Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 25

THERE’S A PIECE ON Byron by William Hazlitt in which, as he’s routinely and genially abusing the latest instalment of Don Juan, he learns that Byron is dead. Well, of course, Hazlitt says, he was the greatest writer of the age. The sudden deaths of contemporaries wrong-foot us: we have to turn too quickly into posterity’s representatives. A living writer is part of the unsatisfying, provisional, myopic, linear, altogether human present, but add a full stop and you can read the work backwards, sideways, whatever, because now it’s an oeuvre, truly finished.

Angela Carter annoyed people quite a lot when she was alive (‘I certainly don’t seem to get the sympathy vote,’ she observed with more than a shadow of satisfaction when last year’s big prizes were announced). But when she died everyone scrambled to make up for it, and perhaps there was more than a shadow of satisfaction behind some of those glowing obituaries, too: she isn’t going to come up with any more surprises; that disturbing sense of someone making it up as she went along will fade; Literature can take its course. For the first time I see that there’s at least one virtue in literary biography: a ‘Life’ can demythologize the work in the best sense, preserving its fallibility, which is also the condition for its brilliance.

This has been critical heresy for a long time. Writers’ lives merely distract us from the true slipperiness and anonymity of any text worth its salt. A text is a text is a text. Angela, of course, was of the generation nourished on the Death of the Author (Barthes, 1968 vintage), as was I.

Looking back, she recaptured some of the euphoria of that time:

Truly, it felt like Year One … all that was holy was in the process of being profaned … I can date to that time … and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created, by means outside my control, and palmed off on me as the real thing.

But she went on to qualify the ‘sense of limitless freedom’ you get by sloughing off the myths with a sentence which ought to stand as the epigraph to any attempt at a biography of her: ‘I am the pure product of an advanced, industrialized, post-imperialist country in decline.’ Well, perhaps not. But it is a remark that captures her tone pretty exactly: I can just see the moue of amused disgust (but also disgusted disgust at the same time, morally and intellectually fastidious disgust) with which she’d greet the notion that you could somehow levitate out of history.

A Life doesn’t have to reinvent its subject as a ‘real’ person. Angela Carter’s life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, the education and self-education, the early marriage and divorce, the role-playing and shape-shifting, the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It’s all happening ‘on the edge’, in no man’s land, among the debris of past convictions. By the end, her life fitted her more or less like a glove, but that’s because she’d put it together, by trial and error, bricolage, all in the (conventionally) wrong order. Her genius for estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times. She was, indeed, literally thin-skinned: her skin was very fair, pink and white; she weathered quite a bit but never tanned, and you could see the veins easily. You might almost say her body thought. She had very good bones and was photogenic, so that it didn’t matter that she’d stopped looking in mirrors and painting her face. She let her hair grow out white in wisps two or three years before she got pregnant. I could have been a grandmother by the time she was a mother, and I was younger than she. The shape a woman’s life takes now is a lot less determined than once it was. Or: the determinations are more subtle, you’re sentenced to assemble your own version.