A WARM BIOGRAPHY OF A FANTASTICAL FEMINIST
New work pays tribute to Angela Carter, a disruptive agent in British fiction
English writer Angela Carter (194092) tended to look, one observer said, “like someone who’d been left out in a hurricane”. She liked to make an impression, and her hair was often wild. She wore, when young, what she termed “a reasonably suave Jimi Hendrix cut”.
She enjoyed floppy hats, tattered furs, large eyeglasses. Boredom was her enemy. Carter was a disrupter of dull dinner parties. A friend called her a “raconteur of glee”. If she rang you on the phone, you’d clear your schedule for the afternoon.
She was a similarly disruptive agent in British fiction. Her novels, when they began arriving in the late 1960s, were unlike the button-down realism that then prevailed. They were fantastical, feminist, absurdist, sexy. She tinkered with genres (fairy tales, horror, science fiction, gothic) most literary writers scorned.
Carter found an audience before she died, at 51, of lung cancer. But it was only after her death that her reputation was secured, and it has continued to rise. The Times of London, in 2008, ranked Carter 10th on its list of “the 50 greatest writers since 1945”. In 2012, her novel Nights at the Circus was named the best of the winners of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Like all the best writers, she was incapable of phoning anything in. Her fiction aside, Carter’s thick book of collected journalism, travel writing, criticism and essays, Shaking a Leg (1997), is its own erudite stay against dullness.
Now we have The Invention of Angela Carter, the first full-length biography, and it will consolidate her position. Edmund Gordon has written a terrific book — judicious, warm, confident and casually witty. The ratio of insight to literaryworld gossip, of white swan to black swan, is as well calibrated as one of Sara Mearns’ impossible balletic leaps.
Gordon has had the good fortune to seize upon, for his subject, not only an important writer but one who led a deeply interesting life. This bio unfolds a bit like one of the fairy tales Carter shook to release its meaning. The pages turn themselves.
She was born Angela Olive Stalker and grew up mostly in London, playing with her brother in the post-Blitz urban rubble. Her father was a journalist. Her mother was a woman who loved too much. She smothered Angela with affection and food.
“It wasn’t easy to become obese” in England in the 1940s, Gordon writes, when milk and butter were rationed. With her mother’s eager assistance, Carter did so. Her nicknames at school included Tubs and Fatty.
She escaped her mother’s clutches by attending an elite prep school on a scholarship, where the weight fell off. She was an intense reader. She escaped, too, by marrying young, at 19, rather than applying, as she had been encouraged to do, to Oxford.
Her first husband, Paul Carter, was deep into England’s nascent folk music scene. The couple became known, sometimes sneeringly, as “the Folk Singing Carters”. This marriage lasted nine years. Carter later had cruel things to say about her husband. She told a friend she had had “more meaningful relationships with people I’ve sat next to on aeroplanes”.
She began writing fiction in earnest while married to Paul Carter, though she did not feel supported by him. She wrote a different friend: “Behind every great man is a woman dedicated to his greatness whilst behind every great woman is a man dedicated to bringing her down.”
Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance, appeared in 1966. By 1972 she had published five more. Her life changed when she went to live in Tokyo for two years on prize money from a Somerset Maugham Award.
In Japan she took on a younger lover, the first of several in her life. About one, she commented: “Every time I pull down his underpants, I feel more & more like Humbert Humbert.” Sex was important to Carter and she wrote about it beautifully, in her fiction and in the letters and journals of which Gordon makes use.
In her book The Sadeian Woman (1979), she wrote, “We do not go to bed in simple pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances.”
Carter never learned to drive or ride a bike. She was a savage smoker of cigarettes. “When she was writing,” Gordon says, “smoke would curl out from the keyhole in her room.”
She was, oddly, to borrow a phrase from Kingsley Amis, a “mean sod” about alcohol. “Guests often felt frustrated by her habit of pouring them a single glass of wine,” Gordon writes, “then corking the bottle and putting it back in the fridge, never to emerge again.”
She returned from Japan to a changing literary world in London. She assisted her friend Kazuo Ishiguro in finding an agent. She helped usher Pat Barker into print. She befriended Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.
There was a boom in British fiction in the early 1980s, with Rushdie, Ishiguro, McEwan and Martin Amis at its vanguard. “Angela missed out on all this,” Gordon writes. Her book advances, unlike theirs, did not soar. She always felt she had never quite broken through.
Selling each new book, Gordon tells us, was a struggle. It is hard to see why. Carter wrote some of the 20th century’s unforgettable first sentences. Her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977) begins this way: “The last night I spent in London, I took some girl or other to the movies and, through her mediation, I paid you a little tribute of spermatozoa, Tristessa.”
Carter ultimately married again, to a construction worker 15 years her junior, and had her only child, a son, at 43. After her death, Rushdie wrote that “English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent white witch”. This biography is witchy, in the best sense, as well.
English literature has lost its high sorceress, its benevolent white witch
SALMAN RUSHDIE