so frail-looking as he to carry.

They called the bass Lola. Lola was the most beautiful bass in the whole world. Her shape was that of a full-breasted, full-hipped woman, recalling certain primitive effigies of the Mother Goddess so gloriously, essentially feminine was she, stripped of irrelevancies of head and limbs.

Jameson spent hours polishing her red wood, already a warm, chestnut colour, to an ever deeper, ever richer glow. On tour, he sat placidly in the bus while the other musicians drank, argued and gambled around him, and he would take Lola from her black case, and unwrap the rags that padded her, with a trembling emotion. Then he would take out a special, soft silk handkerchief and set to work on his polishing, smiling gently at nothing and blinking his short-sighted eyes like a happy cat.

The bass was always treated like a lady. The band started to buy her coffee and tea in cafés for a joke. Later it ceased to be a joke and became a habit. The extra drink was always ordered and placed before her and they ignored it when they went away and it was still on the table, cold and untouched.

Jameson always took Lola into cafés but never into public bars because, after all, she was a lady. Whoever drank with Jameson did so in the saloon and bought Lola a pineapple juice, although sometimes she could be prevailed upon to take a glass of sherry at festive occasions like Christmas or a birthday or when someone’s wife had a child.

But Jameson was jealous if she got too much attention and would look daggers at a man who took too many liberties with her, like slapping her case or making facetious remarks.

Jameson had only ever been known to strike a man once when he had broken the nose of a drunken, insensitive pianist who made a coarse jest about Lola in Jameson’s presence. So nobody ever joked about Lola when Jameson was there.

But innocent young musicians were hideously embarrassed if ever it fell out that they had to share a room with Jameson while on tour. So Jameson and Lola usually had a room to themselves. Away from Jameson, the trumpeter, Geoff Clarke, would say that Jameson was truly wedded to his art and perhaps they ought to book the bridal suite for the pair at some hotel, sometime.

But Clarke gave Jameson a good job in his trad group that was called the West End Syncopators. Ignoring the august echoes of the name, they dressed themselves up in grey toppers and tail coats when performing and their souped-up version of “West End Blues” (plus new vocal) had penetrated to the lower reaches of the top twenty.

They all looked grotesque in grey toppers and none more grotesque than Jameson; but the band still made money.

Making money, however, meant day after day spent in a converted Green Line bus travelling up and down the country from one one-night-stand to the next. It meant dates at corn exchanges, town halls, grimy back rooms in pubs. It meant constant bone-weariness and constant cash and credit and the band all loved it. They all shared a crazy jubilation.

“The trad boom ain’t going to last for ever, so let’s enjoy it!” said Len Nelson, the clarinettist.

He was an incorrigible fornicator, whose idea of profiting from the trad boom was to lure star-struck young girls from the provincial clubs and concerts up into his hotel bedroom and there copulate with them. He loved success. And, to a lesser extent, they all exulted.

Except, of course, Jameson, who did not even notice that trad was booming. He played just whatever he was told to play. He never really cared what it was as long as the quality of the sound he produced did not offend Lola.

One night in November, they were engaged to play at a small town in the Fenland wastes of East Anglia. Darkness came with the afternoon, dragging mist with it to fill the dykes and shroud the pollard willows. The band bus followed a straight road with never a turn or dip and when they reached the pub where the jazz club at which they were to perform was held, and climbed from the bus, the darkness fell around their shoulders like a rain-soaked blanket.

“Are they expecting us?” asked Dave Jennings, the drummer, anxiously. Not a light shone in the pub.

A frayed poster pinned to the closed main door announced their coming. But the chronic Fenland rain had so softened the paper that the slogan: “Friday night is rave night—with the raving, rioting, hit parade happy West End Syncopators” was almost indecipherable.

“Well, it’s not opening time, yet,” comforted Len Nelson.

“More’s the pity,” grunted Jennings.

“Of course they’re expecting us,” said Geoff firmly. “The club booked us up months ago, before the record even. That’s why we accepted a date in this God-forsaken hole, isn’t it, Simeon?”

The manager was a peripatetic Jew named Simeon Price, a failed tenor sax man who travelled with them out of nostalgia for his swinging days. Simeon was staring at the pub with bright, frightened eyes.

“I don’t like it here,” he said and shivered. “There’s something in the air.”

“Bloody lot of wet in the air,” grumbled Nelson. “Bet the dollies round here all got webbed feet.”

“Don’t come the mysterious East,” Geoff urged Simeon.

Simeon shook his head agitatedly and shivered in spite of the great, turned-up collar of his enormous cashmere coat. He always dressed like a stage Jew. His race was his gimmick and he always affected a strong Yiddish accent although his family had been respected members of the Manchester bourgeoisie for nearly 150 years.

But then the landlord appeared and then the two sixth form grammar school boys who ran the club and there was beer and chat and warmth and laughter. Jameson was very worried in case the damp should hurt Lola, warp her, rot her strings. He allowed one of the grammar school boys, they called him the Boy David at once, to buy her a rum and orange, for her health’s sake. Nelson and Jennings had to take the wondering Boy David off into the Gents and explain about Lola, quietly.