Wise Children

Contents

About the Book

A richly comic tale of the tangled fortunes of two theatrical families, the Hazards and Chances, Angela Carter’s witty and bawdy novel is populated with as many sets of twins and mistaken identities as any Shakespearean comedy, and celebrates the magic of over a century of show business.

About the Author

Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, and from 1976–8 was a fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She lived in Japan, the United States and Australia. Her first novel,
Shadow Dance
, was published in 1965, followed by
The Magic Toyshop
(1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize),
Several Perceptions
(1968, Somerset Maugham Award),
Heroes and Villains
(1969),
Love
(1971),
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972),
The Passion of New Eve
(1977),
Nights at the Circus
(1984, James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and
Wise Children
(1991). Four collections of her short stories have been published:
Fireworks
(1974),
The Bloody Chamber
(1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award),
Black Venus
(1985) and
American Ghosts and Old World Wonders
(1993). She was the author of
The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History
(1979), and two collections of journalism,
Nothing Sacred
(1982) and
Expletives Deleted
(1992). She died in February 1992.

‘Dora and Nora Chance are the illegitimate twin daughters of the great Shakespearian actor Melchior Hazard. Disowned by his family and, by extension, the whole “legitimate” theatre to which he belongs, they set out on a career as chorus girls, working their way through the music halls and, after achieving a brief moment of celluloid immortality, ending their dancing days in a dispiriting succession of post-war revues with titles like
Nudes, Ahoy!
and
Nudes of the World
 . . . Carter’s insistent aim is to show how thoroughly the legitimate and illegitimate worlds are entangled, and in a country whose cultural life continues to be crippled by false distinction between “high” and “low”, this is an important subject for any novel . . . Between these poles . . . lies endless scope for verbal exuberance, exotic figures of speech, filthy colloquialisms and more than a smattering of good jokes’

‘
Wise Children
is a celebration of wrong-sidedness. It is a south London novel, announcing itself defiantly as hailing from the wrong side of the tracks . . . The book’s narrator, Dora Chance, twin sister to Nora in a novel bursting with twins, hails from the wrong side of the blanket as well as the tracks. The two girls, the Lucky Chances as they are known on the halls, are the unacknowledged offspring of the famous Shakespearean actor, Sir Melchior Hazard, in whose person all the great hams of the age – Wolfit, Richardson, Olivier – are united and exceeded . . . In
Wise Children
Hamlet’s great soliloquy becomes a sketch for the Chance girls in bellhop costumes, wondering if a parcel should be delivered to “2b or not 2b”. Nobody’s parents are their real parents – Dora and Nora’s Grandma Chance may actually be their mother, and the closest thing they have to a grandfather is, not inappropriately, a clock – and children, too, are easily found and lost’

‘The saga is a slack-jawed, razor-witted jounce through the highways and back alleys of twentieth-century showbiz, coupled with a family history of Byzantine complexity . . . We’re flipped effortlessly through the decades and immersed in a flailing menagerie of characters. Both the physical detail and
geist
of each era are brought alive with unerring dabs of description. The earthiness and orotundity of Carter’s prose is as dazzling as ever . . .
Wise Children
is a glorious, high-kicking carnival of ill-decorum, and a shrewd chronicle of personal survival’

‘Angela Carter has always been an exuberant writer and never more so than in
Wise Children
, her first novel in seven years (and her eleventh work of fiction). This is a book that moves effortlessly from shock to coincidence, from slight complication to swift resolution, from suspense to thumpingly absurd resolution, and yet at every point the incidents feel more musical than literary, as though the author’s only goal had been to create the verbal equivalent of Mozart’s
Cosi fan tutte
 . . . The best thing in the book is Dora herself, an actress who has played in Shakespeare and vaudeville and even in one disastrous Hollywood film, a survivor who has taken in an old enemy out of compassion and foregone a dazzling marriage out of pity, a game old thing in the attic of a house in Brixton, pegging away at her word processor, an electronic palette on which she blends purple prose and the bluest of blue words, a good old girl who is as eternal as her real and putative fathers’

Introduction

What exactly is the wisdom advocated in Angela Carter’s final novel,
Wise Children
? First, there’s its blatant demand that we lighten up. ‘What a joy it is to dance and sing!’ Then there’s a much less exclamatory kind of wisdom. Take the word ‘child’. Carter, a writer fond of what words mean, will have known that for much of its history it was specifically a provincial word for ‘girl’. ‘Mercy on’s, a barne; a very pretty barne! A boy or a child, I wonder?’ as the old shepherd says when he finds, by chance, on the shores of Bohemia, the abandoned baby Perdita in Shakespeare’s late romance of birth, death and rebirth,
The Winter’s Tale
.

