Step Across This Line (6 page)

Angela Carter

[
First published as an introduction to
The Collected Stories of Angela Carter]

The last time I visited Angela Carter, a few weeks before she died, she had insisted on dressing for tea, in spite of being in considerable pain. She sat bright-eyed and erect, head cocked like a parrot’s, lips satirically pursed, and got down to the serious teatime business of giving and receiving the latest dirt: sharp, foulmouthed, passionate. That’s what she was like: spikily outspoken—once, after I’d come to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, “
Well.
You’re going to be seeing a
lot
more of
me
from now on”—and at the same time courteous enough to defy mortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea.

Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one consolation. She had taken out an “immense” life insurance policy shortly before the cancer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortune to “her boys” (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating black-comedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh.

She planned her funeral carefully. My instructions were to read Marvell’s poem “On a Drop of Dew.” This was a surprise. The Angela I knew had always been the most scatologically irreligious, merrily godless of women; yet she wanted Marvell’s meditation on the immortal soul—“that Drop, that Ray / Of the clear Fountain of Eternal Day”—spoken over her dead body. Was this a last surrealist joke, of the “thank God, I die an atheist” variety, or an obeisance to the metaphysician Marvell’s high symbolic language from a writer whose own favored language was also pitched high, and replete with symbols? It should be noted that no divinity makes an appearance in Marvell’s poem, except for “th’ Almighty Sun.” Perhaps Angela, always a giver of light, was asking us, at the end, to imagine her dissolving into the “glories” of that greater light: the artist becoming a part, simply, of art.

She was too individual, too fierce a writer to dissolve easily, however: by turns formal and outrageous, exotic and demotic, exquisite and coarse, precious and raunchy, fabulist and socialist, purple and black. Her novels are like nobody else’s, from the transsexual coloratura of
The Passion of New Eve
to the music-hall knees-up of
Wise Children;
but the best of her, I think, is in her stories. Sometimes, at novel length, the distinctive Carter voice, those smoky opium-eater’s cadences interrupted by harsh or comic discords, that moonstone-and-rhinestone mix of opulence and flimflam, can be wearying. In her stories, she can dazzle and swoop, and quit while she’s ahead.

Carter arrived almost fully formed; her early story “A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home” is already replete with Carterian motifs. Here is the love of the gothic, of lush language and high culture; but also of low stinks—falling rose-petals that sound like pigeon’s farts, and a father who smells of horse dung, and bowels that are “great levelers.” Here is the self as performance: perfumed, decadent, languorous, erotic, perverse; very like the winged woman, Fevvers, heroine of her penultimate novel,
Nights at the Circus.

Another early story, “A Victorian Fable,” announces her addiction to all the arcana of language. This extraordinary text, half “Jabberwocky,” half
Pale Fire,
exhumes the past as never before, by exhuming its dead words: “In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.”

Be advised, these early stories say: this writer is no meat-and-potatoes hack; she is a rocket, a Catherine wheel. She will call her first collection
Fireworks.

Several of the
Fireworks
stories deal with Japan, a country whose tea-ceremony formality and dark eroticism bruised and challenged Carter’s imagination. In “A Souvenir of Japan” she arranges polished images of that country before us. “The story of Momotaro, who was born from a peach.” “Mirrors make a room uncosy.” Her narrator presents her Japanese lover to us as a sex object, complete with bee-stung lips. “I should like to have had him embalmed . . . so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.” The lover is, at least, beautiful; the narrator’s view of her big-boned self, as seen in a mirror, is distinctly uncozy. “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.”

In “Flesh and the Mirror” the exquisite, erotic atmosphere thickens, approaching pastiche—for Japanese literature has specialized rather in these heated sexual perversities—except when it is cut through sharply by Carter’s constant self-awareness. (“Hadn’t I gone eight thousand miles to find a climate with enough anguish and hysteria in it to satisfy me?” her narrator asks; as, in “The Smile of Winter,” another unnamed narrator admonishes us: “Do not think I do not realize what I am doing,” and then analyzes her story with a perspicacity that rescues—brings to life—what might otherwise have been a static piece of mood music. Carter’s cold-water douches of intelligence often come to the rescue of her fancy when it runs too wild.)

In the non-Japanese stories Carter enters, for the first time, the fable-world which she will make her own. A brother and sister are lost in a sensual, malevolent forest whose trees have breasts, and bite. Here the apple tree of knowledge teaches not good and evil but incestuous sexuality. Incest—a recurring Carter subject—crops up again in “The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter,” a tale set in a bleak upland village, the quintessential Carter location, where, as she says in the
Bloody Chamber
story “The Werewolf,” “they have cold weather, they have cold hearts.” Wolves howl around these Carter-country villages, and there are many metamorphoses.

Carter’s other country is the fairground, the world of the gimcrack showman, the hypnotist, the trickster, the puppeteer. “The Loves of Lady Purple” takes her closed circus-world to yet another mountainous, Middle European village where suicides are treated like vampires (wreaths of garlic, stakes through the heart) while real warlocks “practised rites of immemorial beastliness in the forests.” As in all Carter’s fairground stories, “the grotesque is the order of the day.” Lady Purple, the dominatrix marionette, is a moralist’s warning—beginning as a whore, she turns into a puppet because she is “pulled only by the strings of Lust.” She is a female, sexy, and lethal rewrite of Pinocchio, and, along with the metamorphic cat-woman in “Master,” one of the many dark (and fair) ladies with “unappeasable appetites” to whom Angela Carter is so partial.

In her second collection,
The Bloody Chamber,
these riot ladies inherit her fictional earth.
The Bloody Chamber
is Carter’s masterwork: the book in which her high, perfervid mode is perfectly married to her stories’ needs. (For the best of the low, demotic Carter, read
Wise Children;
but in spite of all the oo-er-guv, brush-up-your-Shakespeare comedy of that last novel,
The Bloody Chamber
is the likeliest of her works to endure.)

The novella-length title story begins as classic Grand Guignol: an innocent bride, a much-married millionaire husband, a lonely Castle stood upon a melting shore, a secret room containing horrors. The helpless girl and the civilized, decadent, murderous man: Carter’s first variation on the theme of Beauty and the Beast. There is a feminist twist: instead of the weak father to save whom, in the fairy tale, Beauty agrees to go to the Beast, we are given, here, an indomitable mother rushing to her daughter’s rescue. It is Carter’s genius, in this collection, to make the fable of Beauty and the Beast a metaphor for all the myriad yearnings and dangers of sexual relations. Now it is the Beauty who is the stronger, now the Beast. In “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon,” it is for the Beauty to save the Beast’s life; while in “The Tiger’s Eye,” Beauty will be erotically transformed into an exquisite animal herself: “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of hairs. My earrings turned back to water. . . . I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” As though her whole body were being deflowered and so metamorphosing into a new instrument of desire, allowing her admission to a new (“animal” in the sense of
spiritual
as well as
tigerish
) world. In “The Erl-King,” however, Beauty and the Beast will not be reconciled. Here there is neither healing nor submission but revenge.

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 Carter’s brilliant, reinventing synthesis of
Kinder- und Hausmärchen.
Now we are offered the radical, shocking suggestion that Grandmother might actually be the Wolf (“The Werewolf”); or, equally shocking, the thought that the girl (Red Riding Hood, Beauty) might easily be as amorally 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 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 toward self-knowledge by the mystery of her own bloody chamber; that is, her menstrual flow. By blood, and by what she sees in mirrors, which make a house uncozy.

At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous. . . . He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self. . . . As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much scenery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old country tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman.

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 can disappear in an exquisite puff of smoke. This dream-wood—“nowhere near Athens . . . 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 toward 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 the 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 toward the real, her interest toward 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 ax,” and the same Lizzie on the day of her crimes, a day described with 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;
Lizzie’s is a bloody deed, and she is, in addition, menstruating. Her own lifeblood flows while the angel of death waits in a nearby tree. (Once again, as with the wolf-stories, one hankers for more; for the Lizzie Borden novel we can’t 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 worlds 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 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 folderol, 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.