Wisdom and innocence. Innocence and knowing.
Wise Children
is a knowing text, packed with interlayered allusion and literary embedding – most of all wise to the fertility there is in any notion of ‘embedding’. Cheerfully bawdy, it’s Carter’s most glorious, most comic, most fulfilled, certainly her most generously and happily orgiastic, fictional performance. By chance it was also her last novel. She died young, at only 51, the year after its publication, so it takes crowning place in her now recognisably revolutionary literary project.

‘Most intellectual development depends on new readings of old texts,’ she wrote in 1983. ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the new wine makes the old bottles explode.’
¹
She was a committed feminist and socialist, ‘the pure product of an advanced, industrialised, post-imperialist country in decline,’
²
and someone who saw all art as helplessly political, because made by history and belonging to its time. Her feminism and socialism form a twinned impetus in her work. ‘Flesh comes to us out of history,’ she wrote in her ground-breaking study of women and gender-codification,
The Sadeian Woman
(1979), one of the books which caused even more than the usual critical alarm and outrage at its writer on its publication. After her first highly praised and steadily award-winning novels of the 1960s, her baroque, gaudy and often violent rejection of British realism in book after fearless book filled with nasty tyrant-puppeteers, falling and failing civilisations and clever lost heroines strung between violence or madness, had earned her a critical reputation as maddeningly uncategorisable. In the end critics liked to label her as tricksy magical-realist. This was a term she scorned in the same way that she scorned the notion that realism was the only available version of ‘real’. ‘I’ve got nothing against realism. But there is realism and realism. The questions that I ask myself, I think they are very much to do with reality.’
³

Lorna Sage, Carter’s great friend and most assiduous critic, noted that 1979, the year in which she published not just
The Sadeian Woman
but also her most celebrated collection of short stories,
The Bloody Chamber
– the first of her collections in which she explicitly changed the endings of traditional tales to let, for instance, Bluebeard’s bride beard Bluebeard or Red Riding Hood seduce the wolf – was the year her interest in transformation as a theme became most accessible to her readers. After this a new laughter, a greater verve, and a sharper keenness to banish puritan constraint, entered her work.

The critics certainly felt a lot safer with her final two novels, tending to see the worlds of a feathered barmaid and high-kicking hoofers in
Nights at the Circus
and
Wise Children
as ‘more benign’
⁴
on the whole than the earlier work where, typically and casually, in works like
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
(1972) and
The Passion of New Eve
(1977), a male protagonist is every bit as likely to shift gender or be gang-raped by a troupe of male acrobats as the literary canon is to be questioned, satirised and rewritten.

But from her first novel,
Shadow Dance
(1966), all the way to
Wise Children
(1991), Carter’s work goes out of its way to take to pieces the powerful machineries of romanticism, desire, dominant narrative and social codification, as well as the machineries of fiction itself, to lay them bare before a reader and show her or him how those machineries are working.

From its sprightly opening riddle onwards, everything in
Wise Children
is about duality – and most immediately, Carter suggests, social duality. The aging birthday girl narrator is one half of a duo: Nora and Dora, ‘the legendary Chance sisters’. They’re from ‘the wrong side’ of a two-track city (and a two-track family and a two-track art form and a two-track tradition and a two-track culture and a two-track world). ‘Once upon a time you could make a crude distinction thus,’ Dora says, making a fairy tale of the real, of the complications of the coming of affluence to this always poorer, always hybrid South of the city. There’s nothing else to do but to bless their chance ownership of a small patch of it, number 49 Bard Road. ‘If it wasn’t for this house, Nora and I would be on the streets by now, hauling our worldlies up and down in plastic bags . . . bursting into songs of joy when finally admitted to the night shelter and therefore chucked out immediately to gasp and freeze and finally snuff it disregarded on the street and blow away like rags.’